Word: dobrynins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bureaucracy that we intended to base our negotiations on a calculation of the national interest, not abstract slogans, and on strict reciprocity, not "gestures" or "signals." By the end of 1969 it seemed that the careful fencing was about to end. My talks with Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin-what came to be known as the Channel-had become increasingly active, usually on Soviet initiative. We had succeeded in making it clear to the Soviets, and with a little time lag to the bureaucracy, that the President's view was the decisive...
...Dobrynin avoided these professional deformations. He was a classic product of the Communist society. The first member of his family to go to a university, he was trained as an engineer. Whether he owed his flexibility to his training in a subject relatively free of deadening ideology, or to a natural disposition, he was one of the few Soviet diplomats of my acquaintance who could understand the psychology of others...
...never forgot that Dobrynin was a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party; I never indulged in the conceit that his easy manner reflected any predisposition toward me or toward the West. I had no doubt that if the interests of his country required it he could be as ruthless or duplicitous as any other Communist leader. But I considered his unquestioning support of the Soviet line an asset, not a liability: it enabled us to measure the policies of his masters with precision. Occasionally he would give me his personal analysis of American politics; without exception...
...Dobrynin was free of the tendency toward petty chiseling by which the run-of-the-mill Soviet diplomat demonstrates his vigilance to his superiors: he understood that a reputation for reliability is an important asset in foreign policy...
...Dobrynin, usually genial, was all business. Were we claiming that the 1962 understanding had been violated? I dismissed this as a legalistic quibble. Cuba, to us, was a place of extreme sensitivity. We considered the sequence of events as acts of extremely bad faith. The installations had been completed with maximum deception; they could not remain. Whatever the phraseology of the 1962 understanding, its intent could not have been to replace land-based with sea-based missiles...