Word: spokes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...with a ready-made issue, when President Ford refused to receive Solzhenitsyn, but the conference just didn't seem to be of much interest to anybody in Eastern Europe. The newspapers gave it plenty of play--the text of the agreement was even printed in full--but nobody I spoke with seemed to attach any real significance to it, either positive or negative. The sense that agreements and treaties don't really affect day-to-day life is very much present...
...television screens in every remote part of every Warsaw Pact country. On Czechoslovakia, the celebration had a distinctly hollow ring, the presence of Soviet troops in the country since 1968 kind of putting a damper on things. But in Poland and Romania as well, a lot of people I spoke with this summer seemed to find the "Eternal Brotherhood With the Soviet Union" propaganda approach somewhat heavyhanded. A Polish student in Gdansk (known in history books as Danzig) told me a joke that is currently making the rounds among his friends. An orange is rolling on the Polish-Soviet border...
...illustration of the hard-to-define attitude toward the United States is the presence of a sort of cult around the memory of John F. Kennedy in Eastern Europe. No one person I spoke with seemed to remember him fondly for any specific reason, but in almost uncanny fashion, several Poles, Czechs, and East Germans described in vivid detail their recollections of the day Kennedy was assasinated. And somehow, even for those who know of and oppose the policies he pursued, he stands as a positive symbol, a symbol of good. Perhaps the same Kennedy phenomenon exists elsewhere...
Shirt Discomfort. Earlier in the week, uneasiness also filled the air as the President made a campaign swing through New Hampshire to support Republican Louis C. Wyman in his rerun Senate race against Democrat John A. Durkin. Ford spoke, shook hands, and waved at the large, friendly crowds at 22 political stops on a 118-mile motorcade-all the while wearing a protective vest under his shirt. It probably was a 4½-lb., ⅜-in.-thick model made of Kevlar, a synthetic material that resembles fiber-glass cloth. The White House refused to confirm or deny press reports...
...rest of Ford's week was spent indoors. Friday night he was in Kansas City, Kans., for another fund raiser; on Saturday he flew to Dallas, and amid inevitable reminders of John Kennedy, Ford addressed some 2,000 members of the National Federation of Republican Women and spoke at Southern Methodist University. Then he journeyed to Midland, Texas, where he dedicated the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum and was thanked with a shower of rose petals-a fitting gesture in a week when Congress sustained his veto of an oil decontrol bill...