The Secret Agent
A Soviet official named Georgi Nikitovich Bolshakov accosted his friend Frank Holeman of the New York Daily News: “I’d like to meet the Attorney General. Could you help arrange it?” He added, “I’m the only person in the Embassy who can communicate directly with Khrushchev.” A meeting with the President’s brother, he said, could bear important fruit.
Jovial, hard-drinking, clownish, with unruly dark hair, blue eyes, and a barrel chest, Bolshakov had first met Holeman while serving in the early 1950s under shallow cover in Washington as a TASS correspondent. In late 1959, he had returned to the capital as an information secretary at the Soviet Embassy and editor of the Soviet English-language magazine USSR.
Bolshakov’s formal rank among the sixty-seven members of the Embassy was fortieth. But the gaggle of FBI and Soviet intelligence agents who followed him around Washington attested to his actual importance. As Holeman recalled, “Georgi was being tailed by everybody on earth.”
According to Alexei Adzhubei many years later, Bolshakov was a Soviet military intelligence agent who had served in the mid-1950s as an aide to the Soviet Defense Minister, the World War II hero Marshal Georgi Zhukov. After Khrushchev fired Zhukov, Adzhubei rescued Bolshakov by commending him to his father-in-law, who was pleased to have him edit USSR and serve as his personal representative in Washington.
As Soviet intelligence surely divined from psychological profiles of the Kennedy brothers, working through a secret agent conformed to their predilection for secrecy and circumvention of the bureaucracy for speed and flexibility. If custom was followed, Bolshakov was briefed on almost everything Soviet intelligence knew about the President and his brother: their ideology, methods, likes, dislikes, and eating, drinking, and sexual habits.
Holeman told the Attorney General’s aide Edwin Guthman that Bolshakov wanted to meet him. Robert consulted the President, who was advised that Bolshakov was “an important agent of the Soviet secret police.” The President told him to find out what the man wanted.
This was not the first time a Soviet agent had been sent to communicate with a high American official. In the late 1950s, distressed by polls showing that Richard Nixon might well be elected to succeed Eisenhower, Khrushchev and his colleagues thought it essential to build bridges to the Vice President so fabled for his anticommunism.
Chosen as the American go-between was Holeman, who was known to be friendly with Nixon and not unduly anti-Soviet. As a practical joke at the end of the, 1952 campaign, Nixon had put the Daily News man alongside his wife, Pat, in a Seattle motorcade, allowing him to play candidate and wave at baffled crowds. Against bitter opposition, Holeman had persuaded fellow National Press Club governors to grant membership to Soviet diplomats in Washington, including one Yuri Gvozdev.
In February 1958, Gvozdev sought out Holeman and asked him, “on behalf of the Soviet Union,” what would happen if Moscow’s Syrian allies moved into Lebanon. Holeman went to the Nixon staff and obtained a reply, which he relayed to Gvozdev: “You’ve got to stop at the Lebanese border or you’ll be in real trouble.”*
The Soviets may have thought that Holeman was a spook himself. He told Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, “I keep telling them I have no influence, I have no connections, and the more I protest the more they think I am not telling the truth.” He called himself “Frank Holeman, Boy Spy.”
After Eisenhower sent the Marines into Lebanon that July, Gvozdev gave Holeman another urgent message for Nixon: “The Russians feel war is close. There are many places Russian volunteers can go, including Egypt.… Any United States or British move toward Iraq will mean war. If war, the Russians will ignore European bases and attack the United States directly.”
When Khrushchev laid down his Berlin ultimatum, Gvozdev asked Holeman to assure his highly placed friends, “Don’t worry about Berlin. There is not going to be any war over Berlin.” This message may have fortified the President’s inclination not to escalate the crisis.
In December 1958, Gvozdev told Holeman that Khrushchev was “very interested” in a Nixon visit to the Soviet Union. He would “bid very high for it in terms of constructive proposals on Berlin.” What was the Vice President’s “attitude toward visiting?”
Nixon conferred with the President and Secretary of State. Holeman was asked to tell Gvozdev that Nixon would come to Moscow “under certain conditions.” The main one was “a period of relative quiet” between the United States and Soviet Union, especially over Berlin. The Soviets complied with Nixon’s terms.
The Vice President’s relationship with the Soviet agent has remained secret until this writing. His contacts with Gvozdev were at such arm’s length that he may not have even known the man’s name. By the time Nixon departed for his trip to the Soviet Union in July 1959, Gvozdev had vanished from Washington. Six years later, he was posted to Brasilia and expelled as a spy.
Now Holeman brought Georgi Bolshakov to the Justice Department, where the man took the private elevator to Kennedy’s office. In almost perfect English, he told the Attorney General that he had once been a farmer and a laborer. Since Khrushchev’s American tour in 1959, he had enjoyed a special relationship with the Chairman.
The President and the Chairman, he said, would surely have things to say to each other that could not be conveyed through official channels. He could offer a more true-to-life portrait of what was happening in the Kremlin than the Kennedys might get from the press or other sources.
Then Bolshakov got down to business. In his February letter, the President had proposed a summit meeting with the Chairman. Did the offer still stand?
Robert took the query to the President, who was startled and annoyed: now, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs embarrassment, Khrushchev had decided he wanted a summit after all. Kennedy wrote Adenauer that he was “faced with the problem” of consenting to a summit or else “withdrawing from my previous indication of my willingness to do so.”
Bohlen reminded the President that Eisenhower had laid down conditions before agreeing to meet with Khrushchev. Kennedy decided to employ the same tactic. He asked Robert to tell Bolshakov that he was “leaning” toward a summit and would give the Chairman a final answer by May 20. That judgment would depend on whether America’s allies approved and whether there was “genuine progress” in talks on Laos and nuclear testing.
Bolshakov assured Robert that there would be progress in both negotiations. According to Kennedy, Bolshakov suggested that Khrushchev would make substantial concessions in order to clinch an agreement on nuclear testing. As Robert recalled, “He indicated to me here quite clearly that they would reach an agreement on the test ban.” If Bolshakov could be believed, this was a tantalizing reason for the President to accept a summit.
By the Attorney General’s account, he and Bolshakov also debated what the two leaders might discuss: Laos, the “importance of their understanding that we were committed on Berlin,” as well as “trying to reach some understanding” about the “control of nuclear weapons.”
For the next year and a half, Robert Kennedy met with Georgi Bolshakov roughly two or three times a month. The Attorney General explained to his brother that “they didn’t want to go through their Ambassador, evidently.” Bolshakov had told him that Menshikov “wasn’t giving accurate reports to Khrushchev.” Thus the Chairman “didn’t really understand the United States.”
Holeman helped to cement the relationship: “Bobby was my client, but I liked Georgi.” When Bolshakov did not wish to risk telephoning Robert’s office directly, Holeman would call Guthman: “My guy wants to see your guy.”
The Daily News man picked Bolshakov up by taxi away from the Soviet Embassy in an effort to give the slip to American or Soviet agents: “My interest was in making sure my friend and the Attorney General were not embarrassed by these bastards.” Kennedy usually saw Bolshakov in his office. Sometimes they met in a doughnut shop next to the Mayflower Hotel or strolled up Constitution Avenue toward the Capitol.
Bolshakov’s clandestine business with Robert Kennedy was camouflaged by his large acquaintanceship in New Frontier Washington. On first-name terms with presidential aides like O’Donnell and Sorensen and presidential friends like Bartlett, Bradlee, and William Walton, he was appreciated for his refusal to spout the Soviet party line. Bolshakov told anyone who would listen that his heroes were Nikita Khrushchev and John Kennedy.
