States for one year, as part of the Fulbright Programme. Of the seventeen Soviet students, fourteen were selected by the KGB. Yakovlev and three others, including Oleg Kalugin, went to Columbia. All other students besides Yakovlev were members of the KGB. He studied intensively the English language, Roosevelt and the New Deal, drawing connections between the United States at that time and the Soviet Union. At the end, in May 1959, the Soviet visitors were taken on a thirty-day tour of the United States, during which he stayed with families from Vermont, Chicago and Iowa. However, his year in America did little to assuage his anti-Americanism because of the greed, racism, and other things that he witnessed. Yakovlev returned to the Central Committee to work on ideology and propaganda, and published several anti-American books. He defended a dissertation dealing with the historiography of US foreign policy, and received the degree of kandidat nauk, the equivalent of a doctorate, in July 1960. Early political career and exile In July 1965, he was appointed the first deputy head of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU by Leonid Brezhnev. In August 1968, Yakovlev was sent to Prague as the representative of Central Committee, and witnessed the entry of tanks into the city. He later spoke out against removing Alexander Dubček. That same year, he was placed in command of a group charged with drafting a new constitution. Yakovlev served as editor of several party publications and rose to the key position of head of the CPSU's Department of Ideology and Propaganda from 1969 to 1973. In January 1970, he visited the United States again, meeting then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan, diplomat Henry Kissinger, and actress Jane Fonda, who warned him that Moscow "did not appreciate the full danger of American militarism". This trip, again, failed to change his unfavourable impression of the United States. Exile to Canada In 1972, he took a bold stand by publishing the article entitled "Against Antihistoricism" in Literaturnaya Gazeta, critical of Russian nationalism, and nationalism in the Soviet Union in general. As a result, he was removed from his position. Given the choice of a diplomatic post as a form of exile, he chose to be the ambassador to Canada, remaining at that post for a decade. He arrived in Canada in July 1973. During this time, he and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau