Summit in Smalltown

FOREIGN RELATIONS

(See Cover)

It looked like a county-fair town at election time. Hawkers were sold out of balloons and popcorn; hotels were jammed--and charging three times their normal prices. On every street, flags hung from front stoops and gawking kids from tree limbs. Several banners proclaimed: L.B.J. ALL THE WAY.

L.B.J. himself grinned and waved back to the welcoming townsfolk, the tension draining from his face as the crowds' enthusiasm washed over him. But he said nothing on arrival. He had not come to New Jersey's Gloucester County last week to mine votes but to fulfill his familiar pledge to "seek peace, any time, any place."

He did not have to travel very far. The place for the first U.S.-Soviet summit conference in six years was no Yalta or Geneva. Rather, as the wife of New Jersey's Governor put it, it was "Smalltown, U.S.A.," the little (pop. 11,689) college community of Glassboro, 135 miles from Washington, near the Colonial farming settlement and crossroads once known as Long A-Comin'.

The meeting between President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin had also been long in coming. Yet once started, the summiteers seemed as loath to end their dialogue as they had been to initiate it. For five hours and 20 minutes, at least two hours longer than expected, Johnson and Kosygin conferred on a wide spectrum of world issues that the superpowers alone can hope to resolve, interrupting private sessions monitored only by interpreters with a working luncheon attended by their top advisers. When they parted, it was not goodbye but au revoir; they surprised the world anew by returning to Glassboro for another meeting 48 hours later.

"Nice Place." Kosygin set the tone of the first meeting with his first words to Johnson after stepping out of his limousine: "You chose a nice place." And indeed it was. The venue was Holly Bush, a 22-room gingerbread brownstone, vintage 1849, on the rolling, tree-studded campus of Glassboro State College. The residence of College President Thomas ("Dr. Tom") Robinson, the house is as fetchingly old-fashioned inside as out, decorated with 19th century English prints and figured wallpaper. In the small, green-walled library set aside for the leaders' private conversation, the President and the Premier sat down beneath such titles as Those Who Love and The Dignity of Man. At least one international misunderstanding was quickly cleared up. When Kosygin remarked that it was a charming farmhouse, Johnson admitted that even Amerikanski farmers do not often occupy 22-room mansions.

The hard talk was something else. As they toured the horizon, it became clear that neither side was going to open the way to a major breakthrough. Johnson found Kosygin temperate, intelligent, experienced, but firm. The U.S. must let the Vietnamese settle their problems, Kosygin insisted, but the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. should force a Middle East settlement--on largely Arab terms. They agreed on Israel's right to existence, but the two had already said so before; Kosygin had even mentioned it when citing the "new realities of the nuclear age" at the United Nations General Assembly earlier in the week. They agreed on the importance of a treaty to bar the spread of nuclear weapons, but that, too, had already been agreed upon in principle.

Tough Grandfather. Before they broke for a luncheon of shrimp cocktail, roast beef and rice pilaf, they joshed about whether to eat at all. Kosygin said he was a tough grandfather. Having sipped coffee and iced tea during the morning meeting, he could go the rest of the day without food. Johnson prevailed, and lunch was served on a cloth-covered raw-wood table hastily hammered together by the White House kitchen staff, which had come up from Washington along with the food. During the meal, which was attended by Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other top aides, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara spoke about the advantages of a mutual freeze on production of anti-ballistic missile systems. Gromyko replied with the standard answer: the Soviets need an ABM network for protection against U.S. missiles.

In leading up to a toast with California Cabernet Sauvignon, Johnson made the first intimation that the meeting should be continued. "We would like to have the opportunity," he said, "to sit down further and discuss aspects of the anti-ballistic missile system, nonproliferation, perhaps some questions arising out of the Middle East situation, and at least the situation in Southeast Asia, as well as questions of mutual interest in Europe and the Western Hemisphere." Later, Kosygin made a firm suggestion for the second session.

Flood Threat. Another theme of mutual interest was grandfatherhood, a status Kosygin had enjoyed for 18 years and Johnson for two days. Kosygin welcomed the President to the club, passed along a gold baby cup for Patrick Lyndon Nugent.* Grandchildren--and the world they will live in--became a frequent touchstone. At one point, Johnson told the Russian: "You don't want my grandson fighting you, and I don't want you shooting at him."

