6
“You Can’t Trust the Russians”: A Fragile Alliance in Geneva

We must behave as though the world was created for man.
—THOMAS MANN

I RETURNED TO BOSTON TRIUMPHANT. While I had not met Brezhnev, which was the ostensible reason for the Moscow junket, something far more important had been accomplished. I had secured the involvement of Eugene Chazov, a leading figure in Soviet medicine, thereby laying the foundation for an international physicians’ movement.

It was evident that to succeed in the Soviet Union we needed someone with impeccable medical credentials as well as with a good deal of political clout—someone who could speak without fear of imprisonment in a Siberian gulag. Chazov was that person—an astute, highly successful navigator in the murky waters of the byzantine Soviet system. I recalled Jim Muller’s extravagant words on the steps of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital when he proclaimed that I was the only one who could persuade Chazov. The prediction had been borne out. The notion that we would have an authoritative voice in the very center of the power structure of a closed and secretive society seemed far-fetched, yet as events unfolded, that turned out to be the case.

Of course, there would be a price to pay for collaborating with the evil empire, especially without seeking official government sanction. Dealing with the highest echelons of the ruling Soviet hierarchy increased the likelihood of being tarred as Reds or, even worse, as KGB dupes.

By the late 1970s, after the USSR invasion of Afghanistan, ideological conflict ratcheted up, and such relations were consigned to cold storage. Radical activities during my youth made me keenly aware of the vindictive power of the American establishment. Little had I appreciated its awesome might and its unhesitating enforcement of conformity. For anyone still aiming to mount an academic ladder, some rungs necessary for ascent could be missing. But I had already arrived. I was more concerned about the squelching of opportunities for public discourse, making activities such as ours invisible. This phenomenon was nearly as true in the United States as in the USSR. The Soviets had their samizdat, and we had our marginalized left-wing media, neither perceptibly able to sway the larger public.

Chazov’s agreement to participate provided us with a license to move ahead and organize. The biweekly meetings at my home in Newton, a suburb of Boston, now included a small Gideon’s army of remarkable physicians. To the four of us who had been meeting regularly—Herbert Abrams, Jim Muller, Eric Chivian, and myself—we added two other physicians, John Pastore and David Greer.

John came from a distinguished political family in Rhode Island. His father had been Rhode Island’s senior Democratic senator for twenty-six years and, while in the Senate, had led the passage of the first nuclear-test ban. Jim Muller was the one who recommended John Pastore. Both were practicing Catholics. John was involved with the church and was the cardiologist for Cardinal Medeiros of Boston. Both men had attended Notre Dame University and shared a similar outlook on the nuclear threat. John was quite knowledgeable on these issues. Unlike the other founders of IPPNW, he had direct experience with atomic victims, having spent time in Japan working for the Japanese Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Hiroshima. He was passionate about the issue and lectured widely to community groups. Jim reflected that having John aboard would help rectify the imbalance that Chazov had created for IPPNW by having better government connections in Moscow than we had in Washington.

David Greer had been a first-rate internist practicing in the small city of Fall River, Massachusetts. I got to know him well, since I consulted on many of his cardiovascular patients. David had gained national attention when he innovated, with federal government support, a large domiciliary facility for the permanently disabled and the chronically ill. Later in life, he turned academic and became dean of the Brown University Medical School. David was outspoken on the nuclear issue.

The six of us, though we differed in outlook on many issues, were determined to promote change in the doomsday direction compelled by the mindless nuclear arms race. This circle did not include the president of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Helen Caldicott. Though she was a dynamic leader and a charismatic speaker, she was a frequent source of controversy. Her focus at the time was on nuclear power. None of us shared her view. We were a small nucleus of opposition against a colossal steamroller, and it was important to have a cohesive leadership group who respected and trusted one another.

