Word: kosygin
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...Reykjavík meeting was similar to one between President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin in June 1967. That encounter too was organized on short notice, without a prearranged outcome and with only a few advisers on each side. Johnson relied most heavily on his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, later head of the World Bank and currently a director of the Ford Foundation. The following exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming book, Blundering into Disaster: Surviving the First Century of the Nuclear Age (Pantheon Books; $14.95), recounts that fateful meeting and its consequences...
...that particular Tuesday, however, he was bubbling over with a secret. He had the stewards bring in a little "sherry wine" and pour each of his aides a glass. Then he announced that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would soon begin nuclear arms talks, and he and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin would hold a summit to seal the deal. That afternoon Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia on their brutal mission of suppression. End of dreams...
...coded cables. How Moscow secretly offered financial aid to Vice President Hubert Humphrey for his 1968 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon (Humphrey declined the offer). How Soviet Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev got drunk while visiting Nixon at San Clemente and vilified Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny and Premier Alexei Kosygin. Hours later, a sleepwalking First Lady Pat Nixon appeared in a nightgown and was carried back to her bed by a kgb agent. How Brezhnev collapsed with seizures just before and after his 1975 summit in Vladivostok with Gerald Ford-and, while summiting with Jimmy Carter in Vienna...
Lyndon Johnson, the master persuader, thought he could work a little magic with Alexei Kosygin at the Glassboro summit in 1967 and slow arms sales to the troubled Middle East. Kosygin joined heartily in swapping stories about going hungry and chopping wood as boys. But the cold curtain came down when they got around to discussing a deal to ease tension. L.B.J. emerged from that meeting, his long face sagging, and told his National Security Adviser, Walt Rostow, "I've used everything I know, but I think I've failed...
...meeting of the Council of Ministers, Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin, who was handling the Baikal project, asked Mstislav Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences, "What does the academy recommend? If the safeguards aren't reliable, we'll stop construction." Keldysh quoted a report that the water-purification system and other safeguards were completely reliable. He may have been acting in good faith. Still, my feeling is that his stand was greatly influenced by the academy's dependence on the bureaucratic machine, and that he was predisposed to respect the wishes of this machine and to ignore the warnings...