“Not as a Cripple”
On Wednesday morning, May 31, Air Force One taxied to a stop at Orly Field in Paris. Inside the plane, Kennedy pulled up his tie knot and brushed his hair. As drums rolled, he stepped out the forward hatch, followed by Jacqueline, and gave his customary choppy wave. Towering at the foot of the stairs, Charles de Gaulle paid him the compliment of employing his rarely used English: “Have you made a good aerial voyage?”
Kennedy toyed with the button on his jacket and mistakenly walked past the waiting color guard. De Gaulle grasped his arm, motioning him to stand still and accept a salute. An American diplomat translated Kennedy’s arrival statement into arcane, stilted French. A French official muttered, “Mon Dieu, the translator is playing Molière!” Later, Kennedy was philosophical: “You can’t crucify somebody for not being as witty as I might be, but we won’t use him again.”
Waiting in the Orly reception room was Rose Kennedy, in Paris for her annual survey of the fashion houses. She thought her son “looked a little surprised when he spotted me.” Lem Billings recalled that Kennedy was “terribly sensitive about his friends and particularly his family going on those trips. He was a new young President who had won a very close election.… But there wasn’t anything he could do about it because Mrs. Kennedy was determined to be in on everything.”
From the airport, fifty black Citroëns escorted by the mounted, saber-armed Garde Républicaine swept past a million cheering Parisians chanting “Kenn-a-dee!” and “Zhack-ee!” Dave Powers opened his car window and called out, “Commen-tally vous, pal?”
At the Quai d’Orsay, the President was shown into the blue-gray, silk-paneled bedroom of Louis XVI, his back in excruciating pain. He stripped off his clothes and with a grateful moan lowered himself into a huge golden tub of steaming water: “God, we ought to have a tub like this in the White House.” Powers told him that if he played his cards right with de Gaulle, he might take it home as a “souvenir.”
Before lunch, the President was driven to the Élysée Palace. He had long been fascinated by de Gaulle, one of the last great figures of World War II, who had been summoned to rescue France from the chaos of the Fourth Republic. Jacqueline had once read him passages from the General’s memoirs evoking de Gaulle’s image of France, which Kennedy used in speeches. Before leaving for Paris, Kennedy had memorized phrases from de Gaulle to quote during their meetings and read briefing papers on the General’s efforts to assert French independence from NATO.
The President also read a memo that Bundy had requested from the Harvard political scientist Nicholas Wahl, who had met with de Gaulle half a dozen times: “Even when there is a dialogue, one usually emerges with the impression that it has all been carefully ‘managed’ by de Gaulle from the beginning.… He often uses the third person to refer to himself, which is more his own historian speaking than the megalomaniac, the latter not being completely absent.”
De Gaulle had been fighting as a captain on the Western front for three years when Kennedy was born in 1917. He was almost as determined as the Soviets not to tolerate a rearmed Germany. Especially after the Bay of Pigs, he thought Kennedy “somewhat fumbling and overeager” and worried that the “young man” might not be resolute on Berlin.
In an effort to dampen the French President’s anxieties and ensure Western unity before the Khrushchev summit, Kennedy began by citing Khrushchev’s recent harangues to Thompson about a German peace treaty. The Allies, he said, had two options: refuse to bargain, because Western rights in Berlin were nonnegotiable, or give the “appearance of negotiation” as Eisenhower had done, by offering minor concessions.
In this palace a year before, de Gaulle had told Eisenhower that the “entire Berlin problem” came down to whether or not the Soviets wanted détente. Now he wearily reminded Kennedy that Khrushchev had been setting deadlines for two and a half years. If the Chairman planned to go to war over Berlin, he would have done so already. Kennedy said the problem was whether Khrushchev really believed in the Western commitment: even President de Gaulle had questioned whether the United States would defend Paris if it meant annihilating New York.
De Gaulle advised him to remind Khrushchev that it was the Soviets, not the West, who wanted a change. The Chairman must be made to understand that the first moment he used force against the West in Berlin, he would have general war: “That is the last thing he wants.”
Jacqueline had still not recovered from John, Jr.,’s difficult birth six months before, but a week at Glen Ora had allowed her to sleep and build strength. Speaking with her during luncheon in French about Louis XVI, the Due d’Angoulême, and the later Bourbons, de Gaulle leaned across the table and told Kennedy that his wife knew more history than most Frenchwomen.
Gesturing at Bundy, he asked, “Qui est ce jeune homme?” She said that he was a brilliant Harvard professor who now ran the President’s national security staff. De Gaulle slowly said something about Harvard to Bundy as if he were speaking to someone who did not know the language. Bundy responded in fluent French. Jacqueline thought, Score one for our side.
After lunch, Kennedy returned to the Berlin problem. Existing Allied military plans assumed that any Soviet probe of Western intentions would be very limited. But what if a brigade or division was sent in? De Gaulle recommended that if access was blocked, it be restored with a new Berlin airlift. If a Western plane was downed, there would be no ambiguity. Russia was also vulnerable to economic retaliation. The Western position in Berlin was not so weak as people thought.
Kennedy asked de Gaulle to increase the French military presence in Laos. The General replied that Laos and its neighbors were “fictitious” countries, their terrain good for neither Western troops nor Western politics. Neutralization was the best solution: “The more you become involved out there against communism, the more the Communists will appear as the champions of national independence, and the more support they will receive, if only from despair.… You will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire, however much you spend in men and money.”
That night, while dressing for de Gaulle’s white-tie dinner at the Élysée, Salinger was telephoned by O’Donnell: Rusk would not be arriving in Paris tomorrow as scheduled “because of the situation in the Dominican Republic.” Trujillo had been murdered. As Salinger recalled, O’Donnell said this “so matter-of-factly” that he presumed that the news had already been broken. At the Hotel Crillon, therefore, Salinger announced that Rusk would be delayed by “the assassination of General Trujillo.”
After calling in the story, newsmen wondered how the United States had known so quickly of Trujillo’s death, which was still being denied in the Caribbean; was the CIA involved? Salinger confessed his mistake to the President, whom he found “never angrier with me than at that moment.” Rusk called Salinger from Washington: “Are you out of your mind?”
Kennedy almost surely knew that the CIA had smuggled guns into the Dominican Republic for Trujillo’s murder before backing off after the Bay of Pigs. Might Salinger’s mistake now cause reporters to link Kennedy to American plotting against Trujillo? The President may have worried that on the eve of the summit, the story might lead to revelations of American assassination efforts against Castro.
That evening Salinger learned that Trujillo’s death had been confirmed. Overjoyed, he went out drinking and did not return to bed until six the next morning.
Despite Kennedy’s gracious references to French influence “which stretches around the globe” and its place as “America’s oldest friend,” de Gaulle remained bent on making his country more independent and influential in world politics. On Thursday, he told Kennedy that while France would not disrupt NATO during a Berlin crisis, he must expect it to chart its own course thereafter.
The President replied with the standard American position that if the Russians attacked Western Europe, he would retaliate with nuclear weapons. If European nations built separate defense establishments, those without the Bomb might be forced into resentment and neutralism.
When Kennedy said that he regarded European and American defense as the same, de Gaulle replied, “Since you say so, Mr. President, I believe you,” but asked how anyone could be certain. The Soviet Union had perhaps “ten times the killing power of France,” but she might not attack if she knew that France could “tear off an arm” of Russia.