Of the highest officials in the American government, only the President and his brother knew everything that Robert was saying to Bolshakov and hearing back. The Attorney General later recalled, “I unfortunately—stupidly, never—I didn’t write many of the things down. I just delivered the messages verbally to my brother and he’d act on them. And I think sometimes he’d tell the State Department and sometimes perhaps he didn’t.”
Thompson’s misgivings about the Bolshakov channel went beyond the professional’s aversion to informal diplomacy. He thought it an “error of judgment.… They tried to sell the idea ‘Well, the State Department is so biased against us that we can’t get anywhere. If we could just get direct contact, why we could do this.’ This way, they hoped to avoid any staff work and to avoid having all the facts known—and to persuade the President to make a judgment simply on the basis of their presentation on the assumption that they could do business that way. I think this was a great mistake.”
Thompson warned the President that the Soviets “might attach great importance to careless remarks”: American officials who spoke with anyone from the Soviet Embassy must be told to keep records of their conversations. Kennedy nodded but ignored Thompson’s advice.
Rusk and Bundy were also unenthusiastic about the channel. Neither knew that the President’s brother was seeing Bolshakov so frequently. The Attorney General’s assistant James Symington resented Bolshakov’s “insinuating jocularity” and “almost unlimited access to the inner sanctum.” He thought his boss was playing a “dangerous game.”
The President was never seen with Bolshakov except in meetings with Soviet delegations. But for his brother to meet so often with a known Soviet agent had its risks. The FBI had both Bolshakov and the Attorney General under surveillance: when Bolshakov dined at Holeman’s Virginia home, Holeman saw FBI photographers “hanging out of the trees.” But as Bartlett observed, Robert was protected by his background of conspicuous anticommunism: “I don’t think Bobby thought he’d be in danger of being attacked as a Communist sympathizer.”
The greater problem with the channel was that it gave the advantage to the Soviets. The Soviets could count on Robert Kennedy not to give their man false information: if the President’s brother lied, it would directly taint the President. But Bolshakov was a deniable agent. If he should be deliberately used to deceive the Kennedys and was found out, all the Kremlin had to do was say its man had been “misinformed” and yank him back to Moscow.
The Chairman used a similar method to communicate with Castro. Their most sensitive dialogues were conducted not through Khrushchev’s Ambassador in Havana, whom the Cuban leader reviled, but through Alexander Alexeyev, the agent who operated, as Bolshakov had, under shallow cover as a TASS correspondent.
An important reason for Khrushchev’s use of such channels with Kennedy and Castro was that he did not fully trust his own Foreign Ministry. The Chairman once said that if he asked Gromyko to “drop his trousers and sit on a block of ice for a month,” Gromyko would do it. But he never forgot that Gromyko’s patron had been Molotov, Foreign Minister under Stalin and a chief conspirator in the 1957 Anti-Party Coup.
Had Khrushchev gained absolute power after 1957, he might have removed Molotov from government altogether and chosen a new foreign minister with few ties to the Stalin group. Instead he had sent Molotov to the Soviet Embassy in Ulan Bator, a not inconsequential assignment, and installed Gromyko as Foreign Minister.*
By 1961, Khrushchev had moved Molotov to the UN Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.* The Chairman remained worried about Molotov loyalists in the Foreign Ministry and elsewhere in Moscow. Most were suspicious of Khrushchev’s openings to the West. The Chairman may have suspected that they might sabotage any overtures he made to Kennedy or use them to show that Khrushchev was “soft on capitalism.”
Nevertheless, using agents as a diplomatic conduit was subject to most of the same risks as using the Foreign Ministry. His efforts to reduce tensions with the West and the harshness of the Soviet police state undermined the raison d’être of the KGB, threatening its chieftains’ power and privileges. The KGB chairman was thought to be a critic of the Chairman’s tough line with China and his efforts to improve American relations.
After Khrushchev’s message, Kennedy had little choice but to accede to a summit. If he tried to escape it, the Soviets might release the contents of his February letter and crow that after his Bay of Pigs humiliation the President seemed to be afraid to go into the same room as Khrushchev.
Necessity forced Kennedy to see the benefits of going ahead with a summit. He noted that “each crisis that I’ve faced so far in this job has really stemmed from Russia”: already the Congo, Laos, and Cuba had all threatened to drag the two powers into confrontation. Berlin and South Vietnam had the same potential.
The President had conceded to Nixon in April that his Cuba failure may have suggested to Khrushchev that he could “keep pushing us all over the world.” A summit would allow Kennedy to demonstrate the contrary. He told O’Donnell, “Getting involved in a fight between Communists and anti-Communists in Cuba and Laos was one thing. But this is the time to let him know that a showdown between the United States and Russia would be entirely something else again.”
Since the Inauguration, Kennedy had been attracted to the idea of sitting down with Khrushchev to arrange a standstill in the Cold War. Such a cooling-off period would keep both powers from finding themselves committed to actions that risked their essential security and threatened the equilibrium of peace. It would give the two leaders the opportunity to build some kind of rational framework for Soviet-American relations that would take account of both leaders’ aims and domestic needs.
It did not escape the President that a summit would fortify his domestic and international position. Eisenhower’s Geneva and Camp David meetings, even the disaster at Paris, had unified the American people and the West. As in the television debates with Nixon, for Kennedy to hold his own against Khrushchev would help to quash the talk now recurring after the Bay of Pigs that he was too young and inexperienced.
Kennedy marveled at how Americans rallied to a President at moments of foreign challenge—even when the danger was his own fault, as with Eisenhower and the U-2 affair. Reading a post–Bay of Pigs poll showing his approval by an unprecedented 82 percent of Americans, he said that it was just like Eisenhower: “The worse I do, the more popular I get.” (Later he added, “If I had gone further, they would have liked me more.”)
The President wrote Adenauer, “I would assume you would share my view that since I have not previously met Khrushchev, such an encounter would be useful in the present international situation. If the meeting in fact takes place, I would expect to inform you of the content of these discussions with Khrushchev, which I anticipate will be quite general in character.”
Lyndon Johnson feared that in the aftermath of the Cuban fiasco, Khrushchev might take Kennedy’s willingness to meet as a sign of weakness. There is no evidence that the President ever took this notion seriously. Neither did Bohlen, who felt that “Soviet rulers usually pay more attention to United States power than tactical errors.” Other American officials worried nevertheless that Khrushchev would come to the summit, make some outrageous demand that Kennedy would have to reject, and then, as in Paris in 1960, blast the meeting apart in order to escalate the Cold War to his own advantage.
As Bolshakov and Robert Kennedy conferred secretly in Washington, Gromyko approached Thompson in Moscow on Thursday, May 4, with a formal proposal for a summit, saying, “Recent events make a meeting even more necessary.”
Thompson cabled Washington that he hoped the President would “maintain” his plan to meet with Khrushchev. Knowing Kennedy’s critics might charge that the Bay of Pigs had stampeded him into a summit, he suggested that the President reveal to the public that he had proposed the meeting two months before the Cuban fiasco: “Moreover, on the questions of the Congo, Laos, and Cuba, the President has made clear his firm stance in the face of Soviet actions.”
The Ambassador thought scheduling a summit would make Khrushchev “more reasonable” during the months ahead. The Chairman was now making important decisions about his October Twenty-second Party Congress, “and it is in our interest to influence these decisions.” The “mere fact of a meeting” would “exacerbate Soviet-Chinese relations.” Despite “recent sharp exchanges and Soviet actions,” Thompson felt there had been no major change in Khrushchev’s intentions: “While it has always been clear that the Soviets seek the communization of the world, Khrushchev continues to advocate peaceful means.”