Energized by the report of Chazov’s agreement, we planned a meeting to widen the outreach of the American group, to be convened in June 1980. We rallied a number of outstanding medical personalities from the Northeast. Most had not been members of PSR, nor had they previously spoken out on the nuclear issue. The notion of a nonpolitical antinuclear organization had great appeal because it was congruent with the deepest-rooted traditions of medicine. Being able to claim Soviet physician involvement was a significant attraction. Of the forty-four academics invited, thirty-two showed up to this meeting, one from as far away as Texas. Among those who came and thereafter played important roles were Dr. Howard Hiatt, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, and Dr. Alex Leaf, professor and chairman of medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

To promote the meeting, we trumpeted what we believed was our ace of hearts, a promised written endorsement from the Soviets’ leading cardiologist and his colleagues. As it turned out, the document that eventually arrived was a threatening ace of spades. In preparation for the first IPPNW gathering, I had asked Chazov to send a letter of greeting to confirm the readiness of like-minded Soviet doctors to partner with us. We needed proof that the Russian connection was real, not just a figment of my imagination. After more than a decade of collaboration with Soviet doctors, I was open to all types of shockers. I was ill prepared, though, for what transpired.

A courier from the Soviet Embassy in Washington delivered the letter from Chazov. As I was out of town, it was received by Herb Abrams, the vice president of our group. After reading the letter, Herb was despairing and outraged. This was not the letter of greeting that we had awaited; it was more of a skewed partisan diatribe. It was signed by sixty-two leading Soviet medical academicians from across the breadth of that huge land, from Leningrad to Vladivostok. The first and last pages were warm salutations stating that nuclear war would be an unprecedented calamity for humankind, following the argument I had laid out for Chazov’s involvement in March.

Page 2 was another matter. It presented the crux of the message, about American imperialist forces seeking hegemony over the Soviet Union. In stilted prose, it directly accused the United States and its allies of unleashing a dangerous and costly nuclear arms race. The letter further alleged that the Soviets were caught in an impossible bind that was not of their making. They were forced to save humankind from imperialist forces gaining world domination. There was not a scintilla of deviation from the party line.

If we exposed this poisoned chalice, a fledgling movement still in utero would have been aborted. While Chazov was the lead signatory, this could not be his thinking. During our intense four-hour discussion in March, I repeatedly stressed the apolitical nature of our movement. To be effective, we must stick unswervingly to the medical facts about nuclear war. We could deviate from this principle only at the cost of credibility and relevance.

Chazov had agreed categorically. As a matter of fact, he emphasized an identical theme—namely, that nothing in doctors’ training gives them the expertise to reach political conclusions. Had I foreseen the content of the letter, I would have taken more time to delineate the increasingly poisonous political climate that was emerging in the United States. In fact, it was just the beginning of a massive historical rightward shift.

Was Chazov aware of the strident anti-Soviet American political climate? Did the letter convey his opinion, or was he without say in the matter? If the latter was true, what was the value of having him as a leader of the Soviet arm of an international doctors’ movement? We were caught in a paradoxical situation. If Chazov resisted the “party line,” we could have no movement in the USSR; if he adhered to the party line, we could have no movement in the United States.

Though discouraged, I remained persuaded that Soviet doctors could be educated to navigate through the dangerous waters. On every front, political, economic, and military, the Soviet Union was a colossal Potemkin village. The Soviets desperately needed to apply their meager social capital to prevent the collapse of critical infrastructures rather than to build more deadly missiles. They were reaching out to every peace movement and launching plenty of their own. This was my growing impression from several visits, reinforced later as I dealt closely with government and party leaders. In the United States, mammoth wealth permitted a greater tolerance of widening disrepair.

My optimism was undoubtedly nurtured by wishful thinking. I was not about to give up and recede back into the anxiety that accompanies inaction. Over and over we repeated the same motif like a broken record: IPPNW had equal relevance for both nations. As the motto of the time stated, “We either live together or die together.” There was no third option.

With adequate exposure to each other, combined with a large measure of patience, tough-skinned tolerance, and Job-like forbearance—and enough time—we could gain an effective collaboration. In short, our singular agenda to promote mutual understanding and trust had to begin with IPPNW itself before we could heal a sick world threatened with self-destruction. As I read these words today they sound sentimental, but I do not apologize for my convictions.

