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Page 139
his résumé. What was Cherny thinking of, Kellner wondered. To what influences was he yielding?
President Caidin had scoffed at the idea that Aleksandr Cherny would send a KGB man to Washington, the most sensitive post in the Russian foreign service. "Aleksandr Cherny would send the Metropolitan of Moscow if he could," Caidin said, laughing at Kellner's suggestion. Cherny was widely pictured in the press and among the pundits of the Beltway as a religious, almost saintly man. Kellner remembered the Western press's earlier enthusiasm for Yuri Andropov, the music aficionado who had, according to reports, just loved Glenn Miller's music. Leonid Brezhnev, Americans were told, was a muscle car buff (just like any rugged American male). For a time the rat pack in the Western press had devoted much effort to "humanizing" senior Soviet leaders. Kellner wondered if the current crop of pundits were not repeating the mistakes of the past with Aleksandr Cherny. An intellectual, to be sure, and a mild-mannered man. But still the executive of the successor state to the USSR, a nation that had kept the world in turmoil for most of the twentieth century.
The current inside gossip said that Cherny had an icon of St. George in his Kremlin apartment. And young Air Force General Collingwood, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had managed to anger many congressmen by assuring Time magazine that the icon was "worth two missile wings."
Kellner's mind had been preoccupied, and he had not been listening carefully until Ambassador Galitzin said smoothly, by way of farewell, "I hope the health of the Secretary of State is improving."
Kellner's face froze. Carl Jannings, the Secretary of State, was not improving; he was dying of AIDS. The Caidin Administration's foreign policy had been in limbo for weeks because of it. The President decided to take the unpleasantand politically unappealingstep of asking for Jannings's resignation and nominating a replacement for him. Vincent Kellner was reputed to be the most likely nominee. Marko Galitzin,

 
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