On Friday morning, May 5, the United States launched its first man into space. The nervous Kennedy said that after Gagarin’s success and the Bay of Pigs, a failure in space would usher in “a very difficult time for NASA and for us all.”
After the fifteen-minute, three-hundred-mile suborbital flight, Kennedy was relieved to learn that the astronaut, Commander Alan Shepard, was safely in the helicopter. Billings wrote in his diary that the President “wasn’t too happy to note that … everyone wanted to get into Shepard’s act, including the Vice President.* He remarked that if the flight had been a failure, he would have been placed in the act fast enough.”
The President had been especially anxious about the Shepard mission because he was fighting off a new challenge in Laos. Khrushchev once asked Thompson why the Soviet Union should bother taking risks over the little country: “It will fall into our laps like a ripe apple.” Now the Chairman’s prophecy seemed to be coming true. The White House was informed that American-backed Royalist forces in Laos were “on the ropes.”
From Vientiane, Ambassador Winthrop Brown asked Rusk for permission to authorize air strikes that would deprive the enemy of key objectives. Brown realized that such an attack “would blow the whole cease-fire negotiations wide open” and “most likely” bring American intervention. The Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared contingency plans for a move against North Vietnam and perhaps southern China.
So soon after the Bay of Pigs, the President did not wish to give Khrushchev or the Republicans the impression that he was pulling punches in Laos as well as Cuba. But he knew if the United States acted “we might find ourselves fighting millions of Chinese troops in the jungles.” He told Billings he could not “afford to make another mistake.” He would “rather not” send troops into Laos “if there were any other way. I feel so much more strongly about Cuba.” But if the Communists were not stopped in Laos, “Vietnam would be next. Then Thailand, et cetera.”
Rusk thought the Royalist regime unworthy of “the life of a single farm boy.” The leaders of Congress agreed. From New Delhi, Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith wrote the President that, as a military ally, “the entire Laos nation is clearly inferior to a battalion of conscientious objectors from World War I.”
The Joint Chiefs were divided. Robert Kennedy recalled, “The head of the Army said that we would have forty-percent casualties within a short period of time—I think thirty days—this based on disease and dysentery. So that we would send these troops in and have them wiped out for a country that really wasn’t interested in defending itself.” After one such briefing, Robert said, “If the Marines aren’t willing to go in, even I’m against it.”
As the Attorney General recalled, someone estimated that “the Communists could send five men into Laos for every one that we sent in, that they could destroy the airports and therefore cut off our people after getting only a thousand or several thousand into Laos,” and that to preserve the Royalist regime “we had to be prepared to engage in a major atomic war both with China and with Russia.”
Unwilling to risk such a nuclear confrontation, the President barred the use of American forces in Laos. He was grateful to the Bay of Pigs for making him more skeptical of military advice, saying that if it hadn’t been for Cuba “we would be into Laos up to our necks.”
Quiet British-Soviet bargaining produced a cease-fire. On Friday, May 12, a fourteen-nation conference on Laos met in Geneva. As his envoy Kennedy sent Averell Harriman, who had argued for the more limited commitment to Laos. The President told him not to come back to Washington without a settlement.
After an official trip to Southeast Asia, Lyndon Johnson privately told Senators that he was “very depressed about Laos.… I don’t think anything is going to come out of the conference. I think the Russians are going to bust it up, and I think that the Communists will practically have it.”
Robert Kennedy consulted Bolshakov about an American-Soviet effort to wind down the conflict. Nevertheless he feared that a Laos settlement could exacerbate the President’s problems in Southeast Asia by offering “the Russians and the Communists a tunnel right into the heart of South Vietnam.”
In support of his effort to lure the President to the summit, Khrushchev said at Tbilisi on Friday, May 12, “Although President Kennedy and I are men of different poles, we live on the same earth.… We have to coexist on our planet, and consequently we have to find a common language on certain questions.” The State Department told Kennedy that Khrushchev’s remarks were “probably the most moderate he has made in a public address since before the U-2 incident of last year.”
By mid-May, as Western allies were consulted about a Kennedy-Khrushchev encounter, the news was leaking all over. Golfing during a long presidential weekend in Palm Beach, the President’s military aide General Chester Clifton told Sander Vanocur of NBC that when he flew with Kennedy to Paris at the end of May he had better take extra clothes. Vanocur had noted Khrushchev’s new moderation; he needed no further hint. He told Salinger he would go with the story “unless there is some overriding reason of national security.” The press secretary said, “I can’t stop you.”
On Tuesday morning, May 16, Mikhail Menshikov went to the White House and gave the President an English translation of a Khrushchev letter dated May 12. In it, the Chairman complained once more about the Bay of Pigs and accepted Kennedy’s summit proposal.
Having waited sixty-eight days for Khrushchev’s reply, the President did not hasten to answer. He coolly noted that when Gromyko had broached the subject with Thompson, it had not been clear whether Laos and other aspects of the international climate would be “conducive” to a summit. Now he would consider the matter with Rusk and reply within forty-eight hours. If he decided to meet with the Chairman, the summit should be held in Vienna.
Kennedy mentioned the speculation in the American press during the previous week about a summit. With his surly manner Menshikov retorted that no leaks had appeared in the Soviet press. The President explained that he had consulted de Gaulle about the meeting; “inevitably” this had spread the news. One reason he wished to talk with Khrushchev was the “crucial” nuclear test ban talks. He did not want official statements to suggest that he and the Chairman expected to reach an agreement on Laos or a test ban. Public expectations must not be raised.
Bohlen called the Secretary of State, who was in Geneva at the conference on Laos: Kennedy wanted to go ahead, unless the Secretary objected. Even less happy about a summit than he was before the Bay of Pigs, Rusk replied that the Laos situation was “not very good from the Russian point of view, which might be a consideration.”
Bohlen told him that word about a summit was already leaking; the President wanted a decision today. Rusk replied that “in the circumstances” the President should “go ahead.” With this exuberant endorsement from his Secretary of State, Kennedy notified Khrushchev that he would meet him in Vienna.
The next day, John and Jacqueline Kennedy flew to Ottawa for their first official foreign trip. The President detested the Canadian Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker, whom he thought ponderous and insincere. He resented Diefenbaker’s public suggestion that Canada mediate between the United States and Cuba. The Prime Minister thought Kennedy a “young pup” and a “boastful young son of a bitch.”
Diefenbaker was newly provoked when Kennedy publicly asked the Canadian Parliament to overrule Diefenbaker’s opposition to Canadian membership in the OAS. When the President left the Prime Minister’s offices, someone left behind a memo from Rostow urging Kennedy to “push” the Canadians on the OAS and Laos. (The President thought the culprit was Bundy.)
Diefenbaker later claimed that the memo bore the letters “S.O.B.” in Kennedy’s handwriting. The President later said, “I didn’t think Diefenbaker was a son of a bitch”—he paused—“I thought he was a prick.” He wondered why the Prime Minister “didn’t do what any normal, friendly government would do: make a photostatic copy and return the original.”
An Ottawa ceremony had been staged in which Kennedy was to plant two red oaks. Perhaps from the tension of dealing with Diefenbaker, he neglected to crouch, as his back doctors had trained him. Instead, he bent over the pile of black earth. Pain seized the lower lumbar region of his back, site of football and war injuries that had almost killed him when infection set in after a 1954 spinal fusion operation. He thrust one hand into a side pocket of his jacket and gripped his forehead with the other.
