Last week Anatoly Dobrynin, 90, died. He was the Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United States through six presidencies — from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan. His death is worth serious American reflection. Even ironic nostalgia for the Cold War.
Dobrynin was much more than a key Politburo operative and a geopolitical player back in the day. He was fluent in English and at ease amid the worldly trappings of free enterprise. He was a civil, urbane, empathetic communist and key intermediary when nuclear Armageddon was hovering over the world like a Doomsday Damoclean sword. He knew his face-saving back channels. He helped pull his country and our country back from the ultimate brink.
What a time to have had an adversary we could reason with. We all wanted to live and would find a way out together. Would that we had that in common today with our most implacable enemies.
I still have Dobrynin’s 1995 memoir, “In Confidence,” on my bookshelf. I re-read some of the chapter on Jimmy Carter and was reminded that Carter — not, say, Richard Nixon — was Dobrynin’s least favorite president. He was frequently put-off by Carter’s “moralizing” tone.
His take on Ronald Reagan has a hauntingly contemporary feel:
“Reagan was endowed with natural instinct, flair and optimism…He presented his own image skillfully, and it appealed to millions…He skillfully manipulated public opinion by means of strong illustrative catchwords which oversimplified complex questions and therefore flew straight over the heads of the professionals into the hearts and minds of the millions, for good or ill. Not infrequently he was accused of trying to apply a primitive approach which made him reluctant to examine questions properly and conscientiously. These accusations were largely justified.”
He summed up by emphasizing how much Russians and Americans have in common. And that one size doesn’t fit all, whether in the structure of the marketplace or in the implementation of power-to-the-people government. It still resonates.
“But just like the market, there are many different understandings of what it (democracy) really is,” wrote Dobrynin. “Even in America this has always been the case, as Abraham Lincoln said in Baltimore in 1864: ‘We all speak in favor of democracy, but when we use the word we do not always mean the same thing.'”
Some things never change.