The General that night gave his grand dinner for the Americans in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, followed by a ballet and fireworks. Earlier that day Jacqueline had toured Josephine Bonaparte’s home with the French Minister of Culture, André Malraux. She did not object when Malraux said that her husband spoke French “with a bad Cuban accent.” Kennedy was proud of his wife’s exuberant reception everywhere in Paris. He told aides, “De Gaulle and I are hitting it off all right, probably because I have such a charming wife.” Watching the General and Jacqueline at Versailles, he murmured, “God, she’s really laying it on, isn’t she?”
Before the two leaders finished their talks on Friday, Kennedy said, “You’ve studied being head of a country for fifty years. Have you found out anything I should know?” De Gaulle told him not to pay too much attention to advisers or inherited policies; what counted for every man was his own judgment.
At the end of Kennedy’s visit, the General uttered a compliment that he expected the Americans to publicize: “I have more confidence in your country now.” Kennedy later told friends that de Gaulle cared only for his country’s “selfish” interests but that he was grateful for the General’s concealment of their differences over Berlin, Laos, and NATO.
He took a quiet Friday dinner at the Quai d’Orsay with Rusk, Bundy, Sorensen, Thompson, Bohlen, and Kohler. Harriman had arrived from Geneva with a late report on the deadlocked talks on Laos. He advised the President to speak gently with Khrushchev about how they both saw the world: “Go in and relax and take it easy and be humorous and funny and open.”
On Saturday morning, June 3, Air Force One moved away from the Orly terminal. A Secret Service man cried out, “Stop that plane!” Onto the field careened a station wagon carrying Mrs. Kennedy’s maid, social secretary, and luggage, which were put aboard the aircraft. During the flight to Vienna, the President gave his briefing papers one more look. Over rolls and orange juice, he consulted with Thompson, who gave him a final warning: “Avoid ideology, because Khrushchev will talk circles around you.”
Kennedy’s back was still contorted with pain. His doctors had told him that if he must go to Europe, he should use crutches. He had shaken his head: he was “simply not” going to meet Khrushchev “as a cripple.” As a Congressman in 1949, Kennedy himself had charged that the Kurile Islands and other strategic points had been “given” to Stalin by a “sick” Roosevelt at Yalta. He wanted no such talk about his performance at Vienna.
On the day of Kennedy’s inauguration, Admiral Arthur Radford, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had arrived early for an F Street Club luncheon being given for Eisenhower after the ceremonies. Watching the new President deliver his speech on television, Radford was startled to note that although Kennedy was standing without coat or hat in frigid weather, heavy beads of perspiration were rolling down his forehead.
“He’s all hopped up!” called out General Howard Snyder, the retiring White House physician. Privy to FBI and Secret Service information that Eisenhower had also seen, Snyder told Radford that Kennedy was “prescribed a shot of cortisone every morning to keep him in good operating condition. Obviously this morning he was given two because of the unusual rigors he must endure, and the brow sweating is the result of the extra dose.”
Snyder added that people dependent on cortisone moved from a high to a low when the medicine’s effect wore off: “I hate to think of what might happen to the country if Kennedy is required at three A.M. to make a decision affecting the national security.”
In June 1960, the co-chairman of Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign, India Edwards, had told reporters that Kennedy had Addison’s disease: “If it weren’t for cortisone,” he “wouldn’t be alive.” Sorensen deflected the charge by saying, “I don’t know that he is on anything any more than you and I are on.”
That fall burglars tried to break into the offices of both of Kennedy’s New York doctors. They were almost surely looking for his medical records, which had been wisely filed under a different name. The burglars were not the only ones interested in Kennedy’s health; William Casey, the New York Republican who twenty years later ran the CIA for Ronald Reagan, investigated the subject for the Nixon campaign.*
Serious people who raised the issue of Kennedy’s health worried that it might affect his decision-making on national security. Raymond Moley of Newsweek warned Nixon after the 1960 election that the new President might suffer “palpable mental lapses” that could usher in “a serious crisis. Perhaps you know all or more than I do, but with Bill Casey I went into it thoroughly. And it is frightening. There are several contingencies which may well mean a one-term Presidency—even the succession of Johnson.”
Long before such cases as Woodrow Wilson’s stroke and Roosevelt’s terminal weariness at Yalta, historians have tried to assess the impact of physical disability on political decision-making. The chief problem with such retrospective diagnosis is the lack of reliable and comprehensive information. In the absence of a Lord Moran, the private physician to Churchill who recorded his patient’s daily condition and treatment, we shall probably never know the exact state of Kennedy’s health as he flew to Vienna.
Aside from his bad back, the President’s most enduring problem was Addison’s disease, which impairs the adrenal glands and weakens the body. Once almost always fatal, by the time Kennedy’s case was diagnosed in 1947, the illness was treated by pellets of corticosteroid hormones implanted in the patient’s thigh, which extended life expectancy to five or ten years. By 1953, Kennedy began using a new orally administered cortisone, which promised a normal life span.
Nonetheless he knew that the treatment was not foolproof and that Addison’s rendered one more prone to infection, especially during surgery. After his 1954 spinal fusion operation, he was given the last rites of the Catholic church. Awareness of his vulnerability had much to do with his private fascination with men dying young, the incessant inquisition about what was the best way to die, the insistence on treating each day as if it were his last.
He hated the bloating effect of the cortisone treatment. Looking in a mirror, he said, “This is not my face.” Cortisone could also inflate the user’s stamina, libido, and sense of well-being, causing the patient’s mood to oscillate.
Replying to rumors, Kennedy’s managers declared that he did not have Addison’s disease, reasoning that the “classic” form of the illness came from tuberculosis. Dr. Travell issued a statement which said that Kennedy’s adrenal glands “do function” but did not mention that the reason was cortisone. The cover-up succeeded, but it denied Americans the knowledge that they were electing a President whose treatment for a chronic illness might affect his decision-making and negotiation skills and, conceivably, his survival.*
Superimposed upon Kennedy’s history of Addison’s disease was his ancient back problem. He once told Billings that he would trade all his political successes and all his money “just to be out of pain.” One of his doctors thought that he was “born with an unstable back,” perhaps aggravated by football. He badly injured his back when the PT-109 was split in half by a Japanese destroyer. He submitted to a life-threatening spinal fusion operation because he “couldn’t take any more pain.”
Still suffering, he began seeing Dr. Travell, one of the first physicians to treat muscular disorders with injections of the anesthetic procaine. Jacqueline later recalled that the treatments “changed Jack’s life.” In 1960, he asked Travell not to leave the United States for the duration of the campaign.
During his visit to Paris, the President spent almost every spare moment soaking in his golden bathtub at the Quai d’Orsay. Travell injected him with procaine two or three times a day. This distressed the White House physician Admiral George Burkley, an Eisenhower holdover. Burkley wished that Kennedy would use the more conventional approach of strengthening his back through exercise and physical therapy. Once numbness from procaine wore off, the pain returned, requiring larger doses. Burkley feared that the President might next require narcotics.
There were more grounds for this worry than Burkley may have known. Kennedy was also being treated by an eccentric known in Manhattan café society as “Doctor Feelgood” for boosting his patients’ mood and stamina with what he called “vitamin and enzyme shots.” The doctor’s syringes may have contained vitamins and enzymes but they also contained amphetamines, steroids, hormones, and animal organ cells, which he used to keep celebrity clients such as Eddie Fisher, Truman Capote, Alan Jay Lerner, and Tennessee Williams coming back. At least one patient later died of what the New York medical examiner called “acute amphetamine poisoning.”