Herb and I agreed that exposing the full content of the letter to participants in the June meeting would slow our momentum and would likely collapse the effort. The overwhelming majority of Americans would not cooperate with any group harboring the views expressed by the Soviet academicians. It was just a few days before the meeting, and there was no way I could get to Chazov in time to explain why the letter was incendiary and request one with a more apolitical tone.

Our troubles were further compounded. Anxious to garner media coverage, we had told a number of journalists, including a friend of Herb’s at Time magazine, that we were awaiting a supporting message from Chazov and other Soviet medical colleagues as an initial step in an antinuclear partnership. It was clear that there was no way we could release the letter to Time or anyone else.

At the meeting convened in June 1980 there was little reference to the letter. We indicated that Soviet physicians shared many of our views on preventing nuclear war. We suggested that the letter contained some unfortunate language that required further discussion. We simply tried to make a molehill out of a mountain, and we succeeded.

There was consensus on the American side to hold a world congress to launch a physicians’ antinuclear movement. But there was no such mandate from the Russians, and without their agreement from the outset, such an event would be stillborn. Those of us acquainted with the letter deemed it a blow to the legitimacy of the core idea: namely, that Soviet and American doctors could engage in a constructive dialogue without partisan politics. We decided that far deeper discussion was required to define the boundaries of what was permissible for the organization. Otherwise, the US part of the movement would never gain legitimacy and public attention. We concluded that I would appoint a mini task force to meet with Russian colleagues somewhere in Europe with the purpose of laying the groundwork for a world physicians’ congress in early 1981.

Eager to avoid future debacles, we turned to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. He, more than most other Russians, by virtue of a long residence in Washington, comprehended the current American mindset. In a letter we complained that the message from the Soviet academicians was “a politicized formulation far removed from the sphere of special competence of physicians” and not consonant with the American doctors’ initiative to establish a Soviet-American physicians’ antinuclear organization. In effect, narrow partisan formulations could lead only to a “fruitless exchange of charges and countercharges” that would not promote public comprehension of the imminence and consequences of thermonuclear war. We reminded the ambassador that when we met in Washington, he counseled us “to eschew partisan politics and to adhere rigorously to the medical dimensions of the problem.” We ended with an appeal for his guidance.

We received no response, nor did we know whether Dobrynin passed our message along. This was not the last time we tussled hard to keep the movement on a nonpartisan track. It was part of an ongoing, awkward courtship—not between two wary strangers but between a tiger and a cobra.

I wrote to Chazov suggesting that three American and three Soviet physicians meet for several days in Geneva, on neutral ground, to clarify shared principles and evolve a single platform. He agreed and promptly sent along the names of the other two Russian participants, who were both leading academicians. Mikhail (Michael) Kuzin, the former dean and a professor of surgery at Russia’s most prestigious medical school, and Leonid Ilyin, chair of the National Commission for Radiation Protection and director of the Institute of Physics Ministry of Health, USSR Academy of Medical Sciences.

I engaged in much soul-searching regarding the Americans who would accompany me to Geneva. It was unlikely that we could match the credentials of the Soviet delegation. A number of senior medical personalities had to be considered. Howard Hiatt was a possible candidate. He was dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. Earlier that year he had presented brilliant testimony before Congress on the medical effects of nuclear war. Herb Abrams too, was a possibility. Deeply committed to the cause and knowledgeable about nuclear issues, Herb was the skilled manager of a huge radiology department and a distinguished member of the Harvard faculty.

Typical of people with their academic stature, they were both deeply involved with other commitments. If the meeting in Geneva succeeded, we would immediately face the formidable task of organizing a world congress. Our goal was to have such a meeting within months as the launching platform for the doctors’ movement. This would require skilled organizers with energy, passion, good sense and, above all, ample free time. The handful of big American players who were interested in IPPNW were far too overcommitted for the task at hand.