The conferees emerged from the first day's meeting beaming at each other and the world. If looks could melt the cold war ice, Gloucester County would have been flooded. Johnson, towering over his stocky, grizzled guest, wore his most affable smile; Kosygin, normally grim in public, grinned shyly. "We have exchanged views on a number of international questions," Johnson said. "We also exchanged views on the questions of direct bilateral relations between the Soviet Union and the United States of America." It was, in the words of countless diplomatic bulletins, "a very good and very useful meeting."

Kosygin agreed. He thanked the President for arranging the meeting, thanked "the masters of the house"--the Republican college president--for "a roof over our heads under which we could meet." (The roof, as Johnson found to his delight, had in earlier times sheltered such visitors as Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.) As to the business of the day, Kosygin said he had nothing to add to Johnson's statement: "I think it was very correctly drawn up." But by the time he got to his limousine, Kosygin had a postscript: "War should be a thing of the past."

Despite the humid 90DEG weather, more than 2,000 townsfolk had excitedly waited out the conference. Their hurrahs drew the normally reticent Russian out of his car after it had gone just a few hundred yards. Upstaging Johnson for the nonce, he shook hands, waved and cried: "I would like to thank you! There are many beautiful and wonderful things to be done!" Then the chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers headed down Route 322 for the 111-mile drive back to New York. He spent the day of Summit recess visiting Niagara Falls. Johnson headed for a political dinner in Los Angeles, where, perhaps a bit too sanguinely, he told his audience: "It is good to sit down and look a man in the eye and try to reason with him and to have him reason with you. Reasoning together was the spirit of Holly Bush."

Hard Road. For all the public smiles and warm words, the road to Glassboro had been arduous, and at times ridiculous. From Washington's viewpoint, there were at least four powerful arguments against the meeting--the four sterile cold-war Summits during the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations, most notably the 1960 Paris meeting that broke up over the U-2 incident as soon as it began, and John Kennedy's unhappy Viennese deadlock with Nikita Khrushchev in 1961. Also, Washington officialdom has a built-in predisposition against high-level meetings without detailed preparation and a concrete agenda. Finally, the Administration was opposed to a meeting that would strengthen Kosygin's hand in his Middle Eastern propaganda push, which was the main reason for his visit to the U.S.

Yet from the moment word arrived on June 16 that Kosygin was coming, the White House felt that protocol as well as good taste required at least a gesture of hospitality. As speculation increased, White House Press Secretary George Christian announced in Washington: "The President has made it clear that Mr. Kosygin would be welcome here, or at Camp David, or some other convenient place near by for either a social visit or substantive discussions."

Roses to the Workers. There, for two days, the invitation rested. Johnson's calendar began filling up. Kosygin, who had landed in New York on June 17 with his married daughter, gracious, well-dressed Liudmila Gvishiani, went about his business and pleasure, giving the impression that he was waiting for further word from Washington. "It is not up to me," he said. By foot and limousine, he toured Manhattan from Wall Street to Harlem; and later, Liudmila, who speaks English and was full of smiles, took an excursion to Times Square, went to the opera (La Gioconda), the movies (Barefoot in the Park, Blow-up), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the photographers delighted in finding her in the Egyptian wing. Kosygin made plans to go to the opera himself (when he had to cancel, he sent roses to "the workers of the opera house").

One place he would not go was Washington. Just as Johnson was unwilling to appear to be buttressing the Russian's presence at the U.N., Kosygin did not want the Arabs to view him as a supplicant at Johnson's table. But four days after he arrived, the feeling in Washington had tilted in favor of a meeting. Johnson has been accused in the past of neglecting diplomacy and missing opportunities to treat with the Communists. Now, moreover, there was a human desire to size up Kosygin, who, despite his wooden mien, is recognized as the closest thing the Kremlin has to a statesman in the Western sense. West European sentiment favored the meeting. Furthermore, there was the belief in Washington that everything possible should be done to keep the line open to Moscow. Finally, at a noon-hour meeting with Kosygin, Secretary of State Dean Rusk made the deal. Kosygin had been a flop at the United Nations. He was increasingly eager to make some showing of success.

