Nixon in China

by Patrick Wright

Having earlier reassured Zhou that he was not a militarist, but rather the peaceable son of a Quaker and an admirer of Woodrow Wilson, Nixon now demonstrated his carefully rehearsed ability to use chopsticks.

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Vienna, 1961

by Peter Riddell

Kennedy became reliant on amphetamine injections from a doctor called Max Jacobson, who looked like ‘a mad scientist’ and who would have been described as a medicine man in earlier New Frontier days. Michael Beschloss notes that during his European trip in 1961, including the near-disastrous Vienna summit meeting with Khrushchev, ‘no one was in overall charge to anticipate or deal with the danger that an injection of cortisone, procaine, amphetamines, or whatever else Jacobson had in his syringe, could cause the President to behave at Vienna in a way that could have had dire consequences.’

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Munich, 1938

by Alan Milward

The gas masks were put away and the digging of trenches stopped. A good civilian with his old-fashioned suit and umbrella had saved the world from destruction by an obvious bad man wearing a kind of military uniform and jackboots.

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Geneva, 1985

by Kim Phillips-Fein

Reagan told Nixon (a frequent correspondent) after the first summit meeting in Geneva that, in his opinion, Gorbachev believed in God.

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Yalta, 1945

by Gavin Francis

In the 1940s there was growing awareness that high blood pressure could be a risk to health. It wasn’t enough to save Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1941 his blood pressure was measured at 188/105 (the norm is around 150/90 or lower); it wasn’t checked again until 1944, when it hadn’t improved. By the time of the Yalta Conference in February 1945 it was 260/150.

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Everest

by Justine Burley

The act of stepping casually over human remains en route to a summit is a powerful illustration of moral lassitude.

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