I chose Jim Muller and Eric Chivian; both were hankering, indeed pleading, to go. They understood well that whoever engaged in this initial negotiation with the Russians would be future leaders of IPPNW. Neither at the time had any significant academic titles. I was already a tenured professor at the Harvard School of Public Health as well as a recognized cardiologist.

Eric Chivian had demonstrated consummate organizational skill in preparing the February 1980 symposium at Harvard. He was a gifted public speaker and passionate about the nuclear issue. Jim I knew a far longer time; his fluency in Russian was an asset, since Chazov’s English was very limited and Ilyin spoke but two words, “OK” and “good-bye.” Furthermore, Jim indicated readiness to take time off from medical work and throw himself body and soul into the cause. I did not give much thought to the problem he had had in Moscow with the Washington Post article, largely because Chazov raised no concerns about the US delegation. Perhaps one of the best moves I made was choosing these two very gifted younger physicians.

Geneva was a watershed event. Without it there would not have been an IPPNW. It took place in December 1980, one year after the Soviets’ Christmas Eve invasion of Afghanistan. Day by day since then, one could note an intensification of the Cold War. Russians were dehumanized as a people; everything Soviet was rejected, belittled, and denigrated. At the same time, a massive campaign portrayed the Russians as technological supermen. Broadcast as well as print media were replete with tales of their overwhelming and growing military might. The message was endlessly repeated that the USSR was leaving the United States behind and vulnerable. Unless we beefed up military spending, we faced a nuclear Armageddon.

Among the leading promoters of these views was the then secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. In 1976 he testified:

The Soviet Union has been busy. They’ve been busy in terms of their level of effort; they’ve been busy in terms of actual weapons they’ve been producing; they’ve been busy in terms of expanding production rates; they’ve been busy in terms of expanding their institutional capability to produce additional weapons at additional rates; they’ve been busy in terms of their capability to increasingly improve the sophistication of those weapons. Year after year after year, they’ve been demonstrating that they have steadiness of purpose. They’re purposeful about what they’re doing. Now, your question is, what ought one to be doing about that?

The fact of the matter is that the CIA and other US spy agencies found no truth in Rumsfeld’s allegations. As Herbert Scoville Jr., former CIA deputy director for science and technology, asserted, “Not in one single nuclear weapons category have the Soviets demonstrated technological superiority. We have more strategic weapons than the Soviet Union. But the myth of US inferiority is being spread to try to panic the public.”

During more than a decade of visits to the USSR, I was persuaded that the CIA analysis was far more realistic than Rumsfeld’s. Having seen firsthand Soviet clinics and hospitals serving the very top members of the ruling elite, I had been startled by the primitive, shoddy technology, which lagged decades behind ours. After all, the leading apparatchiki received the best health care their system could provide. One of my postdoctorate trainees spent three months in the USSR working on a collaborative project on cardiac arrhythmias. He reported that in one of the best Moscow hospitals, there were no vacutainers for obtaining blood samples. There was a shortage of syringes. Needles were sterilized between uses and had to be sharpened to get rid of burrs. He drew blood by sticking a solitary needle into a vein and letting it drip into a test tube.

I observed patients attached to monitoring systems in coronary care units with blank-screen oscilloscopes. I was repeatedly taken aback that modern façades of buildings constructed the year before were presenting the aged visage of decrepitude and were already crumbling; elevators lurched, TV images sputtered, faucets dripped, toilets did not fully flush. It was hard to imagine that the military was exempt from the backwardness afflicting every other walk of life.

The American public was being frightened into believing that the Soviets had the most powerful military machine in the world. At that very time, the Pentagon was outspending them more than fourfold and operating from the most advanced industrial base in the world. I found Soviets in different walks of life aware of America’s immense and growing superiority. No one I met was eager for Russia to challenge the global colossus.

Yet the United States, the most mighty of nations, was scaring itself witless with self-generated nightmares that the USSR was preparing to fight and win a nuclear war. Already under President Carter, and far worse under President Reagan, the very image ascribed to a Manichaean USSR was precisely mirrored by the Washington establishment. The myth of Soviet might was driven by the Committee on the Present Danger. In the years ahead, IPPNW would bump into CPD roadblocks wherever it turned.

