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The alternative was to use a limited number of nuclear weapons in a "surgical operation" to intimidate the Chinese and destroy their nuclear facilities. But, according to Ogarkov, a bomb or two would hardly annihilate a country like China, and the Chinese, with their vast population and deep knowledge and experience of guerrilla warfare, would fight unrelentingly. The Soviet Union would be mired in an endless war with consequences similar to those suffered by America in Viet Nam.
Grechko's opponents prevailed, happily, and no military option was exercised, nuclear or otherwise. But the long border with China remained a highly volatile area.
AT GROMYKO'S
RIGHT HAND
When Gromyko, on a visit to New York in 1969, offered me a post as his adviser, I accepted with alacrity and anticipation. In April 1970 my wife Lina, my daughter Anna, then eight years old, and I left New York to take up my new duties.
Gromyko's senior assistant was Vasily Makarov. High-ranking diplomats gave him expensive presents to grease the way for their reports to Gromyko or their appointments to coveted jobs. Makarov accepted these as his due; he would even commission purchases for himself, once telling me pointedly how much he needed a rug of a certain size and color.
Makarov was a surly, pompous, sarcastic contrast to Gromyko's cool but generally courteous personality. Gromyko kept him as the perfect watchdog. He scared off intruders. He sheltered his master from unnecessary contacts with lesser humans. Gromyko is an efficient machine, constructed to perform and to endure, and almost completely devoid of human warmth. He can joke and he can rage, but underlying any such expression is a cold discipline that makes him formidable as a superior or as an adversary.
Gromyko inhabits a cocoon as though born to it. I do not believe he has ever had close friends. Inside the Stalin-era skyscraper that houses the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Trade, Gromyko takes a special elevator, reserved for him and a few very senior officials, straight to his seventh-floor office. There, except for a meal in a private dining room, he stays all day, reading those documents that Makarov and others on his personal staff feel it is essential to show him, seeing a carefully screened group of senior ministry officials or top foreign visitors, talking on the special Kremlin telephone system, the Vertushka, to those of his rank outside the ministry.
As his daughter Emilia once said to me, "My father lives in the skies. For 25 years he has not set foot on the streets of Moscow. All he sees is the view from his car window."
At the same time, he is an excellent family man; he has a well-deserved reputation for being faithful and solicitous to his wife Lidiya. Her influence upon him is considerable; she is the one person he listens to attentively. Her advice extends beyond their personal life to government affairs, particularly in the selection of people for top posts at the ministry. A ministry wag once dubbed her "the real chief of the personnel department."