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Boris Yeltsin just has a cold, says the Kremlin. (Colds are dangerous in Russia. Leonid Brezhnev had a "cold" and it turned out he was gravely ill, addicted to sedatives and barely functional; Konstantin Chernenko had a "cold" and vanished behind Kremlin walls; Yuri Andropov had a "cold" and was dead in weeks.) Well, maybe flu. (Last time Yeltsin admitted to "flu" it was really pneumonia, and he was out of action for two months.) But there's no cause for alarm, officials claimed last week: the President will keep working while he is resting for 10 or 12 days...
Maybe. The Kremlin has a credibility problem when it comes to presidential health. The first time officials announced Yeltsin had a head cold, while he was running for re-election in the summer of 1996, it turned out to be a loose synonym for a near fatal heart attack. For the rest of the year, he was prostrate and the country was paralyzed. A multiple-bypass operation in November 1996 seemed to bring a miracle recovery. Then two months later, Yeltsin came down with another "cold"--this time, his aides said, the result of a post-sauna chill. This cold...
...Yeltsin's illness proves more severe than the Kremlin has admitted, uncertainty about the entire nation's immediate and long-term health will quickly kick in. Voices will be raised calling for the presidential succession to be clarified; at the moment the only mechanism is essentially for the president to declare himself incapable of governing. Yeltsin's closest aides will circle the wagons around him, forward movement in politics and economic change will come to a halt, and the debilitating struggle to succeed Yeltsin will gather force...
...Will the Kremlin End the Crisis? Although details are under wraps, Russia has apparently cooked up a deal that will resolve the current Iraq standoff. What's the big secret? Full Story...
Hersh claims to present a "new history" of the Cuban missile crisis that contradicts previously accepted versions. But he offers almost nothing substantively new, other than an unsupported claim that Kennedy allowed himself to be deceived about Soviet intentions by a private, back-channel Kremlin source and hence delayed sending critical reconnaissance missions over Cuba in the fall of 1962. Hersh's clumsy effort to portray Kennedy's handling of the crisis as reckless and politically motivated is a much inferior version of an intelligent, if controversial, argument Garry Wills presented 15 years ago in The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation...