“He Just Beat Hell Out of Me”
At the Soviet Embassy, Khrushchev led the President up the grand staircase and into a parlor upholstered in melancholy red damask. Rusk, Bohlen, Thompson, Kohler, Gromyko, Dobrynin, and Menshikov clustered around an oblong table. Khrushchev called out to the two foreign ministers, “You look so aloof. Move closer and join us!”
Using the crisp new approach suggested by his Secretary of State, Kennedy began by saying that if they couldn’t agree on anything else, at least they might agree on Laos. The United States had treaty commitments to the little nation but wished to reduce its involvement. He hoped the Soviet Union would do the same. “Laos is not so important as to get us as involved as we are.”
Khrushchev replied that the Soviet Union had no desire to assume responsibilities in remote geographical areas. It was in Laos at the request of Souvanna Phouma, the “only legitimate government.” He was not impressed when the President spoke of American commitments: “The U.S. has no right to distribute indulgences, as it were, and to interfere in the various areas of the world.” What business did the United States have claiming special rights in Laos?
If the President would pardon his bluntness, he said, the American policy stemmed from delusions of grandeur, from megalomania. “The United States is so rich and powerful that it believes it has special rights and can afford not to recognize the rights of others.”
The Soviet Union would not stop helping other peoples win independence. “As the President has stated, the forces of the two sides are now in balance.… A great deal of restraint is required because the factors of prestige and national interests are involved here. We should not step on each other’s toes and should not infringe upon the rights of other nations, small or big.”
Responding with excessive candor, Kennedy said that “frankly speaking,” the American obligations in Laos were made before he took office on January twentieth. Why they were made was not at issue here. He wanted to decrease U.S. commitments: “What is at issue here is how to secure a cease-fire and to have the fighting stop.”
Khrushchev rejoined that he could see the President’s “own hand” in Laos. “I’ve read all your speeches.” Hadn’t the President ordered U.S. military advisers in Laos to wear American uniforms? Hadn’t he ordered and then canceled a Marine landing in Laos?
The President insisted that he had never ordered in the Marines. Khrushchev said that was not what he had read in the American press. He pointed out that when Molotov opposed the Austrian State Treaty in 1955, he had “overruled” him. On taking supreme power, he had canceled all “unreasonable decisions” made by Malenkov and Bulganin.
Westerners were “much better than the Easterners at making threats in a refined way. Every once in a while it is intimated that Marines might be used. But as engineers know, the law of physics says that every action causes a counteraction. So if the United States were to send Marines, other countries might respond with their Marines or some other forces. Another Korea or an even worse situation might result.”
Khrushchev pledged every effort to influence the Laotian forces to establish a truly neutral government. The American and Soviet foreign ministers “should be locked into a room and told to find a solution.” Chuckling, Gromyko noted that the Palais des Nations in Geneva was “a big place with a lot of rooms.”
The President said he was “anxious to get the U.S. military out of Laos.” He had been reluctant even to consider a Marine landing because he recognized that such an action would bring a “counteraction, and thus peace in that area might be endangered.”
Khrushchev agreed: “The situation at the front lines is always unstable. Even a shot fired accidentally by a soldier could be regarded by the other side as a violation of the cease-fire. Therefore other questions should not be made contingent upon a cease-fire.… The basic question is to bring about agreement among the three forces in Laos so that the formation of a truly neutral government can be secured.”
Now the Chairman raised the subject of nuclear testing. In May, Georgi Bolshakov had given Robert Kennedy the impression that Khrushchev was ready to tolerate up to twenty inspections per year in order to reach a test ban agreement.
If this was the President’s expectation, he was badly disappointed. Khrushchev declared that three inspections per year should be sufficient. “A larger number would be tantamount to espionage, which the Soviet Union cannot accept.” The West should simply agree to complete and general disarmament. Then espionage would be impossible “because there would be no armaments.” If both sides showed goodwill, they should be able to reach such an agreement within two years.
The Chairman added that any commission devised to monitor a nuclear test ban agreement would have to be run by troika: the behavior of Hammarskjöld’s UN forces in the Congo had shown that there were neutral nations but no neutral men. Disheartened, Kennedy asked whether Khrushchev really thought it “impossible to find any person that would be neutral both to the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.” The Chairman nodded.
Kennedy dismissed the idea of a treaty allowing the Soviets to veto control measures. It would be as if he and Khrushchev lived in adjoining rooms and “could not go to each other’s rooms without the consent of the occupant” to inspect suspicious events. Such a treaty “could not be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.” Without proper verification, how could the Chairman assure those of his own people who charged the United States with secret testing? He conceded that the problem was less acute for the Russians because the United States was an open society.
Khrushchev grinned: “But what about Allen Dulles? Isn’t that secret?” Kennedy said he wished it were.
The Chairman said a test ban was not so important. “The danger of war would remain because the production of nuclear energy, rockets, and bombs would continue full blast. What people want is peace. Therefore, agreement should be reached on general and complete disarmament.” In that case, the Soviet Union would agree to any controls, “even without looking at the document.”
Kennedy acknowledged that a test ban would not of itself lessen the number of American and Soviet nuclear weapons. “Nor would it reduce the production of such weapons. However, a test ban would make development of nuclear weapons by other countries less likely—although, of course, no one can guess what will happen in the future.… Great Britain possesses certain quantities of such weapons and France is also getting some capability.
“If we fail to reach agreement on a nuclear test ban, then other countries will undoubtedly launch a nuclear weapons program.” He was too diplomatic to speak the name of China. “If no agreement is reached, then in a few years there might be ten or even fifteen nuclear powers.” The Chairman must balance his fear of espionage “against the risks involved in the proliferation of nuclear weapons.”
Khrushchev confessed that Kennedy’s position had “some logic.” This was why the Soviet Union was negotiating at Geneva. “But practice has shown that this logic is not quite correct, because while the three powers are negotiating … France simply spits at them and goes on testing.… Without a link between a nuclear test ban and disarmament, other countries may say that they are in an unequal position and might act like France.”
Under general and complete disarmament, “nuclear weapons would be eliminated and other countries would be in an equal position” and would not have to spend money on the development of nuclear weapons. This was “the most radical means of preventing war.… Let us now begin with the main issue and include the test ban in it.”
The President replied that under the current draft of a test ban treaty, a signatory could abrogate it “if any country associated with any party to the treaty should conduct tests. The United States does not support French testing. We hope that once a treaty has been concluded, most other countries will join in it. The question of a nuclear test ban is a relatively easy problem to resolve because the controls are based on scientific instrumentation.… So why not start with this relatively easy question?”
