“Going Steady”: The Kissinger-Dobrynin Channel

Abstract

In his preface to this remarkable collection of American and Soviet documents from 1969 to 1972, the historian of the U.S. State Department, Marc J. Susser, claims, “This is a unique volume” (p. xxvii)—not simply “distinctive,” but “unique”—and he is correct in making this extraordinary claim. The editors have collected the transcripts of telephone calls, summaries of meetings and memoranda of conversations (“memcons”). Documents written by and for President Richard Nixon, Soviet Communist Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, and other American and Soviet foreign policy officials are included; however, the majority of the 380 documents consist of memcons written by Dr. Henry Kissinger, who was then serving as the president's assistant for national security affairs, and Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the long-time ambassador of the USSR to the United States. Researchers who are familiar with various volumes of The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon and the Nixon presidential papers in the National Archives will not be surprised by the American documents in this volume; however, the Soviet documents are unique and owe their declassification and publication to unforeseen historical developments: the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its replacement, at least for a while, by a government striving for greater openness and democracy. The Soviet documents come from the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation and from Dobrynin's ambassadorial journal. The American documents come primarily from the Nixon papers at the National Archives. The organization of this volume around meetings and conversations differs from the FRUS volumes that focus on policy formulation. The editors have done an excellent job of cross-referencing other document collections, telephone conversation transcripts, memoirs, and articles in the Current Digest of the Soviet Press.