Word: viet
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There was one dramatic session during the summit-on Viet Nam. Held at Brezhnev's dacha outside Moscow, it pitted Nixon against a troika of Soviet leaders: Party Boss Brezhnev, Premier Aleksei Kosygin and President Nikolai Podgorny...
...Soviet leaders and Nixon faced each other across the oval table. The discussion started harmlessly enough but finally Nixon decided to put Viet Nam squarely on the table. If he had not, the Soviet leaders surely would have; they were loaded for bear...
Nixon began by arguing that the "collateral issue" of Viet Nam should not interrupt the basic progress in our relations which was being achieved. He was aware that the Soviet Union had an ideological affinity with Hanoi. But we did not choose this moment for the "flare-up" in Viet Nam [he was referring to Hanoi's 1972 Easter offensive]. We could not reconsider our policy unless Hanoi indicated new flexibility in its negotiating stance. Moscow, he needled, should use the influence it acquired through supplying military equipment to make Hanoi think again...
...that the subject was Viet Nam, the atmosphere clouded suddenly. Each of the three Soviet leaders in turn unleashed a diatribe against Nixon, who, except for two one-sentence interruptions, endured it in dignified silence. Not only was the substance tough but the tone was crudely hectoring. Brezhnev complained not only about our "cruel" bombing but about the whole history of our involvement in Viet Nam. He denied that military actions were needed to end the war. Hanoi was eager to negotiate; all we had to do was to get rid of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and accept...
Nixon had always felt cheated because the narrowness of his 1968 victory and the pressures of Viet Nam had prevented a house-cleaning of the bureaucracy, which he had mistrusted as packed with holdover Democrats. Still, it does not explain the frenzied, almost maniacal sense of urgency about this political butchery. To ask for resignations en masse within hours of being elected, to distribute forms obviously mimeographed during a campaign in which many of the victims had been working themselves to a frazzle, was wounding and humiliating. Nixon's later troubles had other causes, of course; yet he surely deprived...