Khrushchev did not respond. Kennedy went on to ask whether a Soviet plan for general and complete disarmament would include “inspection anywhere in the U.S.S.R.” The Chairman said, “Absolutely.”
Kennedy said in that case why not declare that both nations were committed to such a plan in stages, including a nuclear test ban as the first stage? Khrushchev asked him “not to start with this measure because it is not the most important one.” Better to start with a ban on the manufacture of nuclear weapons “or elimination of military and missile bases.”
The President said, “A nuclear test ban would be if not the most important step, at least a very significant step and would facilitate a disarmament agreement. There is a Chinese proverb saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. So let us take that step.”
Khrushchev looked at him quizzically: the President seemed to know the Chinese very well, but he too knew them quite well. Kennedy retorted that the Chairman “might get to know them even better.” Khrushchev evidently took this as a taunting signal that the President knew of Mao’s designs against him. He primly retorted, “I already know them very well.”
Kennedy complained that on a test ban, they were now back to where they had started. For three years, their countries had observed an unpoliced moratorium on testing. If the test ban were now to be tossed into discussions on general disarmament, the unverified moratorium would have to be extended for several more years. This would be “of great concern” to Americans. He insisted that they try for a test ban now.
Khrushchev said he was happy to negotiate, but the Soviet Union would not accept controls amounting to espionage. This was “what the Pentagon has wanted all along. Eisenhower’s Open Skies proposal in 1955* was a part of that scheme.” The West wanted inspection stations inside the Soviet Union: “This is also espionage.”
The President warned, “This is bound to affect the national security of our two countries and increase the danger of major conflicts.”
Now they turned to Berlin. Khrushchev became more intense than he had been all weekend. “Sixteen years have passed since World War Two. The U.S.S.R. lost twenty million people in that war, and many of its areas were devastated. Now Germany, the country which unleashed World War II, has again acquired military power and has assumed a dominant position in NATO.” This threatened a third world war.
The Soviet Union wanted to “draw a line” through World War II: “There is no reason why, sixteen years after the war, there is still no peace treaty.” He was simply observing the reality “that two German states exist. Our own wishes or efforts notwithstanding, a united Germany is not practical because the Germans themselves do not want it.”
Emphatically he told the President that he wanted to reach agreement “with you” on the German question. Otherwise he would sign a peace treaty with the GDR. Then “all commitments stemming from Germany’s surrender will become invalid. This would include all institutions, occupation rights, and access to Berlin, including the corridors.”
If a “free city” were established in West Berlin, he was willing to offer guarantees “to ensure noninterference and the city’s ties with the outside world. If the U.S. wants to leave its troops in West Berlin, this would be acceptable under certain conditions. However the Soviet Union believes that in that case, Soviet troops should be there too.” If the United States rejected his proposal, he would regard the rejection as the result of the “pressure of Adenauer.” Then the Soviet Union would “sign a peace treaty unilaterally.… All rights of access to Berlin will expire because the state of war will cease to exist.”
Kennedy thanked the Chairman for being so frank. “At the same time, the discussion here is not only about the legal situation but also about the practical facts, which affect very much our national security. Here we are not talking about Laos. This matter is of the greatest concern to the U.S. We are in Berlin not because of someone’s sufferance. We fought our way there, although our casualties may not have been as high as the U.S.S.R.’s. We are in Berlin not by agreement of East Germans but by contractual rights.
“This is an area where every President of the United States since World War II … has reaffirmed his faithfulness to his obligations. If we were expelled from that area and if we accepted the loss of our rights, no one would have any confidence in U.S. commitments and pledges.… If we were to accept the Soviet proposal, U.S. commitments would be regarded as a mere scrap of paper. Western Europe is vital to our national security, and we have supported it in two wars. If we were to leave West Berlin, Europe would be abandoned as well. So when we are talking about West Berlin, we are also talking about Western Europe.”
He noted that Khrushchev seemed to agree “that the ratios of power today are equal. Therefore it is difficult to understand why a country with high achievements in such areas as outer space and economic progress should now suggest that we leave an area where we have vital interests.”
Khrushchev said that under the President’s definition of national security, the Americans could justify forging on to Moscow. Kennedy replied, “We are not talking about the U.S. going to Moscow, or of the U.S.S.R. going to New York. What we are talking about is that we are in Berlin and have been there for fifteen years. We suggest that we stay there.”
He conceded that the Berlin situation was not satisfactory; Eisenhower had told Khrushchev at Camp David that it was “abnormal.” Nevertheless “because conditions in many areas of the world are not satisfactory today, it is not the right time now to change the situation in Berlin and the balance in general.” The Soviet Union “should not seek to change our position and thus disturb the balance of power. If this balance should change, the situation in Western Europe as a whole would change, and this would be a most serious blow to the U.S.” Khrushchev would not accept a comparable shift in the world balance away from his country: “We cannot accept it either.”
These were almost the most ill-chosen words that Kennedy could have used with Khrushchev. He had not stopped trying to persuade the Chairman to accept that since the world balance of power was in equilibrium, he should consent to a standstill in the Cold War. This would have required Khrushchev to renounce the ideal of dynamic world communism that he privately cherished and publicly championed, especially under the new pressures of the Chinese.
Kennedy’s insistence that Khrushchev not change the power balance came just six weeks after he himself had tried to change it at the Bay of Pigs. As he had done for five months through Thompson, Lippmann, and other emissaries, he was asking the Chairman simply to drop the Berlin demands that he had been making since 1958, whatever the political humiliation.
Twenty months before, at Camp David, Eisenhower had suggested compromise to ease the Berlin situation. Kennedy had renounced Eisenhower’s concessions. Now, in Khrushchev’s view, he was arrogantly brandishing the superior might of the United States. Despite his earlier rhetoric about parity, Kennedy seemed to be saying that since America was more powerful, it could afford to ignore Soviet concerns about Berlin.
The Chairman’s anger grew slowly. He began by saying that Berlin was “the most dangerous spot in the world. The U.S.S.R. wants to perform an operation on this sore spot, to eliminate this thorn, this ulcer.” A peace treaty would “impede the revanchists in West Germany who want a new war.…
“Today they say that boundaries should be changed.… Hitler spoke of German’s need for Lebensraum to the Urals. Now Hitler’s generals … are high commanders in NATO.” He was “very sorry,” but “no force in the world will prevent the U.S.S.R. from signing a peace treaty.” How long should it be delayed? “Another sixteen years? Another thirty years?”
