The Crisis Years

Novosibirsk

On Monday evening, January 30, when Kennedy walked down the center aisle of the House of Representatives through cheering members of Congress, Hugh Sidey of Time thought the new President was trying to look “as solemn as a forty-three-year-old man can look” but that the effort was “not quite successful.”

Kennedy declared that it was “an hour of national peril and national opportunity. Before my term has ended, we shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure.” American domestic problems paled “beside those which confront us around the world.” The United States must never be “lulled” into believing that the Soviet Union or China had “yielded its ambitions for world domination—ambitions which they forcefully restated only a short time ago.”

Asia was menaced by Communist China’s “relentless pressures.” The Congo was “brutally torn by civil strife.” In Latin America, “Communist agents seeking to exploit that region’s peaceful revolution of hope have established a base on Cuba, only ninety miles from our shores.” He had asked the Secretary of Defense “to reappraise our entire defense strategy.” He would accelerate the Polaris submarine and missile programs and order fifty-three new transport planes designed for airlifts in time of crisis.

Jabbing his right hand into the air, he read phrases he had scrawled onto Sorensen’s text: “Each day, the crises multiply. Each day, their solution grows more difficult. Each day, we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger, as weapons spread and hostile forces grow stronger.* I feel I must inform the Congress that our analyses over the last ten days make it clear that, in each of the principal areas of crisis, the tide of events has been running out—and time has not been our friend.”

Americans who had read Eisenhower’s reassuring final message to Congress eighteen days before must have thought they were now living in another country and world. For a decade, no President had spoken in such apocalyptic terms.

The speech was far more alarmist than Kennedy was in private. For ten days, he had been closeted with his foreign policy circle, reviewing fresh intelligence information. From this he knew that the Soviets and Chinese were no longer working in harmony, that the Soviet military buildup was not frenzied. He knew that while Khrushchev was exploiting opportunities in Laos, the Congo, and Cuba, he had refused Chinese demands to mobilize Soviet resources in an absolute drive for world communism.

He knew that, with the exception of the Wars of Liberation speech, the signals Khrushchev had sent since the election were more conciliatory than at any time since May 1960. But in Kennedy’s mind, Khrushchev’s speech had dwarfed all the Chairman’s other post-election words and actions.

The President’s alarming rhetoric also had domestic political uses. Kennedy wished to vindicate his campaign charges that Eisenhower had been too complacent about the Soviet danger. With his slender victory margin, he needed to build national support that would help him to push his defense, foreign policy, and other programs through Congress. He knew Americans were more likely to rally to him in an atmosphere of mounting world crisis.

The man whose campaign slogan was “A Time for Greatness” knew that great Presidents are not easily made in tranquil times. With his Churchillian penchant for stirring rhetoric and theater, Kennedy as President moved naturally into the role of rousing a complacent people against the external danger he had celebrated in Why England Slept. He had warned Democrats at Los Angeles that the New Frontier would be the opposite of Eisenhower, that he promised “more sacrifice instead of more security.”

Kennedy knew it was politically safer to err on the side of seeming too tough on the Soviets than too soft. During his early Senate years, anxiety about Joseph McCarthy’s large Massachusetts following had kept him from making a public stand against the demagogue, even though it would have been unlikely to make a serious dent in his reelection majority.

Kennedy’s worry about the Right had not ended when he entered the White House. He did not enjoy Eisenhower’s immense popularity and the public’s confidence that, even if Eisenhower’s words and deeds seemed diffident about the Soviets, the Supreme Commander of World War II would never put the nation in danger. Kennedy knew that Cold War rhetoric would help to immunize him against accusations that he was too intellectual or too surrounded by people like Stevenson and Bowles to oppose the Russians with adequate fervor.

There is little evidence that Kennedy devoted much thought to the effect of this speech on the Soviets, aside from responding in kind to Khrushchev’s Wars of Liberation speech. He had yet to have a serious extended discussion with his Soviet experts on what his policy toward Khrushchev should be. He knew that portraying a nation besieged by “hostile forces,” nearing an “hour of maximum danger,” would make it more difficult for himself to negotiate with Khrushchev and hold down the arms race.

Khrushchev almost surely thought Kennedy’s State of the Union address a deliberate slap in the face. By his own lights, he had praised the new President in public as another Roosevelt, signaled through Menshikov and Thompson that he wanted better relations, released the RB-47 fliers.

With his eternal assumption that American leaders were telepathic enough to read his mind, he probably thought that Kennedy knew his Wars of Liberation speech had been delivered mainly for Chinese consumption. In return, the President had seemed intentionally to undermine Khrushchev’s effort to show his rivals that negotiation with the imperialists would be more fruitful than confrontation. After Kennedy’s State of the Union speech, Izvestia dropped its politeness toward Kennedy. It complained that the address evoked “irksome echoes of the Cold War.”

On Wednesday, February 1, the United States conducted the first test launching of its Minuteman ICBM. The American press predicted deployment in large numbers by the middle of 1962. The Kremlin knew that these missiles, placed in hardened silos, could be used for a first-strike nuclear attack against the Soviet Union.

At the same time, the United States was rumored to be planning to shift ownership of its Jupiter missiles in Turkey, perhaps even some kind of access to atomic weapons to the Turkish government newly arousing the ancient Russian and Soviet anxieties about encirclement and threats along the border. In Ankara on February 3, Soviet Ambassador Nikita Ryzhov demanded that the Turkish foreign minister tell him what was going on.

On Monday evening, February 6, at Robert McNamara’s first background session with reporters at the Pentagon, someone asked about the missile gap that Kennedy had so dramatized in the campaign. The Secretary of Defense candidly replied that he had been going through the classified evidence: “There is no missile gap.”

He reported that the United States and the Soviet Union had about the same small number of missiles in the field. (He did not go on to reveal the far more secret information that the United States had roughly six thousand nuclear warheads against roughly three hundred for the Soviets—a twenty-to-one advantage.)

As McNamara recalled, he knew almost instantly that he had made a “terrible mistake”: “They broke the damn door down. They went out and the headline on the late afternoon edition of the [Washington] Evening Star says, ‘McNamara declares no missile gap.’ And the next day, perhaps with tongue in cheek, the Republicans asked that the election be rerun.”*

With rising anger, Kennedy read the columns and news articles suggesting that he had won the Presidency by exploiting a fraudulent issue. At his February 8 press conference, he tried to obscure the matter: “It would be premature to reach a judgment as to whether there is a gap or not a gap.” Later, during military discussions in the Cabinet Room, he sardonically asked, “Who ever believed in the missile gap?”

The President was chiefly worried about the political embarrassment of having exploited a campaign issue that now had been proven false. Far more serious was the Soviet reaction to McNamara’s declaration. The Secretary of Defense had unwittingly overturned the tacit understanding by which Eisenhower had never specifically refuted Khrushchev’s bombast about a crash missile buildup in order not to compel the Chairman to escalate his missile program and other military spending and avoid being branded a liar.*

Khrushchev was inclined to view American actions in Soviet terms, as the deliberate result of decisions made by a highly centralized bureaucracy. The rebuffs of his pleading for an early summit, the unpublicized air incident over the Karsk Sea, Kennedy’s harsh State of the Union speech and his broad review of American defense, the Minuteman launching, the Jupiters in Turkey, and now McNamara’s declaration that there was no missile gap had all occurred within seventeen days of Kennedy’s Inauguration.

