In the weeks since the American and Soviet governments announced that Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev would meet in Vienna, June 15-18, there has been little doubt that the SALT II treaty —the centerpiece of the encounter—would be ready for their signatures. Yet there has been considerable suspense about whether the summit would ever take place. Would Brezhnev's health hold up long enough for him to attend?
For the past few months, the Kremlinologists of the Carter Administration have been doing double duty as actuaries and diagnosticians, trying by remote means to calculate the risks of travel and take the pulse of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. Both titles are held by a man of 72 who has eaten too much starchy food, smoked too many cigarettes and drunk too much vodka in a life full of stress, and who is now suffering from a variety of chronic neurological, respiratory and circulatory ailments. Brezhnev's physical condition has already severely drained his energy, slurred his speech and slowed his movements. It could kill or incapacitate him at any time.
Even the site of this weekend's summit is dictated by the fragility of Brezhnev's health. In 1974 Richard Nixon had traveled to Moscow and Gerald Ford to Vladivostok, so protocol required that this time the U.S. play host to the Soviet leader. But Brezhnev's doctors did not want to subject him to the rigors of a transatlantic flight. The agenda for the Vienna summit has been kept as flexible as possible to allow Brezhnev maximum time for naps and ministrations by the physicians in his entourage.
Brezhnev has good days and bad days. In April he was barely able to conduct his side of the conversation with visiting French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, while last month he seemed to have bounced back somewhat to receive Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, who is 14 years older than Brezhnev but markedly more vigorous. Two weeks ago, when Brezhnev journeyed to Budapest for a perfunctory meeting with Hungarian Boss Jāanos Kádár, the local press and diplomatic corps were not so much interested in what Brezhnev said as the difficulty with which he said it. Ambassadors in a receiving line compared notes afterward on the Soviet leader's flaccid handshake and his shuffle as he mounted the steps to a speaker's platform. Brezhnev's public appearances are becoming primarily chances to examine the patient.
If, as both the Soviet and American summiteers hope, Brezhnev has a series of good days this weekend, he and Carter might conduct negotiations that would be—in fact as well as in the parlance of the communiquės—frank, businesslike and useful. But if, as both sides fear, Brezhnev has a relapse, the meeting could be little more than an anticlimactic signing ceremony, tediously stretched out over four days. It would also be a lost, probably last opportunity for these two men, who are meeting for the first time, to thresh out some of their differences in a period of deep mistrust and misunderstanding between the superpowers.