Three brushes with Balkan history

- By Albert Eisele, May 99

One of the advantages of being a journalist with a checkered job history that includes stints in government and business is the opportunity to occasionally rub shoulders with people and events destined to earn a place in the history books. Here are three such encounters that have some relevance to events that are in today’s headlines.

In May 1980, as press secretary to then-Vice President Walter Mondale, I accompanied him to Belgrade for the funeral of President Tito of Yugoslavia — whom we had met on a visit in 1977. One of the members of the U.S. delegation was the late John Blatnik, a veteran Democratic congressman from northeastern Minnesota who had parachuted into Yugoslavia during World War II and worked with Marshal Tito to rescue downed American pilots.

Tito was a dedicated Communist who became the head of government when Yugoslavia was proclaimed a republic in 1946. But he boldly rejected Soviet domination, while steering an independent course that allowed him to accept economic and military aid from the West.

Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev also attended the funeral, and afterwards, I asked Blatnik and Larry Eagleburger, then the U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, why the Soviets never forced Yugoslavia to join the Soviet bloc. They explained that, even at the height of their power, the Russians knew they could not conquer Yugoslavia by air power alone, but would have to send their tanks and troops into a region of extremely difficult terrain. So they left Tito alone.

The lesson for NATO and the Clinton administration should be obvious, while the comparison between American pilots being rescued by Yugoslavian troops a half-century ago but being regarded as hostile invaders today is painfully ironic.

In April 1979, I accompanied Vice President Mondale on a trip to the Nordic countries, including Sweden. It was less than a month after the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, and the subject naturally was on the minds of our hosts.

At a state dinner at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I was seated between Wilhelm Wachtmeister, then the Swedish ambassador to the United States, and former Prime Minister Thorbjorn Falldin, who had just left office in 1978 and would serve another term. Falldin was a vehement foe of nuclear power, and I spent much of the dinner trying, without much success, to defend the U.S. approach to nuclear power. (Sen. Bob Torricelli [D-N.J.], then an associate counsel for the vice president, was on the same trip, but didn’t rate an invitation to the dinner.)

The 20th anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident was observed last week, serving as a reminder that technological progress does not always advance on a straight line.

When Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji visits Washington next month, I doubt that he will remember how I helped him get his job.

Zhu, then mayor of Shanghai, was leading a delegation of Chinese mayors on a visit to the United States. At the time, I had my own consulting firm and had been asked to help coordinate his visit. One of the most important parts of his schedule was a meeting I arranged with members of Congress in the Hugh Scott Room on the Senate side of the Capitol.

The meeting came off well and the members were impressed with Zhu’s personable style and obvious enthusiasm for expanding business and economic ties to Shanghai and other major Chinese cities. The meeting and the rest of his visit earned him favorable press coverage in the United States and China, and helped burnish his image as a star in the Chinese political firmament.

If I run into Premier Zhu during his Washington visit, I’ll remind him of my minor, but certainly not insignificant, role in his rise to power. Of such moments is history made.

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