Khrushchev found Kennedy’s previous views on the Soviet Union so difficult to decipher that he inevitably read too much into what he now saw. He may have assumed that the seeming provocations of Kennedy’s first seventeen days were not isolated events but a deliberate campaign to herald a harsh new American strategy for dealing with Moscow.

In early February, the President convened his Soviet experts. He had wired Thompson to come home “both to get your advice and demonstrate highest level confidence in you.” His reappointment thus assured, Thompson wrote a friend from Moscow, “It was not easy to forego the possibility of a post with a normal life but I do think this will be a critical year and not the best time to change nags here, even though I feel most incompetent in the face of the enormous problems we have with these people.”

The Ambassador took off from Moscow in an Air Force plane and landed at Idlewild Airport. He took the train to Washington, arriving in a blinding night storm of sleet and snow. Noting that the Soviet winter had been probably the warmest in fifty years, he said, “It looks like we’re on the wrong end of a cultural exchange!” From Union Station he went to his quarters in the fine old Georgetown house of his CIA friend Frank Wisner.

Before leaving Moscow, he had sent Kennedy a series of long tutorial telegrams of the kind Eisenhower had disliked. He told Jane, “It’s wonderful to work for someone you know will read what you write.” He wrote the President that events were already forcing him to decide “our basic policy toward the Soviet Union.” He assumed that Kennedy was willing to take risks to reach accommodation: “We should be under no illusions as to what can be accomplished within a reasonable period of time.” But to do anything else would probably divide the West, estrange the Third World, and lead to war.

In the Kremlin, “Khrushchev is the dominant personality, but it is quite possible that he could disappear from the scene within the next few years from natural Or other causes.” The President must always remember that Soviet leaders “have an almost religious faith in their beliefs, and this motivates them to a larger extent than generally believed.” Even Khrushchev, the least doctrinaire of them all, justified his position by working for world communism: “The degree of effort and the methods used are factors which our own policies can influence.”

The great problem? “We both look at the same set of facts and see different things.” But there was reason for optimism. The Soviet people ardently wished for peace as the best way to gain a better life. Thus they exerted “constant pressure toward accommodation with us.”

Thompson wrote that Khrushchev believed that if he reduced tension and diverted resources from weapons to the Soviet consumer, perhaps with Western aid, he could make an example of the Soviet Union and thus lead the world to communism: “I believe the Soviet leadership long ago correctly appraised the meaning of atomic military power. They recognized that a major war was no longer an acceptable means of achieving their objective.” But “we shall, of course, have to keep our powder dry and plenty of it.”

The Ambassador noted that Communists felt that if their movement lost its dynamism, it would risk disintegration: “Unfortunately, the Chinese Communists have considerably rejuvenated the revolutionary posture of the Soviet party.” Still, the Soviets had a “strong strain of nationalism.” If Khrushchev could “offer hope of a period of tranquillity, I would not exclude an eventual complete break between the Soviet and Chinese Communists.”

At the start of his Presidency, Eisenhower had characteristically sought to shape his general approach to the Soviet Union by devising formal machinery. He assigned three teams of advisers to make the case for three levels of aggressiveness: rolling back the Iron Curtain, containment, and Fortress America. After weeks of debate and study, the President called the teams to the third-floor White House solarium, where he listened to their presentations and asked questions.

Kennedy’s method, honed through years in the Senate, was the opposite of Eisenhower’s. As Bundy later put it, “All Senators are disorderly.” On Saturday morning, February 11, the new President gathered Lyndon Johnson, Rusk, Bundy, Thompson, and three previous envoys to Moscow—Harriman, Kennan, and Bohlen—for a free-form skull session to “chart our future relations with the Soviet Union.” Kennan was about to leave for Belgrade as Ambassador. Bohlen was staying on at the State Department.

Kennedy opened the meeting by saying, “Now tell me about Russia.” As the four diplomats spoke, the President interrupted only to stimulate and clarify. Dean Rusk was surprised at how he “wanted to look at everything from the beginning, the ground up.” Through the entire two and a half hours, Vice President Johnson said virtually nothing.

Kennan argued that Khrushchev was faced with “considerable opposition” from Stalinists, who opposed negotiation with the West: “Control over the Party apparatus is today being exercised collectively … and not personally by Khrushchev.”

Thompson agreed but thought that Khrushchev would be “seriously threatened” only if he faced “unusually grave difficulties” in farming and foreign affairs: the Soviet Union had had “two really disastrous years in agriculture, and right now the prospect is pretty good for another one.”

He said that the Soviet government would keep showing off its economic growth in flamboyant ways, such as building the world’s largest heated swimming pool. Everyone in Moscow seemed to have a friend with a new house, and “the appetite grows with eating.” Recently Thompson had sent a member of his staff to a community meeting: “The people got so out of hand that they were just pounding the table and screaming and yelling and demanding. Once you abolish terror as the way to operate this system, you run into this.”

Thompson said, “Khrushchev’s own deepest desire is to gain time for the forthcoming triumphs of Soviet economic progress. For this he really wants a generally unexplosive period in foreign affairs.… While the Soviet attitude toward the world is fundamentally optimistic, Khrushchev would very much like some specific diplomatic successes in 1961.” The Soviet Union’s “great long-run worries” were West Germany and Red China. Khrushchev was deeply anxious that both nations would acquire the Bomb.

Meanwhile, the Chairman and his colleagues were “cheerfully taking advantage of targets of opportunity.” Recent successes in Laos, the Congo, and Cuba had made them “perhaps overconfident about their prospects in such adventures.”

Thompson felt that the United States was better off with Khrushchev in power than an alternative: “He is the most pragmatic of the lot of them and he is tending to make his country more normal.… This is evident in their quarrel with the Chinese, and I think that is our one hope of the future. This evolution inside there is going very fast. These people are becoming bourgeois very rapidly.”

Thompson noted that Khrushchev had been talking about flying to the UN in March as a means of staging a get-acquainted meeting with the President. All four ambassadors endorsed such an informal meeting, but not a full-fledged summit with serious bargaining. Bohlen dreaded the thought of an encore of the fall of 1960 at the UN: Khrushchev would be “incapable of resisting a rostrum” and it would be “unlikely to add to the sum of goodwill.”

Bohlen warned Kennedy to move quickly if he wished to prevent Khrushchev from flying to New York. Perhaps he should tell the Chairman that while he looked forward to seeing him “before too much time has passed,” a meeting connected with the General Assembly session would be “unproductive.” Harriman suggested that Kennedy tell Khrushchev it would be hard to see him before he had seen the leaders of Britain, France, and West Germany.

Kennedy closed the meeting by asking what the United States should do. Thompson shrewdly framed his reply in the language of Kennedy’s own campaign speeches: “Make our own system work.… Maintain the unity of the West.… Find ways of placing ourselves in new and effective relations to the great forces of national ism and anticolonialism.… Change our image before the world so it becomes plain that we and not the Soviet Union stand for the future.”

Later, Bohlen told Thompson that when he was in Moscow he would have given “a good deal” to have had anything “remotely approaching” their talk with the President: “I never heard of a President who wanted to know so much.” Like Rusk, he was amazed at how few fixed ideas Kennedy had about relations with Moscow: “He had a mentality extraordinarily free from preconceived prejudices, inherited or otherwise … almost as though he had thrown aside the normal prejudices that beset human mentality.”

Bohlen was startled that the President’s private talk bore so little resemblance to the fierce language of his State of the Union message. “He saw Russia as a great and powerful country and we were a great and powerful country, and it seemed to him there must be some basis upon which the two countries could live without blowing each other up.” Bohlen worried that, if anything, Kennedy privately underestimated the seriousness of Khrushchev’s commitment to dynamic world communism.

On a Saturday morning one week later, as rain spattered the Cabinet Room windows, Kennedy reconvened his council to consider whether he should ask for a meeting with the Chairman. Sitting on the President’s right, the back of his rounded head and shoulders lit by the tall windows behind him, Dean Rusk was appalled by the notion that the President should go to the summit with Khrushchev so early in his administration.

Rusk once said, “I am more comfortable on the inside than on the outside.” In this most personality-conscious of administrations, he insisted that processes were more important than people: “I don’t think the United States should be represented by someone hamming it up.” He wired American envoys that they should stop using the word “feel” in their cables.

Years later, after leaving office, Rusk wrote Bohlen that his old superior George Marshall (“the greatest man I’ve ever known”) had “a very strong feeling both as a soldier and as a Secretary of State that the public business should not be influenced by personal considerations and friendships.… In my own case, this trait has always been part of a dour man from Cherokee County, Georgia—such people just don’t talk very much about the things they feel most deeply.… Let me surprise you by sending my love to you and Avis!”

Using Marshall as his role model, Rusk sought to be Kennedy’s chief adviser on questions men “should approach on their knees.” No one must overhear or interfere with the advice the Secretary of State gave the President. In large meetings, he would deliberately “act the position of a dumb dodo” while others spoke. When they were done, he would summarize what had been said, let the meeting end, and then follow Kennedy into the Oval Office to offer his own views in private.

One of the few subjects that conspicuously aroused him was leaks. He allowed few written records to be kept of his Oval Office conversations and ended the practice of allowing someone to listen in on presidential telephone talks in order to write an action memo. Suspicious of wiretapping by the FBI or the Soviet bloc, he preferred not to speak with Kennedy over the telephone about grave subjects altogether. This handicapped him in gaining the good opinion of a President who liked to do business by telephone. In early 1961, Rusk told J. Edgar Hoover in Kennedy’s presence that if he ever found a tap on his telephone or a bug in his office, he would resign immediately and go public with the evidence.

Rusk’s demand for secrecy extended to history. Later, when he retired, he destroyed those records of his presidential meetings that he could find. Like Marshall, he resolved not to write memoirs; future Presidents might not be candid with their Secretaries of State if they had to worry about publication of what they said.* “There are some things that history does not deserve to know,” he told this author in 1987. “Ninety-nine percent of the information historians will get. As for the other one percent, I say, ‘What the historians don’t know won’t hurt ’em.’”

After World War II, Rusk had enjoyed the swiftest ascent of anyone in the Truman State Department, rising to the number-three post by the age of forty-two. A principal source of success had been his ability to win the admiration of patrons—generals Joseph Stilwell and George Marshall, Truman, Dean Acheson, and John Foster Dulles. But in each of these relationships, he had had time for the careful building of confidence.

Appointed Secretary of State, he had entered the most important partnership in the American government with a man he had never known before December 1960. He lacked the strength of the independent political base that Stevenson had or the personal relationship with the President that Robert Kennedy had. Rusk knew enough about his new boss to know that, unlike Truman with Acheson, Kennedy would not be reluctant to fire a Secretary of State who became heavy political baggage.

During the Truman years, Rusk had made friends in Congress and the press but not many steadfast allies. By 1960, probably no more than one in a thousand Americans had ever heard of him. As for his new department, Rusk was in the opposite position of most new Secretaries of State: those loyalists he had were more in the Foreign Service than at the top of the hierarchy.

Before agreeing to serve at Defense, McNamara had exacted the President’s written promise that he could choose his own people. Rusk was unable to be so demanding. He was saddled with Kennedy political creditors like Bowles, Stevenson, Harriman, and G. Mennen Williams, Assistant Secretary for Africa, all of whom the President had appointed before he had decided on his Secretary of State.

Chester Bowles later recalled that at the start of the Kennedy administration, Rusk felt “very insecure.… He had no political experience, he knew no one on Capitol Hill, he was afraid of Capitol Hill, and he had no press connections at all—almost none.… And he worried about these things.”

Dean Rusk’s father was considered the most accomplished man in Cherokee County, Georgia: a violinist, the first college graduate in his family, an ordained Presbyterian minister rendered inactive by a bad throat. Robert Hugh Rusk married a schoolteacher, rented forty acres of red-clay farmland, built a three-room house, and grew cows, chickens, hogs, corn, and cotton, the only cash crop. But as one of his sons said, “The land didn’t want us.”

Born in 1909, David Dean Rusk was named for a great-grandfather and for the horse that had carried an aged doctor through a stormy night for his delivery. (For much of his life, Rusk was under the mistaken impression that the doctor had been a veterinarian.) When floods ravaged the Rusk acres in 1912, the desperate father moved the family to Atlanta, where he found a job as a letter carrier.

The young Dean walked to school in flour-sack drawers sewn by his mother, carrying hot bricks in a woolen sack on cold days, spelling girl “G-A-L,” and admiring General Robert E. Lee for his “patient courage, patriotism, and his love for his men.” In 1918, when Woodrow Wilson rode through Atlanta, Rusk turned out with a placard touting the League of Nations.

When Rusk played basketball at Davidson College in North Carolina, his manner and already-receding hairline led teammates to call him “Elijah” or “Old Folks.” Captivated by politics and international relations, he shifted his ambitions from the ministry to college teaching. As a Rhodes Scholar he went to Oxford, which gave him “digs” and “a man” and changed his orthodox Southern views on race. On his return, he taught political science at Mills College in California and married a student named Virginia Foisie.

When war came, Rusk served in military intelligence, enrolled in the elite Fort Leavenworth command school for General Staff, and left for New Delhi and the China-Burma-India Theater as the legendary General Stilwell’s chief of war plans. He wrote Virginia, “I feel deeply this loss of time from a life that should be concerned with other things than war.”

