Working as a journalist in the Soviet Union was a consuming but rewarding experience. I was pitched into it on June 1, 1960, in fact, only a few hours before landing at the Moscow airport. Invited into the cockpit of the British airliner taking me to Moscow from London, I reported in my first dispatch what was entailed for a foreign aircraft to pass through the tight Soviet security air screen. On the following day, I attended the funeral of Boris Pasternak, in his little summer cottage surrounded by white birch trees in the artists’ community at Peredelkino close to the Soviet capital. Invited with several other correspondents into his dacha, I paused at the bier of the seventy-year-old poet, who lay in an open coffin in the drawing room surrounded by flowers. As the celebrated pianist Sviatoslav Richter played Franz Liszt’s “Consolation” and then a Tchaikovsky funeral dirge, KGB agents stood about in the room taking photographs of the mourners at this farewell to the 1958 Nobel Prize winner in Literature who had been a symbol of resistance to Soviet oppression. For accepting the Nobel Prize he had been vilified by the official Moscow Union of Writers as taking “thirty pieces of silver” from the West. His death on May 30 had been virtually ignored in the Soviet press, but more than a thousand people gathered outside his home on this day to render homage. The lips of many of them moved in unison as an actor from the Moscow Art Theater recited Pasternak’s poem Hamlet. The coffin was carried into the garden lifted by many hands over the heads of the massed mourners. I followed the coffin as it was borne to the burial place on the crest of the hill. Although I knew Pasternak only from his poetry and his magnificent novel Doctor Zhivago, I instinctively joined in the outpouring of grief. I could think of no sadder introduction to this nation that I was to live in and cover for the next three years.
The pace of news coverage of the Soviet capital was demanding, intense, and highly competitive. I wrote at a battered desk in a tiny crowded office sitting opposite my fellow Times correspondent, initially Osgood Caruthers and later Ted Shabad. There was always a Russian guard at the gate of our shabby tenement building. During my first three months I covered an array of stories such as the trial in the Hall of Columns of Francis Gary Powers, the civilian pilot employed by U.S. intelligence who bailed out over the Soviet Union after his U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down on May 1 by a surface-to-air missile. Powers pleaded guilty to the charge of espionage and was sentenced on August 20 to three years’ imprisonment and seven years at hard labor.* Soon after there was the marvelous yarn of Strelka and Belka, the frisky dogs who orbited the earth seventeen times on August 20 aboard the second Soviet space ship, becoming the first living creatures to return safely from outer space. The epic space event took place the following spring, April 21, 1961, when I heard a broadcaster on Moscow Radio intone repeatedly: Govorit Moskva! Govorit Moskva! (“Moscow Speaks! Moscow Speaks!”). It was the call which Moscow Radio reserves for its most important announcements. On that morning, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to enter space. In a five-ton space ship named Vostok (“East”), Gargarin in 1 hour and 48 minutes had made a single orbit of the earth and landed in good shape. The flight, resounding evidence of the technological advance of Soviet society, brought a great outpouring of pride and happiness among the Russians. But the achievement also stood in glaring contrast to what was lacking in the everyday existence of the average Russian. Audrey recalls that on the day of the flight she could not find any eggs in the local open market or in the nearby shops. When I returned home from the Central Telegraph Office after filing a story on the epic space event, I walked up eight flights of stairs to our apartment because yet once again the elevator was not working.
Monitoring developments in the Cold War was my foremost concern in reporting from Moscow. Having observed Khrushchev’s reckless tactics in Berlin, I arrived in the Soviet capital convinced that there was a real and ever present danger that he might ignite World War III through some miscalculation. It was extraordinarily difficult to ascertain and define what were the policies and intentions of the secretive men in the impenetrable Kremlin. Correspondents lived and worked encased within a complex of walls.
Audrey and I managed to surmount one such wall thanks to our four dauntless daughters. We were quartered in one of the so-called diplomatic ghettos for foreigners on Prospekt Mira in a four-room apartment shared with the girls’ pets: five cats, an ailing pigeon, two goldfish, and two turtles. There was only one entrance to our walled compound, at which a Soviet militiaman was posted. Neighboring Russian homes beyond the wooden wall were as remote to us as the moon. That was until the self-styled “Fabulous Four” consisting of Susan, now nine, Karen, seven, Lesley, five, followed by Robin, three, launched their breakout. The Fabulous Four pulled out boards in the wooden wall and looked into the eyes of Russian children in a playground. Without delay the Russian children taught our kids their first Russian word. It was poyedem, meaning “let’s go, let’s go and play.” Not having any idea they were trespassing on forbidden territory, our girls crawled between the slats of the wooden wall and joined their new playmates. When the Soviet guards observed this commingling, they ordered our children to return to their ghetto space. Soon after, when the children continued to defy the rules, the wooden wall came down and a construction crew put up a stone replacement. But in their transcendent wisdom, the children were not to be separated. At the first snowfall, our children built snow steps while their Russian friends did the same on the other side, and soon they were chatting atop the stone wall. When the Russian children asked to visit our apartment, Susan did cartwheels to divert the guards while Karen led their pals across the courtyard. Thereafter, the militiamen seemed to give up and wink at this clandestine traffic. Our older daughters were relaying to us gossip of the neighborhood, telling of the joys and tears of Russian life in overcrowded apartments. Hidden in family cars they were smuggled by their pals to dachas on the outskirts of Moscow beyond the travel limit for foreigners. Consumed with curiosity about everything about them, the Fabulous Four ventured ever farther. Observing Susan as she took ballet lessons, the director of the Bolshoi School, Madame Golovkina, commented that she had talent and brought her into the school. Susan enthralled us with insights to the cultural world.
After a year, Susan and Karen, having acquired some grasp of Russian, asked if they could attend the Russian elementary school rather than the Anglo-American School for foreigners. They became the first American children in Moscow to attend a Russian elementary school. They donned the uniform of brown dress with white apron but were excused, given they were Americans, from wearing the obligatory red kerchief of the “Young Pioneers.” At PTA meetings Audrey and I met parents eager to know us. The girls never complained about the lack of anything or having to sleep on double-deckers in a tiny bedroom overstuffed with clothes and toys. Audrey and I recollected with amusement how we’d been cautioned about going to Moscow with children. At times the Fabulous Four were more at home than we were. Tumbling about, they provided us with needed respites from the harshness of life in Moscow. After a year I noted in a letter to Clifton Daniel, the managing editor: “I am convinced that it is better to send a family here, rather than a single man. The family group provides a natural buffer against many of the strains.” In our apartment we were guarded in discussing what we learned from diplomatic contacts or our Russian friends and neighbors. We lived with the knowledge that there were KGB listening devices secreted about and that our maid and the office chauffeur, however friendly, were assigned to us by UPDK, the government-run agency that serviced foreigners. One night a lighting fixture in the ceiling above the foot of the double bed in the small room where Audrey and I slept exploded and exposed a listening device. The KGB had been listening to some choice pillow talk.
The KGB unknowingly was instrumental in transforming Audrey from sculptor into a full-time journalist. When she went to a Russian store to buy clay and tools, she was turned away by the clerk, who said he was not permitted to sell art supplies to foreigners. A distinguished Russian portrait sculptor happened to be standing nearby when this exchange took place and offered the use of his studio to Audrey. She did her sculpting there happily until one day there was a telephone call to Audrey’s language teacher from her Russian benefactor advising Audrey not to come to the studio. He explained that his friend had been arrested for associating with an American. Unable to continue sculpting, Audrey turned full-time to photojournalism, producing among other media work at least sixteen illustrated articles from Moscow for the New York Times Magazine—including such pieces as a cover story on the Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to enter space, and Robert Frost, the American poet, in conversation in a café with the leading Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
Less than two weeks after my arrival in Moscow, one of the most momentous developments in world politics began to unfold. On June 12 there appeared an editorial in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party, which denounced unidentified “revisionists and sectarians.” On that day, picnicking at Uspenskaya, a sandy spit on the Moscow River, I sat beside Marvin Kalb, a CBS specialist in Russian affairs, and Max Frankel, whom I was replacing as the Times correspondent in Moscow, with a copy of Pravda spread on our blanket trying to divine just whom the vitriolic editorial was directed against. It was actually the first hint in the Soviet press of the veiled ideological polemics in progress between Moscow and Peking. We were to learn the polemics were harbingers of a dispute whose implications would alter the balance of power in the world. The Western nations would no longer be dealing with a monolithic Communist bloc. By 1969, the split would bring on clashes on the Siberian border between Soviet and Chinese troops. The Chinese would initiate construction of a nationwide system of air raid shelters against the possibility of a Soviet nuclear strike. The implications were also enormous for the United States. Seeking help in withstanding Soviet pressure on his borders, Mao Zedong eventually reached out for a new foreign support by mending relations with the United States embodied in the Shanghai Communiqué entered into with President Nixon in 1972.
