The Nation's Pulse/Summer Guests
Emmerson, Donald K.
The room was empty save for two chairs, a desk, and a large man who sat behind it. He was leaned back heavily in his seat, his clothing ill-matched and disrupted—even the enormous tie—by his...
...I sat quietly, knowing that my departure from Poland was decided, and feeling in a strange way flattered...
...But at the end of the lunch, one Soviet could not resist remarking sarcastically to the pizzeria manager, "I'm sure you got the publicity you wanted...
...It may also have taken that long for the Kremlin to reassure itself that a man with an American childhood would not defect...
...492 pages • Cloth $22 • Paper $14 "A brilliant work of history as well as strategy...
...For I don't know how long I sat dumbfounded...
...It's three in the morning...
...Not exactly hilarious...
...While the Soviet government appears to have funded their travel in the U.S., Posner's was covered by U.S...
...It's nothing unusual...
...The joyful thing is that I love all of you...
...I'd rather make a million friends," Posner replied...
...He was Vladimir Nadein of Izvestia...
...In Madison's eyes, Posner was a tough act to follow, and that may have rankled...
...The name of the restaurant was in fact later mentioned by a local paper in a story headlined, " `Cozy' Madison Impresses Soviets," accompanied by a photo-graph of four Soviets waving their soft drinks and beaming around the re-mains of the meal...
...Posner wore upscale Western clothes, spoke flawless English, smiled frequently, and made statements about Soviet pplicy that we did not expect to hear...
...she too had such a problem...
...We spent minutes looking at each other in silence across the empty desk...
...Outside the restaurant where he was scheduled to speak, several Americans stood quietly withplacards pleading the case of Soviet Jews...
...He was glad to...
...Paul to St...
...Imagine, he said...
...By thetime the family moved to Berlin in 1948, _where -Posner acquired Soviet citizenship, his American accent and tastes were well established...
...Helps people think about SDI without telling them what to think:' — MORTON KONDRACKE Washington Bureau Chief, Newsweek "An important contribution...
...Later, when a man inquired about Soviet dissidents, mentioning names, Posner wondered why his questioner should be so well informed—had he perhaps been in touch with the CIA...
...SUMMER GUESTS by Donald K. Emmerson Madison, Wisconsin Madison has been unusually busy this summer welcoming Soviets, showing them around, and getting in touch with the USSR...
...The American persona of Vladimir Posner dates from 1940, when at the age of six he and his wealthy Russian parents fled Nazi-occupied France for Manhattan...
...So Posner added a punch line that appealed to the affable capitalist hustler inside many of us: "If I had a million friends, I could ask each one for a dollar and get it both ways...
...In his many appearances around town Posner diverged repeatedly from Soviet policies...
...SWORD OR SHIELD...
...With some 130 Americans aboard the paddle-wheeler Delta Queen, the Soviets had floated from St...
...The enormity of the statement struck me immediately...
...Once, when I must have looked especially taken aback, he said: "Of course, every country does this sort of thing...
...At one point I came across one of the visitors being engaged in conversation—button-holed, really—by a local lady...
...PAPides the historical perspective that has been almost totally lacking elsewhere — an ideal classroom text:' — SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON Harvard University "Covers a wide spectrum of opinions, and places in proper historical perspective one of the most important strategic developments since the introduction of nuclear weapons:' — LORD CHALFONT Author, Star Wars: Suicide or Survival...
...He did not try to coerce me into accepting, though he would occasionally add encouragements...
...He repeated the offer and the job description, which, admittedly, made it seem easy enough...
...sources, including ABC television and local hosts...
...Did they get ten bucks for coming...
...We even felt free to kid him about how independent-minded he seemed to be...
...Russia, she had heard, had a problem with alcoholism...
...A caller wanted to know whether a decision by the Politburo could be vetoed...
...It,took Soviet authorities thirty-eight years to realize Posner's value as an emissary to the U.S...
...Whenever pressed, Posner defended his government...
...The desk held nothing atop it save a soft green telephone...
...A unique and valuable contribution:' — RONALD REAGAN ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER 1030 Fifteenth Street N.W...
...In fact, I think I waited until it was out of sight...
...All you need to do, my friend says, is to thank them for coming down to the river to see you...
...In my final days in Warsaw, my Polish friends greeted the story with comparable sangfroid, expressing puzzlement at only two facets of it...
...His face, though the color of clay, coruscated with a silver bicuspid on either side...
...You have contacts at work with Poles, and you have contacts with other foreindzers...
...The sticker read: THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 37 ESCAPE TO WISCONSIN...
...He was leaned back heavily in his seat, his clothing ill-matched and disrupted—even the enormous tie—by his outspread stomach...
...Back in the USSR, they could be expected to write at length about their "cruise for peace" through middle America, contrasting the friendly Americans who had boarded the Delta Queen with the bellicose Reagan Administration isolated in Washington...