Max Jacobson was a German-Jewish refugee who emigrated to the United States in 1936. With his thick dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and fingernails stained black with chemicals, he looked like a mad scientist. He experimented in his East Side office and a Long Island shack with magnets, precious stones, boiling vials, and cauldrons, professing to search for a cure for multiple sclerosis. Drawn to famous names, he claimed to have invented the world’s first laser microscope and that a “completely insane” partner had absconded with the device.
Eddie Fisher recalled that Jacobson “prided himself on being able to diagnose his patients at a glance, and his injections were designed to treat them for fatigue, nervous tension, vitamin deficiencies, or anything else he thought was wrong with them.” After injecting the singer backstage, the doctor would boom, “Anybody else? You, ja? You want it in the arm or the ass?” Sometimes he injected patients in the solar plexus, the back of the neck, and the spinal column. Using oranges, he also showed them how to inject themselves.
Kennedy was evidently referred to Jacobson in September 1960 by his friend Charles Spalding, who was concerned about his exhaustion from campaigning. By his own account, Jacobson saw Kennedy at the White House, Palm Beach, New York, and Hyannis Port, where Joseph Kennedy’s chauffeur recalled being told, “Dr. Jacobson’s here.… Do you want a vitamin shot?”
Another of the President’s doctors later said he warned him to stop seeing Jacobson: “I said that if I ever heard he took another shot, I’d make sure it was known. No President with his finger on the red button has any business taking stuff like that.” But as late as 1963, Jacobson was still close enough to Kennedy to be photographed with him in sport clothes in Palm Beach.
William Manchester recorded in his 1983 volume One Brief Shining Moment that after the President arrived in Paris, while his golden bathtub was being filled, he “gave himself a novocaine injection.” But if the injection was one of Travell’s prescriptions, Kennedy would almost certainly have summoned her from her nearby room to administer it. This suggests that he may have actually been injecting himself with one of Jacobsen’s amphetamine formulas.
This explanation is not incompatible with Jacobson’s own account. In an unpublished autobiography, he recorded that he did not arrive in Paris until later that day. He recalled being brought that evening to Kennedy’s suite, where he injected him once to give him “a restful night” and again the next morning, before the talks with de Gaulle resumed. By Jacobson’s account, he flew on with the President to Vienna on Air Force One to provide more treatments during the summit with Khrushchev. As Mrs. Jacobson said years later, “The last thing Kennedy wanted the Russians to know was that he was in anything but the best of health.”
The President’s resort to the New York doctor was not quite as bizarre as it may at first seem. In late May 1961, he found himself locked into a summit with Khrushchev, doubled over with pain, and surrounded by advisers admonishing him to extinguish any suspicion Khrushchev had that he might be soft or indecisive on Berlin or other matters. He was facing the possibility that when he confronted the Chairman he would be on crutches and exhausted from pain—especially after three densely packed days with de Gaulle in Paris.
Kennedy’s long medical history had instilled in him roughly the same lack of awe for medical experts as he held for the political experts who had told him he had no chance to win the Senate in 1952 or the Presidency in 1960. He knew that more orthodox doctors looked askance at Travell’s procaine injections, but as far as he was concerned she had succeeded where the so-called experts had failed.
He had not found Jacobson in some back alley. His brother-in-law Stanislas Radziwill, Charles Spalding, and other respectable friends were among the doctor’s clientele. The President evidently felt that if Jacobson was able to put him in fighting condition for Paris and Vienna, he would have done what his other doctors could not. Better to take whatever was in Jacobson’s shots and ask questions later. Kennedy reputedly said, “I don’t care if it’s horse piss. It works.”
The President’s use of mutually resentful doctors was perfectly matched to the way he sought political advice. He preferred to assign a problem to several advisers and let them compete. Thus he avoided being on what he called the “leading strings” of a single aide.
The problem with this was that medicine was not the same thing as politics. Now that Kennedy was President, he should have been vastly more careful in pursuing his medical experimentation than he had been as a Senator. The stakes now were not one political career but literally the fate of the world.
At no time during the European trip was a single doctor supervising Kennedy’s entire medical treatment. No one was in overall charge to anticipate or deal with the danger that an interaction of cortisone, procaine, amphetamines, or whatever else Jacobson had in his syringe could cause the President to behave at Vienna in a way that could have had dire consequences.
Even in small doses, amphetamines cause side effects such as nervousness, garrulousness, impaired judgment, overconfidence, and, when the drug wears off, depression. What if Kennedy should display these qualities in Vienna, when Khrushchev would be scrutinizing every aspect of his behavior, assessing his capacity, mettle, and judgment?
On Friday afternoon, Khrushchev’s train had reached the Austrian border, where it was coupled to an Austrian locomotive for its last forty miles to Vienna, arriving at five o’clock. Among the welcoming committee at the Vienna station was the Chairman’s enemy Molotov, smiling sardonically. With no conviction, Khrushchev told him, “We must get together.” The old rival replied, “Nice weather we’re having.”
Unbeknownst to both men, the CIA in 1961 thought Molotov might be discouraged enough about his prospects in the Soviet Union to accept a million dollars, funneled through an American magazine, to defect to the West or at least submit to a debriefing. An offer was being prepared.
Scattered crowds lined the streets as Khrushchev rode by in an open car to the presidential palace, where he called on the Austrian chief of state, Adolf Schärf. Then he rode on to the Soviet Embassy residence, equipped with swimming pool and tennis courts. His aides were disturbed by the inflexibility about Berlin that had emerged from Kennedy’s talks with de Gaulle in Paris: “A militaristic exercise and poor preparation for the meeting here.”
It was raining on Saturday morning when Air Force One landed at ten-fifty. Placards cried, GIVE ’EM HELL, JACK! … HELP BERLIN … LIFT THE IRON CURTAIN … INNOCENTS ABROAD SAY HOWDY. Austrians handed out leaflets saying, “Mr. Kennedy, Europe does not forget Yalta.”
Nervous that the President would attract more enthusiastic throngs, the Soviets had tried to suggest no parades for either Kennedy or Khrushchev. The Americans had responded by adding more limousines and flags. As in other cities, the local CIA station worked overtime to make sure that the President’s welcome was warm.
As the Kennedys rode through the rains to the presidential palace and on to the American residence, Lem Billings saw “more people than I had ever seen before, all of them roaring with enthusiasm.” He later recalled that Kennedy’s “attitude toward great crowds was always the same. The bigger the crowd, the greater was his pleasure.… Obviously the Austrians wanted to show their preference for the President of the United States over the Premier of Russia.”
A chill wind shook the pines and rattled windows as the President and First Lady walked into the grim stone American residence. Surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and police dogs wearing wire-mesh muzzles, the mansion had once belonged to a Jewish merchant driven out by the Nazis. During the war, it served as a local headquarters for Hitler’s SS.
Kennedy paced the upstairs hallways. He wondered whether Khrushchev would remember meeting him at the Foreign Relations Committee tea in 1959. According to Jacobson, the President summoned him and said, “Khrushchev is supposedly on his way. You’d better give me something for my back.”
At 12:45 P.M., Kennedy and his aides heard the ZIL limousine crunching up the circular gravel driveway. He stepped out onto the red-carpeted front steps. When the black car halted, Khrushchev swung out his short legs and stood below the President. Two medals were pinned to his breast and lapel.