In World War II, “the U.S. lost thousands and the U.S.S.R. lost millions. But American mothers mourn their sons just as deeply as Soviet mothers shed tears over the loss of their beloved ones.” He had lost a son, Gromyko two brothers, Mikoyan a son. “There is not a single family in the U.S.S.R. or its leadership that did not lose at least one of its members in the war.”
His proposal of a German peace treaty was not designed “for the purpose of kindling passions or increasing tensions” but “just the opposite—to remove the obstacles that stand in the way of development of our relations.” After the treaty was signed, the Soviet Union would regard violations of the GDR’s sovereignty as “open aggression against a peace-loving country” and would act accordingly.
Kennedy opposed “a buildup in West Germany that would constitute a threat to the Soviet Union. The decision to sign a peace treaty is a serious one.… The U.S.S.R. should consider it in the light of its national interests.” He repeated that his own brother had been killed in the last war. Khrushchev’s proposal would “bring about a basic change in the situation overnight and deny us our rights.… No one can foresee how serious the consequences might be.… What is discussed here is not only West Berlin. We are talking here about Western Europe and the United States as well.”
Khrushchev said, “The Polish and Czech border should be formalized. The position of the GDR should be normalized and her sovereignty ensured. To do all this, it is necessary to eliminate the occupation rights in West Berlin.… It would be impossible to imagine a situation where the U.S.S.R. would sign a peace treaty with the U.S. retaining occupation rights based on the state of war.”
The President replied that the Soviet Union had no right to break the Potsdam agreement. Khrushchev insisted that the war had been over for sixteen years. “In fact, President Roosevelt indicated that troops’ could be withdrawn after two or two and a half years.” Kennedy replied that Roosevelt “was not able to foresee this situation or the fact that our two countries would be on different sides.”
Khrushchev said that they both knew “very well that Berlin has no military significance. The President speaks of rights, but what are those rights? They stem from war. If the state of war ends, the rights end too.”
He recalled that at Camp David he and Eisenhower had discussed an “interim arrangement” that “would not involve the prestige of our two countries. Perhaps this could serve as a basis for agreement. The U.S.S.R. is prepared to accept such an arrangement even now. Adenauer says that he wants unification, but this is not so. As far as unification is concerned, we should say that the two German governments should meet and decide the question of unification.
“A time limit of, say, six months should be set, and if there is no agreement we can disavow our responsibilities. And then anyone would be free to conclude a peace treaty.” This would be “a way out” that resolved “this question of prestige.”
He said that in May 1960 he had hoped to reach such an agreement with Eisenhower at the Paris summit, “but the forces which are against improvement of relations between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. sent the U-2 plane.… The U.S.S.R. decided that in view of the tensions prevailing as a result of that flight, this question should not be raised.” Now the “time for such action is ripe.”
They must not act “like crusaders in the Middle Ages” and “start cutting each other’s throats for ideological reasons.” The Soviet Union could no longer delay on Berlin. “It will probably sign a peace treaty at the end of the year.… If the U.S. refuses to sign a peace treaty, the U.S.S.R. will have no other way out than to sign such a treaty alone.”
History would be the judge of their actions. “The West has been saying that Khrushchev might miscalculate.… If the U.S. wants to start a war over Germany, let it be so. Perhaps the U.S.S.R. should sign a peace treaty right away and get it over with. This is what the Pentagon has been wanting. But Adenauer and Macmillan know very well what war means. If there is any madman who wants war, he should be put in a straitjacket.”
Kennedy said, “It is an important strategic matter that the world believe the U.S. is a serious country.”
In cold anger, Khrushchev declared that American intentions led to “nothing good.” After the peace treaty, the Soviet Union would “never, under any conditions,” accept U.S. rights in West Berlin. He was “absolutely convinced” that the world would understand. The United States had stripped the Soviet Union of its rights and interests in West Germany and unilaterally signed a peace treaty with Japan.
“If the U.S. refuses to sign a peace treaty, the U.S.S.R. will do it alone. East Germany will obtain complete sovereignty, and all obligations resulting from the German surrender will be nullified.” The United States could not longer follow its policy of “I do what I want.”
Kennedy replied, “There is every evidence that our position in Berlin is strongly supported by the people there, and we are committed to that area. Mr. Khrushchev says that we are for a state of war. This is incorrect. It would be well if the development of U.S.-U.S.S.R. relations were such as to permit solution of the whole German problem.”
He said that during the Chairman’s stay in power, he had seen many changes. Now Khrushchev wanted “a peace treaty in six months, an action which would drive us out of Berlin.” He may be a young man, as the Chairman had noted, but he had not “assumed office to accept arrangements totally inimical to U.S. interests.”
Again Khrushchev suggested an interim agreement on Berlin that “would give the semblance of the responsibility for the problem having been turned over to the Germans themselves. If the U.S. does not wish such an arrangement, there is no other way but to sign a peace treaty unilaterally. No one can force the U.S. to sign a peace treaty, but neither can the U.S. make the Soviet Union accept its claims.”
Kennedy refused to discuss an interim agreement that might allow the Chairman to postpone a Berlin crisis without public embarrassment. Unlike Eisenhower at Camp David, he felt that to show any flexibility on Berlin during this meeting would suggest to Khrushchev that he would not fulfill the American commitment to the city.
After the two leaders adjourned for lunch, the President told aides that he wanted to see Khrushchev once more alone for about twenty minutes to pin down the Soviet position on Berlin and leave the Chairman with no doubt of his firmness: “I can’t leave here without giving it one more try.” Someone cautioned that another meeting would keep the President from leaving Vienna on time. Kennedy barked, “No, we’re not going on time! I’m not going to leave until I know more.”
The banalities of diplomacy proceeded. Mrs. Khrushchev and Mrs. Kennedy lunched at the Pallavicini Palace with the daughter of the Austrian President. Outdoor mobs shouted, “Jah-kee! Jah-kee!” The two ladies walked to an upstairs window. Nina Petrovna later said that she felt “motherly” toward Jacqueline, who looked “like a work of art.” She appreciated her intelligent conversation, so unusual in public life. Smiling, she took Mrs. Kennedy’s gloved hand in hers and held it aloft.
At the Soviet Embassy, the Chairman and the President and their delegations were served caviar, fish cartilage pie, and crabmeat. Khrushchev said he had studied the President’s May defense message to Congress: obviously America was controlled by monopolists and could not afford to disarm.
