Special Section: Andrei Gromyko

He was a survivor. He had lived through the Stalin period, the Molotov era at the Foreign Ministry, and Khrushchev’s roller coaster diplomacy. He had been Foreign Minister since 1957.

The price of survival included being the butt of the crude jokes of whoever was the top Soviet leader.

Khrushchev once boasted to a foreign visitor that if Gromyko were asked to sit on a block of ice with his pants down, he would do so unquestioningly until ordered to leave it. Brezhnev’s humor, though less brutal, made the same point.

Gromyko’s face would crease in smiles when he was the butt of this heavyhanded joshing. Only his eyes remained wary and slightly melancholy, like those of the beagle who has endured the inexplicable foibles of his master yet bent them to his own will. Through all this Gromyko preserved an aloof kind of dignity; he was loyal and compliant but not obsequious. He became the indispensable drive wheel of Soviet foreign policy, the consummate Soviet diplomat, well briefed, confident and tenacious. It was suicidal to negotiate with him without mastering the record or the issues. He had a prodigious memory that enabled him to bank every concession he believed we had made—or even hinted at. It would then become the starting point for the next round. Before he was elevated to the Politburo in 1973, he was an implementer, not a maker of policy. Afterward, he became visibly more influential and self-confident.

The American style of wisecracking at first eluded him. We met for the first time in September 1969. Gromyko walked up to me and said: “You look just like Henry Kissinger.” I replied:

“You look just like Richard Nixon.” This took him a few seconds to hoist aboard. He soon absorbed the style. During the Moscow summit of 1972 one of our Xerox machines broke down.

Knowing the KGB’S reputation for Orwellian ubiquity, I asked Gromyko during a meeting in the Kremlin whether he could have some copies made for us if we held certain documents up to the chandelier. Gromyko replied without missing a beat that unfortunately the cameras were installed by the tsars; they were adequate for photographing people but not documents.

Within the framework imposed by the system he represented he was honorable. He was a man of his word. He stuck to his bargains—or, if he was obliged to change course, he did so with visible embarrassment.