Constrained by a tight corset to keep his back straight, Kennedy leaned stiffly forward, wearing a fixed smile. Thrusting out his hand, he looked Khrushchev in the eye and said in his best Boston street manner, “How are you? Glad to see you.” Looking up with a slightly patronizing upturn of the lips, Khrushchev shook Kennedy’s hand and then started up the stairs.
Photographers shouted, “Another handshake!” Kennedy told his interpreter, “Say to the Chairman that it is all right to shake hands if it is all right with him.” After a second handshake, the President stepped backward. Menshikov followed and stamped on Dean Rusk’s foot, apologizing profusely.
His mouth a straight line, Kennedy thrust his hands into his coat pockets and looked Khrushchev up and down. Reporters scribbled fiercely in their notebooks. Later he told O’Donnell, “After all the studying and talking I’ve done on him in the last few weeks, you can’t blame me for being interested in getting a look at him.”
Frank Holeman, who was in Vienna to cover the summit for the New York Daily News, received a telephone call from his old Soviet contact Yuri Gvozdev, who asked him to meet him at a coffeehouse. The two men had not seen each other since Nixon’s trip to Moscow in 1959. Now, as Holeman recalled, “Yuri was trying to find out if I knew the American position at the summit. I was trying to find out if he knew the Soviet position. We met at a different place each time. When we came to one place, he said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’”
During the Geneva summit in 1955, the local CIA station had a clandestine source with contacts in the Soviet delegation. Every evening the source came to a nightclub for debriefing on Soviet reactions to the day’s proceedings, information which was slipped to Eisenhower when he awoke the next morning. In Vienna, neither Holeman nor Gvozdev could shed much light on what their leaders were about to say to each other. As Holeman recalled, “Neither of us struck oil.”
Khrushchev walked into the American residence, his heavy footsteps shaking the rafters. The President introduced him to members of his staff, including O’Donnell, who glared. Later Kennedy told his aide, “He must have thought you were a spy from the IRA.” The two leaders sat down side by side on a rose-colored sofa in the red, gray, and gold music room. Seated on a half-circle of chairs were advisers: Gromyko, Dobrynin, Menshikov, Rusk, Kohler, Bohlen, Thompson. Underneath the room was the entrance to an SS escape tunnel.
The President started off by saying that, of course, Khrushchev knew “our Ambassador to Moscow.” Khrushchev retorted, “You mean our Ambassador.” All laughed.
Kennedy said how pleased he was to see the Chairman again: as he had mentioned to Gromyko and Menshikov, he was “extremely interested” in discussing “at least to a certain extent” matters affecting their relations. He hoped that during the next two days “a better understanding of the problems confronting us could be reached.”
Khrushchev replied that he too wanted the conversations to be useful. Recalling their first meeting in 1959, he needled Kennedy by noting that he had been late. There had been “no opportunity to say much except hello and goodbye.” He recalled mentioning that he had heard he was “a young and promising man” in politics. Now he was pleased to meet him as President.*
“I remember you said that I looked young to be a Senator, but I’ve aged a lot since then.”
“Did I really say that to you?” Khrushchev said that young people always wanted to look older and the old to look younger. As a boy, he had been offended when people misjudged his youthful appearance. Then his hair had begun to turn gray at twenty-two, which solved the problem. He would be happy to exchange ages or even split his years with the President.
Turning to business, Kennedy declared that their common objective should be to conduct their competition without endangering peace: “The problem is to find means of avoiding situations in which our two countries become committed to actions involving their security.” How could two great nations with different social systems, confronting each other around the world, avoid head-on collision in an era of great change?
Khrushchev replied that the Soviet Union had long worked for friendly relations with the United States but would not do so at the expense of other peoples: “The United States is a rich country and has all the necessary resources. So far, the Soviet Union has been poorer than the United States and it recognizes that fact. However the Soviet Union will develop—not at U.S. expense, because it has no predatory intentions, but rather by developing its own human and natural resources.” He did not wish to conceal that the Soviet Union wanted “to become richer than the United States.” But it did not wish to “stand in the way of U.S. economic development.”
Kennedy replied that he was impressed with the Soviet economic growth rate: surely this was a “source of satisfaction” to the Chairman, as American growth was to the United States.
Khrushchev said he could not expect to convert the President to communism, but “the West must recognize that communism exists and has won the right to develop. Such recognition should be de facto and not de jure.” American policy under John Foster Dulles had been based “on the premise of liquidation of the Communist system.” But communism would finally triumph “through the spread of ideas.”
Kennedy said that Khrushchev’s remarks raised a very important problem: “You wish to destroy the influence of my country where it has traditionally been present. You wish to liquidate the free system in other countries.” At the same time, the Soviet Union objected to any efforts to liquidate Communist systems.
Khrushchev called this “an incorrect interpretation of Soviet policy. The Soviet Union is against implanting its policy in other states. As a matter of fact, this would be an impossible task. What the Soviet Union says is that communism will triumph. This is a different proposition.… The Soviet Union proceeds from one assumption alone—namely, that any change in the social system should depend on the will of the peoples themselves.”
He said that the Soviet Union was challenging the capitalist system just as the French Revolution was a response to the Holy Alliance created by feudalist Russia. His country had “proposed general and complete disarmament” to demonstrate “its intention not to use arms.” The U.S.S.R. believed in its system, just as the President believed in his, but this was “not a matter for argument, much less for war.”
Kennedy replied that the American position was that “people should have free choice.” When Communist minorities seized control, the Chairman considered this historical inevitability. The United States did not. Obviously they could not avoid disagreement, but he hoped that they could at least avoid direct military confrontation.
Khrushchev said he hoped he had misunderstood: had the President said that if communism moved into new areas, the United States would be in conflict with the Soviet Union? Dams could not be placed in the way of the development of the human mind. “The Spanish Inquisition burned people who disagreed with it, but ideas did not burn and eventually conquered.”
History should be the judge: “People will judge capitalism and communism by the results of their respective efforts. If capitalism ensures better living for people, it will win.… If communism achieves this goal, it will be the winner.” He wanted to “emphasize” that what he had in mind was “a victory of ideas, not a military victory. In any event, the military aspect has become unimportant today.… Ideas should not be borne on bayonets or missile warheads.”
Kennedy wryly noted that Mao Tse-tung had said political power came out of the barrel of a rifle. Khrushchev doubted that Mao had really said such a thing: “Marxists have always been against war.”
The President said that he and the Chairman owed it to their people to “have this struggle for ideas, which is part of our times, conducted without affecting the vital security interests of the two countries.” Both the Americans and the Soviets had certain essential interests. “The struggle in other areas should be conducted in a way which would not involve the two countries directly and would not affect their national interest or prestige.”
As the Chairman knew from history, it was very easy to get involved in a struggle that would affect the peace of the world. “My ambition is to secure peace. If we fail in that effort, both our countries will lose.… Our two countries possess modern weapons.… If our two countries should miscalculate, they would lose for a long time to come.”
Khrushchev cried, “Miscalculation! All I ever hear from your people and your news correspondents and your friends in Europe and everyplace else is that damned word miscalculation.” Did America want the Soviet Union to sit like a schoolboy with hands on top of the desk? “We don’t make mistakes. We will not make war by mistake.” Moscow would defend its vital interests whether the United States called it miscalculation or not. “You ought to take that word and bury it in cold storage and never use it again.” The U.S.S.R. did not want war but would not be “intimidated.”