In the weeks following publication of the puzzling editorial in Pravda, similar commentaries appeared in the Soviet press. I filed a succession of dispatches quoting the commentaries and speculating that the “monsters” being denounced were the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. Every such dispatch was blocked by Soviet censors. The speculation about a Sino-Soviet rift intensified in November when a summit conference of leaders of eighty-one Communist parties was convened in Moscow. In open rebuff to Khrushchev, Mao did not attend, sending Liu Shaoqi, China’s head of state, in his stead to lead the Chinese delegation. In late November, working with Arrigo Levi, a brilliant Italian correspondent for Corriere della Serra, I learned from sources in the conference that a severe ideological rift had developed with the delegations dividing and joining the opposing Chinese and Soviet camps. Liu Shaoqi, pursuing the Maoist line, was urging militant revolutionary action by Communist parties worldwide rather than reliance on Nikita Khrushchev’s newly declared policy of “peaceful coexistence.” The Khrushchev stratagem called for winning over the developing countries to the Communist bloc through political and economic attraction without necessarily resorting to violent revolution or war with the Western powers
On the evening of November 23, I went to the Central Telegraph Office, where Glavlit, the Soviet censorship office, was located and wrote a lengthy dispatch on the ideological split based on the leaks from members of the congress delegations. I had no real expectation that it would get through censorship. The dispatch reported in detail on the exchange of hostile polemics between the Chinese and Soviet ideological blocs. Khrushchev was gaining support for his policy from mainly the European parties, while the Latin American, North Korean, Indonesian, and Albanian delegations were leaning toward Liu Shaoqi. As required, I pushed two copies of my story through the green curtain which masked the censor’s booth and waited. After several hours, my carbons, which in keeping with the usual procedure would show any penciled-out lines, were returned to me unmarked. I was astounded. The Russians had decided for the first time to allow the ideological dispute to be made fully public and had, therefore, passed my cable. My dispatch was already was en route to New York and the next morning led the front page of the Times.
At the moment, Western observers were not aware of the enormous price Mao was paying for daring to challenge Khrushchev. Five months earlier, in June, Khrushchev had summoned Communist Party leaders worldwide to a meeting in Bucharest during a congress of the Romanian Communist Party. Mao Zedong had refused to attend that meeting and sent Peng Zhen, the mayor of Peking, in his place. At the congress Khrushchev furiously denounced the Maoists, accusing them of “adventurism” and “deviationism,” lumping them with their Albanian ideological allies. Peng Zhen responded by scornfully criticizing Khrushchev for blowing hot and cold in his exchanges with the West. He was alluding to the inconclusive encounter of the Soviet leader with President Eisenhower the previous month in Paris when the Russian broke up an East-West summit meeting by raging about the U-2 spy flight over the Soviet Union by Gary Powers. He characterized Khrushchev as “patriarchal, arbitrary and tyrannical.” Peng’s retort infuriated Khrushchev, and overnight the Soviet leader impulsively ordered termination of the Soviet aid program to China. Within the next month, 1,390 Soviet expert advisers were withdrawn from China, 343 contracts were scrapped, and 257 cooperative projects in technology and science ended. What I had been reading in Pravda about unidentified “revisionists and sectarians” was a reflection of the exchange of diatribes at the Romanian congress. The communiqué issued after at the congress emphasized unity in a new action program to attain world Communism but covered up the inter-party polemics.
The Sino-Soviet split had its early origins in the Soviet Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin, who had died three years earlier, characterizing him as a paranoid tyrant. Mao had little reason to grieve for the Soviet leader. The Chinese Communists had been bullied by Stalin, and from 1927 to 1945 the Soviet dictator had wavered in his support of Mao in the struggle with Chiang Kai-shek. Speaking to the Eighth Central Committee on September 24, 1962, Mao confided that Stalin never trusted the Chinese Communists, believing them to be independent-minded Titoists except for the three-year period from the time of Peking’s intervention in the Korean War until Stalin’s death in 1953. Despite his differences with Stalin, Mao expressed irritation with the denunciation of Stalin, long considered one of the heroic figures of the international Communist movement, by the upstart Khrushchev and his retreat from the concept of the militant struggle for attainment of world Communism. By inference, the castigation of the Stalin cult of personality was also seen as a criticism of the adulation of Mao in China. With the passing of Stalin, symbol of Soviet infallibility, the Chinese Communists had begun at the 1957 World Conference of Communist Parties in Moscow to challenge Soviet leadership of international Communism.
Despite the open break at the Moscow congress in November 1960, Premier Zhou Enlai attended the Twenty-second Party Congress in Moscow in October 1961. From the balcony of the hall, I watched the premier sitting grim faced among the other foreign Communist leaders on the stage of the auditorium of the new Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin as one Russian leader after another denounced the Albanians, the close ideological allies of the Chinese. It was, in fact, as the congress delegates knew, a proxy attack on the Maoists. Khrushchev accused the Albanian leadership of practicing the methods of the Stalinist cult of personality. Zhou Enlai rejoined with a call for a halt in the polemics, When his appeal went unheeded, the Chinese premier abruptly left Moscow while the congress was still in session. After Zhou Enlai’s departure, Khrushchev stunned the congress delegates. Pressing his policy of de-Stalinization, Khrushchev read a decree that sent me running to a telephone. Khrushchev proclaimed: “The further retention in the Lenin mausoleum of the sarcophagus with the bier of J. V. Stalin shall be recognized as inappropriate since the serious violation by Stalin of Lenin’s precepts, abuse of power, mass repressions against honorable Soviet people, and other activities in the period of the personality cult make it impossible to leave the bier with his body in the mausoleum of V. I. Lenin.” A few days later Stalin’s body was removed without ceremony from the mausoleum and interred near the Kremlin wall beside the graves of less distinguished revolutionary leaders beneath the plain marker “J. V. STALIN, 1879–1953.” The day after Stalin’s body was moved I strolled with our office translator through Red Square, near the Lenin Mausoleum, where groups of people stood about arguing heatedly about the justice of what Khrushchev had done. Questions were asked. “Why were we not told before?” Prior to Stalin’s death in 1953, despite his cruelties, many Russians worshiped Stalin as a father figure. He had sustained the country during the Nazi invasion and had achieved victory in World War II. One of the people we spoke to was a uniformed serviceman, a pilot, who muttered: “I don’t believe it. I would have died for Stalin in the war.” When Audrey went to the Russian elementary school to pick up our daughters, Susan and Karen, she noticed that Stalin’s head was missing in the portrait of members of the Politburo which hung above a portal.
