Word: macmillan
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...feel like a lion who discovers that the bear's hug doesn't break his ribs." So said Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan on the first jovial evening of his mission to Russia. This week, as he prepared to carry out the diplomatic equivalent of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, Macmillan has learned a little more about bears...
...beginning, the Soviet bear hug seemed full of earthy cordiality. At Stalin's old dacha 60 miles southeast of Moscow, Macmillan and Khrushchev jaunted companionably through the pine woods in a troika, sharing a lap robe and chatting with apparent candor about the great issues of the cold war. Next night in the British embassy Khrushchev harked back to the Geneva Conference of 1955 (which Macmillan attended as Britain's Foreign Minister), warmly told the Prime Minister: "It was with your help that the Geneva spirit was created...
...Irritation. But behind the Soviet smiles, irritation was rising. The British diplomats and political backroom experts who had urged Macmillan to go to Moscow had done so on the basis of a fatally naive and condescending assumption. Sublimely convinced that no diplomats in the world are as smooth as British diplomats, Macmillan's advisers seriously thought that Khrushchev might somehow be persuaded, three months before a showdown date he himself had set, to take the urgency out of a crisis Khrushchev had deliberately provoked to try the free world's nerve...
...backroom experts also forgot that Khrushchev had no urge to enhance Macmillan's prestige with the British electorate; to the Russians, Britain's Socialists, with their distrust of the U.S. and their more experimental approach to the cold war, have more appeal than the Tories. Khrushchev's main interest in the Macmillan visit, obvious except to Whitehall, lay in his hope that it would uncover a split between the U.S. and British governments over Berlin. When he found Macmillan consistently taking the line that the West was unshakably united in the determination to hold its position...
...Campaign Speech. The blowup came on the fourth day of the visit, when Macmillan's back was turned. Though feverish from a nagging cold, Macmillan dutifully allowed himself to be bundled off to the Soviet bloc's Joint Nuclear Research Center at Dubna, 95 miles south of Moscow. With Macmillan safely out of the way, Candidate Khrushchev-running unopposed for the Supreme Soviet of the Federated Russian Republic in this week's "elections"-delivered a campaign speech that shook the Western world (see above...