Kennedy retorted that, as Khrushchev knew, history had shown that it was “impossible to predict the next move of any country.… Western Europe has suffered a great deal because of its failure to foresee with precision what other countries would do.” Just recently, he had himself conceded “certain misjudgments” by the United States. In the Korean War, the United States had “failed to foresee what the Chinese would do.… The purpose of this meeting is to introduce precision in judgments of the two sides and to obtain a clearer understanding of where we are going.”
Khrushchev agreed: if their meeting succeeded, the “expenses incurred” would be “well justified.” If they failed, “the hopes of the peoples would be frustrated.” At 2 P.M., they adjourned for lunch.
In the dining room, Khrushchev downed a dry martini: “Like vodka.” Accompanied by nine aides each, the two leaders sat down to a luncheon of beef Wellington. Kennedy asked the Chairman about his medals. Khrushchev touched his chest with his chin: “This one is the Lenin Peace Price.” Kennedy told the interpreter, “Tell him I hope they never take it away from him.” Khrushchev laughed.
Trading stories about outer space, Khrushchev revealed that Soviet scientists had feared the psychological effects of orbital flight. They had encoded Gagarin’s instructions so that only a sane person could use them. The precaution had happily proved unnecessary; Gagarin had even sung songs while in orbit. The President asked why their countries could not fly together to the moon. Khrushchev said he must be cautious: space flight could be used for military advantage. Then he said, “All right, why not?”
Briefed on Khrushchev’s favorite subject, Rusk told the Chairman about a new fast-growing American corn that would produce two or more annual crops in the same field. “Remarkable,” said Khrushchev, “but do you know that we have found a way to make vodka from natural gas?” The President said, “It sounds like another of Dean Rusk’s corn stories.”
Khrushchev told Kennedy that he had “voted” for him in 1960 by waiting until after the election to release the RB-47 fliers: “We kept Nixon from being able to claim that he could deal with the Russians.” The President laughed. “You’re right. I admit you played a role in the election and cast your vote for me.”
Khrushchev asked Kennedy how he got along with Gromyko. “All right,” replied the President. “My wife thinks he has a nice smile. Why do you ask?” Khrushchev: “Well, a lot of people think Gromyko looks like Nixon.” Laughter up and down the table.
Raising his glass, Kennedy stood up and said that having welcomed Khrushchev to the United States in 1959, he was now glad to welcome him to this small piece of the United States in Vienna. Khrushchev rose and reminisced about Eisenhower. He was “almost certain” that the old General had not known about the U-2 plane sent on May Day 1960 but had chivalrously taken the blame. He had respected Eisenhower and was sorry that his Soviet tour had had to be canceled. He hoped to welcome Kennedy to the U.S.S.R. “when the time is ripe.… The road is open.”
Playing to his audience, Khrushchev recalled that Nixon had tried to convert the Soviet people to capitalism by showing them a “dream kitchen” which did not exist and never would. “I apologize for referring to a citizen of the United States, but only Nixon could think of such nonsense.”*
He complained of the commercial language so often used in dealings with the Soviet Union: “You give this and we’ll give that.” What was he supposed to concede? “We are blamed for Communist parties in other countries, but I don’t even know who their leaders are. I am too busy at home.” He decried the idea of mutual concessions in negotiation.
He said that Russians admired Americans—especially their technological success. He and the President should work together to improve their peoples’ futures. Hadn’t the Soviet Union decorated American engineers who helped build the country after the Revolution? He recalled that one engineer came back to the Soviet Union for a visit and mentioned that he was building houses in Turkey. Of course, the Soviets knew “that in fact he was building military bases there. But this is a matter for his own conscience.”
Khrushchev toasted Kennedy’s health. He envied the President’s youth: “If I were your age, I would devote even more energy to our cause. Still, even at sixty-seven, I am not renouncing the competition.”
After lunch, Kennedy took Khrushchev for a stroll in the residence gardens, accompanied only by interpreters. Reading the minutes of Eisenhower’s Camp David conversations with Khrushchev in 1959, he had noted that the Chairman became more temperate during a walk in the woods, away from the others in his entourage.
As Kennedy and Khrushchev walked in the newly emerged sun, O’Donnell watched from a second-floor window, drinking a glass of Austrian beer. He noticed that Khrushchev was shaking his finger and “snapping” at the President “like a terrier.”
By Kennedy’s account, he started the conversation by saying that they both had a special responsibility for peace: “I propose to tell you what I can do and what I can’t do, what my problems and possibilities are, and then you can do the same.” According to Khrushchev, the President described the narrowness of his 1960 victory and his weakness in Congress and asked him not to demand too many concessions because he could be turned out of the Presidency.
Khrushchev replied with a harangue on Berlin. He complained about the American insistence on German reunification: his own son had been killed by the German army. Kennedy replied that his brother had also been killed by the Germans. He had not come to Vienna “to talk about a war of twenty years ago.” The United States could not turn its back on the West Germans and pull out of Berlin.
To ease the tension, Kennedy asked how Khrushchev managed to have such long conversations as those with Humphrey and Lippmann without interruption. His own White House schedule was “very crowded.” He was “constantly wanted on the telephone.” The Chairman replied that the Soviet system had been decentralized under his leadership.
Kennedy explained that the American system of consultation between the President and Congress was a “time-consuming process.” Khrushchev seized the opening: “Well, why don’t you switch to our system?” The President invited him inside for further talk without their advisers. At 3:20 P.M., they returned to the music room, this time sitting on pink damask chairs.
The President restated his morning thesis in terms more likely to appeal to Khrushchev. Noting the Chairman’s reference to the death of feudalism, he said he understood this to mean that capitalism would be succeeded by communism. This was “disturbing.” As the Chairman well knew, the French Revolution had brought “great disturbances and upheavals throughout Europe.
“Even earlier, the struggle between Catholics and Protestants … caused the Hundred Years War.… When systems are in transition, we should be careful, particularly today, when modern weapons are at hand. Whatever the result of the present competition—and no one can be sure what it will be—both sides should act in such a way as to prevent them from coming into direct contact and thus prejudicing the establishment of lasting peace.” Even the Russian Revolution had produced convulsions and “intervention by other countries.”
He wanted to restate what he had meant by miscalculation. In Washington, he had to try to make judgments about events—“judgments which may be accurate or not.” Hoping to win Khrushchev over with a self-deprecating remark, he said that he himself had miscalculated at the Bay of Pigs. “It was more than a mistake. It was a failure.”
This admission did not have its desired effect. Frustrated, he blurted out to Khrushchev, “We admit our mistakes. Do you ever admit you are wrong?” The Chairman said, “Oh, yes, in the speech before the Twentieth Party Congress I admitted Stalin’s mistakes.” Kennedy replied, “Those weren’t your mistakes.”
The Chairman went on to say that he had liked the President’s May statement to Congress that it was difficult to defend ideas that would not improve people’s living standards. But the President had drawn the “wrong conclusion” if he thought that “when people rise against tyrants, that is a result of Moscow’s activities. That is not so. Failure by the U.S. to understand this generates danger. The U.S.S.R. does not foment revolution, but the United States always looks for outside forces whenever certain upheavals occur.”
