Foreign Relations: Summit in Smalltown

Friday, Jun. 30, 1967

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(9 of 9)

To their client countries as well as the older nations that profess concern that their fate should largely reside in American and Soviet hands, the non-news of the Summit should in itself be a measure of reassurance. Johnson was no more the plains-Texan wheeler-dealer than was Kosygin a shoe-banging Khrushchev. Both men demonstrated that they are able to survey, if not to solve, the overriding issues with acumen and restraint.

In the aftermath of history's first hotline diplomacy, the most significant aspect of the Smalltown Summit was that it happened. The road toward a meaningful East-West dialogue may even have started at Glassboro, N.J.

^{* Kosygin also gave the Robinsons a cigarette lighter and
several objects of Baltic amber, including a cigarette holder for Dr.
Robinson, a teetotaler who does smoke an occasional cigarette.
* Local
historians maintain that the town helped popularize the word "booze."
The term was coined earlier but gained wide currency when a now-defunct
Glassboro glassworks made cabin-shaped bottles for William Henry
Harrison's 1840 log-cabin presidential campaign. The contents were
supplied by a Philadelphia distiller named E. C. Booz.
* Soviet news
outlets gave the initial meeting, scant notice. Radio Moscow waited
until midnight before announcing that the meeting had ever been held.}