Word: gromykoisms
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...When Gromyko, on a visit to New York in 1969, offered me a post as his adviser, I accepted with alacrity and anticipation. In April 1970 my wife Lina, my daughter Anna, then eight years old, and I left New York to take up my new duties...
...Gromyko's senior assistant was Vasily Makarov. High-ranking diplomats gave him expensive presents to grease the way for their reports to Gromyko or their appointments to coveted jobs. Makarov accepted these as his due; he would even commission purchases for himself, once telling me pointedly how much he needed a rug of a certain size and color...
Makarov was a surly, pompous, sarcastic contrast to Gromyko's cool but generally courteous personality. Gromyko kept him as the perfect watchdog. He scared off intruders. He sheltered his master from unnecessary contacts with lesser humans. Gromyko is an efficient machine, constructed to perform and to endure, and almost completely devoid of human warmth. He can joke and he can rage, but underlying any such expression is a cold discipline that makes him formidable as a superior or as an adversary...
...Gromyko inhabits a cocoon as though born to it. I do not believe he has ever had close friends. Inside the Stalin-era skyscraper that houses the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Trade, Gromyko takes a special elevator, reserved for him and a few very senior officials, straight to his seventh-floor office. There, except for a meal in a private dining room, he stays all day, reading those documents that Makarov and others on his personal staff feel it is essential to show him, seeing a carefully screened group of senior ministry officials...
...Gromyko is a tough boss. Not only does he expect anyone he calls to appear instantly, but his most desultory suggestion is to be observed as a crisis order. Shortly after I joined his staff, he put me to work on his address to the U.N. in the fall and told me casually to find the right people to work on the project. Early the following week he asked me whom I had chosen. I said I would soon have a roster for him. His head snapped toward me, and he fixed me with a finger stabbing...