The next day in the Oval Office, his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, found him “cranky” and “almost exhausted.” In the privacy of the White House family quarters, he resorted to crutches for the first time in years.
On Saturday, May 20, while the President and Jacqueline were at Glen Ora, the Khrushchev summit was announced simultaneously in Moscow and Washington. White House aides told reporters of their certainty that Khrushchev would “quickly” recognize the President as “a man of decision.”
The announcement of earlier summits such as Geneva, Camp David, and Paris had been greeted by vast hope. But this time the reaction in Western countries ran from mild expectation to outright worry. As William Fulbright conceded, there was now “great nervousness” about the young President going to see Khrushchev. A Jacksonville businessman said, “You don’t negotiate with somebody who has just given you a beating.” According to a Carson City laborer, “Khrushchev will kick him around the block.”
Columnists quoted past Kennedy statements that Presidents should not go to summits unless results were negotiated in advance. In the New Yorker, Richard Rovere warned that “Mr. Khrushchev may not see in our young President quite all that Theodore Sorensen and Charles Bohlen see in him.”
From Madrid, Ambassador Anthony Biddle cabled, “There is worry here which, reduced to simple terms, is that somehow the wily and corrupt old Soviet leader may get some advantage at Vienna from meeting with the youthful President of ‘idealistic young’ America.” A Newsweek correspondent reported that diplomats of Western Europe thought the meeting would “merely serve to enhance Khrushchev’s prestige” and that “Khrushchev is unlikely to worry very much about American warnings.”
Senator Albert Gore called the summit “ill-advised and untimely.” Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, Republican of Iowa, said, “No justification … no hope of success.” George Ball, the number-three man at State, told a friend it was “unfortunate” that Kennedy should see Khrushchev just after the “series of defeats we have suffered” in space, Cuba, and Laos. Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg bluntly told Kennedy he was not ready to talk to Khrushchev because he hadn’t been President long enough.
Kennedy’s friend and Senate leader Mike Mansfield of Montana wrote him a letter noting that since January his foreign policy had left “much to be desired.… If the meeting degenerates into a slugfest of words, with each trying to prove he is stronger and more adamant than the other, then it would have been better had the meeting not taken place.”
By May 1961, in Kennedy’s campaign formulation, the people of the world seemed to be growing less interested in what the United States was doing than in what Mr. Khrushchev was doing. In a column reprinted by Pravda, James Reston noted that the Chairman was “having a ball. He has us over a barrel in Laos. He has made us look foolish in Cuba.”
The American setbacks in foreign affairs and space caused the President to feel overtaken by events. He said, “I’m going to start doing like Eisenhower and have my staff cut up the paper.” With his approval, the U.S. Information Agency quietly stopped taking the polls on American prestige that he had used so effectively to needle Eisenhower and Nixon during the 1960 campaign.
During his mid-May trip to Palm Beach, Kennedy had pondered how to regain the initiative before the summit with Khrushchev. Fred Holborn of the White House staff said, “There’s a feeling that the next ten days are crucial.”
The President decided to break with tradition by delivering a second State of the Union address on Thursday, May 25, twelve weeks after his first. (Wags called it a “Re-state of the Union.”) With this noon speech on “urgent national needs,” he hoped to make a powerful new start before he went to Vienna. Cautioned by aides against a new military request on the eve of Vienna, he said that if Khrushchev was offended, that was the way it would have to be.
Augmenting his earlier defense appeal to Congress in March, Kennedy now asked for fifteen thousand more Marines, new emphasis on guerrilla warfare, howitzers, helicopters, personnel carriers, more battle-ready Army reserve combat divisions—and tripled funds for fallout shelters across the nation.* He also asked for the most open-ended financial commitment ever made in peacetime in order to land an American on the moon by 1970.
During his first months in office, the President had been cautioned to distance himself from Project Mercury, lest his stature be damaged by exploding rockets or dead astronauts. In March, he had rejected a NASA request for funds that would go to man-in-space projects: But after the Gagarin coup, when Congressmen accused the President of tolerating a “Soviet space monopoly,” Kennedy asked his experts, “Is there anyplace where we can catch them? … Can we put a man on the moon before them?”
Cuba and Southeast Asia had further sapped the President’s political ability to defend a measured effort in space. Using Kennedy’s own campaign rhetoric, Lyndon Johnson wrote him, “In the eyes of the world, first in space means first, period.” Scientists warned that there was only a fifty-fifty chance of beating the Soviets to the moon and that the huge expense of a hurry-up moon landing program could not be justified on scientific or technical grounds. The deciding reason would have to be political.
Political advisers reminded the President that a moon project would stimulate the national economy. It would help to mollify Congressmen, generals, and aerospace tycoons angry about McNamara’s Pentagon reforms. It would also bolster Kennedy’s popularity; they imagined the President greeting the courageous young spacemen at Cape Canaveral and in the Rose Garden.
Kennedy knew that if the United States held the lead in an all-out moon program, it would help to protect him and his government through Cold War setbacks. As Khrushchev had done with Sputnik, the President could use successes in outer space to divert public attention from domestic and foreign frustrations on earth.
With his unassailable reputation on defense and foreign matters, Eisenhower had resisted post-Sputnik demands for an expensive American rush to the moon, just as he had resisted demands for a massive defense buildup. Kennedy did not. Twenty billion dollars, the ultimate cost of an American moon landing, was a large price to pay for the primary purpose of recapturing Cold War prestige.
Eisenhower wrote a friend that Kennedy’s decision was “almost hysterical” and “a bit immature.” He complained to the astronaut Frank Borman in 1965 that the moon effort “was drastically revised and expanded just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.… It immediately took one single project or experiment out of a thoroughly planned and continuing program involving communication, meteorology, reconnaissance, and future military and scientific benefits and gave the highest priority—unfortunate in my opinion—to a race, in other words, a stunt.”
Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut complained that Kennedy would “unleash the forces of inflation” by refusing to recommend the taxes to pay for his new defense and space programs. Joseph Kennedy agreed. He told White House aides, “Damn it, I taught Jack better than that! Oh, we’re going to go broke with this nonsense. I told him that I thought it was ridiculous.”
During the last week of May, the President lay in his four-poster bed with a moist heating pad under his back. He pored over galleys of The Grand Tactician, a new Khrushchev biography by a Soviet émigré named Lazar Pistrak, and read black leather-bound State Department and CIA briefing books. Bundy wrote, “Here are the beginnings of some of the interesting dope on Vienna.”
Kennedy was advised by State that Vienna offered him an opportunity to show Khrushchev his “grasp of the world situation” and his intention to shape it. Worried about China, the Chairman “would prefer that the talks end on a note of accord.” Khrushchev believed “that a détente atmosphere would establish a political deterrent of sorts to forceful U.S. action against Cuba and against Laos.… He might also hope that this atmosphere would take some of the steam out of an expanding U.S. arms program.”
A CIA profile noted that Khrushchev’s “speech is larded with peasant proverbs and even biblical phrases.… He is at his folksiest best in the fields of a collective farm, dispensing advice to the assembled peasants on the best means of planting potatoes or corn.”
The Chairman was “the poor man’s universal genius with solutions to all problems … an expert on everything from silage to outer space. An uninhibited ham actor, who often illustrates his points with the crudest sort of barnyard humor, he is endowed on occasion with considerable personal dignity. Proud of his proletarian origin, he is nonetheless determined to receive full recognition and honor as the authentic leader of a great world power.”
