1968 - Mark Kurlansky [175]
Also it is a personal tragedy for me because I have many personal friends in Czechoslovakia and I don’t know how I will be able to look into their eyes if I should ever meet them again.
And it seems to me that it is a great gift for all reactionary forces in the world and we cannot foresee the consequences of this action.
I love my country and my people and I am a modest inheritor of the traditions of Russian literature of such writers as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Solzhenitsyn. These traditions have taught me that silence is sometimes a disgrace.
Please place on record my opinion about this action as the opinion of an honest son of his country and the poet who once wrote the song “Do the Russians Want War?”
De Gaulle and Britain’s Harold Wilson were among the first of many world leaders to condemn the invasion—one of the first times all year when the two were in complete agreement. De Gaulle went on to liken the Soviet invasion to the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in April 1965. The General was trying once again to assert his policy between the two superpowers. It was an idea that would be widely rejected as a direct result of the Soviet invasion, which made many Europeans feel that Moscow was a far more imminent danger than Washington. But on August 24 de Gaulle had a good day—he announced that France had exploded a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific. De Gaulle called the blast “a magnificent scientific, technical, and industrial success, which has been achieved for the independence and security of France, by an elite of her children.”
Senators Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern both, like de Gaulle politically damaged by the Soviet invasion, also compared it to the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic and Vietnam. The invasion was also proving awkward for Richard Nixon, who only a few weeks before had softened his career-long anticommunist posture to say that the Soviets were not the menace they had once been and now was the time to be open and negotiate. The problem for many Western politicians was that the invasion had come at a time when it was thought that the Soviet Union didn’t do things like that anymore.
Oddly, one of the mildest condemnations came from Washington. The Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly F. Dobrynin, met with President Johnson shortly after the invasion had begun. Johnson called an emergency meeting of the National Security Council, for which Eugene McCarthy, trying to play down the invasion, criticized him. In Chicago, it seemed what little chance was left for a peace plank in the party platform had vanished with the invasion. The cold war was back. But Johnson clearly was not willing to take any measures other than a strong denunciation in the UN. He said that the progress that was being made in U.S.-Soviet negotiations was too important to be abandoned. In fact, while the tanks were still crossing the borders, Secretary of State Dean Rusk was giving a speech to the Democratic Party platform committee on the progress being made in negotiations with the Soviets.
The UN did condemn the Soviet action, but the Soviets simply used their veto to override the condemnation.
Moscow was focused on Czech president Svoboda, who they had never imagined would be much of a problem. If Svoboda did not agree to the Soviets changing the regime, there was no possibility of a claim of legitimacy for the Soviet invasion. But Svoboda, who had always shown his first loyalty to the Soviet Union, still refused to sign anything. The Soviets threatened him and he countered by threatening suicide, which would have been a disaster for the Soviets. The stick having failed, the carrot came, in the form of promises of unprecedented Soviet aid to Czechoslovakia. The septuagenarian was unmoved by this and by offers of a high position for himself and a hand in choosing other high-level Czech leaders. Nothing the Soviets tried worked with Svoboda. To the aging general, the only acceptable course for Moscow was to release Dubek, ›erník, Smrkovsky, and the other constitutionally