After Zhou’s abrupt departure from the congress, the Peking-Moscow polemics escalated rapidly, fragmenting the international Communist movement. Between June 1959 and October 1961, the Chinese-Soviet alliance in effect dissolved, thus eliminating the ideological restraints which had inhibited the reemergence of the historical national antagonisms between the neighboring giants.
One of the more inexplicable aspects of American policy in Asia during the 1960s was the disinclination to take cognizance or advantage of the Sino-Soviet dispute. Despite my reporting from Moscow on the ideological split, American policy makers continued to base their strategy in Asia on the theory that there existed a Soviet bloc, embracing both the Soviet Union and China, with the Kremlin as the directing center. It was not until the advent of the Nixon administration in 1969 that the momentous implications of the Sino-Soviet split began to be factored effectively into American policy making. By playing off one Communist giant against the other, Nixon was successful in managing the opening to China and obtaining concessions from the Soviet Union in negotiations on strategic arms limitation.
In March 1961, Khrushchev abolished prepublication censorship, which dated from czarist days, although its existence had been officially denied. Correspondents were called to the Foreign Ministry and told deftly by Mikhail Kharlamov, head of the Press Department: “From this day forward, correspondents will be able to use facilities both at the Central Telegraph Office in Moscow and in their offices, homes, and hotel rooms to phone directly.” The abolition of censorship meant that I could file in much the same way as I would from any European capital. I would not have to worry about whether a dispatch would emerge from behind the green curtain or with deletions that would require rewriting to retain coherence. It also meant that in bitterly cold weather I would not have to trudge through the snow after midnight to the Central Telegraph Office to garner some important announcement from Pravda and push my dispatch through the green curtain.
The lifting of censorship had another special significance for me. Beginning in the late 1940s, with its correspondents in Moscow handicapped by censorship, the Times deemed it necessary to employ an expert on Soviet affairs in New York who would provide supplementary reporting and analysis. During my stint in Moscow, the expert was Harry Schwartz. Schwartz had never served as correspondent in Moscow, but he was fluent in Russian, had impressive academic credentials as an economist, and during World War II had been trained as a military analyst. His articles for the Times were based on regular perusal of some thirty-five Soviet articles and interviews with returnees from the Soviet Union. I found Schwartz’s articles useful, but I had reservations about some of the conclusions arrived at far distant from the scene. The lifting of Soviet censorship, which I exploited at once by filing broader, more explicit analysis pieces, led to the transfer of Schwartz to another beat. I was no longer second-guessed by him.
Although censorship had been lifted, there was always the possibility hanging over correspondents of expulsion for what they were writing. Moscow was a vital post, and given the dangers of the Cold War, I was determined to stay on. Therefore, I avoided any snide reporting about the personal demeanor of Soviet leaders. The fact that Khrushchev got tipsy after too many vodka toasts at diplomatic receptions concerned me less than what he was revealing about his thinking and policies. Whitman Bassow, bureau chief for Newsweek, one of the ablest and most experienced of the Moscow correspondents, inadvertently stepped over the line in August 1962 and was expelled for writing “crudely slanderous dispatches about the Soviet Union.” Bassow believed, as he explained in his book The Moscow Correspondents, published in 1988, that the ax fell on him most likely because of a humor feature which he tried to cable. It was a joke which he was told was circulating among Muscovites after Khrushchev ordered Stalin’s remains moved to the Kremlin wall. The joke:
“A little boy asks his grandmother about Lenin.”
“Ah, he was a great and good man.”
“What kind of man was Stalin?”
“Sometimes he was good and sometimes he was very bad.”
“And Grandma, what kind of man is Khrushchev?”
“When he dies, we’ll find out.”
The humor feature was not transmitted by the Central Telegraph Office, and that evening a television news commentator announced that Bassow had been expelled for violating “standards of behavior.”
