CHAPTER 13

“Dear Mr. President” and “Dear Mr. Chairman”

Bolshakov had brought Russian and English Versions of a twenty-six-page private letter that Khrushchev had sent to Kennedy from Pitsunda. He said he had spent the whole night on the English translation. The only Russians in the United States who knew about Khrushchev’s letter were himself and Gromyko. Ambassador Menshikov had not been informed.

After the Russian departed, Salinger called Newport. Kennedy told him, “Get that letter over to Dean Rusk as quickly as possible. Then bring it up here to me.”

Salinger took the letter to the Secretary at the Waldorf. Rusk read it twice but was unwilling to offer a snap judgment. He took the letter along with him to Washington that evening and then sent it by courier to Salinger in New York the next morning. Salinger flew to Providence and delivered the precious envelope to the Auchincloss house in Newport, where the President had just returned from Sunday Mass.

Opening with “Dear Mr. President,” Khrushchev’s missive began with a homey note about resting at Pitsunda with his children and grandchildren. He said he had planned to write earlier in the summer after Kennedy’s meeting with his son-in-law. But the President’s statements on Berlin had been so belligerent they led to an exchange of militant actions by both countries that must now be restrained.

Replying to Kennedy’s private message on Laos and Berlin, Khrushchev said he saw no reason why negotiation in good faith could not produce settlements in both places. He was willing, if the President was, to take another look at positions frozen hard through fifteen years of Cold War. He favored his Catholic counterpart with a biblical metaphor. The postwar world was like Noah’s Ark. Both the “clean” and the “unclean,” whatever their disagreements, wished it to stay afloat.

As leaders of the two mightiest states, he wrote, he and the President had a special obligation to prevent another war. It might be useful to start a purely informal correspondence that would bypass the American and Soviet bureaucracies, omit propaganda statements written for public consumption, and convey their positions without the necessity of a backward glance at the press.

If the President disapproved, he could consider that this letter did not exist. In any event, Khrushchev would not refer to the correspondence in public. He closed, “Accept my respects, N. Khrushchev, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R.”

Khrushchev had corresponded with Eisenhower, but these were mainly formal documents.* Why did the Chairman now send such a personal letter? At this perilous moment, he may have feared leaving the Soviet-American relationship to the tender mercies of Rusk and Gromyko, two bureaucrats he distrusted. He had tried to send public and private messages to the President through Pearson and Sulzberger, but these had not brought a serious response.

He presumably felt that if he built a fruitful personal relationship with the President by letter, this could be cited to Kremlin critics as evidence of Khrushchev’s indispensability in foreign affairs. It would also lend Kennedy stature and might give him a stake in helping to keep Khrushchev in power as a man he knew and with whom he could deal. The Chairman felt that the stronger Kennedy felt his domestic standing to be, the more likely he was to follow what Khrushchev assumed were private views on the Cold War that were close to those of Mansfield, Stevenson, and Fulbright.

The Chairman was worried about his Twenty-second Party Congress, scheduled for Moscow in October. He knew that the meeting could be rocky and unpredictable, with people saying many harsh things against the United States. A private correspondence would allow him to maintain quiet contact with the President and keep hostilities from escalating.

Why the cloak-and-dagger? Under Eisenhower, Khrushchev had allowed such letters to be delivered to the President by Menshikov and Smirnovsky. But as Foy Kohler recalled, each time one of the Russians appeared at the West Wing, “the entire press corps laid siege to the U.S. government until they managed to find some inkling of what the message was about.”

In March 1960, Eisenhower had been forced to wire the Chairman, “I deeply regret that the substance discussed in our recent correspondence has leaked to the press. I assure you that I believed that I had taken every precaution to safeguard against the exposure of these matters.” He arranged to have the Embassy transmit Khrushchev’s future letters more discreetly through the State Department.

Secrecy was restored, but Khrushchev did not like to imagine his letters appearing on the President’s desk under some kind of disclaiming cover note attached by the Cold Warriors of the State Department. Sending the letters through Bolshakov and other secret emissaries would avoid this problem. It would appeal to what he knew to be Kennedy’s penchant for secrecy and convey the implied compliment that he was willing to use a channel with Kennedy that he had never used with his predecessor.