After VE-Day, Rusk was appointed to the staff of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee in Washington. With his insistence on orderly procedure, he was appalled that Truman did not seek a systematic range of advice for his decisions on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or about the bomb’s political impact on Stalin. He had not outgrown his Wilsonian ardor for international law and was pained by George Kennan’s championship of a balance-of-power approach to the Soviet Union.

At the Truman State Department, Rusk worked on the Soviet threat to Iran, the founding of the United Nations, the first Soviet-American arms talks, the birth of Israel, the Berlin Blockade, the drafting of NSC-68, and Korea. By March 1950, when the department was buffeted by the Alger Hiss affair and “Who Lost China?” inquisitions, he manfully asked for demotion to the hot seat of Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs.

Dean Acheson told Rusk that he deserved “a Purple Heart and a Congressional Medal of Honor, all in one.” Enemies later gibed that no one remembered what Rusk did in the job, but this was exactly the point: a more attention-grabbing official would have deepened the Truman government’s misery. As fondly as Rusk looked on the Truman years, he was angry at the “meddling” of White House aides in what he saw as the department’s business.

Like every President-elect, Kennedy had no shortage of eager candidates to head the State Department. The New Dealer Adolf Berle had noted after a summer cocktail party at Averell Harriman’s house in New York that “half the men in the room were running for Secretary of State.”

Three weeks after the election, Kennedy went to the Georgetown house of the last Democratic Secretary of State and told Dean Acheson that the person he knew best in foreign affairs was Bill Fulbright. He did not know that in 1952 and 1956 Stevenson had planned, if elected, to make Fulbright Secretary of State. Acheson complained to the President-elect that Fulbright was a dilettante: “He likes to call for brave, bold new ideas and he doesn’t have many brave, bold new ideas.… You either think of them or you don’t, and if you don’t, you better shut up.”

Acheson suggested the sixty-two-year-old diplomat David Bruce or John McCloy, Republican alumnus of the Roosevelt and Truman diplomacy, the epitome of the postwar bipartisan foreign policy establishment, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Kennedy replied that it would seem too bad for a Democratic President to seem unable to find a Democrat able to be Secretary of State.

Next Acheson brought up Rusk. Kennedy said he only knew the name. Acheson told of Rusk’s voluntary demotion in 1950: he was “strong and loyal and good in every way. I would recommend him without reservation.” He added that someone so good as a number two or three might, of course, prove not so good in full command, but that the only way to find out was to try him.

Three days later, Kennedy summoned the sixty-five-year-old Robert Lovett for lunch at his house on N Street. Son of the president of the Union Pacific Railroad, Lovett had risen like Acheson and McCloy through State and Defense under Truman and returned to private life under Eisenhower. Lovett lacked Acheson’s sarcasm, Cold War adamance, and enemies as well as McCloy’s conspicuous identification with Big Business and the Republican party. He must have passed the muster of the President-elect’s father, who had served alongside him on Eisenhower’s intelligence advisory board.

For a new President worried about his slender victory and a skeptical foreign affairs establishment, Lovett would provide reassurance. “Henry Stimson was one of those New York Republicans, and Roosevelt was glad to get him,” Kennedy told aides. “I’m going to talk with Lovett and see what he can do for me.” Pleading ill health, Lovett refused Kennedy’s offer of State, Defense, or Treasury. He said that choosing a Secretary of State was easy: Dean Acheson. Kennedy shook his head. He said that Eisenhower had given Foster Dulles too much license. He intended to make foreign policy himself.

“Do you want a Secretary of State,” asked Lovett, “or do you really want an Under Secretary?” Kennedy laughed. “Well, I guess I want an Under Secretary.” Lovett said that Dean Rusk would be “perfect.” Kennedy asked his staff to get “all the information you can” on Rusk.

The gentleman himself, from his place at the Rockefeller Foundation, was not above discreet campaigning for the job. Eliminating any doubts the President-elect might have about his stand on race, he wrote Kennedy “as a Georgia-born citizen” advising him to make no deals with Democratic members of the Electoral College who were threatening to vote against him unless he pledged to go slow on civil rights. He also arranged a breakfast between the President-elect and the UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, at the Carlyle.

On Wednesday, December 7, Rusk was at a Rockefeller Foundation board meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, along with Bowles and Lovett, when he was called from the room for a message from Sargent Shriver, the President-elect’s brother-in-law and talent scout. Rusk later said, “I knew so little about the Kennedys that I thought this was probably a military aide that had been assigned to Kennedy.” He asked Bowles, “What in hell does he want to see me about?” Bowles said, “He wants to make you Secretary of State.”

Tipped off by the President-elect, Lovett told Rusk that his breakfast with Kennedy, scheduled for the next morning, was indeed an audition: “I spoiled his sleep for that night and probably digestion as well.” That night, Rusk dined at Bowles’s Georgetown house, talking long into the evening about Kennedy and his views on foreign policy.

When he arrived at Kennedy’s house the next morning, Kennedy asked him what kind of man would make a good Secretary of State. Rusk said that the most important quality was loyalty to the President. He found Kennedy vaguely unsure of himself. He was not charmed by the mess of papers on the floor or Kennedy’s informal manner. Bowles recalled that after the meal Rusk called him to say that the breakfast had been “a complete dud.… I’m not going to become Secretary of State because Kennedy and I simply found it impossible to communicate. He didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand him.”*

After Kennedy’s breakfast with Rusk, he still preferred Fulbright, with whom he felt “humanly comfortable,” while admitting, “He’s lazy.” Robert Kennedy was determined to block the Arkansas Senator, who had signed the Southern Manifesto opposing public school desegregation: every time the United States had to take a position against an African nation, the Soviets would say it was because America had a white supremacist as Secretary of State. Friends of Israel were outraged by Fulbright’s frankly pro-Arab approach to the Middle East.*

The brothers argued strenuously about the matter. Kennedy changed his preference to David Bruce, although he worried that Bruce had “no fire in his belly.” Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune assured Robert that Bruce would be “tough with the Russians,” but the President’s brother concluded that Rusk would be the least of three evils.

Rusk recalled that when Kennedy called him to take the job, “it came as a complete surprise.” He replied, “Now, wait a minute. There’re a lot of things we ought to talk about before you come to that conclusion.” Kennedy: “Come on down to Palm Beach and we can talk about it further.”

Sitting behind his father’s house and walking down the beach, Kennedy asked Rusk if there was anything about him he should know before making the appointment. So that Kennedy would not hear it from others, Rusk mentioned that he had wired Harriman during the Los Angeles convention, DON’T BE A DAMN FOOL. SUPPORT ADLAI STEVENSON. Kennedy laughed.

Rusk told Kennedy that serving at State would place him “on a thin financial margin.” He could only serve for one term. Kennedy said he understood. At noon, the President-elect told reporters perhaps a bit too candidly that Rusk was “the best man available” for the job.

The incoming Secretary of State flew north to New York, still uncertain about his compatibility with the incoming President. After selecting Rusk, Kennedy told Galbraith, “I must make the appointments now. A year hence, I will know who I really want to appoint.”