The CPD, composed of articulate neoconservatives, was formed in 1950 as a “citizens lobby” to alert the nation to the growing Soviet threat. It promoted a massive military buildup to counter the USSR. Never before had a more impressive cross-section of the American elite joined to advance national policy with the singular aim of stoking the Cold War. Throughout the three decades after World War II, the official government policy was the containment of the Soviet Union. This was the brainchild of George Kennan, former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, in charge of long-range planning for the State Department. CPD stalwarts viewed containment as appeasement and were promoting a military “rollback” of the USSR.

One cannot overstate the political clout of the CPD. Its power derived from a membership that cut across political, social, and cultural divides, and it was prodigiously financed. In its vanguard were anti-Soviet hardliners from both the Democratic and Republican parties, led by the influential senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson.

Designating the CPD as a lobbying group would denote it as an outsider when in fact it had a prominent presence in the highest echelons of government. Powerful establishment credentials set it apart from the myriad lobbies of parochial interests that routinely besiege Washington and badger the public for attention. In 1951 the CPD succeeded in having President Truman adopt National Security Council Directive 68 (NSC-68). The document was drafted by Paul Nitze, a key leader of the CPD, who for over forty years was one of the chief architects of US policy toward the Soviet Union. NSC-68 was a stimulus for revving up the Cold War to a new and threatening pitch. It provided a belligerent strategic outline to counter the perceived threat of Soviet armaments and tripled our already bloated military budget.

A bone in the throat choking the CPD agenda was the contrary information generated by the CIA. According to American intelligence on the ground, the CPD analysis was based on invention. The CIA found that the Soviet Union was becoming less of a threat, as it was falling behind rather than surging ahead. To combat such contrary information, the CPD successfully pressured President Gerald Ford to create in 1976 the so-called Team B. Its purported intent was to promote an independent judgment of Soviet capabilities and intentions and thus expose the hidden threat to America. The inquiry would be run by neoconservatives and headed by one of the leading critics of the USSR, Richard Pipes, soon to be appointed chief Kremlinologist of the Reagan administration.

Powerful groups like CPD ordinarily work behind the scenes, invisible to the public eye, preferring collegial persuasion within executive councils over a cocktail in the cozy surrounds of an exclusive club or on golf greens. They relied on numerous well-placed pundits of bipartisan suasion to shape a popular consensus.

In this case the CPD plunged into the public arena. I recall that every Sunday night, the group used the Mutual Broadcasting System to frighten people about the “present danger” and make clear the urgency to take action or face a mortal peril. As Scoville, the former CIA deputy director, explained, Team B was “dedicated to proving that the Russians are twenty feet tall.” I observed the impact of nightmares on American public opinion. Instead of being worried over burgeoning nuclear arsenals, we were terrified that we lacked enough nuclear overkill.

The election of President Reagan the month before we journeyed to Geneva brought many principal players of the CPD into government. Thirty-three CPD members received appointments in Reagan’s first administration, more than twenty of them in national security posts. These changes heightened my unease and enhanced my resolve to advance our project.

Self-righteous positions, increasingly strident tones, and accusatory rhetoric did not permit civilized Soviet-American discourse. I could see no easy way through the thicket of propaganda on both sides. How could we bring our Soviet colleagues to share our understanding that a medical organization would be listened to only if it rose above the divisive animosities of the Cold War and spoke to humanity’s shared imperiled fate?

Our departure for Geneva on a wintry evening the first week in December 1980 received local press coverage. For us, this heightened the pressure to succeed.

We stayed at the fancy Richemond Hotel. By coincidence the Napoleon Room, dominated by a portrait of the emperor, was assigned for our meetings. No one spoke of the symbolism. Napoleon represented the invasion of Russia. Were we Americans about to invade Moscow? Would we share a like fate and be defeated at her gates?

