Word: sovietize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...more is at work in the world these days. The President's voice hints that he senses a yearning the world over for reducing tension, for paying more heed to people's needs. Maybe, he muses, they sense it in the Soviet Union too. "I've never believed I could break new ground with the General Secretary, that I could make him abandon his beliefs and embrace ours. The leopard is not going to change his spots. But what we do there can be for his good...
...watch all those things," says Reagan. "His tone, his mood, his look. I've been doing that since I was a labor negotiator in California. In Geneva, when the Secretary posed his ideas, I could see that they were based on true belief and the statements that the Soviet Union put out. He really believes them. It was plain to me that I had to answer back just as earnestly about our beliefs. There is no question that he is intelligent, that he is dedicated to their system...
Reagan will try humor, because last time when he told his few jokes to Gorbachev, the Soviet chief's eyes lighted up. Humor sometimes penetrates heavy shadows when other thrusts fail." It really was natural with him," says the President. "I had a good supply of jokes, and I'll have a few new ones for this time...
...little bit upbeat," says the President. "The hardest thing to deal with is the Marxist-Leninist policy that says the Soviet Union must create one Communist world. That has to be countered. If they come to realize that our feelings about each other's system do not mean we can't live together, then we can live in this world in peace...
...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...