The secret note sent last week by Soviet Communist Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev to President Nixon threatened the “destruction of the state of Israel” by Soviet forces if Israel did not stop violating the cease-fire, according to this week’s issue of Time magazine. Time also writes that the note did not begin with the usual diplomatic salutation “Dear Mr. Nixon” but started out with a harsher “Mr. Nixon,” Sen. Henry Jackson described the note last Thursday–its contents have not been revealed by the White House–as “brutal,” and Pres. Nixon said during his Friday night press conference the message “left very little to the imagination as to what he intended.” But Time notes that one member of the Johnson Administration recalls that the Russians made similarly harsh threats toward the end of the 1967 war and that Johnson correctly decided that they never intended to act and ignored them.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