...I'm in my cabin trying to sleep—exhausted from meeting so many friendly Americans crowding the banks of the river, from shaking so many hands, from having to speak English all the time...
...Trying to ignore the rain that drizzled down on the three of us, the Soviet took a decorous sip from his Bud Light and allowed as how, well, who knew, perhaps "an Anonymous" in his country would be a good idea...
...The 35 selections in this comprehensive new anthology reflect both the history of strategic defense thinking and a wide range of views on the contemporary debate...
...Perhaps the Delta Queeners regarded him as some-how less official than they, hence less reputable...
...I said: "I only want to teach...
...The thought occurred to me—as it has with this intensity only one or two other times in my life—that what I was experiencing happens only in movies...
...Yours does it...
...Occasionally, Posner showed his darker side...
...Cuts through the hyperbole of the SDI debate and presents the basic arguments in a most ex-acting way:' — RICHARD LUGAR, Chairman Senate Foreign Relations Committee "If you are going to read only one volume on SDI, this is it...
...the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Posner in his most sincere tone of voice denied that Sakharov had been sent to Gorky for that reason...
...I'm too tired...
...Never had we met a Soviet who looked, acted, and sounded more like ourselves...
...Of the thirteen riverboat Soviets, four were listed as "journalists...
...Private incentives" were...
...But that doesn't make it right," mymother would have told him...
...Intrigued, I asked Nadein to give an example of an amusing incident from his days on the Mississippi...
...Well, she understood that...
...just tell them thanks...
...Before an overflow crowd at one dinner for him, the American master of ceremonies gave Posner a favorite local bumper sticker for emergency use, should his candor in Madison get him canned in Moscow...
...Gorky being off limits to foreigners, American journalists could no longer reach Sakharov to report his views...
...Another headline concluded: "Soviet a Hit with Most in Madison," and he was...
...How much quicker and slicker Posner's answer would have been...
...He had his own paper route and developed a life-long liking for peanut butter...
...So I do...
...Whatever our views, we enjoyed the performance...
...First was amazement that with people bitching and speaking out in food lines daily the government should need special envoys to learn their thoughts...
...By impressing us with his candor, he hoped to improve the image of the Soviet Union...
...Of all our Soviet guests, the most memorable was Posner...
...he sneered...
...Earlier in the day, the same Russian had been stumped on a local radio talk show...
...Being herself a member, she thought it could help them...
...Exit visas should be granted, he told us, to "anyone who wants to leave" the Soviet Union...
...The event was not nearly as fantastic to her, being Polish, as it was to me: she asked jokingly what the starting salary was...
...20005 (202) 682-1200 Promise or Peril The Strategic Defense Initiative IMII IiN Zbigniew Brzezinski 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986...
...I agreed...
...His jokes and flourishes re-minded me at times of one of those superclever TV ads in which the product is upstaged by the pizazz...
...I only want to teach," a statement that, coming from someone who had begun his career as an instructor only six months before, was beginning to sound hollow...
...But he concentrated on projecting himself as an individual...
...That they finally allowed him in 1986 to revisit his previous homeland reflects Mikhail Gorbachev's interest in using Western public relations techniques more effectively...
...In Madison, this was headline news: "Top Soviet Commentator Backs Open Emigration" . . "Soviet Commentator Rips Radio Jamming" . . . "Soviet Doesn't Always Toe the Party Line" . . . "Posner Doesn't Fit Soviet Mold...
...Had they thought of establishing a Russian chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous...
...It's very like what journalists do—you gather information and then you report it...
...It would be nice to report that I responded sarcastically, or full of moral indignation...
...Although what he told us was of course in no sense anti-Soviet, Posner's artful departures from the party line surprised us...
...We enjoyed the sound of a true-red Soviet Communist bantering so casually about the possibility of a second revolution in the USSR...
...It's an American friend, telling me there are still.more people out-side who want to meet me...
...Well," he said...
...And two, that that little friend of yours know nothing about this...
...The sad thing is that in my country I'm a humor writer...
...These differences showed when they visited one of Madison's pizzerias...
...Didn't the patriotic citizens of the USSR have the right to protect their country...
...To make certain that I had not misunderstood, Iasked him, naively, to elucidate...
...THE NATION'S PULSE...
...He asked me to sit down and proceeded to go through the file our man had handed him...
...In only two days with us, he received more than five hours of time on local radio or TV...
...But one of the journalists, I learned, would write a humorous book about the experience...
...Thirteen more Soviets arrived in August, fresh from a "peace cruise" down the Mississippi River...
...You are a foreigner," he said, pronouncing the g as in "ginger" with the n before it...
...Subtler than such ad hominem re-marks was Posner's knack of making the form of what he had to say so reasonable that his listeners, he hoped, would be tempted to accept its other-wise outrageous content...