Lighting his cigar, Kennedy replied that not one of the financiers and industrialists Khrushchev had met at Harriman’s house in New York in 1959 had voted for him. Khrushchev was certain it was all a trick: “They are clever fellows.” Kennedy mentioned that the auto union leader Walter Reuther had endorsed him; hadn’t the Chairman met him on his trip to San Francisco? Khrushchev said, “We hanged the likes of Reuther in Russia in 1917.”
He warned that the American military buildup would force him to increase the size of the Soviet armed forces. Kennedy replied that he had no plans to increase his own force, “except for ten thousand Marines to bring three Marine Corps divisions up to full strength.”
Khrushchev said that “missiles are the gods of war today.” He noted that both he and the President were being pushed by their scientists to resume nuclear testing: “We will wait for you to resume testing—and if you do, we will.… We will never be the first to break the moratorium. You will break it, and that will force us to resume testing.”
As for the joint moon project they had discussed yesterday over lunch, he said that on further reflection the United States should go itself. Without disarmament, a joint flight would be impossible because rockets could also be used for military purposes. The project would be so expensive it would divert resources that should go to Soviet defense. He said he was resisting pressure from Soviet scientists to send a man to the moon. The United States was rich. It should go first. The Soviets would follow.
Kennedy suggested that their two countries save money by coordinating their space efforts: “This would not involve Soviet rockets.” Khrushchev did not rule out the idea but confessed that so far there had been “few practical uses of outer space launchings.” The space race was not only expensive but “primarily for purposes of prestige.”
The President presented him with the replica of the U.S.S. Constitution, chosen so late that Billings had had to bring it to Europe. Kennedy’s good manners kept him from revealing to Khrushchev that the model had been his own birthday gift from his father. The Chairman would never have been so self-restrained under similar circumstances. He reciprocated with a silver Czechoslovak coffee service, a gold humidor, caviar, and phonograph records.
Billings later recalled that Kennedy regarded the coffee set “as plunder from a captive people and felt that while he had taken it on the chin in other respects, he had at least gotten the best of the exchange of gifts.… But afterward he wished that he had kept the Constitution for himself.… We could never find as good a model again.”
The Chairman rose and lifted his glass of champagne. Personal contacts were “always better than acting through even the best ambassadors.” If the leaders of states could not resolve “the most complex problems between themselves,” how could lower officials accomplish that task? He and the President had heard each other out and reached “no understanding.”
But “if people could resolve all difficult questions in their first meeting, no difficult questions would exist.” The German peace treaty would be “a painful process, and it is similar to a surgical operation. However, the U.S.S.R. wants to cross that bridge and it will cross it.” It would cause “great tensions” with the United States, but he was sure that “the clouds will dissipate, the sun will come out again and shine brightly.
“The U.S. does not want Berlin. Neither does the Soviet Union. It is true that U.S. prestige is involved in this matter, but the only party really interested in Berlin as such is Adenauer. He is an intelligent man, but old.” Nodding to Kennedy, he said, “The Soviet Union cannot agree to having the old and moribund hold back the young and vigorous.”
He called Franz-Josef Strauss, the GDR Defense Minister, “the most aggressive-minded man in West Germany. But even a man like himself, whose mind is in eclipse, can apparently see the light. On one occasion, Strauss wisely admitted that he fully understood how greatly Germany would suffer in a new war and how complete its destruction would be.”
The Chairman drank to the President and to solution of their problems. “You are a religious man and would say that God should help us in this endeavor. For my part, I want common sense to help us.”
Kennedy replied that both their countries were strong. Their peoples wanted peace and a better life. As he had told Mr. Gromyko, his ambition was “to prevent a direct confrontation between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in this era of evolution, the outcome of which we cannot foresee.” He had never underestimated the power of the Soviet Union. Both countries had “vast supplies of destructive weapons.”
Swinging an open hand at the Constitution model, he noted that the vessel’s guns had reached only a half mile. In the Constitution’s day, nations had been able to recover from war. No longer. He hoped not to leave Vienna “with a possibility of either country being confronted with a challenge to its vital national interests.” Germany was “extremely important because of its geographic location.” He and Khrushchev could keep the peace only “if each is wise and stays in his own area.”
He recalled that at Schönbrunn Palace last night, he had asked the Chairman what job he had held at the age of forty-four. Mr. Khrushchev had replied that he was head of the Moscow Planning Commission. Kennedy said that when he was sixty-seven, he hoped to be head of the Boston Planning Commission and possibly national chairman of the Democratic Party. Khrushchev said, “Perhaps the planning commission of the whole world?” Kennedy grinned: “No, Boston would be fine.”
At 3:15 P.M., the two leaders sat down one last time, accompanied only by interpreters. Kennedy said he hoped that Khrushchev understood the importance of Berlin. He hoped the Chairman would not present him “with a situation so deeply involving our national interest.” Evolution was under way all over the world. “No one can predict what course it will take.”
Khrushchev thanked Kennedy for being frank but complained that “the U.S. wants to humiliate the U.S.S.R. We cannot accept this.” He would be glad to have an interim agreement on Germany and Berlin “with a time limit.” But force would be met by force. The President asked whether an interim agreement would allow the West to stay in Berlin and maintain its access. Khrushchev said yes—“for six months.” Then it would have to go.
The President said that if Khrushchev was going to take this “drastic action,” he must not believe the American commitment to Berlin was “serious.” He was about to see Prime Minister Macmillan in London. He would have to tell him that the U.S.S.R. had presented him with a choice of “accepting the Soviet action on Berlin or having a face-to-face confrontation.”
Khrushchev replied that in order to save Western prestige “we could agree that token contingents of troops, including Soviet troops, could be maintained in West Berlin. However, this would be not on the basis of some occupation rights, but on the basis of an agreement registered with the UN. Of course, access would be subject to the GDR’s control because this is its prerogative.” With steel in his eyes, he slammed his open hand on the table. “I want peace. But if you want war, that is your problem.”
The chamber was deathly silent but for a loudly ticking mantel clock. As de Gaulle had recommended, Kennedy replied, “It is you, and not I, who wants to force a change.”
Khrushchev said that the Soviet Union had “no choice other than to accept the challenge. It must respond and it will respond. The calamities of war will be shared equally. War will take place only if the U.S. imposes it on the U.S.S.R. It is up to the U.S. to decide whether there will be war or peace.” His decision to sign a peace treaty was “firm and irrevocable.… The Soviet Union will sign it in December if the U.S. refuses an interim agreement.”