Although “capable of extraordinary frankness, and in his own eyes no doubt unusually honest,” Khrushchev was also “a gambler and dissembler, expert in calculated bluffing.… While priding himself on his realism and particularly his mastery of the realities of the balance of power, he is imbued with the idea that he can utilize Soviet power to move the world toward communism during his lifetime.”
The CIA warned the President that Khrushchev might deliberately try to knock him off balance at Vienna. As the briefing paper noted, this was an old Khrushchev tactic: in Moscow, he had once arrived late for an American television interview, ordered the cameras turned off, and “launched into a tirade against the methods of the American press. Just when the production seemed doomed, Khrushchev told the crew to proceed and became completely charming for the interview. Throughout the program, the reporters, not Khrushchev, were on the defensive.”
The Agency also submitted the findings of more than a dozen internists, psychiatrists, and psychologists whom it had secretly convened in 1960 to assess Khrushchev’s personality. The experts had watched films of the Soviet leader greeting Indians, dozing off during ceremonies, removing his shoe and pounding his fists at the United Nations. After scrutinizing telephone intercepts, letters, speeches, and Agency debriefings of Westerners who had watched and bargained with Khrushchev, they concluded that the Soviet leader was a “chronic optimistic opportunist.”
One member of the project, a social psychiatrist named Bryant Wedge, warned Kennedy by letter that efforts to change Khrushchev’s mind about important issues were useless: “There can be only one mode of argument—to state the realities of Western positions in unmistakable terms so that miscalculation will be avoided and practical accommodation achieved. Explanation as to why U.S. positions are taken on any other than pragmatic grounds will fall on deaf ears.”
The President read transcripts of Khrushchev’s conversations with Eisenhower, Nixon, Stevenson, Humphrey, the Iowa corn grower Roswell Garst, and the United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther, whom the Chairman had told, “You are like a nightingale. It closes its eyes when it sings, and sees nothing and hears nobody but itself.” (Khrushchev would have known.)
Stevenson gave Kennedy a memo on “the way Soviet leaders see things.” The President asked Humphrey and James Reston whether logic worked with Khrushchev. Bohlen told him that the Chairman’s personality was best described by the French word “méchanceté”*: “I can’t really translate this for you. You had better ask your wife to elaborate.” Khrushchev’s chief characteristic, he said, was “an extraordinary amount of animal energy.”
Walter Lippmann told the President over lunch that he could get along with Khrushchev by being self-confident and, above all, patient: “This man moves very slowly. He cannot be hurried, and you’ve just got to make up your mind that it’s going to be a terribly long affair or it won’t work.… Three hours for Khrushchev? He hasn’t started.” He warned that Khrushchev was a “committed revolutionist.”
“He’s not a real revolutionist,” said Kennedy. “He’s never going to carry a revolution to the point where he thinks it is going to produce a war with us.”
The third great leader of the Soviet Union was born in 1894 in the village of Kalinovka, near the border between Russia and the Ukraine. The young muzhik worked as a shepherd before being sent at sixteen to the coal pits, which he later called “a working man’s Cambridge, the university of the dispossessed of Russia.” During the Civil War, he reputedly led a battalion of metalworkers to victory over a Cossack army. After the cannons died, his first wife died of scarlet fever, leaving their children, Leonid and Julia.
Khrushchev entered a miners’ school where, backed by Cheka, the infamous secret police, he was student, commissar, police informer, and interpreter of the news. He married a schoolteacher named Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk, attached himself to the Ukrainian boss Lazar Kaganovich, and followed him to the Soviet capital. Chief of the Moscow Communist Party by 1935, Khrushchev became a minor member of Stalin’s circle, mutely watching as hundreds of thousands of Soviets were murdered in the Great Purge.
He returned to Kiev in 1938 as Stalin’s viceroy to wipe out those Ukrainian enemies of the people who still survived. In the early months of World War II, he followed Red Army tanks into eastern Poland to oversee the region’s incorporation into the Soviet Union. He helped plan the disastrous assault on Kharkov and served as political adviser when the Soviets defeated the Nazis at Stalingrad and Kursk.
In 1946, during a Ukrainian famine, Khrushchev greeted a UN mission in Kiev headed by Marshall MacDuffie, one of the first Americans he had ever met, who recalled, “He stared at me quizzically and with great curiosity, like a man studying a bug on a rock.” Before the mission members left, Khrushchev surprised them by entertaining them and their wives and “sat on the porch with them until long past midnight, discussing their personal lives and plans.”
Stalin in 1949 gave Khrushchev back his old post as Moscow Party chief and made him a secretary of the Central Committee, one of the half dozen most powerful men in the Soviet Union. These were the years of Stalin’s wildest paranoia, leading to the arrest of members of the so-called Doctors’ Plot and rumors of a new purge at the highest level.
Then, in March 1953, Stalin died. As the new Party chief, Khrushchev quickly began undermining the new Premier, Georgi Malenkov, from the right. Opportunistically he grabbed for support from the military and the secret police by criticizing Malenkov’s overtures to the West, the resources being shifted from arms to consumer goods, and Malenkov’s un-Stalinist laments that nuclear war would end civilization. (All these were policies that Khrushchev later championed as soon as he took full power.)
By 1956, Malenkov was out. Khrushchev served alongside Premier Nikolai Bulganin. At a secret session of the Twentieth Party Congress, he gave the speech that gave him immortality. Delegates wept as he exposed Stalin’s transgressions, the “intolerance, brutality, and abuse of power,” policy mistakes, the “grave perversions” of Party principles, the personality cult. The CIA obtained a copy of the address, soon called the Secret Speech, and passed it to the New York Times. Stalin’s political prisoners staggered out of labor camps.
Khrushchev’s indictment of the Great Father encouraged satellite governments in Eastern Europe to liberalize. Nationalist rebellion spread through East Germany and Poland. By fall, the revolutionary danger was so great that Khrushchev flew to Warsaw, where he demanded a crackdown and crushed the Hungarian revolution, earning his reputation in the West as the “Butcher of Budapest.” By January 1957, the domestic backlash against de-Stalinization was so great that Khrushchev was compelled to declare that when it came to fighting imperialism, “we are all Stalinists.”
With Khrushchev’s blood on the water, more genuine Stalinists like Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, and Bulganin saw their opportunity. In June 1957, while Khrushchev was in Finland, they convened the Presidium and demanded his resignation.
Khrushchev refused to quit unless the verdict was ratified by the Central Committee: “You are afraid to face its members.” He knew the larger group was weighted toward officials outside Moscow who appreciated his efforts to increase their authority. His Defense Minister, Marshal Zhukov, flew in Central Committee members from the most distant corners of the Soviet Union on Army planes. His gamble succeeded.
With his talent for the political use of language, Khrushchev called the episode the Anti-Party Coup, portraying it as a crime against the Communist Party. Once reconfirmed in power, he ousted his Anti-Party foes. Marshal Zhukov’s critical role in his survival convinced him that the Defense Minister was too powerful. With rank ingratitude, he forced out Zhukov on a trumped-up charge of “Bonapartism.”
As for Bulganin, “the fool didn’t realize that they would have got rid of him the next day if they had succeeded,” Khrushchev said. “The post of Prime Minister of the Soviet Union is not intended for an idiot.” Adding Bulganin’s portfolio to his own chieftainship of the Party, Khrushchev in 1958 became supreme leader of the Soviet Union as only Lenin and Stalin had been before.