...On the delay in acknowledging Chernobyl, Posner admitted that "in my country, the bureaucratic element prefers to stonewall" before letting people know about important events...
...For others, the more "like one of us" he looked and sounded, the less it mattered where he came from, and that too limited his success as a Soviet representative...
...So much for those dour men in dark suits reviewing weapons on Red Square...
...Posner put us at ease...
...In June we played host to a delegation led by the Soviet TV and radio personality Vladimir Posner...
...Sakharov was there be-cause he had repeatedly appealed to "a foreign country" (the United States) to "use pressure" against the Soviet Union...
...There's a knock on the door...
...The audience roared...
...I was unsure how conversations such as this one were ended...
...Washington, D.C...
...Some Polish friends had told me of similar interviews when applying for passports abroad, and I wondered how they had acted...
...From Moscow's standpoint, his visit Donald K Emmerson, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written on Soviet affairs for the Christian Science Monitor...
...End of anecdote...
...Prolonged silence ensued...
...I said: "It doesn't interest me...
...as if the Soviets had done the establishment a favor by eating there...
...What if I made a scene, I mused, or stalked out with a stinging epithet (the movies again...
...Well," he said at last, putting his hands resignedly on his desk, alluding—I supposed—to the phantom pa-perwork, "if that's your answer, then there is not anything we can do for you.,, As I had not accepted the offer, I felt free to tell anyone...
...These were lapses that Pozner would have known to avoid...
...Finally came the hesitant reply that, well, the Party Congress could disapprove what the Politburo had decided...
...At summer's end another thirteen Soviets arrived, part of a group of fifty-three who had completed a "peace cruise" down the Mississippi River...
...Posner smiled...
...You should be used to this sort of work," he said smiling, and flashing his silver...
...When some-one said to Posner that Andrei Sakharov should not have been exiled to Gorky for criticizing...
...At one point, undefeated, he said: "Of course if you accept you must promise two things, One, that everything you telling us is the truth...
...That could have seemed a hackneyed plug for socialist fraternity over capitalist greed...
...Interestingly, when the subject of Posner arose, the larger delegation did not praise him...
...was "counterproductive...
...In poor English, he recounted aloud my recent past, noting that I had been a journalist in the States, that here in Warsaw I was teaching English, finally, that I wanted a visa to stay...
...here was a public relations bonanza...
...Then he would repeat his proposal, and I my refusal...
...Yet for some, what made his outspoken style attractive was its uniqueness, which depended on being reminded of Soviet speech controls...
...His government's jamming of Western radio broadcasts...
...You make notes, you come to us once a week, and you tell us what people saying...
...Posner remembered the family's Fifth Avenue apartment as "swanky" and the schools he went to as "posh and progressive...
...But spirits were not dampened...
...cooperation while enhancing its own commercial reputation...
...You have contacts with many people...
...Presented with a golf tee in hopes that he would popularize the game in his country, Posner quipped, "This may be the beginning of a revolution...
...You're a journalist...
...I can't, I say...
...The larger delegation seemed less comfortable with their surroundings than Posner, and a shade more defensive about the USSR...
...Nevertheless, in keeping with standard Soviet precautions, while Posner was in Madison his wife and child stayed in Moscow...
...Second was surprise that they would try to recruit a foreign journalist, someone who they knew could upon returning home make the deed public—as, here, I finally have...
...Included are essays and speeches by Winston Churchill, Alexei Kosygin, Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Harold Brown, Charles Krauthammer, Robert Jastrow, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and many others...
...Jokingly, one of us advised Posner to defect: "If you come over here, you could make a million dollars...
...They enjoyed the food, which the restaurant had decided to provide free of charge, furthering Soviet-U.S...
...Many of us had already seen him perform on television as a guest of Phil Donahue, Ted Koppel, Robert Novak, or Larry King...
...Now that was a quip worthy of Vladimir Posner himself...
...Or perhaps, on a deeper level, they were unsure of a man who had grown up in the West...
...But you must, says my friend...
...Hania followed me silently out of the building—she told people later that I looked as if I had just seen a ghost—for I feared confessing while still inside its walls...
...But later, at the picnic, when his turn came, Nadein stepped to the microphone and said, "I will tell you a joyful thing and a sad thing...
...Inside, I asked Posner privately what he thought of the protesters...
...Louis, stopping to spread their message in towns along the way...
...needed to speed the lagging Soviet economy...
...If you help us, we can help you...
...In July a local teacher arranged for his middle-school pupils to talk with Soviet counterparts on a Madison-to-Moscow conference call...
...Another delegate informed us that there were, after all, pizza parlors all over the Soviet Union...
...In Madison, at the picnic given for the delegation by our Society for American-Soviet Friendship, it rained...
Vol. 19 • October 1986 • No. 10
