"that's why I say hey man, nice shot, what a good shot man."

JOURNAL ARCHIVE: - posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 04:36 AM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Wednesday 04 March 2015 - http://hvom.blogspot.com/2015/03/arlington-road-1999.html


http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0718.html

The New York Times


On THIS Day

July 4, 1989

OBITUARY

Andrei A. Gromyko: Flinty Face of Postwar Soviet Diplomacy

By CRAIG R. WHITNEY

Whether Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko was a principal architect of the policies he expounded over nearly three decades as Soviet Foreign Minister, or simply their loyal executor, remains a mystery shrouded in his loyalty to the cause he served so long.

What is clear is that Stalin, Nikita S. Khrushchev and Leonid I. Brezhnev all found him indispensable in turn. But Mikhail S. Gorbachev finally found him an obstacle to his program for sweeping change in Soviet internal and external affairs and ended Mr. Gromyko's 28-year tenure as Foreign Minister in July 1985 by easing him upstairs to the ceremonial post of the presidency.

Mr. Gromyko had been the instrument of Mr. Gorbachev's accession to the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985, going before his aging colleagues in the Politburo then to tell them that it was time to cede the leadership to a younger man.

Later, after Mr. Gromyko retired, he wrote his memoirs - revising them in 1989 as ''Memories,'' published in Britain by Hutchinson - and said he had decided himself to retire as President in October 1988 because he felt old and out of touch. In April 1989, he was dropped from his last position of power as a member of the Politburo, in a sweeping purge of the old guard by Mr. Gorbachev.

By that time, Soviet policies associated with the cautious Mr. Gromyko were being swept aside with dizzying speed. In what Mr. Gorbachev called ''new thinking,'' one arms reduction proposal followed another, and the Soviet grip over Eastern Europe relaxed, allowing Hungary and Poland to evolve in political directions Mr. Gromyko described as counter-revolutionary when they first surfaced decades earlier. The Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan that he and his colleagues had decided on in 1979 was openly derided 10 years later as a costly mistake.

To Foreign Ministry at 29

Thus ended an extraordinary diplomatic and political career that had begun in 1939 when Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov called Mr. Gromyko, a postgraduate student not yet 30 years old, to the Foreign Ministry.

In the years that followed, he traveled to most of the countries of the globe, met and outlived the greatest statesmen of the age.

Present at the creation of the United Nations, he never missed a General Assembly session until he left the Foreign Ministry. He was the first professional diplomat to be elevated to the Soviet Communist Party's ruling Politburo, and he was one of the few members who did not drink, even before Mr. Gorbachev took over and decreed abstemiousness as one of his first reforms.

He was the able spokesman for many different Soviet policies over the years. He was ''Mr. Nyet'' in the cold war, the ''new Gromyko'' during the period of detente, and the dour and gruff exponent of a tougher line in Afghanistan and Poland in later years.

While Mr. Gromyko was new to office, Khrushchev, who had appointed him, told a group of foreign ambassadors, ''If I tell my Foreign Minister to sit on a block of ice and stay there for months, he will do it without back talk.''

As he acquired experience, Soviet officials acquired more respect for him, and gradually the Foreign Ministry became his personal preserve. Foreign diplomats agreed that he always seemed to be in charge and superbly in command of his material.

Mr. Gromyko's career was closely bound up with the United States. In the spring of 1939, when he was a researcher at the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Economics in Moscow and learning English, Molotov had him transferred to the Foreign Ministry, most of whose experienced men had been eliminated in Stalin's purges.

He was put in charge of the American section, and six months later found himself in Stalin's office, where the dictator announced that he was sending him to the embassy in Washington as second in command. In 1943, Stalin appointed him Ambassador to the United States. After the war, he moved to New York for the first sessions of the United Nations, living at first in a Plaza Hotel suite.

There - in the belly of the capitalist beast, as he later put it in ''Memories,'' translated by Harold Shukman - he confirmed a view of America that stayed with him all his life: ''Profit is the pitiless filter through which everything to do with culture and art and the country's spiritual life has to pass. Only that which promises a return on capital can survive.''


[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 04 March 2015 excerpt ends]










http://www.leethomson.myzen.co.uk/The_Twilight_Zone/The_Twilight_Zone_1x01_-_Where_is_Everybody.pdf


THE TWILIGHT ZONE

Episode 101: "WHERE IS EVERYBODY?"


VOICE
(filtered) This is the Special Operator. The number you have reached is not a working number. Please make sure you have the right number and are dialing it correctly.

MIKE
A recording? (he pounds on the receiver hook and shouts) Operator! Look, all I want to know is where I am. I just want to know the name of this place.



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 3:09 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Saturday 07 March 2015