I can remember the event as if it happened yesterday. It was the evening of August 20, 1968. I was at the State Department covering a talk by Secretary of State Rusk on the Johnson Administration’s foreign policy in advance of the start of the Democratic Party convention which was to start on August 26 in Chicago. The department auditorium was filled with delegates to the convention and newsmen. Just as Rusk was about to start taking questions, his assistant Benjamin Read handed him a note. Rusk’s face turned white and he said he had to return immediately to his office. We quickly learned that the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces had just invaded Czechoslovakia to quash the liberalization program that had been carried out by its new president, Aleksander Dubcek.
What we newsmen did not know at that hour was that on Monday morning, August 21, Moscow and Washington had secretly agreed to announce simultaneously that Johnson was going to visit Moscow in the first ten days of October, 1968 to discuss “questions of mutual interest.” But at 7 p.m. that Sunday night, Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin was told to deliver a personal note to Johnson informing him of the invasion. He did so. Then Rusk says that when he returned to his office he telephoned Dobrynin “to protest the invasion, telling him that the Soviet action was like throwing a dead fish in the president’s face. I insisted that Dobrynin telephone Moscow immediately and tell the Soviets not to announce Johnson’s upcoming trip the next morning because that would have been interpreted worldwide as the United States’ condoning the Soviet march into Czechoslovakia.
I had been in Czechoslovakia in the previous year, as part of another East European swing for The Star. I was already aware of the reports from Prague of the new liberalization taking place, in part by the new president, Alexander Dubcek. I had had lunch in Washington prior to that trip with the correspondent of Rude Pravo, the leading paper then in Prague, and he told me of the wave of new writings and plays and movies taking place in his country. On my own trip to Prague in 1967, I reported on the new freedoms in that country, how young people were able to travel around Europe on their own.
In the spring of 1968, there had been a seeming breakthrough on Vietnam. The Hanoi regime suddenly said it was willing to hold negotiations on ending the war, and after days of haggling, the two sides agreed on Paris and the negotiations began on May 14, 1968. But the early rounds of talks did not indicate an early breakthrough. Yet, on June 27, 1968, Gromyko surprised everyone in Washington by saying that Russia was willing to open talks on mutual cutbacks in both offensive and defensive missiles. And on July 1, Johnson announced that the two governments had agreed to hold talks at some future date. But even though the superpowers were seemingly on a course toward easing tensions, the mood inside the Soviet Politburo was not relaxed. Brezhnev could not abide the liberalization taking place in Czechoslovakia. I wrote in The Star on July 23 that the entire Soviet Politburo was about to descend upon Czechoslovakia. I wrote that “this is unparalleled in the history of the Communist movement and dramatizes the importance that Moscow attaches to halting the accelerating liberalism in Czechoslovakia.”
The two sides got together on July 29 for two days of talks in the border town of Cierna Nad Tira. At this point, I felt it was possible that Moscow would again invade another country as it did in 1956 when it crushed the liberal government in Hungary. I was hoping The Star would send me back to Prague, but it did not. The invasion by Soviet troops, aided by forces from Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, ended Johnson’s hopes for his own summit with the Brezhnev.
While all this was going on, the Democratic Party held its nominating convention in Chicago. Since Johnson had removed himself from the competition, it became a contest between Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, and some more liberal senators. Humphrey of course won, having the backing of Johnson.
Meanwhile, in early July I had been invited to New York for an interview with Seymour Topping, then the foreign editor of The New York Times. The Times needed a new correspondent in Moscow to replace Raymond Anderson who had recently been expelled for his writings. I had not heard back from Topping so I assumed I was no longer a candidate for the job. But on Friday night, August 30, the start of the Labor Day weekend, I received a phone call from Topping at home, offering me the job. I would have to spend a few months working for The Times in the United States before going to Moscow. I accepted the offer a few days later and that started a 34-year romance between me and the New York Times.
