280. Editorial Note
Although the Soviet Union’s military incursion into Czechoslovakia in late August 1968 abruptly undermined the prospect for an early summit meeting and the opening of the missile talks (see Document 274), both initiatives were revived in the last months of the Johnson administration.
On August 6, Ambassador Thompson met with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin in Washington to consider these matters. Instructions for Thompson for this talk, August 5, and a memorandum of his conversation with Dobrynin are in the Johnson Library, Rostow Files, Chlodnick File. At the President’s instruction, Walt Rostow then invited Ambassador Dobrynin to come to Rostow’s home on September 9 at 8:30 p.m. to discuss a prospective summit meeting between President Johnson and Chairman Kosygin. At their meeting Rostow presented Dobrynin with six points, which Rostow had apparently developed with guidance from the President. These points summarized President Johnson’s conditions and proposals for a summit. At his meeting with Rostow, Dobrynin took down these points and repeated them several times to make sure he understood them. The first of these points was, “The President does not wish to launch the missile talks at a meeting lower than the Kosygin-Johnson level.” Concerning the missile talks, Dobrynin said early in their conversation:
“He said, as he had said several times to Thompson, that he had seen the position papers of the Soviet Union. They were detailed and highly technical. Moreover, he said that as a diplomat he must report to me in candor that they represented not a final position but a bargaining position. He assumed that our papers would be similar in character. To complete the negotiation on the missile question would, in his judgment, take considerable time. Therefore, if concrete results were to emerge from a first meeting between Kosygin and the President, he thought we should consider two possible steps:
- “—an early exchange of papers at the Ambassadorial level: via Thompson in Moscow and Dobrynin in Washington. This could be done quietly and would give each side a chance to see what elements in them could be the subject for an interim agreement in principle at the Summit meeting;
- “—an effort be made, before a Summit meeting, to agree on these matters of broad principle which would guide the negotiations in the wake of a Summit meeting.” (Memorandum from Rostow to the President, September 10; ibid.)
The remainder of their long conversation covered the problems in the Middle East, Vietnam, and Czechoslovakia and their relationship to [Page 717] the proposed summit. The six points are contained in an unsigned paper, September 7; ibid.
Discussions on a proposed summit and preparations for the opening of the missile talks continued to the end of 1968. See Documents 281, 282, 287, 294, 295, 297, and 299.