Tight-lipped, Kennedy said, “If that is true, it’s going to be a cold winter.”
Years later, Khrushchev recalled that the President “looked not only anxious, but deeply upset.… I would have liked very much for us to part in a different mood. But there was nothing I could do to help him.” Politics was “a merciless business.” The two leaders walked onto the front step of the Embassy to shake hands one final time. Photographers wondered why Kennedy’s smile had vanished.
Riding back to the American residence with Rusk and Salinger, the President thumped the shelf beneath the car’s rear window. The Secretary of State was in shock over Kennedy’s final exchange with Khrushchev. “In diplomacy, you almost never use the word war,” he noted long afterward. “Kennedy was very upset.… He wasn’t prepared for the brutality of Khrushchev’s presentation.… Khrushchev was trying to act like a bully to this young President of the United States.”
The Soviet delegation quietly gave the Americans an aide-mémoire demanding a German settlement in “no more than six months.” Kennedy decided not to publicize it unless the Russians did. He knew that when his critics learned that Khrushchev had exploited the summit to start a new Berlin crisis, they would question his wisdom in meeting the Chairman so soon after the Bay of Pigs. Publicizing the deadline would only increase the pressure on Khrushchev to fulfill it.
The President wanted no false “Spirit of Vienna” that would boomerang against him when the world finally discovered Khrushchev’s new demand on Berlin. The unfortunate Bohlen was briefing reporters on the “amiable nature” of the talks when Kennedy decided to let reporters know that in truth the atmosphere had been “somber.” He asked Salinger to stay behind in Vienna for a few hours and see as many influential correspondents as he could.
The President had already agreed to see James Reston of the New York Times, who was waiting in a dark room at the American residence with the blinds drawn so that no other journalists could see him. Kennedy dropped onto a sofa next to Reston, pushed a hat over his eyes, and sighed loudly. The columnist said, “Pretty rough?”
“Roughest thing in my life.” Kennedy said he had tried to tell Khrushchev what he could and couldn’t do, proposing that the Chairman do the same. The result: a violent attack on American imperialism, especially in Berlin. “I’ve got two problems. First, to figure out why he did it, and in such a hostile way. And second, to figure out what we can do about it.
“I think the first part is pretty easy to explain. I think he did it because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought that anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken. And anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts. So he just beat hell out of me.… I’ve got a terrible problem. If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.”
Air Force One took off for London. Kennedy’s Air Force aide, Godfrey McHugh, noted how silent and depressed the President and his party seemed: “It was like riding with the losing baseball team after the World Series.”
Jacqueline Kennedy was also on edge. When she asked McHugh to proofread a handwritten letter in French to de Gaulle, he suggested that she not use the male form of address, “mon général”; the French leader was so exacting about etiquette. She replied, “In that case, the State Department can write its own goddamn letter.”
Summoning O’Donnell to his stateroom, the President denounced Khrushchev as a “bastard” and “son of a bitch.” So controlled for two days as he had tried to convince the Chairman of his firmness on Berlin, he now unburdened himself of his actual feelings. “We’re stuck in a ridiculous situation. It seems silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty preserving Berlin as the future capital of a reunited Germany when all of us know that Germany will probably never be reunited.”
He kept thinking “of the children, not my kids or yours, but the children all over the world.… God knows I’m not an isolationist, but it seems particularly stupid to risk killing a million Americans over an argument about access rights on an Autobahn … or because the Germans want Germany reunified. If I’m going to threaten Russia with a nuclear war, it will have to be for much bigger and more important reasons than that. Before I back Khrushchev against the wall and put him to a final test, the freedom of all Western Europe will have to be at stake.”
He thought that the main reason Khrushchev wanted to shut down West Berlin was the drain of manpower from East Germany: “You can’t blame Khrushchev for being sore about that.” He complained about Adenauer’s obstruction of American and British efforts for a peaceful settlement. The four-power occupation of Berlin was “a mistake that neither we nor the Russians should have agreed to in the first place.”
Now the West Germans wanted the United States “to drive the Russians out of East Germany. It’s not enough for us to be spending a tremendous amount of money on the military defense of Western Europe … while West Germany becomes the fastest-growing industrial power in the world. Well, if they think we are rushing into a war over Berlin, except as a last desperate move to save the NATO alliance, they’ve got another thing coming.”
From Heathrow Airport, the Kennedys rode into London in an open beige Bentley with Harold Macmillan and his wife, Lady Dorothy. They passed demonstrators in Trafalgar Square: NO POLARIS … BAN THE BOMB … FREE us FROM FEAR! The Prime Minister recorded in his diary that Kennedy “talked all the way up on his experiences.” He had “laid great hopes” on the summit but for the first time in his life “met a man wholly impervious to his charm.”
The presidential couple was to spend the night at the Radziwills’ Georgian town house in Belgravia. Dr. Jacobson recorded that a Secret Service agent summoned him from Claridge’s: “The driver escorted me through the garden to the back door.… I walked into Lee Radziwill’s bedroom where Lee, the President, and Jackie were … chatting. The President and I retired to an anteroom, where I attended to him.”
On Monday morning, June 5, Kennedy went to Admiralty House for formal talks with Macmillan.* Observing that his guest was very tired, the Prime Minister flung out his hand. “Let’s not have a meeting—the Foreign Office and all that. Why not have a peaceful drink and chat by ourselves?” He found the President “grateful and relieved.”
The previous November, Macmillan had worried about getting along with the “cocky Irishman” twenty-three years his junior: “I was an aging politician … and of an altogether different experience and background.” The Prime Minister shared the British establishment’s loathing for Joseph Kennedy, who as Roosevelt’s Ambassador in London had opposed American aid to Britain’s fight against Hitler. It helped that Kennedy’s late sister Kathleen had been married during the war to Lady Dorothy’s nephew, Lord Hartington, before Hartington’s death in the invasion of France.
Ambassador David Bruce once cabled the President from London that Macmillan gave the “impression of being shot through with Victorian languor” but in fact he was “a political animal, shrewd, subtle in maneuver.” Embodiment of “Edwardian and eighteenth-century England in the grand tradition of the Establishment,” the Prime Minister had “charm, politeness, dry humor, self-assurance, a vivid sense of history, dignity, and character.”
Meetings in Washington and Key West had helped to cement Kennedy’s closest relationship with a foreign leader. Before Vienna, Macmillan wrote the President a birthday letter: “I value our friendship. I rejoice that relations between the United States and my country are so close and happy.”
