Usually the truth is more prosaic than a reportedly “apocryphal story”, but not regarding the joke about “Onassis and Mrs Khrushchev” (Letters, February 17).
My father, Miles Hudson, was Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s political adviser when he was foreign secretary from 1970 (the first such role in the Foreign Office, paid for by the Conservative party). He was at the meeting in Moscow in 1973 between Douglas-Home and Andrei Gromyko, minister of foreign affairs of the USSR under Leonid Brezhnev.
It was going to be a tense and politically tricky meeting, the first at this level since Douglas-Home daringly expelled 90 Soviet “diplomats” from the embassy in London in 1971 — and a year after Richard Nixon’s visit to China blindsided the Soviets.
The usual pleasantries were exchanged in a distinctly frosty atmosphere. Then Douglas-Home, with his impish sense of humour, asked Gromyko, “What do you think would have happened if, instead of Kennedy, Khrushchev had been assassinated in 1963?”. Without hesitation, the supposedly dour Gromyko side-stepped the political minefield: ‘I do not think that Onassis would have married the widow Khrushchev.” Everyone laughed.
The ice was broken.
Mark Hudson
Blandford, Dorset, UK