GENEVA: What's the Use?

In the stale language of the cold war, this was the conference that could not succeed; rarely in history had an international meeting been so discounted beforehand. "What is the use of a foreign ministers' meeting?" asked Russia's Mikoyan. "We'll just send Gromyko here, he'll spend a few weeks talking and he'll come back with nothing, so what's the use?"

So long as it takes two to make a deal, and four to make a peace treaty, Russia's cynicism was justified. Khrushchev wanted only a summit: Eisenhower agreed that Khrushchev ''is the only...