Khrushchev asked how he and the President could work anything out if the United States was inclined to regard revolution everywhere simply as the result of Communist machinations. The Soviet Union “supports the aspirations of the people.” The instigator of revolution was the United States, with its support of “tyrannical regimes.”
Look at Cuba! During Castro’s battles in the late 1950s, American capitalists had supported Batista: “This is why the anger of the Cuban people turned against the United States.” The President’s decision to launch a landing against Cuba had “only strengthened the revolutionary forces and Castro’s own position, because the people of Cuba were afraid that they would get another Batista and lose the achievements of the revolution.”
Khrushchev warned that while Castro was no Communist, “you are well on the way to making him a good one.” The President had claimed that the United States attacked Cuba because the island threatened American security: “Can six million people really be a threat to the mighty U.S.?” If the United States felt threatened by tiny Cuba, what was the Soviet Union to do about Turkey and Iran? “These two countries are followers of the United States. They march in its wake, and they have U.S. bases and rockets.”
Khrushchev mocked the Shah’s claim that his power was granted by God; in fact, “everyone” knew the Shah’s power had actually been seized for him by his father, who was no God but only an army sergeant. “If the U.S. believes that it is free to act, then what should the U.S.S.R. do? The U.S. has set a precedent for intervention in internal affairs of other countries. The U.S.S.R. is stronger than Turkey and Iran, just as the U.S. is stronger than Cuba.” He warned that, “to use the President’s term,” this situation might generate some miscalculation too.
Kennedy said he held “no brief for Batista.” And if the Shah did not improve his people’s condition, Iran would have to change too.* He objected to the Castro regime not because it had ousted commercial monopolies but because of “Castro’s destruction of the right of free choice and his stated intent to use Cuba as a base for expansion in the neighboring area.” This “could eventually create a peril to the United States.” As for American bases in Turkey and Iran, “these two countries are so weak that they could be no threat to the U.S.S.R.—no more than Cuba to the U.S.”
The President reminded Khrushchev that the Soviet Union had said it would not tolerate hostile governments in areas it regarded as of vital interest. What would the Chairman do if a pro-American government were established in Warsaw? “The United States stands for the right of free choice for all peoples.” If Castro had acted in that spirit, he might have won American support.
Kennedy reiterated that it was “critical to have the changes occurring in the world and affecting the balance of power take place in a way that would not involve the prestige or the treaty commitments of our two countries.” If certain governments should fail to give their people a better standard of living and worked “in the interest of only a small group,” their days would be numbered.
Khrushchev replied, “If Castro has not held any elections, this is an internal affair and it grants no one the right to intervene. If Castro fails to give freedom to his people, he will detach himself from them and be just as removed as Batista was. It would be a different situation if our two countries took it upon themselves to decide this question.”
He hoped that American-Cuban relations would improve. “Such a statement might sound strange to the United States, but the U.S.S.R. believes that this would improve relations not only in the Western Hemisphere but also throughout the world.” Once again he compared Cuba to Turkey: when the Ankara government was toppled in May 1960, the Soviet Union had remained neutral “because it regarded the change as an internal affair of that country.”
Turning to Laos, Khrushchev said that the President “knew very well” that the United States was behind the coup against Souvanna Phouma in December 1960. They should “be frank and recognize” that both of their countries were sending arms to Laos. But just as with Mao Tse-tung’s defeat of Chiang Kai-shek, “the side supported by the U.S.S.R. will be more successful because the arms supplied by the United States are directed against the people.”
He and the President must be patient about Laos: “If the United States supports old, moribund, reactionary regimes, then a precedent of intervention in internal affairs will be set, which might cause a clash between our two countries.”
Kennedy replied, “We regard … Sino-Soviet forces and the forces of the United States and Western Europe as being more or less in balance.” He said that he did not wish to discuss the details of each of their military postures, but this was how he saw the situation.*
The President’s declaration sent Khrushchev into near ecstasy. For the rest of his life he boasted that at this summit the leader of the United States had finally acknowledged that there was rough parity between the two great powers. Dictating his memoirs in the late 1960s, he praised Kennedy for understanding that the Soviet bloc had amassed such economic and military might “that the United States and its allies could no longer seriously consider going to war against us.”
In Washington, when the Joint Chiefs learned of Kennedy’s comment, they were furious.
The President went on to say that the United States had three basic objectives. First, “free choice through elections for all people.” Second, “defense of our strategic interests.” Third, ensuring that events in the 1960s would not be “greatly disturbing to the balance of power” in the world. One such disturbing event, he said, would be the growing military potential of the Chinese. Kennedy may have raised the subject of China to see whether Khrushchev might suggest some joint effort to keep Peking from acquiring nuclear weapons.
The Chairman said only that the United States should recognize China, allow it into the UN, and end the “occupation” of Taiwan. If the Soviet Union were in China’s place, it would have attacked Taiwan long ago. (This was balderdash; the Soviets had in fact restrained Mao in his efforts against the island.) The President replied by citing the “constant hostility” of Peking toward the United States and noting that the Taiwan question involved American strategic interests.
Knowing that Laos was one of the areas on which Bolshakov had suggested that Khrushchev was ready to make concessions, Kennedy said that while Laos was “relatively unimportant from the strategic standpoint,” the United States had commitments in the area under the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. He added that, “speaking frankly,” American policy in Southeast Asia had not always been “wise.”
He had not yet been able to ascertain “what the people’s desires in that area are.” There were nine or ten thousand Pathet Lao, who had two distinct advantages. “One is that they are for change.” Second, the Pathet Lao were getting “support not only in the form of supplies, but also in the form of Viet Minh manpower, which has made them a stronger force.” Last March he and the Chairman had agreed on a “neutral and independent Laos.” Now they must find “a solution not involving the prestige or the interests of our two countries,” including a cease-fire and a mechanism to verify it.
Khrushchev changed the subject; he wanted to say “a few words about the so-called guerrilla warfare against regimes that are not to the liking of the United States. There has been a lot of talk about this kind of warfare in the United States, and this is a dangerous policy.”
The President should believe him when he warned that if the United States sent in guerrillas unsupported by the people, that would be a “hopeless” cause. “If guerrilla troops are local troops, belonging to the country, then every bush is their ally.” He recalled his own service in the Red Army: “In spite of its being very poor, the Red Army won because the people were on its side.”
Khrushchev argued that “modern times are not like the past. Modern weapons are terrible.” He did not know whether the balance of power was exact, but that did not matter. “Both sides know very well that they have enough power to destroy each other. This is why there should be no interference.”
America was supporting colonial powers: “This is why the people are against it. There was a time when the United States was a leader in the fight for freedom. As a matter of fact, the Russian czar refused to recognize the United States for twenty-six years because he regarded it as an illegitimate creature. Now the United States refuses to recognize the new China. Things have changed, haven’t they?”
Kennedy said that Americans were concerned about the Chairman’s January speech endorsing wars of national liberation: “The fact is that certain groups seize power, frequently by military means.” Some were supported by the Soviet Union, some by the United States. “If one takes the situation in Vietnam, there are some seven to fifteen thousand guerrillas there. We do not believe that they reflect the will of the people.… The U.S.S.R. may believe so. The problem is to avoid getting involved in direct contact as we support the respective groups.”
Khrushchev replied that he and the President had different conceptions of liberation struggles. When the “people’s only recourse is to rise in arms,” the Soviet Union called it a sacred war. “The United States itself rose against the British. The Soviet Union has been proud of the United States in this respect. But now the U.S. has changed its position and is against other people’s following suit.”
