In Confidence:: Moscow's Ambassador to America's Six Cold War Presidents

This diplomatic history by the former Soviet ambassador to the U.S. from 1962 to 1986 casts the Cold War as a saga of missed opportunities and misunderstandings. Dobrynin believes that the ideologies of both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. perpetuated a wasteful, dangerous rivalry, and he blames the collapse of detente on the growing influence of the Soviet military-industrial complex, Moscow's overextension (e.g., in Afghanistan), U.S. inflexibility in arms control and President Ronald Reagan's bellicosity. Paradoxically, Dobrynin also credits Reagan for opening a dialogue with Moscow during his second term. Drawing on his own unpublished diaries and archival research, the ex-ambassador charges that during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Moscow made him an involuntary tool of deceit by keeping secret the deployment of Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba. He also divulges that President Lyndon Johnson pushed for a negotiated end to the Vietnam War in 1965 whereby the U.S. would accept any government in South Vietnam, even if it eventually turned socialist. This monumental chronicle is a fundamental source on Soviet-American relations. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour. (Sept.)