of ‘THE VOICE REASON’
Soviet ambassador’s daughters talk about life with their diplomat father in a new book
When it comes to today’s top U.S. leaders, Jenny Thompson says, it’s qualities that come along with “deep American roots” — honesty and level-headedness — that are often missing.
It’s what she says her father, Cold War-era diplomat Llewellyn Thompson Jr., gained from his upbringing in Southern Colorado and New Mexico.
Thompson’s foreign service career included two stints as the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1957-62 and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1967-69. In between, he worked as John F. Kennedy’s special adviser on Soviet affairs
He was raised in Las Animas, Colo., in the early 20th century and spent summers working on his father’s sheep ranch in Corona, N.M.
It was his early years full of hard work, according to Jenny and her sister Sherry Thompson, that made him a direct but reasonable diplomat and negotiator.
“Some people said during those hairiest moments of the Cold War that his was the voice of reason,” said Jenny.
“He wasn’t getting hysterical or emotional about anything. He was the one who was always calm, looking at things from all sides and trying to find a solution. This (his upbringing) is what made him, this is what formed him as a man, and that’s what did help save the world a few times.”
The same qualities are also what helped Thompson establish a famously close relationship with then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, said Jenny, and later helped him successfully advise Kennedy on how to correspond with the Russian leader during the 1962 missile crisis.
Thompson has been described as an “unsung hero” in helping the U.S. avoid a nuclear war.
Llewellyn Thompson’s personal life and his political career that spanned four presidential administrations are the basis of Jenny and Sherry’s new book, “The Kremlinologist: America’s Man in Cold War Moscow.”
The launch of the book, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, takes place Wednesday at Santa Fe’s Collected Works Bookstore.
What turned into a 600-page biography based on dozens of interviews, research from U.S. and Russian archives, and rifling through old personal documents began 15 years ago as a family project that the sisters intended to pass along to their kids and grandkids.
But after interviewing those who knew or worked with their dad, such as U.S. Sen. Tom Udall’s late father Stewart Udall, Interior secretary
during Kennedy administration, the daughters were urged not to keep the work to themselves.
“We just felt that our father wasn’t really well known in general, (nor were) his accomplishments, because he never wrote anything,” said Jenny. She said he left no memoirs.
Llewellyn Thompson died in 1972, at age 67, when Sherry, now a retiree in Santa Fe, was 18 and Jenny, who runs an English language school in Estepona, Spain, was 22.
Through their research, they said they learned things about their dad they didn’t know before, including his involvement in crafting the 1947 Truman Doctrine in which the U.S. promised to help European countries threatened by the Soviets and Communism; 1955’s Austrian Independence Treaty that the sisters said included Thompson playing hardball in negotiations to ensure no loopholes existed that could allow the Russians to re-occupy the country; or his work advising President Nixon regarding the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty that created nuclear weapons controls between the U.S. and the Soviets.
Sherry noted that her father never wanted the spotlight. He was “circumspect” in what he wrote down about himself in his notes or official documents. Sherry added that, for Cold War historians, his name isn’t one that will “hit you in the face.”
“Our father used to say to our mother that where it was important to be known, he was. His colleagues knew. At the time, certainly after the Cuban Missile Crisis and a bit in the Vietnam era, he was in the news a lot. Certain people of a certain age would know who he was. But he was very circumspect. He never tried to get in the news. He never tried to put himself forward.”
Researching for the book, the sisters took trips to Washington, D.C., and various presidential libraries, and conducted interviews with those who worked under their father or Khrushchev. They also interviewed two of the Khruschev’s children, Sergei and Rada.
The finished product also includes personal anecdotes from the sisters about their dad and their own experiences living in Moscow, which Sherry said are used as “illustrations” to break up the historical accounts in “The Kremlinologist.”
Jenny said that during the family’s two stints in Moscow, totaling about eight years, the ambassador ran the home like an embassy. “He was there if you needed him, but he was not imposing,” she said.
One story the sisters tell in the book is about preparing for a visit from then-vice president Richard Nixon during the Eisenhower years. The girls told Nixon’s Secret Service detail about the several secret tunnels they would explore under the Moscow house. The tunnels were made during the 1917 Russian Revolution. To their dismay, the tunnels were boarded up the next day and the girls “swore a solemn oath never to tell a grown-up in a suit anything else ever again.”
Though the effort to write the book started long before today’s increased tensions between Russia and the U.S., Sherry said the similarities between her father’s era and now will “inevitably” shed new light on what her father went through.
And while they think presentday diplomats can learn from Llewellyn Thompson’s political wisdom, the two daughters said there are also more universal lessons from his life.
“The importance of empathy and the ability to put yourself in the other’s shoes,” said Jenny, “and the importance of not isolating another country, or yourself, because that only aggravates a situation.”
“The Kremlinologist,” now available for sale on Amazon, will be released officially on April 2.