In Confidence
Dobrynin, Anatoly
BOOK REVIEWS uring the Nixon, D Ford, and Carter administrations, when Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin was paying a call on the U.S. Secretary of State, he was usually permitted to drive into...
...military alert during the 1973 Mideast war, his version of events is misleading and self-serving...
...As with other recent Soviet reminiscences (especially Fyodor Burlatsky's, and even Georgii Arbatov's), there are nuggets of anecdotal information here, of a kind that has always been available about Western governments and their decision-making, but has always been lacking on the Soviet side...
...and an ingratiating humor and charm that worked very effectively on all of the above...
...By the same token, the American policy that Dobrynin reported back to his superiors was in our own hands to decide...
...ri The American Spectator December 1995 71...
...Thus we have his report on key Politburo discussions he participated in...
...His success, in turn, reflected the qualities of the foreign policy he served—the seductive charm of its peace offensives, its relentlessness in pursuit of its aims...
...Secretary of State, he was usually permitted to drive into the basement garage of the State Department and take a private elevator up to the Secretary's seventh-floor office...
...Read with proper care and without exaggerated expectations, however, the Dobrynin memoir is a historical gold mine...
...N o one should have expected Dobrynin to do more than that...
...In any event it testifies to the mystique that surrounded Dobrynin's extraordinary 24-year tenure as Soviet ambassador and the unique position he came to occupy in Washington...
...And he was a career civilservant, not a political philosopher—that is to say, no Solzhenitsyn...
...When Ronald Reagan became president, Secretary of State Alexander Haig revoked this privilege...
...As Dobrynin indicates, his reporting of the American scene in all its turbulent complexity—"such a difficult but wonderful country," he calls it—did not always endear him to his Kremlin bosses, whose ideological blinders and paranoia led them often to dismiss him as a victim of clientitis...
...Some reviewers have focused on the portrait of Kissinger, who took a central role as Dobrynin's interlocutor for eight years...
...Sometimes, as in his discussion of the U.S...
...Nixon creating his own personal back-channel with Dobrynin, meeting with him privately for candid conversations behind Kissinger's back...
...Jimmy Carter refusing to carry an umbrella in the rain during a Vienna Summit with Brezhnev because (Hamilton Jordan explained) he was sensitive to comparisons with Neville Chamberlain at Munich...
...Whether or not this was a mortal blow that accelerated the collapse of the Evil Empire I will leave to future historians...
...Dobrynin, on instructions from Moscow, offering Hubert Humphrey financial and other help for his 1968 presidential race against arch-Cold Warrior Richard Nixon...
...He was, as he readily admits, a loyal servant of the Soviet state to the end...
...The portraits of his Soviet bosses are often chilling...
...Most reviewers have found the book disappointing...
...And though overly long and ponderous in places, Dobrynin's memoir is filled with rich and candid portraits of his Kremlin masters: Stalin, Molotov, Gromyko, Brezhnev, Suslov, Andropov, Gorbachev...
...He came from a poor working-class family, studied engineering, had modest expectations in life, and was vaulted through a series of fortuitous circumstances into a diplomatic career...
...Taking due account of the old saw attributed to Dean Acheson that no man ever came out second best in his own record of a conversation, Dobrynin's recitation of events is an indispensable historical source...
...Dobrynin showed up one day for an appointment and was made to enter through the front door and main lobby like any other ambassador (and any other visitor), under the gaze of journalists, tourists, and other passers-by...
...He indirectly confirms what this reviewer has long suspected about Khrushchev's motivation for placing missiles in Cuba in the first place: that the Kremlin was cooking up a new diplomatic campaign, set to be launched at the end of 1962, to squeeze the Western allies out of Berlin, and wanted to do so from a position of strength after redressing the imbalance in strategic weapons...
...access both offiPeter W. Rodman, who served in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush administrations, is director of national security programs at the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom and a senior editor of National Review...
...Yet he gives Gorbachev most of the credit for ending the Cold War, disputing any notion that Ronald Reagan had anything to do with it except by his conciliatory response to Gorbachev's peace-loving overtures...
...He criticizes Soviet policies on China, IN CONFIDENCE: MOSCOW'S AMBASSADOR TO AMERICA'S SIX COLD WAR PRESIDENTS Anatoly Dobrynin Times Books/672 pages /$30 reviewed by PETER W. RODMAN 70 The American Spectator December 1995 Israel, Jewish emigration, human rights abuses, KGB spying, Angola, the deployment of SS-20s in Europe, the Korean airliner shootdown, and other issues...
...He had access to his own files when compiling the book, and so was able to quote from or paraphrase, in voluminous detail, important internal policy documents and his own contemporaneous messages to Moscow reporting on important conversations...
...He pulls few punches in describing the dogmatism, crudity, and paranoia of leaders whose knowledge of the outside world, minimal to start with, was distorted by ideological caricatures...
