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for George Meaney at the AFL-CIO, had a slight acquaintanceship with
me and knew that I was interested in Solzhenitsyn. When he called me
about this banquet, I happened to be doing something for the
Times
in
San Francisco. I dropped everything I was doing and reached Washing–
ton just barely in time to get to this banquet. The first person I encoun–
tered there was James Buckley, who was then a U.S. Senator from New
York. And he said to me, "Would you like to meet Solzhenitsyn?" So I
was introduced to Solzhenitsyn through an interpreter, and we chatted
for a few minutes. Then I went into the room where there were some
journalists and a number of
New York Times
editors. I explained, "Well,
I am not here as a journalist. I am just here as a guest of the AFL-CIO."
They were very upset about my presence, and it turned out they had rea–
son to be. Solzhenitsyn gave a great speech that night, full of condem–
nation of the West's attempt to capitulate to the Kremlin in that period
of detente. He quoted Lenin's remark that when it came time to hang the
bourgeoisie they will compete with each other to sell you the rope, which
was not a bad description of the detente policy at that moment.
The next morning, looking at the newspapers in my hotel room, I
noticed that the top half of the
Washington Post
was devoted to
Solzhenitsyn's arrival in Washington and his speech.
It
was noted that
Henry Kissinger had advised Ford not to invite Solzhenitsyn to the
White House, because it would be offensive to the Kremlin. Then I
looked at the
New York Times.
Nothing on the front page. On page
twenty-four there was a small item written by the State Department cor–
respondent, whose name I think was Leslie Gelb, and whom everybody
understood to be in Henry Kissinger's pocket.
It
was a small news story
mostly concentrated on the technical problems of the simultaneous
translation of Solzhenitsyn's speech.
What did the
New York Times
have against Solzhenitsyn? Well, the
trouble began when Solzhenitsyn was still in the Soviet Union. In the
West he was much admired as a dissident, the author of
One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich,
an important account of the Gulag. But when
the then head of the Moscow bureau of the
Times,
Hendrick Smith,
arranged to interview Solzhenitsyn, he came with a list of prepared
questions. When he started asking these questions, Solzhenitsyn had the
temerity to suggest to the celebrated chief of the
New York Times
Moscow bureau that he was asking the wrong questions. And the
New
York Times
made a momentous discovery based on Rick Smith's report
back to New York, that Solzhenitsyn wasn't a liberal. Not only that, he
was a believing Christian.