In May 1961, I left Moscow on assignment to cover the Russian delegation at the fourteen-nation conference on Laos in Geneva. The conference had been convened at a time when the Cold War seemed close to turning into a hot one in Asia. The Geneva parley eventually reached an agreement in July providing for the establishment of a unified neutralist government under Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma. But shortly thereafter, the pro-Communist Pathet Lao faction broke away. It continued to dominate eastern Laos, safeguarding a key segment of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the North Vietnamese supply route to the Vietcong in the south.
While in Geneva, Audrey and I attended a dinner given by Chen Yi, the then Chinese foreign minister, in honor of Chester Ronning, who was heading the Canadian delegation to the Laos conference. Ronning had asked Chen Yi if he could bring me, an American correspondent, to the dinner. Chen replied: “Of course, but only as your son-in-law.” The Chinese delegation to the conference had not granted any interviews to American correspondents. Chen and I hit it off rather well. In command of the armies which had captured Nanking and Shanghai, he told me how he had enveloped Chiang Kai-shek’s capital, and I told him what it was like covering the entry of his troops into the city.
There was also an interesting encounter with a Russian spy. One of my contacts in covering the Russian delegation was a Soviet official who obviously had the job of what we called “bird-dogging” American correspondents. He became particularly interested in me because I was the Times correspondent in Moscow and once in chatting with him I had mentioned that my mother was born in the Ukraine. One afternoon I strolled with him through the garden of the Palais des Nations, in which the negotiations were taking place, and he mentioned a memorandum which had been made available by the U.S. delegation to American correspondents. It dealt with matters relating to the American negotiating stance. It was officially classified as restricted, which meant, although not deemed secret, it was sensitive enough so that it would be made available only to designated individuals. The Russian asked with a broad smile if I would let him have a copy of the memorandum, since, after all, it had been distributed to many Americans. It was a KGB tactic. Once a target is sucked in by some minor exchange, then intimidation follows together with demands for higher-priority information. I told the friendly Russian with an innocent smile that I would be glad to ask the American delegation for a copy of the memorandum for his information. He turned pale and quivered. I never saw him again.
While the conference was still in progress, John F. Kennedy, the newly elected forty-three-year-old president, and Nikita Khrushchev agreed to meet in Vienna in June to discuss the East-West confrontations in Berlin and Indochina. Kennedy headed for Vienna with the burden of having suffered a major foreign policy reverse. The CIA-managed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles had been thrown back in April with heavy casualties. I went directly from Geneva to Vienna to cover the talks in the company of other Times reporters, among them Russell Baker, who was then with the Washington Bureau and later a popular columnist. Before leaving Geneva, Baker and I had drinks in a hotel bar with Joe Alsop, the superhawk Washington columnist, and we listened to him, as he stared at us over his outsized horn-rimmed glasses, hold forth on the need for Kennedy to disable the North Vietnamese by bombing Haiphong. It was reflective of the aggressive mood then among conservatives in the United States. Haiphong had not yet been bombed because of the danger of hitting Russian and other Eastern European shipping, although it was known the port was being used to supply North Vietnam with military matériel.
In Vienna I covered the Russian delegation while James Reston, the columnist and Washington bureau chief of the Times, looked after the American side. On June 4, I glimpsed Kennedy for the first time since our 1951 meetings in Saigon. He was coming down the stairs of the Soviet Embassy at the side of Nikita Khrushchev after two negotiating sessions with the Soviet premier. Kennedy looked rather exhausted. I didn’t know at that moment that he had agreed, at the suggestion of his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to see Reston privately in the American Embassy following the meeting with Khrushchev. After covering a press briefing by the Russian delegation, I was alone in an upper-floor room of the press hostel writing my dispatch when Reston walked in. “What are you writing?” he asked. I responded by reviewing the contents of the Soviet briefing. “Wait,” he said. “I’ve just talked to Kennedy.” Startled, I left my typewriter, perched on a chair, and listened raptly to Reston’s account of his meeting with the president.
In a vacant room in the American Embassy Reston had waited for more than an hour for Kennedy to arrive. When the president entered, he sat down on a couch beside Reston, tipped his hat forward, and breathed heavily. Reston told me the president looked angry and was obviously shook up. Kennedy had been through two sessions with Khrushchev, which were much more contentious than he had anticipated. The Russian had handed him a virtual ultimatum contained in an aide-mémoire. The United States must sign a German peace treaty by December, which would in effect give legal status to East Germany and control over the access routes to Berlin. If the United States did not agree, the Soviet Union would sign a separate treaty and move unilaterally to dominate the access routes to Berlin. Kennedy responded by warning that the United States would fight to maintain access to its military garrison in Berlin. Kennedy told Reston he thought he knew why Khrushchev had taken such a hard line with him. He felt sure that Khrushchev thought that somebody who had made such a mess with the failed Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion lacked judgment and any president who made such a blunder and did not see it through thereafter had no guts. Kennedy told Reston there was now a need for him to demonstrate firmness and the place to do it was Vietnam.
