Up the Back Stairs

FOREIGN RELATIONS

In a classic brag designed to show that he alone dictated Soviet foreign policy, Nikita Khrushchev once declared: "When I tell Gromyko to take off his pants and sit on a cake of ice, he does it." Last week, after sitting on the ice cake through nearly three years of steadily worsening U.S. -Soviet relations, it looked as if Khrushchev's successors may have at last told Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to get off and hitch up. With the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. already moving toward the conclusion of a New York-to-Moscow air pact and an outer-space treaty, the habitually dour Gromyko astounded newsmen by emerging from a State Department dinner with the observation that "both countries are striving to reach agreement" on measures to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

It was a small straw, but straws make the bricks of international agreement, and U.S. officials and newsmen alike grasped at it eagerly. Perhaps too eagerly. Before the week was out, Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev seemed to be ordering Gromyko back to the freezer when he issued a tough reply to Lyndon Johnson's recent appeal for better East-West relations. "If the U.S. wants to develop mutual relations," snapped Brezhnev, it must "remove the main impediment," which, in his view, is the bombing of North Viet Nam by U.S. aircraft.

Had Gromyko got his signals crossed? Hardly. He told President Johnson much the same thing in a private chat at the White House last week. Yet for weeks he had also been transmitting subtle signals of encouragement.

Free of Flak. The first such signal was flashed when Secretary of State Dean Rusk met Gromyko at the United Nations last month and found the atmosphere refreshingly free of polemic flak. Kremlinologists thought they detected an extra beep when Gromyko, in the midst of an otherwise vituperative speech to the General Assembly, remarked: "Even when other centers of international tension appear, Europe still remains the barometer of the world's political weather." That, in the convoluted language of Soviet diplomacy, appeared to mean that the Russians, whatever they may say in public, are tired of letting Viet Nam stand in the way of agreements elsewhere. Heartened, Rusk invited Gromyko to see President Johnson.

Gromyko found L.B.J. racing through a schedule that even by Lyndon's standards was frenetic. He was boning up for his Asian tour, politicking for Democrats, discussing Viet Nam with Laos' Prince Souvanna Phouma and Britain's Foreign Secretary George Brown.

The war was also the overriding issue during Gromyko's 1-hour 45-minute talk with the President, and U.S. officials concluded from what was said that Moscow would like to see a settlement there, but will not lift a finger toward that end until Hanoi gives the go-ahead. Leaving the White House by the back door, Gromyko headed for the State Department for a shrimp and lamb dinner with Rusk. The talk centered on prospects for a nuclear-nonproliferation treaty. "Gromyko made it very clear," said one official, "that there will be no agreement, now or in the future, by which Germany could move into a nuclear force." Even so, the fact that Gromyko and, obviously, his bosses were willing to talk at all indicated a shift, in view of the fact that negotiations have been stalled for nine months.

There is little prospect of reaching any such agreement in the near future. Rusk pointed out that talks "are now concentrated on clearing the underbrush" and nothing more. In other areas, however, Washington sees more cause for hope. Veteran Sovietologist (and newly confirmed U.S. Ambassador to Moscow) Llewellyn Thompson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Moscow now feels much freer to act than it did just a few months ago. Red China, he reasoned, is in such bad odor with the rest of the Communist world that the Russians no longer cringe whenever Peking accuses them of "collusion" with the U.S.

Exploring Real Estate. Thus, the U.S. last week lifted export restrictions to Russia and Eastern Europe on more than 400 nonstrategic items.* This week a team of Pan American World Airways negotiators heads for Moscow to work out final details on an agreement for Moscow-New York flights. Talks on an outer-space treaty may be nearing completion. The two governments have even reopened the prickly question of replacing inadequate embassies in each other's capitals: the U.S. has tentatively offered a 13-acre plot in Northwest Washington, while the Russians have tentatively offered a central location in Moscow.

Still there remained the stubbornly insoluble obstacle of Viet Nam. At his press conference last week, Johnson implicitly acknowledged Moscow's--and his--dilemma by noting, "There are only two governments in the world that now appear opposed to ending the war." But, given the intransigence of Hanoi and Peking, the President pointed out, the U.S. cannot afford the gesture of suspending bombing raids on the North as a step toward peace talks. "We have had two pauses," he snapped. During both, "our boys sat there and watched" while the enemy "threw his hand grenades, lobbed his mortars, and killed our Marines, our airmen, our Army soldiers." Added the President: "I see nothing on the horizon that would justify my asking all three or four hundred thousand Americans to stand there with their hands in their pockets because someone here suggested they pause--unless their enemy would pause."

Changing Intangibles. With Johnson off for Manila and Brezhnev busy conferring with satellite leaders, any real improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations will have to wait a while--most likely until after the November elections. There are those who doubt that any improvement is forthcoming. One official, dismissing the recent overtures as "just noise on the back stairs," predicts that Gromyko will soon be back on ice.

On the other hand, diplomacy--particularly as practiced by the Russians--has of necessity always been a backstairs exercise. More often than not, it is the public noise generated by Communist leaders that says least about their intentions. What has undeniably changed in recent weeks has been the intangibles of mood and nuance, an amelioration that suggests that progress may be possible, whatever the route.

* Including power tools, die presses, diesel engines, certain metals and industrial chemicals--as well as corset stays and hog troughs, firemen's hats and bathtub stoppers, arsenic and lace, popcorn and canned hominy.

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