...More broadly, he seems at a loss to explain why the Soviet edifice came crashing down, except to blame the clumsiness of Gorbachev...
...He had a direct private phone line to Kissinger (and some of Kissinger's successors...
...In other words, he was the beneficiary first of the system's egalitarianism and then of its privileges...
...indeed, to suspect him of having been too "Americanized" by his time here...
...officials thought, it did no harm to have a Soviet Ambassador who understood the truth about America and its policies and who could reflect them accurately to his masters...
...And he tells the story of Brezhnev's physical deterioration, including a seizure the Soviet leader suffered during a break in his Vladivostok meetings with Gerald Ford in 1974, and a second seizure on the train back after the meetings were over...
...Dobrynin's role in U.S.-Soviet diplomacy was often pivotal...
...A nervous Scoop Jackson, after the Jackson-Vanik amendment had prompted a Soviet curtailment of Jewish emigration, inviting Dobrynin to his home for a private chat in which he assured the Ambassador that his (Jackson's) approach to the Soviets was not all that different from Nixon's and Ford's but that domestic politics forced him to look for tactical differences...
...George Bush confiding to Dobrynin (while still vice president) that in order to win the presidency he had no choice but to conceal his moderate views because the country had become more conservative...
...His ex post facto criticisms of Soviet misdeeds are often balanced by standard Party-line criticisms of American actions...
...It's not a very deep analysis...
...Humphrey rebuffed the offer...
...But Dobrynin also paints Kissinger as a wily adversary who out-maneuvered the Soviets in China and the Middle East...
...Ted Kennedy complaining to Dobrynin after the Geneva Summit that the improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations was boosting Reagan's popularity in the United States and weakening the antinuclear movement...
...Our quarrel was with the Soviet system, its power, and its ideological ambitions...
...cial and social to the most important people in Washington of both parties, in all branches of government, from presidents on down...
...In 1986 he was summoned back to Moscow where he served another five years as a confidential adviser to Gorbachev, accompanying him on a number of subsequent U.S.-Soviet summits into the Bush era...
...military paranoia was just as frightening...
...Kissinger is also shown in a somewhat embarrassing light in the Reagan period, exaggerating his own standing in the Reagan entourage...
...So too on most arms control topics...
...Dobrynin complains bitterly of Khrushchev's duplicity over Cuban missiles, of which he was an unwitting instrument, and he recognizes the 1968 Czech invasion and the Afghanistan war as major moral and political disasters...
...Fortunately, we had more tools in our arsenal than just banishing Anatoly from the garage...
...Dobrynin was the Kremlin's premier interpreter of America and, indeed, many American officials' principal interpreter of Soviet policies...
...Haig's office leaked word of it to the press as a major breakthrough...
...He was posted to the capital in early 1962, and was a player in major Cold War events from the Cuban missile crisis later that year to the October 1973 Middle East war to the climactic era of Reagan and Gorbachev two and a half decades later...
...D obrynin's long tenure in Washington undoubtedly gave him an intimate grasp of American politics and personalities that well served the purposes of Soviet diplomacy...
...Kissinger spoke volubly and openly to Dobrynin about a variety of developments, foreign and domestic, including Watergate (and guessed wrong in flatly declaring that Nixon would never resign...
...Carter as ex-president (ever the helpful elder statesman) warning Dobrynin in early 1985 that conciliatory statements by Reagan were not to be trusted and that arms control was doomed so long as Reagan was in power...
...Dobrynin remains convinced, however, that U.S...
...His record of negotiations with Robert Kennedy on the secret trade of Turkish for Cuban missiles is probably the definitive one...
...B ut it is the revealing portraits of Americans that readers will find most titillating...
...Indiscretions abound...
...There are a host of little bombshells involving many other Americans: • Bobby Kennedy pleading with Dobrynin to keep the Turkey-for-Cuba missile swap secret because it could damage his future plans to run for president...
...a detailed account of his crucial back-channel meetings with Robert Kennedy during the Cuban crisis, and his private meetings with Nixon, Kissinger, and scores of other Americans who confided in him with an extraordinary abandon—presumably believing their confidences were safe in the Kremlin vaults until the end of time...
...From our perspective, too, there is no point shooting the messenger...
...His memoir was long awaited—and not without trepidation...
...He also describes his own terror at a briefing he received from Chief of Staff Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev warning of the danger of a NATO attack on the USSR: "1941 shall never be repeated," the marshal growled...
...These were concealed from public knowledge...
...But in the end, as many U.S...
...As in the case of any other such memoir, these need to be tested against other evidence...
...Bob Dole confiding to Dobrynin later in 1985 that he hoped the Geneva Summit between Gorbachev and Reagan would "weaken the wave of bellicose ultraconservatism in the country" and reduce the influence of the "extreme right-wingers" around Reagan...
Vol. 28 • December 1995 • No. 12