Years later he carped that Kennedy spent “half his time thinking about adultery, the other half about secondhand ideas passed on by his advisers.” But he said, “You know how it is when you meet someone and feel immediately as if you had known him always? That is the way I felt with Jack. We could talk in shorthand.”
Now the President told him that Khrushchev had been “much more of a barbarian” than he had expected. Macmillan wrote in his diary that Kennedy “seemed rather stunned … like somebody meeting Napoleon (at the height of his power) for the first time.”
Khrushchev returned to Moscow determined to look like the victor. At an Indonesian Embassy celebration of the visiting President Sukarno’s sixtieth birthday, a Western reporter thought that Khrushchev looked “more exuberant and relaxed” than in years. Time observed that he was “apparently without a care in the world.”
As the band struck up “Indonesia / Is free / Cha cha cha,” the Chairman shouted at Mikoyan and Brezhnev, “Dance, you two!” Brezhnev whipped out a white handkerchief, fluttered it over his head, and sashayed with the Deputy Premier. Beating on a bongo drum, Khrushchev said that Mikoyan was “a good dancer. That’s why we keep him on the job.”
Sukarno ordered decorative Indonesian women to kiss the Soviet leaders and demanded to be kissed by a Russian girl. Mrs. Khrushchev asked a Russian girl to do her duty: “Oh, please come. You only have to kiss him once.” The Chairman thanked the girl for “upholding Russian honor.”
At the Kremlin, he gave colleagues a mixed report on Vienna: Kennedy did not need to consult his Secretary of State “the way Eisenhower always depended on Dulles.” Still, the President seemed “too intelligent and too weak.”
Khrushchev told of his astonishment when Kennedy undercut his own arguments by saying he had inherited many of his policies and had no choice but to defend them. To a leader of Khrushchev’s belief, this absence of emotional conviction hinted at weakness; if Kennedy was motivated only by abstract geopolitical gamesmanship, he might fold under pressure. He also worried about the “very small majority in the presidential election” that Kennedy had mentioned at Vienna. During a world crisis, the President might be excessively warlike in order to shore up his domestic standing.
Khrushchev’s aide Fyodor Burlatsky felt that, to Khrushchev, Kennedy had “more the look of an adviser, not a political decision-maker or President. Maybe in a crisis he would be an adviser, but not even the most influential.” He felt that Khrushchev looked on Kennedy with the condescension of the self-made man: “This guy was here as a result of his own activities. And he understood the feelings of simple people. John Kennedy had no such feeling. Maybe his relations with workers or peasants were like a political game.”
Sergei Khrushchev recalled that his father saw Kennedy “as a worthy partner and a strong statesman, and as a simply charming man to whom he took a real liking.… He trusted Kennedy and felt real human sympathy toward him, and such likes and dislikes played a big part in Father’s life.” He thought the President a “serious political figure” with whom it “would be possible to do business.”* Georgi Kornienko recalled that Khrushchev cited his 1959 report that Kennedy was “independent and intelligent and could be counted on for new departures”: “You were right and the others were wrong.”
In London, the President and First Lady attended the christening of Antony Radziwill and a party afterward, attended by the Macmillans, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Randolph Churchill, Douglas Fairbanks, and David and Cissie Ormsby-Gore. David Bruce’s wife, Evangeline, thought Kennedy looked “very depressed.” Joseph Alsop was unnerved when the President told him, “I won’t give in to the Russians no matter what happens.” Alsop thought the comment “a little chilling among the duchesses and the champagne.”
Before going to Buckingham Palace for dinner, the President sat in a bathrobe on his bed autographing a picture of himself for Elizabeth II. The two heads of state had first met in 1938, when Kennedy was visiting his parents at the London Embassy. He wrote Billings, “Met Queen Mary and was at tea with the Princess Elizabeth, with whom I made a great deal of time. Thursday night I’m going to Court in my new silk knee breeches which are cut to my crotch tightly and in which I look mighty attractive.”
The Queen disliked Radziwill, but to accommodate the President she included the couple and addressed them by their royal Polish titles, which the Palace ordinarily did not recognize. While flying to London, Jacqueline had asked the American Chief of Protocol, Angier Biddle Duke, whether she should bend her knee to the Queen. He told her that the wife of a head of state never curtsied to anyone.
After the dinner, she and her sister flew off for eight days in Greece, where the Greek government had provided a villa and a yacht for a tour of the Greek islands. Still wearing his tuxedo, the President boarded Air Force One for Washington. After takeoff, he ordered some hot soup, looked through the London newspapers, and called in Hugh Sidey of Time, who found him sitting in boxer shorts, his eyes “red and watery, dark pockets beneath them.”
Kennedy told him that the meeting with Khrushchev had been “invaluable.” Before going to sleep, he scribbled out a Lincoln quotation that he had used at the end of the campaign: “I know there is a God, and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”
The next morning, Charles Bartlett was working in his office at the National Press Building when he heard the President’s helicopter roaring overhead from Andrews Air Force Base to the White House. Earlier in the spring, when Kennedy asked why Bartlett had so many Russian friends, the columnist had defended himself by saying, “Every man has his Russian.”
Now, a few minutes after hearing the presidential chopper, Bartlett received a call from the Oval Office: “Well, I want you to know that I’ve now got a Russian of my own!”
Salinger had asked the three networks for television time on Tuesday evening. Bundy advised Sorensen that the President’s speech should portray Vienna as a “direct, frank, and civil exchange” in which Kennedy had shown American “vigor and confidence.… No one ever expected that a weekend of talk would bridge the gap” between the two countries. He suggested the “Churchill custom” of describing “the moments of color and beauty” and “the overwhelming crowds that lined the streets.”
Kennedy called congressional leaders to the upstairs Oval Room for an off-the-record briefing. Under Jacqueline’s supervision, the room was being transformed into an elegant salon. He reported that Khrushchev was “confident and cocky.” Berlin was the only subject on which the Chairman had raised his voice. Fulbright asked whether Khrushchev had set a deadline for signing a peace treaty.
“He said December.” The President added that in his speech he intended to concede that Berlin was serious but would not “press it home too sharply. We shall soon send back an aide-mémoire on our own rights, and we must consider what else we can do.” He would “give no sense of a time limit.” He asked the leaders to “say nothing that would seem to put Khrushchev in a corner where he must fight back.”