Eric arranged for CBS to attend, after the Russians asked for permission to bring a crew from Soviet television. We insisted in as much symmetry as possible. CBS News sent a young correspondent, Leslie Cockburn, and a film crew from London. Vittorio de Nora, my friend and patient who had played a critical role in my trip to Moscow several months before, came to Geneva for the meeting. He was eager to be of help even though he was originally alarmed by my involvement with Communists.

Another participant was Zbynek Píša, a Czechoslovak representative to the World Health Organization and the director of its cardiovascular section. About a month earlier, I met Píša at an American Heart Association conference in Miami. I lured him to breakfast by promising to share breakthrough research on cardiac arrhythmias. My prologue related to the prevailing nuclear madness. The subject of cardiac research seemed mundane and irrelevant. Píša was horrified by the nuclear threat and eager to get WHO involved. We conversed for more than three hours about the antinuclear organization I was trying to build. I apprised him of the upcoming meeting with Chazov in Geneva, and he wanted to attend, so we invited him to join us as an observer.

The first session of the Geneva meeting was scheduled for a Saturday morning. As Jim, Eric, and I discussed strategy before the meeting, it became evident that we were not of one mind about how to proceed. I wanted to begin by emphasizing the nonpartisan nature of our movement and the importance of speaking as doctors, not as adherents of any political or ideological persuasion.

Jim disagreed. He was adamant in his desire to begin by acquainting the Russians with anti-Soviet feeling in the United States. He had brought a stack of articles from mainstream leading dailies like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, as well as from Time and Newsweek. He wanted to present the information in Russian, thereby engendering a “congenial atmosphere.” Jim felt it was critical for Russians to understand how they were perceived in the West. Our future work depended on their sensitivity to western public perceptions.

Jim had not raised this idea in the several meetings we had before arriving in Geneva, and it took me by surprise. I thought his approach would bring the chill of the Cold War to our deliberations, when our intent was quite the opposite. After all, we had been maintaining that our strength derived from punctiliously adhering to our medical professionalism. This was the basis for our common language, shared values, and identical goals. I felt that we should play to our strength to bridge the divide rather than magnify our differences.

Jim insisted that the Soviets would appreciate our frankness. I warned him that we would have a stillborn organization if he pursued this tactic. Jim noted that his intimate knowledge of the Soviet mind derived not from books and movies but from having lived and studied in the USSR for a year. He had not been there as a tourist. He spoke the language; he was intimate with the culture. He loved the Russian people. I found much of the above suspect.

We argued intensely. Eric eventually weighed in on Jim’s side. He urged me, as chair, to bow to Jim’s more knowledgeable experience and have him kick-start the discussion with his prepared position paper providing an American perspective of the Soviet Union. Eric shared Jim’s view that the Russians would understand that we were trying to help them and would be grateful.

Jim had brought large stacks of news clippings about gulags, Stalin’s atrocities, and human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. From my perspective, they were a mangle of legitimate criticism from refuseniks and inventions emanating from the likes of Richard Pipes. Jim wasn’t going to take them to task for Soviet sins, past or present; he simply believed the Russians needed to understand how western public perceptions about their country were shaped.

Finally we sat down, just the three Russians and the three Americans. Most of us didn’t know each other well, and the situation, though not tense, was not comfortable. I began with a few brief words of welcome and emphasized the importance of moving ahead quickly with the formation of a movement. Reagan’s election the previous month was an ominous bellwether and made a movement such as ours far more urgent. The relationship between our two countries was going to catapult downhill faster than before.

Jim then began to speak in Russian and I held my breath. Not speaking the language, I watched the faces of the Soviets intently. As Jim continued, Ilyin began to chain-smoke; I could sense rising tension. At first Chazov looked puzzled, then increasingly uncomfortable. But I didn’t know how to stop Jim. He behaved as though he were on a sacred mission. With exuberant energy, he pointed to clippings and photographs as though trying to convince a jury, of what I couldn’t fathom. Presumably, he was explaining that Russians were badly regarded in the United States.

