BREZHNEV DECLARES: ‘Nixon merits my profound respect’

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33253, 16 June 1973, Page 15

BREZHNEV DECLARES: ‘Nixon merits my profound respect’

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) MOSCOW, June 15. The First Secretary of the Soviet Union Communist Party (Mr Leonid Brezhnev) today brushed aside suggestions by American reporters in Moscow that the Watergate affair would have any influence on his forthcoming summit talks in Washington with Mr Nixon, who, he said, merited his profound respect.

“It does not enter my mind to think of whether Mr Nixon has lost —or gained — any influence because of the (Watergate) affair, and I do not intend to refer to it,” Mr Brezhnev said at a news conference in the Kremlin just before his departure for Washington.

“My attitude towards Mr Nixon is one of very great respect, based on the fact that he has taken a realistic and active approach to relations between our two countries, passing from an era of confrontation to an era of negotiations. Mr Nixon merits my profound respect.”

It was Mr Brezhnev’s first news conference since he took power from Mr Nikita Khrushchev nine years ago. Before his journeys to France and West Germany, he granted individual interv : pws, but he has not held a fullscale news conference until now. In Washington, the Presidential adviser, Dr Henry Kissinger, today predicted that the summit would mark a turning point in RussianAmerican negotiations for a comprehensive nuclear arms curb agreement, and he indicated that the pact could be concluded within two years. In the agreement signed by President Nixon when he was in Moscow a year ago, the United States and the Soviet Union placed limits on defensive nuclear missiles each country can have, and put some temporary curbs on offensive weapons as a first step to slowing the nuclear arms race. Now the two countries are engaged in what Dr Kissinger described as extraordinarily complex negotiations, dealing with the quality of offensive nuclear weapons, and not merely with numbers. He said that the United States hopes that the NixonBrezhnev summit would pave the way for the two leaders to give more harmonious, and more compatible, instructions to their negotiators.

Mr Brezhnev will arrive in Washington on Saturday, and will have almost a week of meetings with Mr Nixon at the White House, at the President’s nearby mountain retreat at Camp David, Maryland, and at the Western White House in San Clemente, California.

The visit will begin officially on Monday, with a ceremonial welcome for Mr Brezhnev at the White House, followed by a day of talks and a State dinner that night. Mr Brezhnev will speak on television to the American people, probably from California.