Donald Trump angled for Soviet posting in 1980s, says Nobel Prize winner

[Jacque67 7,328]

Donald Trump, in the mid-1980s, aggressively pursued an official government post to the USSR, according to a Nobel Peace Prize winner with whom Trump interacted at the time.

"He already had Russia mania in 1986, 31 years ago," asserts Bernard Lown, a Boston-area cardiologist known for inventing the defibrillator and sharing the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize with a top Soviet physician in recognition of their efforts to promote denuclearization. Lown, now 95 and retired in Newton, Massachusetts, tells The Hollywood Reporter that Trump sought and secured a meeting with him in 1986 to solicit information about Mikhail Gorbachev. (Gorbachev had become the USSR's head of state — and met with Lown — the year before.) During this meeting, Lown says, the fast-rising businessman disclosed that he would be reaching out to then-president Ronald Reagan to try to secure an official post to the USSR in order to negotiate a nuclear disarmament deal on behalf of the United States, a job for which Trump felt he was the only one fit.

"He said to me, 'I hear you met with Gorbachev, and you had a long interview with him, and you're a doctor, so you have a good assessment of who he is,'" Lown recalls. "So I asked, 'Why would you want to know?' And he responded, 'I intend to call my good friend Ronnie,' meaning Reagan, 'to make me a plenipotentiary ambassador for the United States with Gorbachev.' Those are the words he used. And he said he would go to Moscow and he'd sit down with Gorbachev, and then he took his thumb and he hit the desk and he said, 'And within one hour the Cold War would be over!' I sat there dumbfounded. 'Who is this self-inflated individual? Is he sane or what?'"

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Lithuania-born Lown, who today is professor of cardiology emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, had been the subject of considerable media attention shortly before he first heard the name Trump. In October 1985, he and Yevgeny I. Chazov, the personal physician of the Kremlin's senior leadership (including Gorbachev), were chosen to share the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a group they co-founded in 1980 that had grown to include more than 150,000 members in 49 countries. And in December 1985, shortly after collecting their Nobel medals in Oslo, Lown joined Chazov for a meeting at the Kremlin with Gorbachev, who unexpectedly had come into power that March, making Lown one of the first Westerners to spend time with him.

It wasn't long after Lown returned to the United States that he learned about Trump. "I get a call from New York and it was a Wall Street broker who was a friend of Trump's," Lown recalls, declining to name the individual. "He says, 'Trump would like to see you,' and I said, 'Who is Trump?' I had no idea." He continues, "This fellow was a member of the board of the Lown Cardiovascular Research Foundation, this Wall Street fellow, and he knew that we were short on funds for the research that I outlined and that we had to do in the following few years. He says, 'Here's somebody who might be a source of [funding]. Why don't you meet him? He wants to talk to you — he asked me to arrange it.' So I came into New York and went to Trump Tower and met him for lunch." Lown says it quickly became apparent that Trump had an agenda of his own. "I was sitting there in this glass bubble, overlooking New York, and feeling, 'What am I doing here?'" he recalls. "He seemed totally disjointed."

 

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/donald-trump-angled-soviet-posting-1980s-says-nobel-prize-winner-1006312

click on article for a great pic of loony Donnie !!!

 

Edited May 26, 2017 by Jacque67

[CaliCat 3,957]

Perhaps that's where his puppy love with Putin began. 

[Jacque67 7,328]

5 hours ago, CaliCat said:

Perhaps that's where his puppy love with Putin began. 

Could be!!