Puzzled and uneasy, I could make no sense of his taking such a foolhardy gambit. Now, a quarter of a century later, despite the analytic power of the all-knowing retrospectoscope, I still have not figured out what he aimed to achieve by this anti-Soviet foray. Jim’s attempt to educate the Soviets crashed even before he was able to complete the first few paragraphs of his discourse.

Though I didn’t comprehend what Jim was saying, with every word the temperature in the room rose. Tension mounted. Suddenly Kuzin stood up, enraged, shouting something to the effect of, “I did not travel this great distance to have to listen to anti-Soviet propaganda. This is outrageous! Did you call us together just to hurl insults at us? I don’t intend to speak out about the murderous American militaristic policies in Vietnam, your genocide of Indians and Negroes, and your support of dictators everywhere you have business interests.” He then stalked out of the room. Ilyin was pacing back and forth, puffing one cigarette after another. His usual genial smile was erased, and beetlike redness suffused his moon-shaped face.

Jim turned as white as a sheet. Chazov was by now in a fury. In poor English, he announced that this was a provocation and that if it continued, he would quit. Clearly this first session had begun on the wrong foot, launching an unnerving altercation. My instinct told me it was all but finished. We had to bail vigorously to salvage the capsizing small craft.

A rescue seemed fruitless. While promulgating a philosophy of accommodation, we had negated it in our very first engagement with the Soviet physicians. I began in a voice that did not disguise my anger and frustration, trying to soothe and bring us back to a common platform. At that moment I didn’t feel like making explanations for Jim, but there was no other option.

I told the Soviet physicians that Jim had been misunderstood. He was not presenting a personal point of view: on the contrary, this is what ordinary people in the United States had been led to believe. Jim was trying to portray the political climate we face in the West because it was important for them to understand the obstacles the Americans had to overcome. I asked our Russian colleagues to give us another chance. Let our common effort prove our noble intentions rather than be swayed by misunderstood words.

For the next two hours, we engaged in what at first appeared to be futile pleading, explaining, and apologizing in order to bring the meeting back on track. We were no longer a streamliner, but even dealing with a slow chugging locomotive was better than being derailed.

Chazov began to respond affirmatively and called Kuzin back into the room, and I explained to Kuzin what Jim was trying to accomplish. I did most of the entreating and cajoling. For the first time, eloquent Jim was struck dumb. Pale and stuttering, he repeated that there was no anti-Soviet intent; this was not his propaganda but what prevailed in the United States.

I had the bizarre feeling of being among theatrical performers, each with assigned, pre-rehearsed roles. After the Russian outburst, I thought they would never speak to us again. Nothing of the kind. Once we agreed to reconcile and laid down guiding principles, the Russians behaved as though nothing at all had transpired and conveyed friendship and camaraderie. What happened to their sizzling rage? Jim behaved in a like manner. Following the upheaval, he maintained that his remarks had helped set a realistic course for our endeavor. Eric suggested that it was an understandable error, part of our learning curve.

What happened in those early moments showed the fragility of our alliance. It proved how susceptible we were to sundering the movement. If we deviated a scintilla from the medical agenda, we were immediately wading in the swamp of partisan politics.

This was a close call; we had our warning. We had to work as doctors. If we were attending to an ill patient, would we be trading accusations about Stalin, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and racism? Those issues were foreign to our calling. It was clear at that moment that we had to stick religiously to a narrow medical agenda. That principle would be put to the test many times in the years ahead—the lesson would have to be learned over and over.

After the initial fireworks, the meetings proceeded on an upbeat note. We agreed to organize a world congress of the physicians’ antinuclear movement near Washington, D.C., a movement we were to call “International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.” The congress was to be held in March 1981. The Russians promised to bring a large and distinguished delegation. It augured well that once we had agreed on the core principles, the Soviet doctors were quite flexible on organizational details.

How did Chazov assess the political digression that came close to derailing this initiative? I never pursued the matter with him, fearing I would open a can of worms. Some years later, when he was no longer in the IPPNW leadership, he wrote about his antinuclear activism in a Soviet journal, where he reflected extensively on the three of us Americans. “They were different people in terms of age, life experience and medical expertise.” He was impressed by how each of us was eager to attract media coverage, stating, “Americans always desire publicity. It is their blood.”

