William Krimer; Presidents’ Interpreter

William Krimer, a Russian language interpreter for the State Department who participated in negotiations between Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Reagan and leaders of the Soviet Union, died Sunday at Inova Fairfax Hospital of complications related to arterial surgery. He was 86.

From 1963 to 1982, Krimer was the State Department’s chief Russian interpreter. He retired in 1982, but in retirement took on such special assignments as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1985 visit to the United States. In 1963 and 1964, he was the interpreter for Russian-born Marina Oswald before the Warren Commission, which was investigating the assassination of President Kennedy by her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald.

“The job presupposes your being at home in both languages,” said Krimer in a 1987 interview with the Washington Post. “Plus education--you can’t be ignorant of what the world is all about. And it takes a great deal of concentration, memory and the ability to present someone else’s views.”

Over his career, Krimer was an interpreter at the 1967 talks between President Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, N.J., and during President Nixon’s visit to Moscow in 1972 to sign the SALT I treaty. He participated in Nixon’s meetings with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Washington, San Clemente and Moscow from 1972 to 1974. Krimer also interpreted at President Carter’s talks with Brezhnev in 1979 in Vienna and at President Reagan’s meetings with Gorbachev in Geneva in 1987.

Krimer was born in then-Old Petrograd in 1915 in the final years of czarist Russia. In 1921, four years after the Russian Revolution, his family fled to Germany, via Latvia, and Krimer grew up in Berlin. After the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, his father figured that as Jews, the Krimer family would be prudent to move again. They went to England.

Krimer studied at the London School of Economics, then in 1941 came to the United States and completed his education at Columbia University. During World War II, he was an Army Air Forces bombardier, serving in the Pacific. Until moving to Washington and becoming a State Department interpreter in 1962, he was in the commercial real estate business in New York. He also did interpreting on a contract basis. He was fluent in English, Russian and German, and he spoke a little French and Latvian.

Typically, at meetings between world leaders, each side would have its own interpreter, and each interpreter would be fluent in both languages. Sometimes they helped each other out, as Krimer discovered during the 1967 talks between Johnson and Kosygin in Glassboro.

“Mr. Kosygin had asked the president, ‘Why don’t you stop the bombing of Hanoi? Any influence I had when I was visiting Hanoi disappeared when you pulled a bombing raid at that time.’ Johnson replied, ‘If I did that, I’d be crucified,’ ” Krimer recalled.

But as an interpreter he had a problem. “I was damned if I could remember the Russian word for ‘crucified.’ I looked over and the Soviet interpreter supplied it.”

Survivors include his wife of seven years, Irina Krimer of Reston, two children and a stepdaughter.