Monthly Archives: June 2017
The October War came as a major shock to the Israelis, who had been overly confident that no Arab state would dare attack Israel. But within a week, there was no sign of this “war” ending any time soon. I wrote after the first week: “Although Israeli forces have taken the offensive against Syria, they face a difficult and a long struggle if they try to crush the 60,000 man Egyptian force that has crossed the Suez Canal. Is Israel—or…..
On Saturday, June 17, 1972, I wandered into the Times’ L Street bureau as I usually did on Saturdays. On this particular day, I had no pressing story to cover. I had already written a lengthy piece on the background to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty which President Nixon and Soviet leader Brezhnev had signed the previous month in Moscow. The story was scheduled to run in Sunday’s paper alongside a similar analysis by Rick Smith, the new Moscow correspondent……
After returning to Washington, Marie-Jeanne and I decided to buy a house in an area of D.C. called Foxhall Village—an area that was built up after World War I in English-style architecture. The house cost us only $59,000, which we paid for with the help of a mortgage from Riggs Bank. Prices were still low in the early 1970s. But on the other hand, my salary was just $400 a week–roughly $20,000 a year. But I remember that prices were…..
The years I was stationed in Moscow were singularly devoid of any major crises in Soviet-American relations. It also was a time when the Nixon administration was so focused on ending the Vietnam war and opening a dialogue with China that Moscow seemed to be pushed aside on the priority list. President Johnson had hoped to visit Moscow in October 1968, in the waning months of his administration and start talks on limiting strategic weapons. But the Soviet Union’s invasion…..
As I write this in June, 2017, I can still remember clearly an incident from August, 1959. I was then a member of a delegation of “American youth” sponsored by Lisle Fellowship which was visiting the Soviet Union under the terms of a Cultural Exchange agreement signed by the two countries in 1958. We were nearing the end of our two month journey at a small town on the Crimea named Gurzuf which was near Yalta. At that time, it…..
By the end of June, I had become bureau chief with Henry’s departure for Asia. Clearly the big story was the planned Apollo 11 launch in mid-July in which the astronauts aboard, Scott Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were to try to land their space capsule on the moon’s surface, do some exploring and then return to earth. Michael Collins would be flying the original ship around while they were on the moon. This was clearly a risky mission, but it was clearly…..
My last days in Washington were pretty hectic. The Washington bureau chief Max Frankel and his wife Toby were kind enough to throw me a farewell party in early February, 1969 at their home. I had a surprise for everyone because on January 26, Marie-Jeanne’s birthday, I proposed marriage to her, and she accepted. Neither her parents nor mine were bothered by the intra-religious aspect. She was and is a devout Catholic, a graduate of Trinity College (now university) in…..