Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XIV, Soviet Union

244. Memorandum of Conversation Between Secretary of State Rusk and the Soviet Ambassador (Dobrynin)¹

Washington, July 26, 1967, 6:30 p.m.

In a long and relaxed talk with Ambassador Dobrynin in my office on the evening of July 26th, with no one else present, the following principal points emerged:

1. Ambassador Dobrynin confirmed that it had been the Algerians and the Syrians who had thrown the monkey wrench into possible Arab acceptance of the compromise resolution worked out between Gromyko and Goldberg in New York.²

2. I pressed Dobrynin as to whether he was trying to give me some message in two earlier remarks he had made about the prospective or actual inactivity of the 3–4 North Vietnamese divisions in and around the DMZ. I asked him if he had anything as to Hanoi’s military policy with respect to these divisions. He said that he had no such special information and that he had been making purely personal remarks on the basis of reports reaching his Embassy in Washington.

3. I asked him once again what the Soviet Union would do about Viet-Nam if the United States stopped the bombing. I reminded him that we had asked him that question quite some time ago and had never had any reply. He asked whether there was anything which the USSR could do which would make any difference to our bombing policy. I said I could not give him any generalized statement but it might be worth their trying to find out.

4. Dobrynin stated categorically that Hanoi had informed Moscow last December that they were preparing to have talks with us in Warsaw but had informed them later that the two bombing raids in the middle of December near Hanoi made such talks impossible. I then went over the four month’s cessation of bombing in the ten nautical mile circle around Hanoi and said we did not understand why if they were prepared to talk in early December they were not able to talk during that four month period.

5. We both agreed that the Glassboro talks had been worthwhile. He said that Kosygin had taken away a positive impression of the President and I said that I could say the same about the President’s impression of Kosygin.

6. We had a very brisk and frank discussion of the Svetlana affair. He said it was inconceivable to the leaders in Moscow that the United States could not have refused Svetlana entry into this country, and that they therefore looked upon her admission as a deliberate attempt to embarrass the Soviet Union. I went over the case in great detail, including the difficulties we had with both the Italian and Swiss Governments and our inability to find another country willing to take Svetlana to which she herself was willing to go. I reminded him that the problem arose because of three “stupidities”:

a) The permission given to Svetlana to leave the USSR;

b) The Indian refusal to permit Svetlana to remain in India unless the Soviet Ambassador approved; and

c) The Soviet Ambassador’s handling of the affair in New Delhi.

I told him that if they had other sensitive personalities of that sort to please keep them at home because we don’t want them.

7. We reviewed briefly the ABM situation and I reiterated our keen desire to get some serious talks started. He offered nothing new.

8. I gave him a “helpful household hint” about contacts with the Congress and staff members of Congressional committees. I told him that, since Ambassadors are accredited to the President, it was important that any contact with the legislative branch be open and not appear to be covert or on the sly. I said that it did not leave a good impression if contacts occurred at remote out of the way places as though something was being hidden. I told him this was a friendly suggestion to him personally because the President has a great regard for him. He saw the point but said that suggestions about where to have lunch or to meet invariably came from our side and that his people could not very well say “I can’t accept your suggestion about where to have lunch because the State Department prefers we lunch in the Statler dining room.” My guess is that his Congressional contacts do, in fact, suggest unnoticed places for meals or for conversations.

9. During his absence from Washington on vacation during August he clearly preferred that any serious contacts between us be through Ambassador Thompson in Moscow rather than through Federenko in New York.

10. I asked him what the Communist Youth publication in Moscow meant when it charged Secretary McNamara and me with being at the head of a large task force of over 200 people with a mission of anti-Soviet propaganda and of undermining their Fiftieth Anniversary Year. He had not seen the article and so I gave him a copy. He made some vague references to a feeling in Moscow that we were attempting to discredit their Fiftieth Anniversary and referred to a large number of seminars being held in American universities this year with speakers hostile to the Soviet Union. I told him that it was inevitable that universities would pay special attention to the Soviet Union on its Fiftieth Anniversary. As far as our Government is concerned, I told him that I had never heard any reference being made to the Fiftieth Anniversary Year in policy discussions of particular subjects and that Soviet leaders should not suppose that their Fiftieth Anniversary is really taken note of in the formulation of U.S. policy. We have tried, in a low key handling of the Svetlana affair for example, to ease some of the sharper edges of our relationships during their Fiftieth Anniversary Year.

DR

1. Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Rostow Files, Non-Vietnam, July-September 1967. Top Secret. Drafted by Rusk. Rusk forwarded the memorandum to the President under a July 28 covering memorandum, which is marked with an L, indicating that the President saw it.
2. For documentation on U.S.-Soviet talks in New York on the Middle East during July, see Foreign Relations, 1964–1968, volume XIX.