Word: kosygin
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Elementary Reciprocity. Despite its ultimate failure, the peace thrust came closer to success than any efforts in the past. Before he boarded his white Ilyushin-18 turboprop last week to end his week-long visit to Britain, Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin spent some eight hours conferring with Prime Minister Harold Wilson on Viet Nam. In public, Kosygin witheringly blasted the U.S. for its role in the war. But in private, he signaled a new Soviet willingness to try to end the war, even agreed to ask the North Vietnamese if they would offer what Washington calls "elementary reciprocity" in exchange...
Hopeful of a breakthrough, Wilson, who maintained almost constant contact with Washington during Kosygin's visit, urged Lyndon Johnson to extend the U.S. bombing pause beyond the truce deadline so that Hanoi could weigh the Russian proposal. Johnson agreed. At one point, Kosygin asked the British if they could get either Johnson or Secretary of State Dean Rusk to the conference table. The U.S. reply was delivered to British Foreign Minister George Brown during Queen Elizabeth's dinner for Kosygin at Buckingham Palace. Brown scanned the answer, then scrawled a note and passed it to Kosygin...
...Kosygin could not deliver. Just hours before the Soviet Premier's departure, Wilson and Brown sped up to his suite at Claridge's for an unscheduled 1 a.m. conference. It was then that Kosygin relayed Hanoi's reply to his plea for a gesture toward deescalation. The answer was, of course, "No." That clinched it for Washington. Once Kosygin was en route home, Lyndon Johnson gave his commanders the signal to resume the bombing...
...Harold Wilson's most frustrating week since last July's sterling crisis - and it was, in fact, a pretty dismal week for British diplomacy in general. Having failed in his peacemaking attempt with Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin, Wilson flew off to Bonn with Foreign Secretary George Brown on what appeared to be a much simpler task: to try to persuade the West Germans to help Britain gain entry to the European Common Market. Since the West Germans already are on record as favoring British entry, Wilson hoped that he could induce Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and his colleagues...
...Kosygin's visit to Britain, marked by Wilson's lavish praise and the British public's acclaim for the Soviet leader, provided just about the worst possible prelude for the British visit to Bonn. It raised West German fears that Britain seeks to build a special relationship with the Soviet Union that might well, considering Russia's implacable hostility toward Bonn, be accomplished at West Germany's expense. Wilson might have postponed either visit, but he chose to put them end to end. The Germans did not appreciate the timing...