Dear CCI Readers,
Few persons have the privilege of being printed or mentioned on the front page of The New York Times, but unfortunately the piece in question that Ambassador Matlock is referring to was pure misinformation.In his rebuttal, Ambassador Matlock calls the NYT to task for their printed untruths. Enjoy this correction. Hopefully the NYT will be more inclined to print facts in the future.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
Ambassador Jack Matlock: Letter to the NY Times Regarding Bernie Sanders’ Trip to the USSR
March 7, 2020
To the Editor: “Papers Detail Soviet Hopes for Sanders” (front page, March 6) is a distortion of history. The truth is that Bernie Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, Vt., opened a sister-city relationship with Yaroslavl in 1988 with the encouragement and strong support of the United States government.
The visit was not used as propaganda by the Soviet Union. I know because I was U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R. at the time and gave strong official support to Mayor Sanders’s effort, along with those of other American mayors, to establish ties with cities in the Soviet Union.
Expanding people-to-people ties was one of the important goals of President Ronald Reagan’s policy toward the U.S.S.R., a policy that was continued by President George H.W. Bush.