Foreign Relations: Summit in Smalltown

FOREIGN RELATIONS

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It looked like a county-fair town at election time. Hawkers were sold out of balloons and popcorn; hotels were jammed—and charging three times their normal prices. On every street, flags hung from front stoops and gawking kids from tree limbs. Several banners proclaimed: L.B.J. ALL THE WAY.

L.B.J. himself grinned and waved back to the welcoming townsfolk, the tension draining from his face as the crowds' enthusiasm washed over him. But he said nothing on arrival. He had not come to New Jersey's Gloucester County last week to mine votes but to fulfill his familiar pledge to "seek peace, any time, any place."

He did not have to travel very far. The place for the first U.S.-Soviet summit conference in six years was no Yalta or Geneva. Rather, as the wife of New Jersey's Governor put it, it was "Smalltown, U.S.A.," the little (pop. 11,689) college community of Glassboro, 135 miles from Washington, near the Colonial farming settlement and crossroads once known as Long A-Comin'.

The meeting between President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin had also been long in coming. Yet once started, the summiteers seemed as loath to end their dialogue as they had been to initiate it. For five hours and 20 minutes, at least two hours longer than expected, Johnson and Kosygin conferred on a wide spectrum of world issues that the superpowers alone can hope to resolve, interrupting private sessions monitored only by interpreters with a working luncheon attended by their top advisers. When they parted, it was not goodbye but au revoir; they surprised the world anew by returning to Glassboro for another meeting 48 hours later.

"Nice Place." Kosygin set the tone of the first meeting with his first words to Johnson after stepping out of his limousine: "You chose a nice place." And indeed it was. The venue was Holly Bush, a 22-room gingerbread brownstone, vintage 1849, on the rolling, tree-studded campus of Glassboro State College. The residence of College President Thomas ("Dr. Tom") Robinson, the house is as fetchingly old-fashioned inside as out, decorated with 19th century English prints and figured wallpaper. In the small, green-walled library set aside for the leaders' private conversation, the President and the Premier sat down beneath such titles as Those Who Love and The Dignity of Man. At least one international misunderstanding was quickly cleared up. When Kosygin remarked that it was a charming farmhouse, Johnson admitted that even Amerikanski farmers do not often occupy 22-room mansions.