If some country in Africa were to adopt the socialist system, “that might mean that a few drops would be added to the bucket of Communist power.… But this would be an expression of popular will. If there were to be interference, there would be a chain reaction and ultimately war between our two countries.”
The Chairman aired his standard complaint about American bases surrounding the Soviet Union: “This is very unwise and aggravates the relations between the two countries. The countries where the bases are located spend money on their military establishments while their people live like paupers. Thus these people have the choice of developing along militarist lines or rising. We must be reasonable and keep our forces within our national boundaries.”
Kennedy wished to make it clear that he did not oppose all countries with different social systems: “Yugoslavia, India, and Burma are extremely satisfactory situations, as far as the United States is concerned.… If the Communist cause were to win in certain areas and if those areas were to associate themselves closely with the Soviet Union, that would create strategic problems for the United States.”
In case Khrushchev did not realize that he was referring to Cuba, the President once again noted that Chairman would be disturbed if Poles were given the opportunity to turn toward the West: “Certainly one could think that they might not necessarily support the present government.”
The Chairman angrily replied that what happened in Poland was none of the President’s business: “Poland has a fine government, more democratic than the United States. Its election laws are more honest than those in the United States.” In America, parties existed only to deceive the people. If the premise of American policy was to preserve the existing balance of power, the United States must not really want peaceful coexistence. Maybe it was seeking a pretext for war.
Khrushchev said that the President was mistaken in thinking that Viet Minh forces were involved in Laos: “What is an actual fact is that military action was started from Thailand by the United States.”
Despite Bolshakov’s assurances, Kennedy found the Chairman little interested in Laos. He and Khrushchev agreed to prod their Laotian clients to cooperate with the commission policing the cease-fire. With a smile, the President said they might unite on this even if they could not unite on the merits of the American electoral system. Unamused, Khrushchev said that elections were “an American internal affair.”
At a quarter to seven, Kennedy saw the Chairman to his car. The President’s friend Henry Brandon of the Sunday Times thought he looked “dazed.” After Khrushchev’s departure, Kennedy asked Thompson, “Is it always like this?” The Ambassador said, “Par for the course.”
By Dr. Jacobson’s account, during an intermission in the afternoon conversations, he had asked Kennedy how he was feeling. The President had replied, “May I be permitted to take a leak before I respond?” When he returned, he said that he was “fine” and that Jacobson could retire to his hotel. When Kennedy returned to his quarters, Jacqueline was having her hair styled. He asked Evelyn Lincoln for a cigar. He said he wanted to rest but instead paced the floor, deep in thought. She asked him how the first day’s meetings had gone. He said, “Not too well.”
As the President soaked in a hot bath, Dave Powers told him that he had watched him walking with Khrushchev in the garden: “You seemed pretty calm while he was giving you a hard time out there.” Recalling the Chairman’s tirade, Kennedy said, “I’m trying to remind myself: the next time I’m talking to Khrushchev, don’t mention miscalculation.”
Knowing that Khrushchev had disdained Eisenhower’s reliance on advisers, the President had guided the conversations in a way calculated to impress the Chairman with his self-assurance, boldness, energy, and command of facts, his willingness to say what he thought without prompting by notes or aides.
His error was in allowing Khrushchev to draw him into debate over ideology. After debating Humphrey and Nixon in 1960 and gaining excellent reviews for his presidential news conferences, Kennedy was more confident than he should have been about his ability to best Khrushchev in an argument over communism versus capitalism.
The Chairman had the advantage not only of his half century as an agitator but of his overflowing idealism about communism. Against this, Kennedy the skeptical pragmatist, armed mainly with speech material from the 1960 campaign, could not stand up. The President was in the position of arguing that the United States, patron of Boun Oum, the Somozas, and the Shah, was a revolutionary and anticolonial nation. When he said that a government’s days would be numbered if it worked “in the interest of only a small group,” only politeness stopped Khrushchev from replying that the President had just described his own system.
Kennedy’s streak of cynicism about politicians and his impatience with ideologues served him badly with Khrushchev. He ignored Thompson’s warning that Khrushchev’s rhapsodies about communism were not just words: “He really believes it.” Khrushchev no doubt took Kennedy’s comment that he could not defend all of his predecessors’ policies and commitments as a sign of irresolution.
Asking Khrushchev to agree to a standstill in the Cold War implied that Kennedy considered the Chairman’s public views about dynamic world communism a political stance that could be discarded in private. It asked Khrushchev to discard his life’s beliefs and guarantee American predominance in the world. In the Chairman’s mind, this embodied the arrogance of American power. For himself and for those in the Kremlin who would later read his remarks, Khrushchev was compelled to reject Kennedy’s appeal and defend his own doctrines in fighting language.
There is no evidence that Kennedy’s performance was hampered by a drug interaction or by amphetamine injections. By his freewheeling approach to his own medical treatment, the President had tempted fate and won.
Charles Bartlett said years later, on the basis of a talk with Kennedy, “I think his problem at Vienna was his damned back.… When that back went off, Jack was off … Jack got sort of borne down by going to Paris first.… He was trying to impress de Gaulle and live up to the French love of formality.… My impression was that he wasn’t in top shape when he hit Vienna.”
A thousand journalists waited in the vast marble ballroom of the Hofburg Palace, an appropriate place for briefings in light of the President’s interest in miscalculation: it was once the home of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose murder ignited the escalating misjudgments that led to World War I.
“Achtung! Achtung!” cried an Austrian official. Salinger and Mikhail Kharmalov read out an American-Soviet statement saying that the first day’s talks had been “frank, courteous, and wide-ranging.” Kharmalov said he hoped the Sunday meeting would be “as fruitful as today.” Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post asked Salinger if he agreed that the talks had been fruitful. Salinger referred him to the official statement, which Roberts thought “an obvious tipoff that all was not as rosy as Kharmalov would have them believe.”
As other journalists vainly tried to pry information out of the two spokesmen, Randolph Churchill of the London Evening Standard declared himself “bored”: “I will not listen to any more of this rot!” Walking out, he was stopped by a security guard. Churchill asked where the man thought he was—in Russia? When he was finally released, the son of the wartime leader staged his own news conference and, so a colleague wrote, “spoke more freely than anyone else had all day.”
During the day’s meetings, someone in the Austrian Foreign Ministry had shown a wicked sense of humor by arranging for Mrs. Khrushchev to attend a Cézanne exhibition and sending Mrs. Kennedy to a factory. As in Paris, Jacqueline stopped traffic when she moved about the city. As she lunched at a candlelit restaurant, the maître d’hôtel went outside to announce that Mrs. Kennedy had “come to the dessert.” The crowds cheered. That afternoon, she begged off a monastery tour to rest.
On Saturday evening was a black-tie state dinner at the 1400-room Schönbrunn Palace. Built in 1694, the old Habsburg country estate was filled tonight with spring flowers. When the car bearing the Kennedys reached the floodlit gates, there was a cry from the dark: “The American princess!”
Greeting Khrushchev, the President had to apologize for being five minutes late. The Chairman wore no black tie. Averse to bourgeois dress, he had decreed business attire for his entire delegation. He would have preferred not to bring Nina Petrovna to Vienna but bowed, as he had on his 1959 American trip, to Western custom. When photographers asked him to shake hands with the President, he leered at the First Lady in her glittering, sleeveless floor-length Cassini and long white gloves: “I’d like to shake her hand first.”