Part of Rusk’s opposition to an early summit meeting with Khrushchev may have come from his fears about Kennedy’s newness to foreign policy. Much of it was the professional diplomat’s aversion to American-Soviet summitry. In a 1960 Foreign Affairs article he wrote that negotiation required patience and precision, qualities not usually abundant at the highest levels of government:

“Picture two men sitting down together to talk about matters affecting the very survival of the systems they represent, each in a position to unleash unbelievably destructive power.… Is it wise to gamble so heavily? Are not these two men who should be kept apart until others have found a sure meeting ground of accommodation between them?”

When Rusk made these arguments to the President in private, Kennedy was not unmoved. During the campaign, he had criticized the kind of informal meeting Eisenhower and Khrushchev had held at Camp David as a “soft sentimentalism” and “diffuse desire to do good” that had become “a substitute for tough-minded plans and operations.”

But as Rusk said years later, “Kennedy had the impression that if he could just sit down with Khrushchev, maybe something worthwhile would come out of it—at least some closer meeting of the minds on various questions. Secretaries of State are very skeptical of summits, but there’s something about the chemistry of being President that causes them not to agree with Secretaries of State on that.”

Thompson understood the degree to which Khrushchev was affected by personal relationships. He wanted Kennedy to understand at first hand Khrushchev’s aspirations and anxieties: “The President has got to know this man.” He had cabled from Moscow, “I believe that Soviet policy was for a time influenced by the conviction Khrushchev gained from his meeting with Eisenhower that the latter was a man of peace.”

The President was burning with curiosity about the second most powerful man in the world. Bohlen observed that Kennedy “really felt he had to find out for himself. The issues and consequences of mistakes of a serious nature in dealing with the Soviet Union are so great that no man of any character or intelligence will really wholeheartedly accept the views of anybody else.”

Kennedy said, “I think we’ll go and see Khrushchev.” Later he told his aide Kenneth O’Donnell, “I have to show him we can be just as tough as he is. I can’t do that sending messages to him through other people. I’ll have to sit down with him and let him see who he’s dealing with.”

On Tuesday afternoon, February 21, the President brought his council to the Cabinet Room for the last time to work on his first substantial letter to Khrushchev. Thompson produced a one-page draft, which Kennedy thought too brief. At the bottom of the sheet he wrote, “Am interested in harmonious relations—recognize the different systems.” Sorensen finished the letter, which Bundy later thought “as gentle an opening ploy as you can find.”

In the Oval Office the next morning, Kennedy asked Thompson to explore Khrushchev’s attitudes on disarmament, nuclear testing, defense spending, the Congo, Laos, Berlin. He produced the final two-page letter to Khrushchev with his illegible signature at bottom:

Dear Mr. Chairman:

I have had an opportunity, due to the return of Ambassador Thompson, to have an extensive review of all aspects of our relations with the Secretary of State and with him.…

I have not been able, in so brief a time, to reach definite conclusions as to our position on all of these matters.… I think we should recognize, in honesty to each other, that there are problems on which we may not be able to agree. However, I believe that while recognizing that we do not, and in all probability will not, share a common view on all of these problems, I do believe that the manner in which we approach them, and, in particular, the manner in which our disagreements are handled, can be of great importance.…

I hope it will be possible, before too long, for us to meet personally for an informal exchange of views in regard to some of these matters. Of course, a meeting of this nature will depend upon the general international situation at this time, as well as on our mutual schedules of engagements.

I have asked Ambassador Thompson to discuss the question of our meeting. Ambassador Thompson, who enjoys my full confidence, is also in a position to inform you of my thinking on a number of the international issues which we have discussed.… I hope such exchange might assist us in working out a responsible approach to our differences with the view to their ultimate resolution for the benefit of peace and security throughout the world. You may be sure, Mr. Chairman, that I intend to do everything I can toward developing a more harmonious relationship between our two countries.

After his post-Inaugural meeting with Thompson, Khrushchev had left Moscow for a long tour of the Soviet farming regions that were giving him such trouble. In Kiev, Rostov-on-the-Don, Tbilisi, and Voronezh, he spoke of the American-Soviet competition in the most peaceful economic terms. Ukrainian meat production could overtake the United States “in two to three years—four at the most.” Soviet industry would surpass its American counterpart by 1970. “In saying this, we do not threaten anyone.… Our success and our growth do not harm other peoples.”

During Khrushchev’s cavalcade came the harsh signals of Kennedy’s first seventeen days, culminating with McNamara on the missile gap. Then on Saturday, February 11, the same day Kennedy was meeting with his advisers on the Soviet Union, Khrushchev was suddenly called back to Moscow. There, in the opinion of the diplomatic historian Robert Slusser, his rivals apparently convened a surprise Presidium meeting and demanded a more tough-minded response to what they considered the new American militance.

On Friday, February 17, Khrushchev reinflamed the Berlin problem. In Bonn, his envoy gave Chancellor Konrad Adenauer a demarche charging the West German government with “extensive military preparations” and proclaiming Moscow’s “unshakable determination” to achieve a German peace treaty.

A week later, at a hastily called farming conference in Moscow, Khrushchev discarded the moderate language he had used since Kennedy’s inauguration and sang a hymn to Soviet nuclear weapons and ICBMs: “All the advantages the Americans won by establishing bases around our country they lost at the moment our rocket soared and, flying thousands of kilometers, landed precisely at the spot planned by our scientists and engineers.”

The same day, Khrushchev’s marshals implicitly acknowledged that McNamara had called their bluff about the missile gap. For years, they had boasted that Soviet missile power was “superior” to the United States. Now for the first time in public, they declared only that Soviet ICBMs were “sufficient” to defend the nation.

Khrushchev’s early relations with Kennedy were further aggravated by the Congo. After being granted independence by the Belgians, the Congo’s richest province, Katanga, had seceded in June 1960 with the aid of Belgian mining interests. Members of the new Congolese army, resentful of Belgian troops who remained, robbed, raped, and murdered white settlers. Paratroopers arrived from Belgium to protect them. The Congo’s erratic new premier, Patrice Lumumba, complained that colonial rule was being reimposed. Twenty thousand UN troops arrived to keep the peace.

At his Kremlin reception the night before Kennedy’s election, Khrushchev declared, “They say that in the Congo, the Soviet Union was beaten. We say that those who laugh last laugh best.” Lumumba accepted the Chairman’s offer of military help and accused the West of plotting against him. President Joseph Kasavubu fired Lumumba and expelled Soviet-bloc personnel. The Soviets demanded Lumumba’s restoration. He was arrested and jailed. On February 13, the Katangans announced that Lumumba had been murdered.

When Khrushchev threatened to intervene, Kennedy told reporters, “I find it difficult to believe that any government is really planning to take so dangerous and irresponsible a step.” He implied that Soviet intervention would be resisted by American force.

Khrushchev restrained himself from charging the United States in public with Lumumba’s killing. But he blamed “Western colonialists” led by the UN and Hammarskjöld: “The murder of Patrice Lumumba and his comrades in the dungeons of Katanga climaxes Hammarskjöld’s criminal actions.” Khrushchev demanded that the UN get out of Africa and that Hammarskjöld be replaced by an East-West-neutral troika.