Shortly before seven that evening, Kennedy sat a technician behind his Oval Office desk, peered, through the camera, and asked for changes in lighting: “These TV lights sometimes give me a double chin.” The naval desk had been swept clear except for leather-bound copies of Why England Slept and Profiles in Courage, his olive-green telephone, and a calendar. Jammed with people and equipment, the room was sweltering.
He sat down on three cushions stacked upon the seat of his upholstered swivel chair. As the camera’s red light blinked on, a fly buzzed around the room, too late to be swatted.
“Good evening, my fellow citizens. I returned this morning from a week-long trip to Europe, and I want to report to you on that trip in full.… To lay a wreath at the Arc de Triomphe, to dine at Versailles and Schönbrunn Palace, and with the Queen of England—these are the colorful memories that will remain with us for many years to come.”
But “this was not a ceremonial trip.” After describing his talks with de Gaulle, he turned to Vienna. “I will tell you now that it was a very sober two days.” Still, the talks had been “immensely useful.” He and Khrushchev needed as “much direct, firsthand knowledge” of each other as possible. He had spoken to the Chairman “directly, precisely, realistically.” The talks had reduced chances of a “dangerous misjudgment on either side.”
Nevertheless “the Soviets and ourselves [sic] give wholly different meanings to the same words—war, peace, democracy, and popular will. We have wholly different views of right and wrong, of what is an internal affair and what is aggression. And above all, we have wholly different concepts of where the world is and where it is going.”* Khrushchev “believes the world will move his way without resort to force.” The one “prospect of accord” was in Laos. But hopes for a test ban had been “struck a serious blow.”
The “most somber” exchange, he said, had been over Germany and Berlin: “We and our allies cannot abandon our obligations to the people of West Berlin.” Kennedy was so determined to conceal Khrushchev’s December ultimatum that he told the American people a falsehood, claiming that there had been “no threats or ultimatums by either side.”
The evasion succeeded. Wednesday’s New York Times headline did not even mention Berlin: KENNEDY SAYS KHRUSHCHEV TALKS EASED DANGER OF A “MISJUDGMENT.”
The next day, the President learned that Pathet Lao forces in Laos had seized the mile-high hamlet of Padong. The news made him angry: hours after his speech insisting that he and Khrushchev had agreed on Laos, the new attack would cause Americans to wonder whether he had been tricked.
Rusk cautioned him that Padong was “something of a special case,” only fifteen miles from the Pathet Lao headquarters, “a thorn in its side, an embarrassment for them from the very beginning.” Thompson reminded him that Khrushchev’s main reason for getting into Laos had been to keep the Chinese out; Padong was no reason to presume that he was not serious about a “temporary deal.”
Kennedy’s critics ridiculed his failure to act after warning Khrushchev that he would protect American interests in Laos. He ordered Harriman to boycott the Geneva conference but, when the cease-fire resumed, told him to return to the table: “I want to have a negotiated settlement. I do not want to become militarily involved.”
Kennedy had hoped to return from Vienna with a test ban accord, a working relationship with Khrushchev, and other achievements that would help to overcome his narrow victory margin and the international setbacks of the spring of 1961. Instead, Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum had thrown the two great powers into the most potentially dangerous confrontation since the early 1950s. As Kennedy had told Reston, he could not understand why the Chairman “did it, and in such a hostile way.”
In fact, Khrushchev would have been hard pressed to ignore Berlin in 1961, even if he had wished. For two and a half years, he had insisted on the fundamental importance of resolving the problem of Berlin and Germany. During that time, he had allowed his demand to be postponed and postponed. In May 1959, he had surrendered his peace treaty deadline in favor of Geneva talks.
When these failed, he agreed with Eisenhower on four-power negotiation at the Paris summit of May 1960. When that collapsed, he had tabled the problem until a new American President took office. After the inauguration, he had granted Kennedy’s request for a few months in which to shape the new American policy on Berlin. He could not keep deferring the problem forever without looking fatally soft.
For Khrushchev in June 1961, the cost of tolerating the German status quo was higher than ever: the growing number of East Germans escaping to the West, the growing danger of a rearmed “revanchist” West Germany with access to nuclear weapons. Taking a hard line on Berlin would help him avoid charges that he was soft on Washington and impress his Soviet critics, the Chinese, and the Third World with his assertion of Soviet power. His acceptance of a cease-fire in Laos had put extra pressure on him to prove that his rhetoric about the rising tide of communism was not merely words.
These facts would have compelled Khrushchev to gain some kind of satisfaction on Berlin no matter who was President in 1961. The ferocity with which he now sought that satisfaction was largely Kennedy’s doing. During his first five months, the President had given Khrushchev the dangerous impression that he was at once more passive and more militant than Eisenhower.
Some of Khrushchev’s advisers suggested that if Kennedy was so ambivalent about retaking Cuba, an island embedded in the American sphere, why expect him to be bolder elsewhere? Khrushchev knew of the President’s private qualms about the American commitment to Berlin and his fear during the Bay of Pigs of Soviet retaliation against the city. If he did not push Kennedy hard, his critics would charge him with forsaking a golden opportunity to bully a President who was vulnerable to intimidation.
During these same months, Khrushchev felt that Kennedy had behaved with unnerving belligerence. The new President had abandoned Eisenhower’s caution about brandishing American nuclear superiority. Despite Moscow’s warnings, he had three times asked Congress to increase the defense budget, the last in his “second State of the Union” of late May. Khrushchev may have thought the timing an effort to send him a threatening message one week before Vienna.
Most galling was Kennedy’s insistence that Khrushchev drop his demands on Berlin, despite the Chairman’s frequent warnings that the problem must be solved in 1961. To Khrushchev, this was a provocative insult. Not only did it presume that he did not mean what he said about Berlin, it suggested that Kennedy was trying to rub his nose in the fact of Soviet nuclear inferiority.
Hypersensitive to signs of American condescension, he felt that if the President genuinely respected the Soviet Union as an equal power, he would negotiate on Berlin as Eisenhower had. Not irrationally, he believed that if he did not manufacture a new Berlin crisis, Kennedy might go on ignoring the issue.
Had the President announced in early 1961 that he would revive the four-power negotiating mechanism used by Eisenhower to deal with Berlin, Khrushchev might have felt less compelled to seize Kennedy’s attention by issuing a new Berlin ultimatum. At Vienna, he suggested that he might be satisfied with some kind of interim solution. Kennedy’s insistence that Khrushchev simply like or lump the existing Berlin situation left the Chairman with few choices other than to ignite a major confrontation.
