The Foreign Service Journal, June 2011

that Mac Toon had an opinion on everything and (except on one occa- sion) was prepared to share it with the correspondents. Some SALTy Remarks Détente, as exemplified in the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty ne- gotiations, represented the first real example of the huge degree of trust Toon placed in the American press corps in Moscow from the outset. Having just been confirmed as ambas- sador, he revealed his advice to Cyrus Vance ahead of the Secretary of State’s visit to the Soviet capital to present the Carter administration’s initial SALT proposals. “I told him frankly, ‘This bird won’t fly.’ My advice was based on public and private Soviet statements that they wouldn’t move. They meant what they said.” Normally in life, it is not a good idea to say ‘I told you so.’ But Mac Toon never believed in ambigu- ity. Throughout the tortuous pas de deux of the following two years, Toon made sure his attentive and potentially influential audience was fully up to speed on the talks. At the end of 1978, well before the Carter administration did the same thing in Washington, he detailed the key issues dividing Amer- ican and Russian negotiators, reveal- ing the cryptography issue for the first time. Nor did he ever hide his frustration at being sidelined from the SALT ne- gotiations, sniping occasionally at the chief U.S. negotiator, Paul Warnke. As he put it in November 1977: “There are still wide differences. I’m sur- prised by Warnke’s optimism. It’s not my understanding that the differences are minor.” Nor was Toon ever at ease with the Carter administration’s other Soviet preoccupation: human rights in the USSR. In essence, he believed the importance of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union was exaggerated and inimical to improved bilateral ties. One consequence was that he tightened up regulations in the em- bassy involving contact with dissidents in order to avoid incidents as far as possible. He also made no effort to disguise his discomfort. An early human rights pronouncement by President Carter in January 1977, for example, led Toon to say: “Personally, I would not have made that state- ment” — quite a position for an am- bassador to adopt under any circum- stances, even off the record. In June 1977, Toon met with Carter alone for the first time and was unnerved to discover the extent of the president’s ignorance of the Soviet sys- tem. He also learned that Carter and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev had been corresponding directly without his knowledge, a fact he shared with the correspondents on his return to Moscow. By the end of 1978 he was some- what more relaxed, but still damned the administration’s approach with faint praise. Washington was handling human rights, he said, “with a good deal more finesse.” It was the dissidents, however, who triggered Toon’s angriest outburst at a briefing. A February 1979 Jack An- derson column in the Washington Post alleged that the ambassador was deny- ing embassy support to Russian dissi- dents and getting in the way of im- proved Soviet-American relations because of his “hardline” views. The column itself was bad enough from Toon’s point of view, particularly since he had only recently made a se- ries of speeches in the United States at Sec. Vance’s express request to help sell SALT. “I didn’t do that to look for a cushy (retirement) job,” he com- plained. Much worse, as he saw it, was the silence from Washington that fol- lowed publication of the column — “completely contemptible.” From then on, Toon was convinced that un- named “small minds (in Foggy Bot- tom) who get great delight out of sniping at people at or near the top” were responsible for the leaked details of embassy procedures contained in Anderson’s report. Generally, though, Toon was care- ful not to get involved in Washington infighting or to step over the policy line. According to McNamara, the ambassador “did not get into trouble with Washington even if some officials disliked his high profile.” So he con- tinued to call it as he saw it. In January 1978, he met with the president again on a visit to the States. At this meeting he informed Carter that U.S.-Soviet relations “were bad — 3½ out of 10, and they are probably going to get worse” — and made sure the U.S. press corps in Moscow knew what he had told the president, who had not yet met the Soviet leadership. Comments on the Soviet Leadership The insider role in superpower re- lations that his opposite number, Ana- toly Dobrynin, played was a constant irritant throughout this period. Toon cordially disliked Dobrynin, blaming him, among other things, for trying to block his earlier ambassadorial ap- pointment to Israel. But his real gripe was the way Vance preferred to deal directly with the Soviets, especially on J U N E 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 41 The sheer unpredictability of Soviet-American relations throughout the period constantly threatened to wrong-foot even the savviest envoy.