Before Thompson left Washington, Kennedy asked him to tell Khrushchev that he hoped their differences over the Congo would not pose a “serious obstacle” in improving relations.

By the Ambassador’s return to Moscow on Monday, February 27, Khrushchev had been informed that Thompson was carrying back an important message from Kennedy. But the next morning, in a calculated insult, the Chairman boarded his plane and resumed his agricultural tour without making any effort to receive the letter from Thompson.

During his tour, maintaining the new Soviet hard line, Khrushchev worked to overcome the damage of McNamara’s missile gap revelation. At his first stop, Sverdlovsk: “The Soviet Union has the most powerful rocket weapons in the world and as many atomic and hydrogen bombs as are needed to wipe aggressors from the face of the earth!”

Back in Moscow, Thompson told Gromyko that he would “go anywhere and at any time” to see Khrushchev, but the Foreign Minister made no promises. A week after the Ambassador’s return, Khrushchev went to Novosibirsk for a meeting of Siberian farm workers. Two thousand miles east, the city was normally closed to Americans, but Gromyko asked Thompson to fly there.

Carrying the letter in his brown satchel, Thompson and Boris Klosson went to Vnukovo Airport outside Moscow in a driving snowstorm. With Anatoly Dobrynin of the Foreign Ministry, they boarded a silver Tupolev-104 passenger jet. Arriving in Novosibirsk after nightfall, they were driven to the city’s only hotel. Dobrynin told Thompson, “It would speed things up if we could write a translation of the President’s letter.” He promised not to give it to Khrushchev until their morning meeting. Thompson agreed and later smoothed out the Soviet translation.

Khrushchev was staying on the edge of Academy City, the three-year-old Siberian headquarters of the Academy of Sciences. In the mid-1950s, the Chairman himself had been the one to command that a “town of science” be built in the heart of Siberia. Now members of the faculty found him in a foul mood, perhaps the result of his recent political frustrations.

Like other autocrats, when Khrushchev encountered problems that were not in his control, he turned his wrath to problems that were. When he learned that the Academy City faculty included a geneticist who did not believe in the theories of his beloved Lysenko, he held a tantrum and ordered him fired. An architectural model of a new academy building was brought for the Chairman’s perusal. Unlike the usual such Soviet edifice of five stories, this one had nine. Violently Khrushchev shook his head and swung his right hand in a chopping gesture. The design was changed to five stories.

Past the sunlit steel mills and nineteenth-century log cabins of Novosibirsk, Thompson and Klosson were taken to the dacha where the Chairman was holding court. They were met by one of his bodyguards. “He was five by five,” Klosson recalled, “and could break a man in half with one fist.” He took the Americans upstairs, where Khrushchev sat at an oblong table in a small room with Dobrynin and other aides. The Chairman showed the strains of his past few weeks. Thompson thought he looked “extremely tired, and his appearance shocked even the Soviets who accompanied me.”

Khrushchev read the Russian translation of Kennedy’s fifteen-day-old letter and said, “It could serve as a good beginning.” He would have to ponder Kennedy’s proposal but was “inclined” to say yes: it would be “useful to become acquainted with the President.” He had had the pleasure of meeting him in 1959, when he was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but they had only exchanged “a few words.”

Thompson mentioned that the President planned to see Harold Macmillan and Konrad Adenauer in April in Washington. After that he would fly to Paris to see de Gaulle. Perhaps he could see the Chairman on the same trip and avoid crossing the ocean twice. Khrushchev said, “I know well these transatlantic flights.” Thompson proposed a meeting at the beginning of May in Vienna or Stockholm. Khrushchev said, “That might be suitable.” He preferred Vienna.

Moving on, Khrushchev said that he held Dag Hammarskjöld “personally responsible” for Lumumba’s murder. With Hammarskjöld’s connivance, Kasavubu had sent him to Katanga, where the Katangan leader, Moise Tshombe, “the stooge of the Belgian mining monopoly,” had killed him. The UN had been used by “colonialists” to retain their colonies and oppress Third World peoples.

Thompson replied that the United States was not always pleased with the UN’s decisions. The Cold War must be kept out of Africa. Nothing in the Congo was basic to American or Soviet interests.

Khrushchev said, “You have your Belgian allies!” The UN’s policy was “colonialist.” The Soviet Union would oppose it “with all its means.” The United States had once raised the “banner of democratic bourgeois freedom”: “Now, unfortunately, it has shown that it does not support popular movements.” He demanded Hammarskjöld’s replacement by a troika of three leaders—“yours, ours, and neutral”—with a veto for each.

Thompson assured him that in late March, when American-Soviet-British test ban talks resumed in Geneva, the President would make a “vigorous effort” to achieve a fair treaty; Kennedy saw the talks as a partial bellwether of détente. Khrushchev replied, “We have had no tests for two years and are not living badly.” But testing was not the main question. “Even if tests stopped, weapons production would not. The main question is disarmament.” Thompson said that a test ban must be the first step.

Khrushchev: “The U.S.S.R. is willing to conclude such an agreement, but would France sign?”

Thompson: “What about China?”

Khrushchev said, “France is conducting tests. China is not. China does not produce atomic weapons today but may achieve progress in this field.” A test ban accord must be signed by both France and China. “Agreement must be universal.” (Thompson later reported home, “I believe the foregoing indicates that the Soviets have less interest than formerly in a test agreement and will probably use the French as the excuse for failure to conclude it.”)

Downstairs, lunch was served: zakuski, soup, fish, beefsteak, chicken cutlets. Khrushchev took some pills, drank only a small amount of red wine, and eschewed the steak. He noted, “My father promised me a gold watch if I didn’t smoke.”

Raising a glass of pertsovka, the pepper-flavored vodka he favored, he said he would not offer the usual toast to the President’s health; “Being so young, he does not need such wishes.” He added that he hoped it would soon be “possible” to invite President Kennedy to the Soviet Union. The Soviet people would like to welcome him and his family and show him their country. But the time was not yet ripe.

Khrushchev told Thompson that he was leaving for Akmolinsk and Alma-Ata and would be back in Moscow by the last week in March. Perhaps he would have an answer to the President’s confidential offer by then.

That evening, at the Moscow airport, reporters asked Thompson whether he was optimistic after the Khrushchev meeting. He said, “I shall always be an optimist.” The next day, in his series of cables to Washington, he reported that Khrushchev was “obviously pleased” with the President’s proposal of a summit: “I believe it moderated the position he took on various problems discussed.”

But Thompson noted that the hopeful spirit of Menshikov’s private messages and his post-Inaugural meeting with Khrushchev was almost gone. It was “noteworthy” that Khrushchev had “refrained from any mention of possible patterns of settlement” in the Congo and that his enthusiasm for a test ban seemed to be ebbing. He had not been able to speak with Khrushchev about the President’s proposed military increases. “I hope there may be an occasion in the future to do so, as I gather from the Soviet press that this is causing them serious preoccupation.”

