The Glassboro Summit

The Hollybush Summit took place in Glassboro, New Jersey from June 23 to June 25, 1967. During these days, President Lyndon B. Johnson and Premier Alexei Kosygin met to discuss Soviet-American relations. This meeting was during the height of an accelerating arms race and against the backdrop of ongoing wars in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. One might refer to this period as the “beginning of the end” of the Cold War. During this summit, no major agreements were met, though the summit boosted morale, gave hope for the future of Soviet-American relations, and set the groundwork for later discussions. Despite periodic setbacks in US-Soviet relations between 1967 and 1991, the trajectory toward peace in many ways can be traced back to the Glassboro meeting and its legacy.

The reasoning behind the selection of Glassboro for such a significant summit was because Glassboro lies halfway between New York City and Washington, D.C. Since the Summit took place in a local/residential area, the community became greatly involved with and connected to the Summit. In a unique way, the Glassboro Summit brought international politics to American suburbia. The Glassboro meeting between Johnson and Kosygin was the only Cold War summit set in an ordinary American community. The Glassboro Summit was thus an event with intertwined local, regional, national, and international significance.

The Glassboro Summit was an important piece of international relations during the late 1960s and also a part of local history. Glassboro reflected the evolving social fabric of the United States in the 1960s, including challenges to ideas about race and gender. The town mobilized to host the world’s two most powerful men together with thousands of media and onlookers, religious and educational institutions, the business community, veterans, and families pitched in, as oral histories and documents show. For many people, the Summit experience brought into sharp focus the leadership roles of women and African Americans and institutions in Glassboro and the region. In 1967, African Americans represented 16 percent of the Glassboro population. This perspective on the intersection of global events, Cold War context, and the diversity of Glassboro community life will be greatly enriched by adding more of the voices of African Americans. Similarly, the role of gender can be explored through studying the Glassboro Summit. The student body of Glassboro State College was over 70 percent women in 1967, and the faculty was also majority female. Women played many key roles during the Summit.

In order to grapple with vital issues of conflict and peace, Rowan University created the Hollybush Institute in 2007 as an academic and public affairs center deeply grounded in the history of the Hollybush mansion and its association with global history and international affairs. The leaders of the superpowers managed to speak to each other during a period of incredible duress. The United States and the Soviet Union not only possessed enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over, but enough chemical and biological weapons to eradicate life over much of the planet, and were on opposite sides of numerous regional wars. Yet they made progress on critical issues such as nuclear non-proliferation and arms control. The Summit helped reduce tensions between the US and the USSR, giving rise to what President Johnson called the “Spirit of Glassboro”: a hope that peace, civility, and, in Johnson’s words, a sense of “more orderly behavior among nations” were all possible.

(Text by Kathryn Seu)