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164 17 WRECKING RECEIVING LINES this is the story of how i thwarted a soviet practice of giving prominence in Moscow to the Viet Cong early in the Vietnam War period, and as a result caused the Soviet government to abandon its use of diplomatic receiving lines. Since the development of special rules for the exchange of representatives among medieval Italian city states, diplomacy has become swaddled in ritual. Some of the rules by which diplomats live are codified in international agreements , such as diplomatic immunity. Others are only accepted in practice but nonetheless held almost sacred by most protocol-conscious members of foreign services. One accepted concept is the ranking of ambassadors for purposes of precedence and ceremony. To avoid controversies among representatives of different countries, ambassadors are ranked by seniority. This has nothing to do with age. Seniority depends upon how long it has been since an ambassador formally presented his credentials from his own country’s chief of state to the chief of state of the nation to which he is accredited. The ambassador accredited the earliest among those currently in a capital is the doyen of the diplomatic corps there. He is consulted by the host foreign ministry on matters affecting the corps as a whole, speaks for the corps on ceremonial occasions, and organizes farewell parties for ambassadors who leave after a shorter time in residence than his own. A tradition much cherished by diplomats is the receiving line. The numerous airport arrivals and departures of state visitors, receptions, and other formal occasions of the diplomatic world require some organized way of handling introductions and greetings. Ambassadors therefore line up to shake hands, or press their palms together in front of their faces in the Hindu namaste form of Wrecking Receiving Lines 165 greeting, or sometimes among Communist comrades exchange bear hugs, or whatever seems appropriate. But how to line up? Seniority provides the answer. By diplomatic convention , after the host and senior officials of his country at the head of a receiving line with the chief guest, followed by diplomats of the visitor’s country, the line continues with the doyen of the diplomatic corps and then other ambassadors according to their time since accreditation. So it was that, when an important foreign leader came to Moscow in August 1965 and the Soviet leadership gave a reception for him in the Kremlin’s magnificent Georgievsky Hall, there naturally had to be a receiving line. There always was such a line when the U.S.S.R. entertained a foreign leader. Sometimes a short line was organized just inside the main entrance to the hall, at its northwest corner. This time, however, Soviet authorities had invited more diplomats than could be conveniently lined up there to shake hands with the honored guest. The receiving line would not fit conveniently into a corner of Georgievsky Hall. I usually was so busy elsewhere that I arrived at receptions after the receiving lines had broken up. In more than a year of attending several Kremlin receptions a month, I had not noticed how Soviet Foreign Ministry protocol officials handled receiving lines. But this time I was a bit early. The officials were inviting ambassadors who would form the receiving line to walk from the Georgievsky Hall in the nineteenth-century Grand Kremlin Palace through a short passageway and down a few curving stairs into a connecting hall. This was the Granovitaya Palata, built in the fifteenth century for Tsar Ivan III to hold councils of state and receive foreign envoys. The four domed chambers of its ceiling that curve down to a massive central column and the outer walls are decorated in dark murals that maintain the heavy, almost gloomy atmosphere of Ivan the Great and other brutal tsars. Trailing behind the diplomats, I watched with idle curiosity a procedure to which I had never before paid attention. Soviet protocol officials, lists in hand to be sure they did not slight anyone, were telling the ambassadors where to line up. Since this was by seniority, the longer-resident ambassadors well knew who should be standing on their left and right, and they readily fell into place toward the head of the line. But toward the end of the line, which had some seventy-five diplomats in it, the protocol officers had to steer people. As that went on, I noticed a curious thing: the protocol officers put into...

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