The story which Reston filed to the Times that night served Kennedy well and was reassuring to the American public, but it puzzled me. He pictured the president as engaging in a calm manner with the Russian, writing that there had been “no ultimatums and few bitter or menacing exchanges” and that Kennedy had departed Vienna in a “solemn, although confident mood.” The story was in keeping with the official American version of the dialogues. But in fact, the threats that Kennedy was subjected to by Khrushchev and his reactions were more accurately portrayed in Reston’s memoir, Deadline, published in 1991. It was akin to what he had told me about his off-the- record briefing by Kennedy.
When Kennedy returned to Washington, he undertook emergency measures against the possibility of war over Berlin, including a doubling of draft quotas and a call-up of National Guard units and Reserves. In July, Kennedy asked Congress to approve a $3.25 billion military buildup and funds to make ready and stock fallout shelters as a precaution against the possibility of nuclear war. Kennedy was obviously putting on a show of strength to warn Khrushchev and to lay the basis for any future negotiation, but the magnitude of his response to the Soviet leader’s threats surprised me. It seemed to me that at Vienna that there had been more theatrics on the part of Khrushchev in his meeting with Kennedy than realpolitik. Recalling my experience in Berlin, I doubted that Khrushchev would follow through on his threat to take over the access routes. I had reported from Berlin on verbal ultimatums one after another and repeated harassment of the autobahn and rail lifelines to West Berlin, but each time the Soviet leader had backed off from a possible military clash. In fact, by August, the ultimatum issued by Khrushchev in Vienna proved as empty as the ones he had put forward previously, and as a fallback Khrushchev conspired with Ulbricht to begin construction of the Berlin Wall.
In briefing Reston, without elaborating, Kennedy had said that Vietnam was the place he had to demonstrate firmness in the test of wills with Khrushchev. I found this puzzling. The test of wills in Vietnam logically was more with Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong than with Khrushchev. The Russians were supplying some material aid to Ho Chi Minh’s forces, notably surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries, but the crucial decisions about military strategy and politics were being made in Hanoi and Peking, not Moscow. Ho Chi Minh’s troops were being trained and armed with modern weapons in South China. Khrushchev himself was embroiled in a deepening ideological quarrel with Mao.
According to what the Russians imparted at their Vienna briefing, Khrushchev’s emphasis had been on Berlin, not Southeast Asia. He had proved amenable to whatever agreement on a coalition government headed by Souvanna Phouma would be reached at the Geneva Conference on Laos. This was not surprising, since the proposed settlement yielded to the Pathet Lao continued control of the gateway territory in Laos to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As for Vietnam, the Russian historian Roy Medvedev later quoted Khrushchev as having told Kennedy: “If you want to, go ahead and fight in the jungles of Vietnam. The French fought there for seven years and still had to quit in the end. Perhaps the Americans will be able to stick it out for a little longer, but eventually they will have to quit too.”
En route to Vienna, Kennedy had stopped off in Paris to meet with President Charles de Gaulle. Recalling the French military disaster, de Gaulle warned Kennedy against becoming bogged down in Indochina. He told Kennedy that France would not repeat the mistakes of the past by sending troops to Indochina, although his nation was a member of SEATO, which was committed to resisting Communist expansion. Two months earlier, at a meeting in New York, Kennedy received similar advice from General Douglas MacArthur, who was quoted by Arthur S. Schlesinger, the historian, as telling the president: “Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland should have his head examined.”
Nevertheless, after his return to Washington, Kennedy tripled the number of American military advisers working with the South Vietnamese army, authorizing them to accompany the troops on combat missions.
I was back in Moscow in October 1962 when my fear of some dangerous miscalculation by Khrushchev seemed to materialize with eruption of the Cuban missile crisis. CIA spy planes had spotted some 22,000 Soviet troops and technicians at work constructing missile sites. They were implanting forty-two medium-range nuclear-tipped missiles with ranges of 1,100 miles. Another twenty-four intermediate missiles with ranges of 2,200 miles were en route to the island aboard disguised Russian merchant vessels. In addition, Khrushchev had dispatched forty-two IL-28 nuclear bombers and twenty-four SAMs. Khrushchev intended with this massive nuclear capability to balance or outweigh the superior intercontinental missile capability of the United States and also that of the mid-range Jupiter missiles sited in Turkey. The Cuban base would also give him leverage in his confrontation in Berlin with the United States, France, and Britain.