Halfway House. Where to meet? Although Kosygin ranks second in the Soviet hierarchy only to Communist Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, he apparently had authorization from Moscow to see Johnson only in New York. An exchange of cables with the Kremlin was necessary for Kosygin to get clearance to go out of town. Then, it turned out, the Chairman had no enthusiasm for a helicopter ride, while the White House insisted on a halfway house near Philadelphia with its big jet strip. There were other considerations--security, privacy, facilities for the press.

Johnson telephoned New Jersey Governor Richard Hughes, an old friend and fellow Democrat. Hughes, who had earlier suggested the possibility of a New Jersey location, immediately proposed Holly Bush. Fifteen miles southeast of Philadelphia, it is almost exactly midway between Washington and New York, an easy automobile ride via the New Jersey Turnpike, with a nice campus setting and a handy gym for press facilities.

In his White House bedroom, Johnson called for a map and, with a trio of aides, searched for Glassboro. There was considerable discussion, an exchange of phone calls with Rusk in New York and, two hours later, final agreement with the Russians. The White House announcement half an hour later put Glassboro on the map for keeps.* No one bothered to tell President Robin son about it until after Glassboro got the word from radio and TV newscasts.

All week, summitry speculation had provided considerably more suspense than the all-too predictable Middle East debate in the General Assembly. The meeting in Glassboro only heightened the atmosphere of unreality at the U.N.'s glass house. Even as Johnson and Kosygin met, Byelorussia's Tikhon Kiselev was railing in the General Assembly against the Israeli "reign of terror" in Arab lands.

Five Principles. Kiselev's effusions were typical of the five-day prepackaged charade on Manhattan's East River. Moscow had demanded the convening of the 122-member Assembly, ostensibly to break the Middle East impasse. For its part, the Johnson Administration opposed the U.N. session from the outset, correctly anticipating that it would accomplish nothing and that the Communists intended it to be a propaganda spectacular. Once confronted with the inevitability of the session, the U.S. did use the occasion for extensive diplomatic lobbying by Secretary Rusk. He saw many of the foreign officials privately, and even conferred secretly one night with United Arab Republic Deputy Premier Mahmoud Fawzy.

As to the public proceedings, it was the Administration's view that Johnson's presence there--regardless of summitry--could only invest the session with unwarranted dignity. Yet the U.S. had to speak out. For a forum, Johnson selected a State Department briefing for educators just an hour before Kosygin was to take the podium at the U.N. The President gave a sober, statesmanlike prescription for sanity in the Middle East. His "five great principles of peace in the region" called for each nation's "fundamental right to live" and be respected by its neighbors, "justice" for Arab refugees, unfettered maritime rights, control of the arms race, and maintenance of the "political independence and territorial integrity" for all.

Soft Voice. Johnson unmistakably supported the Israeli cause, although he shrewdly avoided crowing over the Soviet-Arab defeat. Specifically, he put the American imprimatur on Israel's premises for peace: Arab recognition of Israeli statehood, an end to the state of belligerence that has existed since 1948, free use of Suez and the Strait of Tiran, direct Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. Yet he also skirted the role of Israeli advocate. "Certainly," he said, "[Israeli] troops must be withdrawn."

Speaking in a soft voice and clearly directing himself to Kosygin--who was watching the President on television and getting a running translation--Johnson said: "We think we have made great progress in improving the arena of common action with the Soviet Union. Our purpose is to narrow our differences--where they can be narrowed--and thus to help secure peace in the world for future generations." In a less charitable aside to the Communists, Johnson proposed that all Middle East nations report new weapons shipments into the region. "Now the waste and futility of the arms race," said Johnson, "must be apparent to all the peoples of the world."

Johnson then went to the White House to take his turn before the TV set. Kosygin, the economics expert who typifies the pragmatic new Soviet man, did little in his U.N. debut but rehearse the catechism of Kremlin cliches. He did, hopeful U.S. diplomats noted, leave open a minuscule area for potential negotiation by acknowledging Israel's right to national existence and mentioning the need for a "common language" among the great powers. Otherwise he sounded like a technocrat's Molotov.

