Day after day after day the dreary drumfire of belligerent words and deeds rolled out of Jimmy Carter's Washington while the U.N. Special Session on Disarmament was meeting in New York during May and June. This first world disarmament assembly in forty-six years was made hostage to a small retinue of image-makers who persuaded a besieged president that, for domestic reasons, he must keep up a relentless fusillade of tough anti-Soviet talk and gestures, avoiding any taint of appeasement.

So Jimmy Carter came to believe he could not risk offering any significant policy initiatives toward a new international disarmament program. He was even persuaded that he should personally boycott the Special Session—though he was president of the host country for the largest U.N. aggregation of summit-level personalities since Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe eighteen years ago. As press secretary Jody Powell explained it, the president was “too busy” preparing major addresses for NATO and the U.S. Naval Academy to appear at the United Nations. The fact that the dates for the Special Session had been set before Carter's inauguration—and spread from May 23 to the end of June—did not find any reflection in Powell's announcement.