As the crisis mounted, I recalled how Kennedy had been shaken by the aggressiveness and bluster of Khrushchev in their confrontation in Vienna and wondered whether Kennedy would show the Russian that he was mistaken in assessing the president as lacking in guts. Two images hovered in my mind. One was of the young Kennedy, who in Saigon had demonstrated toughness in his encounter with the bullying French general de Lattre. The other image was of his close adviser, Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, the American ambassador to Moscow who had been recalled three months earlier to Washington. Thompson had been at Kennedy’s side in the meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna. A brilliant Kremlinologist, he was respected by Westerners and Russians alike. He was openly admired by Khrushchev, who gave a picnic for Thompson, his wife, Jane, and two daughters when they were returning to Washington. Embracing Thompson in farewell, Khrushchev teased the ambassador about the possibility of another international crisis. Thompson guessed he was referring to Berlin, given the Vienna confrontation. Like other correspondents benefiting from his incisive briefings, I had great admiration for Thompson. Audrey and I were quite close to the Thompsons personally. Our daughters took ballet lessons with his daughters, Sherry and Jenny, in Spasso House, the embassy residence. Once, the good-humored ambassador came to a masquerade party we hosted wearing a red wig, dressed in an old bathrobe, and carrying the cleaning lady’s mop, all of which served to utterly baffle the KGB agents tailing his limousine and the Russian guards at the gate. I was grateful that this man of profound acuity and engaging personality was with Kennedy as the president faced off against Khrushchev. My concern as to whether Kennedy had guts enough in the confrontation with Khrushchev was soon dispelled when he imposed a naval blockade on Cuba to prevent the arrival of the Russian ships, and massed troops and planes in southern Florida for a possible strike at Soviet installations on the island.
At the height of the crisis, Moscow was a frightened city with Kennedy pictured in the Soviet propaganda as an ominous, threatening figure. Our older daughters, Susan, then ten, and Karen, eight, came home worried one afternoon after conversing with their Russian schoolmates, and Karen asked anxiously: “Kennedy doesn’t want war, does he?” Attending a PTA meeting, we listened to a Soviet army general speaking to the parents about the missile crisis. Glancing at us and hesitating, he obviously skipped over pages containing anti-American diatribes. (When we were leaving the Soviet Union, the general sent us flowers and a note thanking us for allowing his children to be friends with our kids.) Near midnight, leaving our apartment to go to the Times office to await delivery of the official newspaper, Pravda, in which most major Soviet announcements were made, I would look at my four daughters sleeping in their double-decker beds and Audrey in the adjoining bedroom and persuade myself that it was beyond belief that Kennedy would loosen missiles that would obliterate us all. But fears that a missile strike was possible, if not likely, were in evidence not only in Moscow households but also in the subtle emanations from the Kremlin. Khrushchev and his cohorts were braced for an American strike on the Soviet missile bases in Cuba and girding for the possibility of a nuclear exchange between the two countries. Filing dispatches to New York via London on a shaky telephone line tapped by the KGB police, I reported the stark apprehensions of the Russian people as well as the pronouncements of their leaders and hints imparted by their subordinates. In Washington, Max Frankel, the State Department correspondent, was covering the American side in the exchanges with the Kremlin, and in turn, day after day, we led the front page of the Times under banner headlines. My only link to the home office was the shaky telephone line tapped by the KGB. Fortunately, I had at my side the second man in the Times bureau, the very able Ted Shabad, a fluent Russian-speaker and expert on the geography and resources of the Soviet Union. I felt driven by the need to report and interpret Soviet attitudes as faithfully and accurately as possible so that Americans would have the information and understanding required to cope effectively with Khrushchev’s manipulations. It was a complex task in the environment of extreme tension permeating the two countries.
Once at a crucial juncture in the crisis when Kennedy was demanding that the Russian rocket-bearing ships turn about, I telephoned Manny Freedman, the foreign news editor, to report a rumor circulating in Moscow that Khrushchev was seeking a summit meeting with Kennedy. Freedman listened but then impatiently snapped: “We’re not going to put up with that.” His retort, more as an ordinary American than an editor, induced in me a feeling of estrangement. I wondered if some Americans viewed me as a messenger of the enemy. I never knew whether Freedman passed my tip to our Washington Bureau. In fact, on October 24, in a letter to Bertrand Russell, the British pacifist leader, Khrushchev had said that a summit meeting would be useful.
The crisis eased on October 28 when Khrushchev messaged Kennedy informing him that the Soviet rockets in Cuba were being dismantled and the other ships loaded with missiles recalled. In exchange Kennedy gave assurances there would be no invasion of Cuba, and in a secret deal negotiated by his brother, Robert Kennedy, the president pledged removal of the obsolete medium-range Jupiter missile bases sited in Turkey targeted on the Soviet Union. Llewellyn Thompson had early on suggested that Khrushchev might be looking for such a deal.