This accounts for Khrushchev’s almost theatrical bellicosity at Vienna—a performance so studied that he said years later he could not help “feeling sorry for Kennedy” as he spoke his brutal lines. He had to convince the President that he was ready to go to nuclear war over Berlin. Otherwise Kennedy might assume that once again he was crying wolf.
Why did Khrushchev renege on Georgi Bolshakov’s assurances about a test ban agreement at Vienna? Bolshakov later told Robert Kennedy that somehow the Chairman had “changed his mind” before the summit. It is possible that Khrushchev had never had any intention of making concessions on the issue and deliberately sent Bolshakov to lie to the Kennedys in order to lure the President to the summit. But it is difficult to imagine that Khrushchev would have so casually risked poisoning his relations with a President whom he expected to remain in power for eight years.
More likely it was in May that Khrushchev decided to launch a new Berlin crisis. Agreement on nuclear testing would have been incompatible with his aim of scaring the President with his pugnaciousness about Berlin. Soviet scientists and generals were pressing him for permission to detonate the largest hydrogen bombs ever produced. Khrushchev realized that in the context of a Berlin crisis, this would demonstrate Soviet nuclear might and his willingness to use it.
He probably believed it when he told Kennedy that the Soviets would not be the first to resume testing. Knowing that a majority of Americans favored resumption, he presumed that once they knew a test ban would be impossible to achieve in 1961, they would pressure the President into ending the three-year moratorium.
If the United States was the first to test, the brunt of world outrage would come down on Kennedy. Then, with a conspicuous show of regret, Khrushchev could respond by exploding his much larger “superbombs,” evoking, as with Sputnik and Vostok, the world’s awe at Soviet might.
Lem Billings found that Khrushchev’s belligerence “absolutely shook” Kennedy; the President had “never come face to face with such evil before.” Harriman found Kennedy “shattered.” Robert Kennedy felt it was the first time his brother “had ever really come across somebody with whom he couldn’t exchange ideas in a meaningful way.” The President complained that dealing with Khrushchev was “like dealing with Dad. All give and no take.”
Ben Bradlee noted that for weeks after the summit, the President “talked about little else.” The Newsweek man was among the friends to whom Kennedy read aloud from the official transcript. When excerpts appeared in the press, the President exploded. Acheson wrote a friend that “while JFK was giving us his lecture on security, he told us that newspaper men had even seen copies of his report of his talks with Mr. K. This did not come as a surprise to me since one of them, a neighbor of mine, told me that over the weekend JFK had read the best parts to him and a colleague.”
Mike Mansfield concluded that Khrushchev had looked on the President “as a youngster who had a great deal to learn and not much to offer.” Lyndon Johnson told cronies, “Khrushchev scared the poor little fellow dead.” Later, as President, he dropped to his knees in dramatic replication of what he thought to be Kennedy’s begging of Khrushchev at Vienna, saying that he would never behave the same way on Vietnam.
Angry at the criticism that got back to him, Kennedy told Dave Powers, “What was I supposed to do to show how tough I was? Take my shoe off and pound it on the table?”
Georgi Bolshakov told Frank Holeman that the Russians were “amazed” that the President appeared to be so “affected and scared” by Khrushchev: “When you have your hand up a girl’s dress, you expect her to scream, but you don’t expect her to be scared.”
Kennedy’s back problem was worse than ever. On Thursday, June 8, he flew to Palm Beach to recuperate at the vacant home of his Palm Beach neighbor Charles Wrightsman, where there were dust covers on the furniture. He slept late and lounged in his pajamas, hobbling on crutches to the heated saltwater pool. In the evening, he entertained friends and several of the White House secretaries with daiquiris and Frank Sinatra records on the phonograph.
Salinger announced the President’s malady to the press. Reporters asked why, if Kennedy was in such pain, the First Lady had proceeded with her trip to Greece. After consulting the President, he improbably explained that Mrs. Kennedy had not known of the back problem until their departure from London, when “he said in passing that his back was bothering him.” Told in Greece that the problem was serious, she had wanted to fly home “immediately” but her husband had “discouraged” her. Asked if the President was taking drugs for his pain, Salinger said, “I don’t know if he is or not.”
Kennedy had speculated in private that Khrushchev might call a peace conference on Berlin before the end of 1961 but noted that the Chairman’s threats were rarely carried out: “As de Gaulle says, Khrushchev is bluffing and he’ll never sign that treaty.… It would be crazy, and I’m sure he’s not crazy.”
Rusk advised the President that if the Soviets kept Khrushchev’s six-month ultimatum secret, it would show their willingness to avoid a new crisis over Berlin. But on Saturday, June 10, Pravda published the full text of Khrushchev’s aide-mémoire, revealing the deadline to the world.
Kennedy left for Washington. Photographers at the West Palm Beach airport gasped when they saw him using crutches and being lifted aboard Air Force One by a hydraulic cherry picker. At the White House, his doctors restricted him to his four-poster bed with a heating pad. He told advisers ranged gravely around the room that the United States could soon be “very close to war” with the Soviet Union.
Later he mused with David Ormsby-Gore about what had gone wrong to disappoint his early, modest hopes for improving Soviet relations. He wondered whether his March and May defense messages to Congress had been too menacing—not in substance, but in presentation.
Robert Kennedy considered Berlin “the first effort by Khrushchev to test the President, figuring that after the Bay of Pigs he was going to back out on everything.” In London, Macmillan wrote in his diary, “We may drift to disaster over Berlin—a terrible diplomatic defeat or (out of sheer incompetence) a nuclear war.”
The President told aides that he didn’t know exactly how Khrushchev would move against West Berlin; perhaps he would repeat Stalin’s effort to take the sector over by blockade. He asked McNamara what supplies would be available for American troops in Berlin and 2.4 million West Berliners, should Khrushchev and the East Germans halt access.
*Eisenhower proposed that the two countries exchange blueprints of and allow surveillance flights over each other’s military-industrial establishment.
*Number Ten Downing Street was closed for repairs.
*Sergei Khrushchev’s memory of Vienna may be colored by Kennedy’s later rise in Khrushchev’s estimation, especially after November 1963. The son also recalled that, in Vienna, Khrushchev and Kennedy “discussed an idea that was daring for its time, the idea of joint Soviet-American flight to Mars.” The joint flight discussed, of course, was to the moon.
*The President had obviously been impressed by the post-Inaugural cable from Thompson, which said, “We both look at the same set of facts and see different things.”