During the negotiations in early May, the Americans had proposed that the first order of business at Vienna be a nuclear test ban: then Kennedy and Khrushchev could turn to other issues like Berlin and Laos. But the Soviets insisted that the Chairman’s first concern would be Berlin.
Meeting at Potsdam in 1945, the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain divided Germany into four zones and established four-power control of Berlin. They intended this accord to prevail until the four victors agreed on a final German peace treaty and an all-German regime. This hope was dashed by the Cold War. The occupied nation was converted into opposing East and West German states: the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).
One hundred and ten miles inside the GDR, Berlin was, as Khrushchev said, a bone in the throat of East Germany and all Eastern Europe. The Western sector of the city was a staging point for anti-Soviet propaganda and espionage, a rebuff to the notion that communism produced prosperity, a holdout against Stalin’s attempt to incorporate every hectare of Eastern Europe into the Soviet sphere.
In 1948, Stalin tried to eliminate these problems with a blockade to starve the two million people of West Berlin into submission. But when the West responded with the Berlin Airlift, he was unwilling to escalate the conflict. In 1949, he declared the GDR a sovereign nation, with a Soviet-controlled government operating East Berlin, which the West refused to recognize.
Khrushchev renewed Stalin’s offensive in November 1958. Thirteen years after the war, he said, there was still no German peace treaty. If the West did not come to terms on a treaty within six months, he would sign a separate peace with the GDR, which would put the East Germans in control of access routes to West Berlin. If the East Germans blocked the routes and the West tried to crash through with tanks, the conflict could spiral into nuclear war.
The Chairman brandished his new force of missiles that could attack all of Western Europe: “We don’t even have to fire them from East Germany. We can send them from the U.S.S.R.… Our troops are not there to play cards. We mean business.”
Khrushchev’s peace treaty was designed to compel the Western powers to recognize two German states, sanctioning the division of Germany and Europe. Berlin would become a “free city.” Stripped of its twenty-five thousand Western troops, it would naturally fall into the Soviet sphere.
Such an accord would cauterize the growing exodus of refugees to the West and buttress Soviet power in Eastern Europe. A peace treaty on Soviet terms would undermine faith in other Western guarantees and demonstrate to the uncommitted nations that the Soviet bloc was indeed the rising force in the world. It would make reunification of Germany less likely, which would suit Khrushchev just fine.
Like most Soviet leaders, one of his darkest nightmares was a reunified “revanchist” Germany, a NATO member whose “Hitlerite generals” had access to nuclear weapons. The CIA profile warned that Khrushchev’s anxiety was “deadly and dangerous.… The Soviet Union lost twenty million people to Hitler—ten percent of her population. Khrushchev himself acted as political commissar at Stalingrad during the German siege. Thus a prime concern of Khrushchev is to keep Germany weak, and this desire should not be underrated.”
The United States, Britain, and France wanted a plebiscite enabling both East and West Germans to vote for an all-German government. They had little doubt that if such a vote were fairly held, the result would be a Western-oriented member of NATO.
Foster Dulles once told Mikoyan that the East German government was “a form of masked occupation” that was “wholly imposed upon” and “hated” by the Germans. Mikoyan retorted that the GDR leaders “did not spring to power by accident. They were people who are well known there.” Many had been in the Bundestag at the time of the Kaiser. The GDR had to fear “neither the Soviet government nor Soviet forces.” The two countries were “allies,” just as the United States and West Germany were allies.
Khrushchev told Humphrey in 1958, “If you try to talk about German reunification, the answer is no. There are two German states and they will have to settle reunification by themselves.” Any other kind of settlement would “come only through force. An attack on the GDR is war, and we will support our partner in that war.” The best hope for reunification was a “kind of confederation” between the GDR and the FRG.
Humphrey asked whether such a confederation would require West Germany to leave NATO. Khrushchev said “NATO would disappear anyhow.” Humphrey countered, “What about the Warsaw Pact? Will it disappear?”
“Yes, any time now.… You must remember that many of your friends, the English and French, do not really want a reunited Germany. They are afraid of German reunification. The U.S.S.R. is not afraid.* The situation isn’t like it was before the war. The U.S. and the Soviets need have no fear of a reunited Germany. Let’s test our mutual strength by economic competition. If the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. are on the same side on this Berlin issue or any other, there will be no war. Only a madman or a fool would think of such a thing.”
Despite their public rhetoric about the sacred need for German “self-determination,” most American leaders of the time, including John Kennedy, expected never to see a reunited Germany. Like Khrushchev and the Soviets they were queasy about a resurgent German nation that might draw the world into a third great global war. During the 1956 campaign, Stevenson confided to an aide that one truth an American politician could never tell the American people was that Germany would never be reunified.
Eisenhower was an exception. Having overseen Germany’s conquest and occupation, he continued to hope that it would someday be reunited through free elections and tied to NATO, ensuring that the new nation served as counterweight to Soviet power and that the German military would never again menace the world. In a prophetic letter to a friend in 1953, he predicted that West Germany’s “steady social, political, military, and economic advance” would one day make it a magnet to East Germany: “It might even become impossible for the Communists to hold the place by force.”
Through Eisenhower’s efforts, the FRG gained its sovereignty in 1955 as a NATO member. Its army was limited to twelve divisions, under the ultimate command and control of the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. The Bonn government pledged never to make or acquire atomic weapons.
This pledge did not convince Khrushchev. As Mikoyan’s son Sergo recalled, the Chairman believed that the West Germans were about to get the Bomb: “We knew that officially they would not get it, but we knew that Germany felt like a second-class power and wanted nuclear weapons so as to feel like a nation.” When NATO announced that nuclear missiles would be placed at the disposal of the Supreme Allied Commander, Khrushchev wondered whether some subordinate FRG commander might not be able to launch a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, reversing the verdict of World War II.
So deep was the Chairman’s anxiety that in March 1958 he endorsed the Rapacki Plan, put forward by the Polish Foreign Minister, Adam Rapacki, but almost certainly drafted in Moscow. It proposed a ban against atomic, hydrogen, and rocket weapons in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and both Germanys.
Eisenhower made the mistake of rejecting the offer. Since the West was not planning to arm the West Germans with nuclear weapons, it had little to lose. A nuclear-free zone in Central Europe would have meant some form of international control in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland that could have shaken the Soviet dominion.
By leaving open the possibility of nuclear weapons in West German hands, Eisenhower’s rebuff helped to provoke Khrushchev into his Berlin ultimatum of 1958. The President replied by reinforcing American troops in Central Europe enough to prevent an easy seizure of Berlin by East German guards. Despite congressional demands, he refused to mobilize U.S. armed forces and increase the defense budget. One purpose of “Khrushchev’s manufactured crisis,” he said, was to “frighten free populations and governments into unnecessary and debilitating spending sprees.”
The Chairman’s deadline came and went. At Camp David, Eisenhower conceded to Khrushchev that Berlin’s status was “abnormal.” He agreed to discuss Western concessions to ease the problem, such as thinning out Western forces in Berlin and scaling down espionage and propaganda. This negotiation was halted by the collapse of the Paris summit.
During the 1960 campaign, Khrushchev’s foreign policy advisers advised him to go easy on Berlin because otherwise it would force Nixon and Kennedy to outbid each other with his toughness. But at the Kremlin celebration of New Year’s 1961, Khrushchev told the West German Ambassador, Hans Kroll, that the question must be “solved” within the year.
