In Confidence.

• Author: Maynes, Charles William

I have to confess that for a considerable period in my professional career I deeply resented the author of this book. In the late sixties I served as a young diplomat in the American Embassy in Moscow, and I saw Anatoly Dobrynin mesmerize an unending series of senior U.S. officials into accepting him as their sole interpreter of the latest twists in U.S.-Soviet relations.

His ability to dominate the diplomatic dialogue left the rest of us, no matter what our level, with mere academic tasks. We spent our days reading Pravda and sending in summaries of articles that our colleagues in Washington could have read at their leisure. We did little real diplomatic work. Feeding our paranoia was the fact that Dobrynin was something of a stealth diplomat. He met with our senior leaders alone, without notetakers or interpreters on either side. We were seldom told what was going on.

This autobiography convinces me that our resentment was wrong-headed. Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States from 1962 to 1986, establishes in these pages that he is one of the great diplomats of modern history, a credit to his country and to a common tradition that spans many centuries.

What does it mean to say that someone is a great diplomat? In this media-obsessed age, many now seem to regard a great diplomat as someone who is an outstanding press agent or a vigorous negotiator who can gain advantage for his government by extracting one-sided concessions from others. His purpose is to prevail.

Yet the more traditional definition describes a person who helps his government accommodate its policy to the policies of others. The purpose is not to prevail but to agree, provided the interests of both sides are served. Nations do not win, they get along. For agreements to endure, they must be balanced. Diplomats are there to help their governments understand how to accomplish that task.

This is Dobrynin. "[I]f I had any great purpose in life," he writes, "it was the integration of my country into the family of nations as a respected and equal partner." For this purpose, he urged a "correct and constructive dialogue between leaders of both countries and maintaining the positive aspects of our relations whenever possible."

But a "correct and constructive" dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union was always an elusive target, and often the victim of electoral demagogy on one side and rigid ideology on the other. One troubling aspect of this...