In regard to Jim Muller, Chazov recalled their long association and commented, “Up to this day I cannot figure out which part of the medical community Dr. Muller was representing. He was not one of the ordinary physicians I had met during visits to the United States. He was closer to (US) government officials than any other member of our organization.” Alluding to Muller’s role in Geneva only obliquely, he stated that “Muller liked to bring up acute political problems.”

As for Eric Chivian, Chazov commented, “Very nice and pleasant, he was far from any prejudice and always was ready to compromise. He contributed greatly toward a better relationship between Soviet and American physicians…. I thought that at our meeting in Geneva he represented the moderate Jewish intelligentsia deeply concerned about the danger of nuclear war and possible confrontation with the Soviet Union.”

In the same article Chazov dwelled extensively on our long and close relationship. “We became true friends whom neither political nor cultural differences, nor state borders could separate.... Dr Lown is an honest human being, who shares other people’s pain, who lives and works for us. His most characteristic features are honesty and clear conscience.” However, I seem to lack what is “typical for Russians, practical vision of a problem.” He continued, “Dr. Lown represents that part of the progressive thinking, liberal American intelligentsia that always fights for independence, its right to make decisions according to its ideas and convictions.”

Regarding the contentious beginning in Geneva, he related that Jim and Eric put on the agenda Angola, Afghanistan, Soviet Jews, dissidents, Andrei Sakharov, and more. He and his Soviet colleagues regarded this move as a destructive dead end. “We had to return to the central issue of how to raise the awareness of thousands of doctors all over the world to protect the earth from a nuclear catastrophe. And with ‘Lown’s full support,’ the Soviet group was able to salvage that first fateful meeting.”

After that first turbulent day, as we were sailing in more peaceful waters, Vittorio de Nora hosted an elegant party in one of the upscale restaurants in Geneva. I remember a toast offered by Vittorio’s young son, Mateo, in which he said, in effect, “You older guys have really screwed up the world for my generation. Now I am happy to see you coming together to straighten it out!” His tone was angry and accusatory—and rightly so. At this party, as I related earlier, Chazov revealed the role of his daughter in swaying him to become a participant despite his being weighed down with onerous obligations.

We continued our meeting on Sunday by working out the details of participation, governance, plans for the congress, and so forth. We concluded that evening in an atmosphere of warm friendship, hope, and excitement. Once the politically divisive factors were removed, we were no different from any other group of doctors working on some difficult medical problem, ready to accommodate and respect collegial views and differences.

The next day, it was as though we had a hangover. We were no longer exhilarated, merely concerned at the gargantuan challenge of a world congress in three months without a treasury or even a Russian kopek. We had a tiger by the tail now. We were holding tight and heading into the unknown.

The meeting garnered some good press that lifted our spirits when we returned home. Time and Newsweek ran pictures and stories. Said Time:

“How can we dispel the notion of some people that anyone will survive nuclear war? How can we doctors influence people to prevent any further buildup of nuclear arms?” These are not the questions of an American pacifist, but of Yevgeni Chazov, the Soviet Union’s deputy minister of health and an official physician to Leonid Brezhnev. Moreover Chazov’s view is at variance with some statements of Soviet officials implying since fewer Soviet citizens are likely to die in an atomic holocaust than Americans, the U.S.S.R. would therefore win…. Both Soviet and American physicians are keenly aware of the danger of being used for propaganda purposes by their own, as well as each other’s politicians. Says Chazov, “I think our movement would lose a lot of credibility if it became political.”

Chazov captured the essence of IPPNW. Whether American or Russian, we physicians and our fellow citizens had a world to lose and nothing but misery to gain from the nuclear arms race. We had to bring the politicians in tow. We had a mere three months to pull off the first IPPNW world congress, and it would tax our limited human resources to their utmost. But the first congress was to put IPPNW on the world scene to stay.