We visited with Bruce on the phone, and he shared this story with us:
I was a good friend of John Chrystal's. I went over there in 1992 with the Iowa Program. We went back in the fall saw that the program had failed due to human error. They didn't apply herbicide and bugs ate the corn. In 1994 we sent equipment over and raised soybeans. It was the only perfect field in all of Ukraine. It helped the Ukraine people get $30-50 million worth of soybean sales, helping them get closer to world market prices.
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John Chrystal led the US ag delegation at the last of the alternating annual US-USSR Chautauqua Dialogues in September 1991. I was along as a delegate to another commission (Defense Conversion led for the US side by Gov. Richard Celeste). John upset some fellow Americans when he blew off conference sessions to go meet with friends including Mikhail Gorbachev who had returned to Moscow after the failed coup a month earlier. John chaired that commission as part of a scheme to bring the next US-USSR "dialogue" to Des Moines. It never happened because the USSR ended in December.
ReplyDeleteI feel privileged to have known Roswell & Elizabeth and their family. I think it was in 1976 that they invited my wife & me to go with them to C.Y. Stephens in Ames for the Philadephia Orchestra. John Chrystal warned me about Roswell's driving, but we went and Roswell drove and we survived but John's warnings should have been heeded. They told us about their experience in Budapest in 1956. In 1959, when they were in the USSR and Elizabeth met Khruschev for the first time, she immediately grilled him as to what in he__ he had done in Budapest in 1956. It was not just Roswell who could be frank. Khruschev respected her, and it was she who extended the invitation to Nikita and Nina.
ReplyDeleteAll of this is relevant now, as the US accounts for 1/2 of all the war spending in the world. I was proud to drive John Chrystal to the Des Moines airport in late 70's or 1980 as he was going to Moscow to make a speech to the Soviet Academy on disarmament. Good current reading suggestion is Gorbachev's article in this month's Progressive on need for Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.