Kennedy’s own statesmanlike silence on Berlin during the 1960 campaign meant that, unlike Cuba, he came to office unencumbered by campaign promises on the subject. But it also meant he had to concoct a policy almost from scratch. Khrushchev, Adenauer, and other leaders would scrutinize each of his utterances on Berlin and Germany far more intensely than if he had come to office with a well-articulated position on the issue.
The President knew that, of all his foreign problems, Berlin had the greatest immediate danger of forcing a choice between “holocaust and humiliation.” He did not ever wish to have to make such a choice—certainly not during his first months in office, before he had closely studied the issue and before he had earned the respect of the Soviet Union, the American people, and the remainder of the West as a world leader.
Kennedy thus tried to sweep the issue under the rug. In January, he instructed Thompson to ask Khrushchev for time to prepare his position. In his first State of the Union message, despite his extended treatment of other world problems like the Congo, Cuba, and Laos, the President did not once mention Berlin. Asked by a reporter about the omission, he lamely explained that it was “very difficult to name every area” of trouble. For the next four months he did not once speak the word Berlin in public, as if his continued silence might encourage Khrushchev to wave the problem away.*
In February, Thompson reminded him that West Germany would hold parliamentary elections in September. If Kennedy informed Khrushchev that “real progress” on the Berlin problem “could be made after the German elections,” the Chairman might be “disposed not to bring matters to a head before that event.” Kennedy could resume the Eisenhower policy by scheduling a September meeting of Soviet and Western foreign ministers, which would lead if successful to a summit meeting on Berlin.
Thompson warned that unless the President took the bull by the horns, Khrushchev would “almost certainly proceed with his separate peace treaty” and attempt the “gradual strangulation of Berlin.” This would be “a highly dangerous situation, and one which could get out of control.”
Kennedy ignored Thompson’s excellent advice. Before the Ambassador called on Khrushchev in Novosibirsk in March, the President told him not to mention Germany and Berlin. When Khrushchev inevitably raised the matter, Thompson replied, as instructed, that Kennedy found it “difficult to understand” why the Soviets found it necessary to question a situation with which, “despite obvious disadvantages to both sides, we have managed to live for many years.”
As further instructed, Thompson warned that if Khrushchev created a new Berlin crisis, he would be “surprised at the unanimity with which the American people will support a firm governmental policy.… If there is anything which will bring about a massive increase in U.S. arms expenditures of the type which took place at the time of the Korean War, it would be the conviction that the Soviets indeed are attempting to force us out of Berlin by utilizing geographic advantages which the Soviets and East Germans admittedly enjoy.”
After the Novosibirsk meeting, Thompson cabled a warning to Kennedy: “All my diplomatic colleagues … consider that in the absence of negotiations, Khrushchev will sign a separate treaty with East Germany and precipitate a Berlin crisis this year.” The Chairman, he said, was disturbed by the fact that Kennedy had shown “greater militancy” than Eisenhower, which gave support to “Chinese arguments that accommodation between East and West is impossible.”
Thompson suggested that the President “hold out the prospect of negotiations, which would at minimum enable Khrushchev to save face somewhat and maintain his position.… If we expect the Soviets to leave the Berlin problem as it is, then we must at least expect the East Germans to seal off the sector boundary in order to stop what they must consider the intolerable continuation of the refugee flow through Berlin.”
Instead, Kennedy persisted in his fantasy that Khrushchev might be willing to live with the problem. As Lippmann recalled, before he himself went to see the Chairman in April, an “American authority” told him, “See if you can find out whether he wouldn’t at least be willing to … leave everything where it is for, say, five years. In five years, we’ll all be older and wiser … and maybe then we can negotiate.” When Lippmann made the suggestion, Khrushchev looked at him as if he were insane.
If Khrushchev did not gain some sort of satisfaction on Berlin soon, he risked becoming a laughingstock. As his enemies bitterly noted, he had dropped his 1958 Berlin ultimatum after gaining Eisenhower’s promise to negotiate, which proved hollow. He had politely granted Kennedy’s request for time to form his Berlin position. In return, Kennedy had merely hinted that Khrushchev should be a gentleman and forget the whole matter.
The Chairman rightly felt that had it not been for his 1958 Berlin demands, Eisenhower would never have agreed to negotiate about the city. Khrushchev knew that the vulnerable position of the West in Berlin gave him a rare chance to win the Western powers’ attention and force them to bargain about other issues. Experience had shown him that the Americans were inclined to rest on their sense of nuclear and economic superiority unless pressured: “If I go to a cathedral and pray for peace, nobody listens. But if I go with two bombs, they will.”
For Khrushchev, removing the Berlin “cancer” from Eastern Europe and codifying the permanent division of Germany would stabilize the western frontier of the Soviet empire. A new Berlin crisis that ended in triumph would give him a new instance with which to claim that the tide was turning in favor of communism. It would serve his old aim of fracturing NATO and faith in American guarantees. It would show Soviet generals that Khrushchev had not gone soft on the West.
By May 1961, he had evidently concluded that Kennedy could be pushed on Berlin. He knew that world leaders did not duck issues in public and ask for stand-still agreements in private out of strength. The Bay of Pigs and Laos had given credence to those Khrushchev advisers who argued that Kennedy was enraptured by his liberal campaign rhetoric and immobilized by intellectual advisers when it came time to use force.
The Chairman knew that a primary reason for the President’s failure to save the Bay of Pigs invasion had been fear of retaliation against Berlin. This suggested that Kennedy had little stomach to fulfill American guarantees on Berlin requiring use of nuclear weapons.
In the wake of his Cuba failure, the President was on the defensive. If Khrushchev treated him with kid gloves at Vienna, his rivals would chide him for forsaking a splendid opportunity to exploit Kennedy’s misery. After the Eisenhower experience, the Chairman was eager to show that he was not subject to some kind of lovesickness that made him weak at the knees when in the presence of an American President.
More urgent crises in the Congo, Cuba, and Laos and domestic problems had kept Kennedy from convening a full-dress review of Germany and Berlin. In March, he had consulted Dean Acheson, the hawkish veteran of the Berlin Blockade, who told him that no agreement was possible that would not “open the way to early Western elimination from Berlin.”
That same month, the administration publicly renounced the concessions that Eisenhower had made and evidently planned to make on Berlin at the Paris summit. Averell Harriman told the press, “All discussion on Berlin must begin from the start.”
Allan Lightner, U.S. Minister in West Berlin, endorsed a further hard line. He proposed by cable that Kennedy “tell Khrushchev in blunt language” at Vienna that the “Soviets should keep their hands off Berlin”: “Any indication that the President is willing to discuss interim solutions, compromises, or a modus vivendi if the Soviets sign a separate peace treaty would reduce the impact of warning Khrushchev of dire consequences of his miscalculating our resolve.”
Thompson urged Kennedy to offer something to Khrushchev: “We owe it to ourselves and to the world to make every possible effort to see if some way around the present impasse can be achieved.… If we hope to arrive at a peaceful solution, some formula must be found which would enable both sides to save face. This is difficult but not impossible. This is an area it seems to me that the President might most usefully explore with Khrushchev in private, stating frankly what his purpose is.” Otherwise Berlin would lead to “a really major crisis.” War would “hang in the balance.”
Bundy wrote the President, “At one extreme are those who feel that the central Soviet purpose is to drive us out of Berlin and destroy the European Alliance as a consequence. On the other extreme are those who feel that if we think in terms of accommodation, we should be able to avoid a real crisis.… The one thing which must be avoided … is any conclusion that the United States is feeble on Berlin itself.… We ourselves might indeed have new proposals at a later time.”
