Word: harrimans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After five weeks of behind-the-scenes operations, the West was prepared to send its emissaries to Moscow. Even then there was no optimism about the results. "Nobody thought there was really a chance," cracks Harriman. "That...
...Moscow, Envoy Harriman operated smoothly out of a tiny improvised office facing the courtyard on the ninth floor of the U.S. embassy. The only extra furnishings were a portrait of George Washington and two extra chairs, one of which was shoved into the open doorway by his secretary. Since the office is usually a waiting room, many a surprised visitor tried to vault the chair. During the mornings...
...Harriman, Hailsham and their advisers met at the British embassy; after about a three-hour daily meeting with the Soviets in Spiridonovka Palace, the Westerners talked over the day's negotiations in the U.S. embassy "tank," a small room safe (hopefully) from ubiquitous hidden Soviet listening devices. During one informal evening that he spent chatting with U.S. correspondents at the Sovietskaya Hotel, Harriman suddenly looked up at the ceiling and said, "Mr. Khrushchev, if you hear what I am saying...
Most observers, Averell Harriman included, believe that Khrushchev signed the test ban treaty-and is seeking a detente with the West in other matters -primarily because of the split with Peking, which Harriman considers as important as the split between Constantinople and Rome. It forces the Kremlin to campaign for outside support among other Communist parties; in order not to wage a two-front cold war, Khrushchev is seeking some sort of understanding with the West. Other motives may be equally compelling. The Soviet budget is badly strained by military spending that is proportionately twice as high...
...What Harriman really wanted to find out during that trip was the extent to which Khrushchev's Russia was really different from Stalin's Russia. More than ever, that remains the question today. With Harriman, the U.S. had witnessed the great Communist switch of the Popular Front period, when Russia was severely threatened by the Nazis, ordered Communist parties everywhere to make common cause with the hither to despised Social Democrats, and even with the bourgeois. Maxim Litvinov, voluble ambassador to the U.S. and the League of Nations, spoke as eloquently as Khrushchev does today about "the peaceful...