“Kennedy’s wife was a young woman whom the journalists were always describing as a great beauty,” Khrushchev later recalled. “She didn’t impress me as having that special, brilliant beauty which can haunt men, but she was youthful, energetic, and pleasant.… As the head of the Soviet delegation, I couldn’t care less what sort of wife he had. If he liked her, that was his business—and good luck to them both.”
As vermouth and pineapple juice was served, the President introduced Khrushchev to his mother, who had followed the presidential party to Vienna. “We knew she was a millionaire, and consequently we had to keep in mind whom we were dealing with at all times,” Khrushchev recalled. “We could smile courteously and shake hands with her, but that didn’t change the fact that we were at opposite poles.”
After meeting Nina Petrovna, Rose Kennedy wrote in her diary that Khrushchev’s wife was “strong, sturdy, capable of hard physical exertion. Wears her hair drawn straight back. No makeup.” Without a scintilla of irony, she wrote that Khrushchev’s wife was “the kind of woman you’d ask in perfect confidence to baby-sit for you if you wanted to go out some evening.” Kennedy’s mother was delighted when Nina Petrovna recalled having read about her in McCall’s, saying, “I must learn your beauty secrets.”
De Gaulle had warned Jacqueline about Khrushchev’s wife: “Plus maline que lui.” [“More malicious than he.”] Perhaps overinfluenced by the warning, she thought Nina Petrovna “hard and tough.” But this judgment was dead wrong. Khrushchev’s wife was indeed a strong woman; she was probably shrewder about people than her husband, and as idealistic or more so about communism. But she was also a woman of uncommon sweetness and had much to do with keeping Khrushchev’s more humane instincts and aspirations alive through the Stalin years in which they were so brutally tested.
Jacqueline liked the Khrushchevs’ daughter Rada Adzhubei but could not stand her boastful husband. She had been told of Adzhubei’s influence on Khrushchev but after seeing the two men together concluded that “Khrushchev doesn’t really like him” and was not “particularly close to him.”
The President’s favorite sister, Eunice Shriver, had also come to Vienna. As Billings recalled, Kennedy “always loved having her around, got a big kick out of her humor. For this reason, Eunice was able to make the atmosphere at this meeting more pleasant.… Khrushchev roared with laughter over something Eunice said. I can’t remember what it was, but I’m sure it was something at her brother’s expense.” Gromyko asked her whether her brother was hard to live with. She replied, “Very.” Gromyko said, “I hadn’t noticed.”
Guests dined on Habsburg china as they listened to “The Blue Danube” and other waltzes. Dr. Travell wrote in her journal, “I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would sit at dinner with Khrushchev!” During the meal, the Chairman regaled Jacqueline with anecdotes. He found her “quick with her tongue. In other words, she had no trouble finding the right word to cut you short if you weren’t careful with her.”
Moving his chair closer to hers, Khrushchev spun off one gag after another, reminding her of Abbott and Costello. Feigning amazement at one story, she put a gloved hand over her mouth. Enchanted by the horses and dances in Lesley Blanch’s Sabres of Paradise, she asked him about the nineteenth-century Ukraine. When Khrushchev told her that the region now had many more teachers than the Ukraine of the czars, she said, “Oh, Mr. Chairman, don’t bore me with statistics.”
Khrushchev laughed, and for a moment she found him “almost cozy.” Running out of things to say, she recalled hearing that one of the Soviet canine space travelers had had puppies: “Why don’t you send me one?”
Following dinner, an opera, and ballet, the Kennedys returned to the American residence. Bohlen found the President “a little depressed” at his failure to persuade Khrushchev to preserve the existing balance of power in the world. He tried to console him: “The Soviets always talk tough.”
Privately Bohlen believed that during the day’s talks, Kennedy may have been “quiet” with Khrushchev but he had been “perfectly firm.” The problem was that Kennedy had let Khrushchev draw him into ideology: “He got a little bit out of his depth.”
Thompson was “very upset” that Kennedy had ignored his advice to stay off ideology; the President still did not seem to realize “that a Communist like Mr. Khrushchev could never yield” in this area of argument “even if he wanted to.” Kohler wondered whether Kennedy should have met with Khrushchev so soon after the Cuban debacle: “After the Bay of Pigs, if you knew Khrushchev, this would just whet his appetite.”
Bohlen, Thompson, and Kohler urged the President to stick to concrete issues on Sunday. Kennedy resolved to make sure that before Khrushchev left Vienna, he was “going to understand the United States point of view.” Rusk suggested that he take the approach, “You aren’t going to make a Communist out of me and I don’t expect to make a capitalist out of you, so let’s get down to business.”
On Sunday morning, the Kennedys attended early Mass at St. Stephen’s Cathedral and heard the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Khrushchev laid a wreath at a Soviet war memorial locally known as “The Unknown Plunderer.” An American reporter asked him how he liked his counterpart. “That is for the American public to say,” said Khrushchev. “Some people like short men, some tall men, some fat men. Everyone likes different types.” Khrushchev invited the American to visit Moscow: “And bring your President with you.”
Kennedy and Rusk were driven to the chestnut-shaded Soviet Embassy, which stood next to a Russian Orthodox Church. Thousands of Viennese who had turned out to see the First Lady were dismayed to find only the Secretary of State. Kennedy said, “Rusk, you make a hell of a substitute for Jackie!” Rusk feared that when Khrushchev compared such public enthusiasm to his own mild reception when he moved about Vienna, it would make him even more truculent.
The President emerged from the car. A beaming Khrushchev shook his hand: “I greet you on a small piece of Soviet territory. Sometimes we drink out of a small glass, but we speak with great feelings.” Kennedy nodded: “I’m glad to hear this.” Then they went inside.
* Despite Casey’s later appetite for covert action, there is no evidence that he or anyone else in the Nixon campaign was behind the burglary. Nevertheless, one must note the resemblance to the 1971 break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in quest of information that could be used by the Nixon White House to discredit the man who had disseminated the “Pentagon Papers” on Vietnam.
*The cover-up continued in November 1963. At the possible behest of Robert Kennedy, the version of the autopsy report released to the public omitted the finding that “the President suffered from bilateral adrenal atrophy.”
*The account of the private Kennedy-Khrushchev conversations in Vienna in this book benefits from interviews by the author and other primary sources but is based on the official memoranda of conversations drafted by the President’s interpreter, Alexander Akalovsky, available at long last. The U.S. government sealed these documents for twenty-nine years after the Vienna summit, until September 5, 1990, when they were released by the Archivist of the United States in response to this author’s four years of appeal.
*This referred to the American exhibition in Moscow in 1959 where Khrushchev and Nixon had held their “kitchen debate.” Although every appliance in the model kitchen was available to American consumers, Khrushchev still refused to believe it.
*This comment was soon leaked to the Shah, who began worrying whether Kennedy was pondering an effort to remove him from power. After the Vienna summit, Dean Rusk told NATO officials that there now seemed a chance that Khrushchev would move against Iran later in 1961.
*After their Camp David talk in April, Eisenhower recorded Kennedy’s belief “that the two great powers have now neutralized each other in atomic weapons and inventories, but that in numbers of troops, and our exterior communications as opposed to the interior communications of the Communists, we are relatively weak. He did not seem to think that our great sea power counteracted this situation completely.”