The enormous relief felt by the Russians was very much in evidence when Audrey and I attended a reception in the Kremlin on November 7, celebrating the forty-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was attended by about one thousand Soviet officials and foreign diplomats and was the first time that Americans had been invited to the Kremlin since the eruption of the missile crisis. At the reception in the gilded banquet hall of the Palace of Congresses, Khrushchev, vodka glass in hand, stood at the head of a phalanx of members of the ruling Presidium with the number two, Leonid Brezhnev, at his side. The Soviet leaders were clinking glasses toasting each other as if to demonstrate their solidarity. Circulating among the Russian guests, I detected near hysterical relief. A prominent Russian magazine editor whispered to me: “I thought a missile might come through my roof at any moment.” Suddenly, to my consternation, I saw Audrey sidle out of the throng of Russian and foreign guests to a spot directly before the Soviet leaders, take a Leica out of her handbag, and begin photographing Khrushchev. I observed KGB agents converging on her from all parts of the hall. Journalists had been required on entering the hall to check their cameras, but Audrey had ignored the order. Unruffled by this blonde apparition standing before him, Khrushchev waved off the swarming KGB agents and posed smiling as Audrey continued to take photographs, which were published the next morning on the front page of the Times.
The incident seemed to break the ice, and led by Khrushchev and his wife, Nina, the Soviet leaders began to mingle with the guests. Surrounded by journalists, Khrushchev accepted questions from correspondents. Tension has not yet completely eased, he told us, but our rockets are out of Cuba. Grimly, he said: “We were very close—very, very close to a thermonuclear war. If there had not been reason then, we would not be here tonight, and there might not have been elections in the United States.” As for Berlin, Khrushchev seemed to be backing off. “The Berlin problem is now assuming greater acuteness because Berlin is not Cuba,” he said, but then added: “We do not want Berlin. We do not need it. We are asking for peace and a peace treaty.” He spoke about the need for peaceful coexistence, compromise, and mutual concessions in East-West relations. Earlier in the day, Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky, speaking before a military parade in Red Square marking the anniversary, omitted the usual Soviet warnings about Berlin which were sounded before the Cuban crisis.
As the evening wore on, Audrey made another approach to Khrushchev. With her friend Lucy Jarvis, an NBC producer, at her side, she asked if they could do a documentary for NBC on the Kremlin. The Soviet leader, who seemed charmed by her, agreed. (The NBC documentary was produced the following year.) Nina Khrushchev, who was standing nearby, invited Audrey to tea and consented to her bringing a camera. The next afternoon, in a small reception room of the Kremlin, with a few wives of ambassadors and members of the Presidium in attendance, Audrey chatted with Nina over tea and cakes about children and life in Moscow. The Cuban missile crisis thus ended, at least for the Toppings, with a tea party. In the summer of 1963, after ten days of hard negotiations in Moscow with W. Averell Harriman, then undersecretary of state, Khrushchev signed a nuclear test-ban treaty, which prohibited testing in the atmosphere and outer space. The Berlin crisis as such vanished.
At year’s end, Kennedy gave another sort of party at Miami’s Orange Bowl when he welcomed back the 1,113 survivors of the 1,300 exiles who landed on the shores of Cuba in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. The president ransomed them from Castro for $43 million worth of baby food and medical supplies.
In September 2001, Audrey and I visited Khrushchev’s gravesite in the Novodevichy Cemetery, the most venerated cemetery in Moscow, where some of Russia’s most famous writers are buried. I was then the administrator of the Pulitzer prizes and had been invited to Moscow by Genrikh Borovik, a former Soviet diplomat, to advise on the creation of a similar competition making annual awards to Russian investigative reporters. The foundation sponsoring the awards was to be named in memory of his son, Artyom Borovik, a celebrated pioneer investigative reporter, a courageous critic of Kremlin policies, and the best-known historian of the Russian defeat in Afghanistan, which he had covered as a journalist. Artyom, who as a child had played with our children when his father was at the United Nations, was killed in a mysterious plane crash at the Moscow airport in March 2000. At Novodevichy, where he was buried, we attended—just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States—a memorial church service at which we held candles as the Russian Orthodox priest intoned prayers for Artyom and for the 9/11 victims. Audrey and I then went to Khrushchev’s burial plot. There was no one else there. It was a small plot headed by a black-and-white marble bust of Khrushchev which the sculptor Ernest Neizvestny said he had crafted in a style that would symbolize the ambiguity and contradictory nature of the Soviet leader’s rule.
As for Castro, the Cuban leader emerged from resolution of the missile crisis enraged by what he denounced publicly as a deal negotiated behind his back. He rejected Kennedy’s no-invasion pledge as meaningless and criticized Khrushchev’s failure to demand American withdrawal from the base at Guantanamo and an end to the trade embargo imposed earlier by President Kennedy. However, I found him mollified by what amounted to a Soviet payoff in subsidies by Khrushchev’s successors when I spent an evening with him in his Havana office in November 1983. Let me, in the next chapter, vault ahead in time, to say what that engaging meeting was like.