With Shultz and Gromyko in Geneva in 1985

On Monday and Tuesday, 6-7 January 1985, US Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko met in Geneva for arms talks, so I went there, mistakenly seeking an anti-nuclear demonstration. Instead, I went with Frank, a young American I'd just met, to the bar of Shultz's hotel, where we asked a man sitting alone if we could join him. The arms talks only provided a few minutes of conversation, but for several hours this Dutch journalist told us about himself – most memorably about his lifelong post-war aversion to Germany. He'd never visited the country – something quite unusual for the Foreign Editor of a Rotterdam newspaper! (Andrew Shields, #111words, 17 May 2021)