Kosygin

Here’s what Johnson said at the end of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in June 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey: “We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions.”

One ailing leader followed another: Premier Alexei N. Kosygin with a heart condition; Yuri V. Andropov, head of the K.G.B. and briefly premier, with a chronic kidney problem; Mikhail A. Suslov, the party ideologist, who latched on to Mr. Gorbachev as a young counterweight to the aging clique surrounding the supreme leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Keep in mind that at the time, the Soviet Union was in the iron grip of Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev and Premier Alexei Kosygin, who saw to it that freedom of the press or the right to publicly dissent did not exist inside their nation.

After more than a dozen hours of direct talks, Johnson stood next to Kosygin and, in effect, made a plea for safeguarding human survival.

He engaged in real summitry with Kosygin.