On Monday, March 20, Alexander Fomin of the Soviet Embassy lunched with Robert Estabrook, editorial page editor of the Washington Post, who was known, to be close to high officials of the Kennedy government. Fomin’s actual surname was Feklisov. His official title was Counselor, but the FBI knew him as the KGB’s rezident in Washington. In 1959, he was a member of Khrushchev’s party during his tour of the United States.

Fomin was not the first Soviet diplomat to cultivate an American close to the New Frontier. During the campaign, Mikhail Smirnovsky had interrogated Charles Bartlett about his friend the Democratic nominee. As Bartlett recalled, “I had the feeling that they were hungering for a better relationship with the United States. He would always say the idea was to try not to give arguments to those in the Soviet Union who favored the Cold War.”

After the Inauguration, J. Edgar Hoover told the President, “You’ve got to be careful of Bartlett because he has lots of Russian friends.”* Kennedy asked Bartlett why he knew so many Russians. “When you’re in the newspaper business, you talk to people,” Bartlett replied. “I’ve always been interested in the Soviet Union and what you might be able to do in the way of making peace. There are some people I like very much over there.”

At an early National Security Council meeting, someone noted that the President’s British friend Henry Brandon of the Sunday Times “has had a conversation with some Russian.” Someone else followed with: “Bartlett has been talking to Smirnovsky and Smirnovsky says—” Kennedy gave out an acid laugh: “Our sources are getting better all the time!”

Over luncheon, Fomin told Estabrook that the Soviets were “disappointed” that the Americans had not reciprocated for the release of the RB-47 fliers. The Soviet Union was “pleased” by suggestions that the crabmeat ban would be lifted. “Nothing very significant” would happen at the spring UN session.

Raising the subject of Laos, he said that the only way to solve the problem was an international control commission. “What is needed is a neutral government on the Austrian model.” The “Austrian solution” could be a model for “settlement of many situations around the world.” The Soviets were hampered by the fact that the Chinese were creating “difficulties on any solution in Laos.” If the United States intervened with force, it would “fight alone.”

Tomorrow the Geneva test ban talks were to reconvene for the first time since Kennedy took office. The West had been holding out for twenty annual inspections of nuclear test sites, the Soviets for three. Fomin believed that a compromise between the two figures was “possible.”

Since 1956, John Kennedy had endorsed a nuclear test ban accord with the Soviet Union. His Senate colleague Clinton Anderson of New Mexico had convinced him that, if tests were stopped, America would remain comfortably ahead of the Soviets. Kennedy thought a test ban the best way to stop the Bomb from spreading to other nations.

His prewar London friend David Ormsby-Gore, chief British delegate to the Geneva talks, tutored the Senator on the subject. As he recalled, “Jack was not passionate about nuclear disarmament at first. He was logical and unemotional, just as he was about every other issue, national or international.”

Like his other campaign rhetoric, Kennedy’s treatment of the test ban issue in the fall of 1960 reflected the post-Paris-summit chill and his new courtship of Republicans and independents. Unlike Nixon, he wished to continue the voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing that the Americans, British, and Soviets had observed since 1958. He had raised the matter of a test ban only twice, in almost identical speeches during a swing through Wisconsin one day in late October:

“If we are to ever hope to negotiate for an effective arms control agreement, we must act immediately. For as each year passes, the control of increasingly complex, mobile, and hidden modern arma ments becomes more difficult, and the chances for country after country to possess an atomic capacity. By 1964 or 1965, we may see a world in which twenty countries have a nuclear capacity.… No problem is more vital.”

One of Kennedy’s first acts as President was to ask the Soviets to postpone reopening the Geneva talks until late March to allow the United States to review its position. He asked his new Special Adviser on Disarmament, John McCloy, to see what concessions might be made. After reviewing transcripts of the more than 250 Geneva sessions since 1957 and calling on an ad hoc panel of scientists, McCloy concluded that current methods ensured detection from outside the Soviet Union of Soviet nuclear tests in the atmosphere and under water, but not in space or underground. The key sticking point was on-site inspections.

The number twenty, sacrosanct to some members of Congress, was a considerable distance from the Soviet offer of three. McCloy recommended that the President agree to an annual minimum of ten, with one additional inspection for each of five unidentified seismic events beyond fifty, up to an annual total of twenty. Despite opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kennedy agreed to this and other serious concessions. Reading the classified record of the 1960 test ban talks, he had learned how close the Americans and Soviets had come to agreement before the Paris summit fiasco.

He told Congressmen over a White House lunch, “If we could gain agreement on a test ban, it might enable us to move on toward agreement on other East-West issues, such as Berlin and Laos.” With Rusk and Bundy he mused about the path they might have to tread if there were no agreement—an endless arms race, the spread of nuclear weapons to other nations like Israel and China. They had to “make a serious effort at Geneva.”

But when the talks resumed on March 21, the Soviets did not even wait to hear the new American offer before unveiling a new hard-line stand. The Soviet position had obviously toughened since December and January, when Menshikov had quietly assured Kennedy’s people that the Chairman was serious about a test ban treaty.

The chief Soviet delegate, Semyon Tsarapkin, now made a new demand. The control board to police an accord should be chaired not by a neutral, as agreed, but by a troika: “It is impossible to find a completely neutral person.” Told of this development, Rusk said, “Utterly unacceptable.”

The new Soviet hard line may have been imposed by the Presidium against Khrushchev’s preference in February. Why had Fomin flashed word to the White House the day before the Geneva talks opened that a test ban compromise was possible? If the source of the KGB man’s message was Khrushchev or his close aides, it is possible that the Chairman was trying to signal Kennedy not to let the formal opening Soviet position dissuade him from genuine bargaining.

At noon on Monday, March 27, a Soviet Embassy Cadillac stopped in front of the West Wing. Andrei Gromyko and Menshikov stepped out. Kennedy’s military aide General Chester Clifton escorted the two Soviets to the Oval Office, where they shook hands with the President, Rusk, Stevenson, Bohlen, and Kohler.

The main subject was Laos, which Kennedy privately called “the worst mess the Eisenhower administration left me.” In December, the Soviets had begun airlifting arms to Pathet Lao rebels. Now battalion-sized units were sweeping up the northwestern part of the country and moving toward the cities against the hapless American-backed Premier, Prince Boun Oum, and his deputy, General Phoumi Nosavan.

During the Cabinet Room sessions in February, the President’s Soviet experts told him that “disunity and the failure of the West to find and support an esteemed non-Communist leader have played into the hands of the Communists.”

The Pentagon advised Kennedy that if American troops were committed to battle, the United States might again face the Chinese. To keep the Chinese out of Southeast Asia could require three hundred thousand troops and Western help. At some stage, it might involve nuclear weapons. The Soviets would probably reply by sending their own volunteers with nuclear support.

Thompson and Bohlen told the President that Khrushchev was probably just as eager to keep the Chinese out and did not want to flirt with American power. But the President must demonstrate his readiness to use force to protect the Phoumist government.