Aleks in Wonderland. Kosygin castigated U.S. policy from Santo Domingo to Saigon, worked in West German revanchism and, straight-faced, held up Soviet respect for the right of "every people to establish an independent national state of its own" as an example the U.S. might follow. On the Middle East, he was strictly Aleks in Wonderland. Israel was the "unbridled aggressor," guilty of "unprecedented perfidy" and encouraged, of course, by the U.S. He likened Israel's actions to "the heinous crimes perpetrated by the fascists during World War II." Demanding U.N. condemnation of Israeli aggression, immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israeli forces and reparations by Israel to the United Arab Republic, Syria and Jordan, Kosygin introduced a formal resolution that would have the General Assembly appeal to the Security Council to enforce its judgment.

Abba Eban, the Israeli Foreign Minister, answered in ringing Churchillian cadences, coining the word "politicide" (death of a country) as the crime of which the Arabs were guilty (see THE WORLD). He was followed by a group of Arab and European spokesmen who either denounced Israel or admonished it against territorial aggrandizement. Of the rhetorical encirclement Eban is said to have quipped: "Never have so few owed so little to so many."

Politicking v. Realpolitik. U.S. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg introduced an alternative resolution to the Soviet proposals that incorporated the five principles laid down by Johnson and added the suggestion that Arab-Israeli peace talks be assisted by a disinterested mediator. After Goldberg's formal motion, the General Assembly became a kind of Hyde Park Corner for every diplomatic soapboxer in town.

In fact, neither the U.S. nor the Soviet resolution seemed likely to be adopted, and there was talk of a compromise proposal by a group of small powers, perhaps this week. Whatever the outcome, the U.N. session seemed almost surrealistically detached from geopolitics, a sideshow that serves at best as a strainer separating politicking from Realpolitik.

Yet for Moscow it was a necessary exercise, both in terms of the immediate question of the Soviet future in the Middle East and the larger one of its standing vis-`a-vis the U.S. in this 50th anniversary year of the Bolshevik Revolution. While the Soviets have been making progress domestically in economic development, they have had little to celebrate in their conduct of foreign affairs for the past 20 years.

Particularly since the 1962 Cuban missile debacle, which helped hasten the fall of Nikita Khrushchev, Moscow has played for smaller stakes at great cost and scant return (see box). One investment it could not liquidate, however, was the Middle East. With the decline of Western influence and the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1950s, the volatile, petroliferous Moslem world became an irresistible and comparatively safe target for Russia's rulers. Their main goal, in the Middle East as elsewhere, was to displace U.S. influence. The ultimate cost of Russia's aid to the Arab world was between $3 billion and $4 billion.

Controlled Trouble. Uri Ra'anan, an Israeli Kremlinologist who is professor of world politics at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, observes that "ironically, the Soviets were not interested in whether these countries actually gained their aspirations. Russia was interested in giving arms, but not in their being used. The Russians found, as always, that it is easier to get in than to stay in."

Even though it became the custodial power of the Arab world, the Soviet Union found that it could not control events. While the Soviets had every reason to welcome turbulence in the area, they could not restrain their clients from provoking an explosion that eventually threatened a direct Russian-U.S. military confrontation--which might well have occurred if the tide of battle three weeks ago had flowed differently and Israel had been faced with extinction.

In their defeat, the Arabs found a scapegoat in the U.S., but they also vented their spleen on their Kremlin friends. "The balance of terror," complained the Algiers daily El Moudjahid, has prompted the Russians to "put the preservation of peace before every other consideration" and to relegate their "support for the liberation movements to second place." Even East Germany's Walter Ulbricht was alarmed over Moscow's refusal to risk war. "The nuclear balance between the Soviet Union and the United States," he said, "is to be used as an excuse to start wars of aggression just below the nuclear threshold to eliminate progressive governments."

Thus the pyrotechnic efforts by Kosygin to prove that Moscow meets its obligations. "The Soviet Union," he promised at the U.N., "will undertake all measures within its power, both in the United Nations and outside, in order to achieve the elimination of the consequences of aggression."

