In Confidence.

I have to confess that for a considerable period in my professional career I deeply resented the author of this book. In the late sixties I served as a young diplomat in the American Embassy in Moscow, and I saw Anatoly Dobrynin mesmerize an unending series of senior U.S. officials into accepting him as their sole interpreter of the latest twists in U.S.-Soviet relations.

His ability to dominate the diplomatic dialogue left the rest of us, no matter what our level, with mere academic tasks. We spent our days reading Pravda and sending in summaries of articles that our colleagues in Washington could have read at their leisure. We did little real diplomatic work. Feeding our paranoia was the fact that Dobrynin was something of a stealth diplomat. He met with our senior leaders alone, without notetakers or interpreters on either side. We were seldom told what was going on.

This autobiography convinces me that our resentment was wrong-headed. Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States from 1962 to 1986, establishes in these pages that he is one of the great diplomats of modern history, a credit to his country and to a common tradition that spans many centuries.

What does it mean to say that someone is a great diplomat? In this media-obsessed age, many now seem to regard a great diplomat as someone who is an outstanding press agent or a vigorous negotiator who can gain advantage for his government by extracting one-sided concessions from others. His purpose is to prevail.

Yet the more traditional definition describes a person who helps his government accommodate its policy to the policies of others. The purpose is not to prevail but to agree, provided the interests of both sides are served. Nations do not win, they get along. For agreements to endure, they must be balanced. Diplomats are there to help their governments understand how to accomplish that task.

This is Dobrynin. "[I]f I had any great purpose in life," he writes, "it was the integration of my country into the family of nations as a respected and equal partner." For this purpose, he urged a "correct and constructive dialogue between leaders of both countries and maintaining the positive aspects of our relations whenever possible."

But a "correct and constructive" dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union was always an elusive target, and often the victim of electoral demagogy on one side and rigid ideology on the other. One troubling aspect of this memoir is the repeated evidence of the incompatibility between democratic practice and sound diplomacy whenever the two parties regard one another hostilely. Thus, the Cuban missile crisis, normally depicted as an unalloyed American victory, really ended in a compromise. In return for the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, the United States agreed to withdraw its missiles from Turkey. But for domestic political reasons, the Kennedy Administration would not agree to reveal the real nature of the compromise it made. As Robert Kennedy told Dobrynin at the time, he himself might "some day" run for president, and his own prospects "could be damaged if this secret deal about the missiles in Turkey were to come out."

The result was a political triumph for the Kennedys, but America paid an enormous price for the public victory. Dobrynin reports that the Soviet military establishment "used this experience to secure for itself a new large-scale program of nuclear arms development" that pushed the arms race with the United States to new heights. The repercussions, he reminds us, were felt for "nearly 30 years."

Indeed, Dobrynin tells frustrating tales of missed opportunities throughout the Cold War. The Americans missed an opportunity during the Kennedy Administration to gain Soviet support for a comprehensive test ban treaty, which would have stopped any new countries from developing nuclear weapons and forestalled the creation of the multiple warhead missile (MIRV), a development which fueled and destabilized the arms race. The Soviets missed an opportunity in the Johnson Administration to agree to an anti-ballistic missile regime. The Americans missed an opportunity to restrict the deployment of MIRVs in the Nixon Administration. Jimmy Carter missed an opportunity to deepen detente early in his administration by refusing to ratify the arms limits agreed to at Vladivostok. Both sides repeatedly missed opportunities to solidify their relationship because of disagreements about peripheral issues involving third world developments.

Given Dobrynin's hopes of constructive dialogue, it is interesting that his two American heroes are Nixon and Reagan, men whom the Kremlin loathed when they took office. But behind the backs of his own cabinet, Congress, and people, Nixon began a diplomatic process aimed at according the Soviet Union a coequal status with the United States internationally. And he made astonishing progress because no one except Henry Kissinger knew what he was doing.

Reagan, of course, greatly damaged the relationship by his mindless arms build-up and the angry rhetoric of his first term. But as the President actually came in contact with Russian leaders and realized that they too were human, he pushed beyond his own administration in obtaining a far-reaching accommodation with his Soviet counterparts. "Reagan's achievements in dealing with the Soviet Union," Dobrynin concludes, "could certainly compare favorably with, and perhaps even surpass, those of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger."

Still, dedicated cold warriors Awill be dismayed by the evidence in this memoir that--contrary to their fears--Soviet leaders never embarked on a march to world conquest. Dobrynin produces as evidence secret reports to the Politburo that make it quite clear that "international tension does not suit the state interests of the Soviet Union and its friends." Moscow's problem, as well as our own, was that each side was often manipulated by its clients into positions that jeopardized the core Moscow-Washington relationship.

Sprinkled throughout this book are a number of sensational revelations. We learn that the Politburo so hated Richard Nixon in 1968 that it offered money to the Democratic candidate, Hubert H. Humphrey. (He turned the offer down.) We are informed that there is a secret protocol in the agreement between the United States and Pakistan that commits the U.S. government to support Pakistan against Indian "aggression." We are told that the Soviets so feared a nuclear attack in the first Reagan term that they authorized "the largest peacetime military intelligence operation in Soviet history." And contrary to American suspicions, there was never a "threat of a direct military clash" between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1973 Middle East crisis. "We took no measures to put our armed forces on high combat alert ... and we certainly did not alert our strategic nuclear forces as the Americans did."

In short, this book is an impressive and important document of the; Cold War. And, my professional resentments aside, I can only conclude after reading it that the United States was very fortunate that its superpower rival chose this gifted man--this great diplomat--to represent it in our "difficult but wonderful country."