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Ironically, Brezhnev's most conspicuous failure was in agriculture, where he tried hardest. In spite of an outsize 33% share of total Soviet investment—far higher than the figure for any other industrial country—agriculture has become such a fiasco that the embarrassed Soviets have ceased publishing figures on grain production. During Brezhnev's final years of rule, the country was bedeviled by acute shortages of meat, butter and cheese. Of course, Brezhnev cannot be blamed for the Soviet Union's periodic bouts of bad weather. But other problems plaguing the country's farms proved endemic under his rule: poor distribution, widespread mismanagement, inefficiency and waste, and a woeful lack of incentives for collective farmers to work harder.
"He seemed somber and dull," wrote a Western journalist about Brezhnev in 1963, a year before he took power. But in fact, until his exuberant style was curbed by age and infirmity, Brezhnev was a man somewhat larger than life: he projected a physical magnetism that fairly overwhelmed many of his fellow statesmen in the West. In his second volume of memoirs, Henry Kissinger described Brezhnev's "split personality": he was "alternatively boastful and insecure, belligerent and mellow." Former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt thought that Brezhnev was "quasi-Mediterranean in his movements when he warmed to a conversation." Unquestionably, he had a zest for life. Until illness intervened, he smoked incessantly and drank vodka toast after vodka toast without showing so much as a sign of weakness. Richard Nixon was impressed, unfavorably, by Brezhnev's love of dirty jokes and his earthy humor, characteristics that Brezhnev shared with Khrushchev.
Brezhnev enjoyed entertaining foreign visitors at his dacha outside Moscow, where he could display his prowess as a hunter, and at his luxurious summer home in Yalta, where the Olympic-size swimming pool was shielded from the wind by thick glass walls that glided back and forth at the press of a button. Early on, he spoke to state visitors of his interest in splashy automobiles. Taking the hint, they plied him with examples of the motorized best that Western technology could offer. Brezhnev was a notoriously bad driver; yet at one time his stable included a Rolls-Royce, a Citroën-Maserati and a Mercedes-Benz 450 SLC. And Nixon remembers giving a Lincoln Continental to Brezhnev at Camp David. Brezhnev's eyes shone when he saw the car. Without warning, he waved Nixon into the front seat, took the wheel and roared off as Secret Service men looked on aghast. He and Nixon hurtled down a narrow, twisting Catoctin
Mountain road at high speed, ran a STOP sign at the bottom of the hill and careened out onto a highway, Brezhnev looking neither right nor left. "That," said a shaken Nixon afterward, "was something."