Word: summits
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...probably should have been anticipated that the practitioners of such a vital art form would finally do what they did last week and proclaim several days before Jimmy Carter left for Germany that the Bonn economic summit was, in effect, over-and it was a washout. From the White House, which last week issued a new official portrait that it hoped would look more "presidential" than last year's photo, came willing explanations for the predestined disappointmen-Congress refused to support Carter, the American economy chose the wrong season to inflate, the New York Times-CBS thoughtlessly polled...
Most modern summit meetings have been meticulously prepackaged: speeches composed, "spontaneous" encounters with the natives scheduled, communiques trumpeting the arrival of a new era of understanding and cooperation written, edited, mimeographed, stapled and flown to the conference site ahead of time, along with the Presidential Seal and the First Lady's hairdresser...
...some sensational new outrage by the Baader-Meinhof gang of political terrorists. Yet the tense atmosphere seemed to symbolize the fact that Carter is embroiled not only with the Soviets but also with some allies, namely the West Germans. Now he had come to attend a seven-nation economic summit conference and, coincidentally, to see if the Bonn-Washington coolness could be remedied...
This all would be laughable if it weren't so important. The Bonn agenda may be relatively meaningless, but the drama of Jimmy Carter on the world stage is critical The measure of the competence of the American President has become about as significant an aftermath of the summit as anything else...
...members of that summit fraternity enjoy belittling one another, albeit nicely. But politicians and technicians at lower levels generally try to avoid personalities and look at inexorable global forces and bureaucratic intractability as the ingredients of most trouble. And even that is now changing in Washington. One after another of these foreign policy specialists last week in private asked the question: How much of the current diplomatic neurosis, and the U.S.-Soviet hostility that lies at its core, has been brought about by Jimmy Carter's singular view of how to improve the world and his fellow...