Rusk suggested that Kennedy ask Khrushchev “what the Soviets really find so unsatisfactory” in the present situation. Bundy agreed: “There is a chance that you might draw him into some clearer statement of their purposes here. It’s not a very good chance, though, because he will probably be cautious in tipping his hand, just as you must be.” Robert Kennedy insisted to Georgi Bolshakov that the United States was “committed on Berlin.”
On Saturday night, May 27, through a rainstorm, the President and Lem Billings flew on Air Force One for Kennedy’s first stay in Hyannis Port as President. Waiting for his son, Joseph Kennedy said, “He’s the President of the United States! You’d think he could at least order somebody to make a telephone call and tell his family what goddamn time he’ll be home!” As a practical joke, he had spread pictures of voluptuous women all over the President’s bedroom.
The next morning, a cold wind and fog knifed across Nantucket Sound. The President hobbled out of his father’s house on crutches, wrapped himself in a gray Navy blanket, and sat on a lawn chair to read more Vienna briefing papers. The pain in his back was growing worse.
Cruising with Billings on his father’s yacht Marlin, he complained, “I don’t have any gift for Khrushchev.” As Billings later recalled, when choosing presents for foreign leaders, the President “always wanted to give Americana. I mean everything had to be historical and with some reason. He didn’t just give out stupid Steuben glass like Eisenhower did.”
Billings thought of Kennedy’s own new replica of the U.S.S. Constitution. When Kennedy had first seen it, he was deterred by the price, about five hundred dollars: “Maybe Dad will buy it for my birthday.” Billings had passed the word to the patriarch. Now the President realized that Old Ironsides was the ideal gift for Khrushchev at Vienna, representing the United States in 1812: “a young republic—strong, youthful, in love with freedom—exactly the kind of message I want to send Russia.” As Billings recalled, “He hated to give it up, it was something he adored,” but “there was no time to find anything as appropriate.”
Before leaving Hyannis on Monday afternoon, Kennedy thrust his hands into his pockets and sheepishly told his father that he did not have “a cent of money.” Joseph Kennedy sent his secretary upstairs for a packet of large bills. The President said, “I’ll get this back to you, Dad.” Watching him walk down the front steps of the house, the father muttered, “That’ll be the day.”
It was Kennedy’s forty-fourth birthday. That evening he attended a hundred-dollar-a-plate celebration by five thousand Massachusetts Democrats in the Boston Armory, festooned in green, red, white, and blue. Kennedy’s aides had asked to let him speak early so that he could get a good night’s rest. After frantic negotiations, he was moved up to thirteenth place on the schedule—after party hacks, the Kennedy family priest Richard Cardinal Cushing, and Robert Frost, who famously urged the guest of honor to be “more Irish than Harvard” in Vienna.
When the President rose to speak, his ovation-was hardly-greater than that for the sheriff of Middlesex County, who was under indictment and whose firm had catered the dismal meal. Kennedy declared that when he went to Vienna, he would go “as the leader of the greatest revolutionary country on earth.”
In 1960, he had often told of how Samuel Adams had threatened the British colonial governor with revolution, later writing, “It was then I fancied that I saw his knees tremble.” This time Kennedy flubbed the tale by referring to “John Quincy Adams.” None of the pols seemed to notice. He went on, “Our knees do not tremble at the word revolution. We believe in it. We believe in the progress of mankind.”
Driving to the armory, he had spotted the statue of the Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and sent a state trooper back to copy the words on its base, which he now read aloud: “‘I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.’”
Khrushchev was gliding toward Vienna on a five-car train with his wife, Anatoly Dobrynin, Gromyko, Menshikov, and the Adzhubeis. Thousands in Kiev cheered their old viceroy. In Bratislava, the Chairman told a huge crowd that while the Soviet Union was “always in favor of relaxing international tensions,” he did not want to “anticipate the results of this meeting.”
Before Khrushchev left Moscow, he had invited Thompson to join him at that evening’s performance of the American ice-skating troupe, the Ice Capades, at the Lenin Sports Palace. The Ambassador had not seen Khrushchev in private since Novosibirsk. When he and Jane arrived at the stadium, the Chairman was sitting in his box with his son Sergei and daughter Yelena. At intermission, he took them into an adjoining salon for dinner.
Khrushchev said he had “seen enough ice shows” in his life. He had only come here tonight as an “excuse” to discuss the Vienna meeting. He bluntly warned Thompson that if he and Kennedy reached no agreement on Berlin, he would sign a separate peace treaty after the September German elections and his October Party Congress. He knew this act would “bring a period of great tension.”
Thompson replied with “utmost seriousness” that Khrushchev must understand the American position: If force were used to block access to Berlin, it would be met with force. Khrushchev replied that “only a madman” would want war, but if the Americans wanted war they would get it.
Kennedy flew to New York, where he met with the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, who had thought him cool toward Israel and wondered whether the President had inherited his father’s anti-Semitism. On Tuesday night, May 30, Kennedy joined Jacqueline aboard Air Force One at Idlewild Airport. Before the plane reached the North Atlantic, the couple slipped into the two bunk beds in the stateroom behind the pilot’s cabin.
Worried that the summit would create unrealistic expectations, the President had asked Salinger to deprecate the chances for success. Privately Georgi Bolshakov’s assurances had led him to assume that Khrushchev was ready to deal on a test ban. Whatever went badly in Vienna would be overlooked if the summit produced what would be the first major nuclear agreement between the United States and Soviet Union. A test ban would help Kennedy to overcome the setbacks of his first spring in office and grant him considerable new world stature.
Robert Kennedy later recalled that he and his brother were “reasonably hopeful about what would happen” at Vienna on nuclear testing. They did not know that Bolshakov’s insistence that Khrushchev was ready to compromise was, at best, premature or, at worst, a deliberate deception to entice the President to a summit that might not otherwise be in Kennedy’s interest.
*Told the story years later, Eisenhower’s foreign policy aide, Andrew Goodpaster, presumed that Nixon would have conferred with the Secretary of State and the President before allowing such a message to be sent in his name.
*Gromyko’s immediate predecessor was Dimitri Shepilov, a young man in a hurry whom Khrushchev had appointed Foreign Minister to replace Molotov in 1956. Shepilov made the mistake of choosing the losing side and betraying his patron during the Anti-Party Coup.
*Khrushchev may have removed Molotov from Mongolia because Chinese leaders across the border took every opportunity to lavish praise on Molotov as Stalin’s pupil and rightful heir and hence show contempt for their antagonist Khrushchev. The Chairman heard rumors of Chinese conspiracies with Molotov and other enemies against him. He may have felt that Molotov would be less dangerous in Vienna, where there were fewer chances to rub shoulders with high-level Chinese.
*Johnson served as chairman of the President’s new council on space.
*The shelters would strengthen his leverage not only against Khrushchev but also against Nelson Rockefeller, the nation’s most vocal champion of a major shelter program, who, as Sorensen recalled, the President felt was “likely to be his opponent in 1964.”
*Best translated as a sort of wicked mischievousness.
*With his determination never to concede any form of Soviet weakness, Khrushchev was as unwilling to confess anxiety about a reunified, rearmed Germany in NATO as he was Soviet weaknesses in nuclear weapons, space, farming, and economic productivity.
*Even in two communiqués issued jointly by the President and the West German foreign minister and Chancellor after White House meetings in February and April, Berlin was buried amid lists of other foreign policy problems that Kennedy was said to have discussed with the Germans.