Kennedy had five hundred Marines flown to the Thai side of the Mekong River. The U.S.S. Midway moved toward the Gulf of Siam, the Seventh Fleet into the China Sea. American bases near Laos were provisioned and fortified.

Especially after Khrushchev’s Wars of Liberation speech, the President was gripped by “something approaching an obsession about guerrilla war,” as one journalist friend wrote. He read from Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, and the Irish Republican Army on guerrilla tactics. In a special defense message sent to Congress in March, he said, “We need a greater ability to deal with guerrilla forces, insurrections, and subversion.”

Kennedy’s public calls for a neutral Laos did not stop the Commu nist offensive. He asked Rusk to make one last plea to Gromyko at the UN. When that failed, Kennedy read out a sharply worded threat at a news conference: “If these attacks do not stop, those who support a truly neutral Laos will have to consider their response.” The next day, Gromyko asked Stevenson for an appointment to see the President; he had just received a message from Khrushchev, who shared Kennedy’s desire for a “neutral, independent Laos.”

In the Oval Office, both Gromyko and the President declared themselves for peace and neutrality in Laos. Gromyko said that both their countries must work for a peaceful settlement and “take steps to prevent the conflict from spreading.”

Gromyko said that he hoped someday their two countries would establish “genuine friendship.” The President noted that there were differences in their systems and national interests in certain areas like Laos, Africa, and Cuba. The problem was to “create an atmosphere where these problems can be settled without bringing the military situation to the brink.”

Kennedy suggested that they go outside into the Rose Garden, where they sat on a white wrought-iron bench. Caroline came running out of the White House, Jacqueline behind her. The President briefly introduced them to his Soviet visitor.

When the formal talk resumed, Kennedy raised one of his most abiding anxieties, the danger of miscalculation. At Harvard, he had studied the origins of World War I and been shocked by how easily one nation’s misunderstanding of another’s intentions could bring global conflict.

He repeated the necessity of “avoiding the brink.” The Soviets should not try to “push” the United States where its prestige was involved. Gromyko and the Chairman should know that the United States would not idly watch the Communists move across Southeast Asia. He also mentioned Cuba and its “belligerent attitude.”

Before the end of their fifty-two minutes together, Kennedy repeated that he was still willing to meet with Khrushchev. Gromyko said that the Chairman “liked” the idea but refused to offer a formal reply.

Exhausted from his provincial tour, Khrushchev returned to Moscow on Friday, March 24. He planned a vacation on the Black Sea, where he would sleep, swim, and work on the program for the autumn Twenty-second Party Congress. He had left Kennedy’s letter unanswered for two weeks.

Why not accept the very summit he had once bid for so eagerly? Now that Kennedy had already set certain of his foreign and defense policies in train, Khrushchev could not argue in the Presidium that a meeting would help him to push in directions agreeable to Soviet interests. A meeting now, after Kennedy had revealed his intentions in military spending, Laos, and other areas, might seem to reward the President for what the Soviets considered Kennedy’s unwarranted hard line. Khrushchev knew that if he met with Kennedy and achieved nothing, it would help to discredit negotiation with the West and strengthen his enemies in Moscow and Peking.

But the main reason Khrushchev refused to commit himself to a summit probably lay in the Caribbean. Khrushchev had suspected that Kennedy would someday try to invade Cuba and destroy the Castro regime with American forces, but he apparently never thought this would happen soon after the Inauguration.

At least one Soviet diplomat reasoned that the new President had people around him like Rusk, Bowles, and Stevenson, all known for their reluctance to use military force. So new in office, would Kennedy overrule such advisers? Would he jeopardize his relationships with the Soviet Union and Latin America, still in their infancy?

Khrushchev thought Kennedy more deliberate than that. Through the winter, Soviet and Cuban intelligence had sent him growing evidence that the President would soon unleash Cuban exiles and other troops being organized for such an invasion. But as one later Soviet defector said, the more such information Khrushchev received, “the less he believed.”

The Chairman probably suspected, not without reason, that the Cubans were inflating the danger to scare the Kremlin into sending more aid. His KGB chief, Alexander Shelepin, evidently defended the soundness of his evidence but deferred to Khrushchev’s political wisdom, resorting to the classic intelligence caveat that it was possible to judge the enemy’s capabilities but not its intentions.

Still Khrushchev could not be certain that Kennedy would not soon invade Cuba. He did not want to commit himself to a summit with a President whose forces might have just dislodged the first government in the world to move toward Soviet communism of its own free will.

Khrushchev’s nervousness showed in his public silence about Cuba. As Soviet intelligence sent him more and more information that Kennedy might soon give the fateful order, the Chairman’s public utterances notably avoided the subject of the island. He knew that if Kennedy committed American force, there was little he could do to save Castro, short of threatening to rain nuclear weapons on the United States.

On Wednesday, March 29, before the President flew to Palm Beach for the Easter weekend, Richard Bissell of the CIA came to the Cabinet Room and presented a progress report on Operation Zapata, the top-secret plan to invade Cuba from the Bay of Pigs. In Cuba, CIA-equipped confederates of Sam Giancana were stalking Fidel Castro with botulinum-toxin pills.

*Kennedy’s use of the term “hour of maximum danger” was not random rhetoric. The 1950 Cold War tocsin NSC-68 referred to 1954 as the “year of maximum danger,” by which time the Russians would have enough atomic bombs to “seriously damage this country” and thus might “be tempted to strike swiftly and with stealth.” During the missile gap controversy, the term came to refer to the moment that the Soviets would feel so secure in their missile superiority that they might blackmail the West into negotiation on Soviet terms or actually wage a surprise nuclear attack. Kennedy’s use of this code phrase in his State of the Union showed his continuing willingness to use the missile gap issue against his predecessor.

*One result of the fracas was the Defense Intelligence Agency, which McNamara established in August 1961 to integrate estimates of such services as the Air Force, whose wildly excessive assessments of Soviet missile capabilities had originally inspired public fears about a missile gap.

*In private, Khrushchev was more reserved about Soviet power. In Moscow in February 1960, Henry Cabot Lodge dropped a comment about the Soviet Union’s having superior missiles and Khrushchev replied, “No, not really.”

*Late in life, Rusk reluctantly acceded to his son Richard’s request to collaborate on an autobiography. In that volume, As I Saw It (Norton, 1990), the son lamented that his father “would say nothing at all about areas crucial to the story”—“personal disappointments; moments of failure; differences with his presidents; critical observations of the men he served with.”

*Reminded of this in 1987, Rusk could not remember saying that he and Kennedy could not communicate: “That was never a problem.”

*In August 1960, an FBI wiretap on the telephone of the United Arab Republic’s Ambassador to Washington revealed, for example, that after Kennedy spoke to a Zionist group in support of Israel, Fulbright called the Egyptian, “apologized for Kennedy’s speech, and explained it was dictated by political expediency.”

*At about the same time, Hoover warned the Attorney General that a prominent journalist and friend of the President’s had been “compromised” by homosexuals during a visit to Moscow. Kennedy ignored the warning and continued to see the journalist socially.