Duplex Diplomacy. Did he mean it? As at least token proof, Russian-made MIGs--more than 100 of them--have arrived in the U.A.R. and Syria to begin replacing the estimated 400 planes destroyed by Israel. Another Cairo arrival was Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny, the third man, with Kosygin and Brezhnev, in the Kremlin's collegial leadership. "The imperialists and their agents imagine that we have come here to exchange small talk," Podgorny told President Gamal Abdel Nasser. "But we will prove to them that we have come here for more than talk. We have come here to frustrate the designs of all conspirators."

In fact, Podgorny's visit was almost certainly more of a political reconnaissance than a mission of condolence; it was a classic essay in the kind of duplex diplomacy at which the Russians are masters: talking on one level while acting--or failing to act--on another. Despite the noise and despite even the MIGS, the Russians were obviously playing for time. As evidenced at Holly Bush, Kosygin's visit to the U.S. was also at once a holding action and a salvage operation. Longer-range Russian tactics remained unclear--probably to the Russians themselves.

Massive Reassessment. Aside from the obvious uncertainties about the Arab countries, eventual relations with Israel and the political longevity of the principal Arab leaders, the Russians have been suffering from their own where-do-we-go-from-here problems. The system of collective leadership practiced since Khrushchev's removal in 1964--what State Department Policy Planner Zbigniew Brzezinski calls a "regime of clerks"--has resulted in a slow-motion foreign policy that inhibits innovation or quick decision even more effectively than Washington's dinosauric bureaucracy. Moscow's inability to get itself out of its self-dug holes, no matter how dangerous they become, is a price the Kremlin is paying for ending Khrushchev-style "adventurism."

Now, in Washington's view, the Russians are engaged in a massive reassessment of their entire foreign policy. If not triggered by the Middle East debacle alone, the review is certainly made more urgent by it. The biggest question to be answered is whether Moscow will come down on the side of detente or defiance, and the answer to that question could shape world events for years to come. Says one East European diplomat: "They desperately want something to crow about." Moscow's policymakers, who have historically gyrated between common sense and ideological intransigence, could swing toward a hard line. Or they could consult the box score of the last two decades, tot up the strikeouts of international mischief, and opt for cooperation instead.

Reality v. Rhetoric. Last week's summiteering, for all its euphoric effect on the U.S. press,* could hardly sway the balance. As the President himself said later: "One meeting does not make a peace." In fact, though Johnson and Kosygin conducted a highly successful first meeting on the personal level--"They enjoyed one another," said one official --and possibly even eased some of the tensions that had developed since the Middle East went to war June 5, their differences on every critical issue were more clearly etched at Holly Bush than they had been before.

Nonetheless, the parley succeeded in dispelling the phantasmagoria that had issued from the U.N. and beclouded world affairs all week. The meeting substituted reality for rhetoric. And it gave two men, astonishingly alike in their experience of power and their awareness of its limitations, an unexampled opportunity to confront and assess one another. Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Aleksei Kosygin has ever won high acclaim as a diplomatist, but their first encounters proved that both men are as equally equipped for such a conference as any two statesmen the two nations have yet fielded simultaneously.

To their client countries as well as the older nations that profess concern that their fate should largely reside in American and Soviet hands, the non-news of the Summit should in itself be a measure of reassurance. Johnson was no more the plains-Texan wheeler-dealer than was Kosygin a shoe-banging Khrushchev. Both men demonstrated that they are able to survey, if not to solve, the overriding issues with acumen and restraint.

In the aftermath of history's first hotline diplomacy, the most significant aspect of the Smalltown Summit was that it happened. The road toward a meaningful East-West dialogue may even have started at Glassboro, N.J.

* Kosygin also gave the Robinsons a cigarette lighter and several objects of Baltic amber, including a cigarette holder for Dr. Robinson, a teetotaler who does smoke an occasional cigarette.

* Local historians maintain that the town helped popularize the word "booze." The term was coined earlier but gained wide currency when a now-defunct Glassboro glassworks made cabin-shaped bottles for William Henry Harrison's 1840 log-cabin presidential campaign. The contents were supplied by a Philadelphia distiller named E. C. Booz.

* Soviet news outlets gave the initial meeting, scant notice. Radio Moscow waited until midnight before announcing that the meeting had ever been held.

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