After reading Khrushchev’s letter, Kennedy called Rusk in Washington. They agreed to have Salinger inform Bolshakov that the President would respond, probably within the week.

Kennedy felt that a correspondence would be in keeping with his often-expressed desire for open communication, and it might postpone or muffle a showdown over Berlin. But he also saw dangers. A strongly negative reply to Khrushchev on Berlin might hasten Soviet action. If he sent a strongly positive reply, Khrushchev might trick him by quietly sending it to the French and West Germans as proof that Kennedy was conspiring behind their backs. If he took the precaution of showing his letter to the notoriously leaky Western allies, Khrushchev might find out and, outraged, halt their private correspondence forever.

The President dictated a memo to himself to “have Bundy and Sorensen analyze K’s letter.” Bohlen observed that Kennedy’s reply “may be the most important letter the President will ever write.”

The following Wednesday, October 4, Kennedy saw C. L. Sulzberger in the upstairs Oval Room. He thanked him for sending on the message from Khrushchev in September about using “informal contacts” to settle Berlin.

He said that he had recently studied the 1959 Western “peace plan,” proposing free elections in both Germanys. It “was obviously not serious and we knew it could never be accepted.” Now, at least, the United States was serious. Without disclosing Khrushchev’s private letter, he reported that the Chairman had lately been “much softer” on Berlin. At Vienna, he had showed no recognition that American prestige was involved: “Now he does, and his attitude is less rigid.”

Sulzberger asked if the Vienna summit had been useful. Kennedy said, “Yes, it was useful for me in judging this man. One always has a tendency to think that reason will prevail in personal conversation, but now I have been able to judge him. Now I know that there is no further need for talking. The only reason to meet again would be to make the final arrangements in any previously prepared agreement.” In personal contacts, Khrushchev had one great advantage: known as a “rough, tough man,” he was therefore more impressive to people when he was polite, just like Joe McCarthy and Jimmy Hoffa.*

Kennedy said he had no doubt that the American people were “ready to go to the brink of war” on Berlin: “The chances of settling this without war are not yet too good.” More than once, he used the words, “If we push the button.” Rocking jerkily in his chair, he said he had been concerned by Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine and others who said he lacked the will to use nuclear weapons, but “I think we have convinced Khrushchev on that.”

Sulzberger reminded Kennedy that Khrushchev had told him the Laos situation would soon improve. The President replied that this was the line Khrushchev was “putting out” but he figured the Chairman expected Laos to “soon fall into his lap.” It was perfectly plain how the United States would fight over Berlin, he said, but how to defend Southeast Asia was not so clear-cut.

On Friday evening, October 6, Andrei Gromyko came to the White House. Kennedy told O’Donnell it was “really the first time since Vienna that they’ve wanted to talk.” A week before, Gromyko had confided to Rusk that his government would not insist on signing a German peace treaty before the end of 1961. Kennedy told Rusk, “It looks like a thaw.”

The President had first met Gromyko while reporting for the Hearst papers on the founding UN conference in San Francisco in 1945. He had found Gromyko polite, agreeable, and human; when he smiled, it was with a real smile—“not like our Russian Ambassador here.”

Others observed that Gromyko combined the durability of Talleyrand, who consistently retained power through the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the Bourbon restoration, with the self-effacement of Tolstoy’s Alexy in Anna Karenina, the minister “who reveals so little of himself that his every remark and gesture was a source of mystery.” Asked once whether he had enjoyed his breakfast, he said, “Perhaps.”

He once told a reporter, “My personality does not interest me.” Harriman thought that Gromyko had “schooled himself out of any human foible.” A British diplomat noted his “impatience, coldness, and heavy, somewhat macabre sense of humor.” His daughter observed that since the 1930s, he had scarcely set foot on the streets of Moscow: “All he sees is the view of his car window.”

Gromyko was born in 1909, son of a father whom he described as “semi-peasant, semi-worker,” a Russo-Japanese War veteran. In 1931, the son left for Minsk, where he joined the Communist Party, married a fellow student, and studied Marxist theory and agricultural economics. By the end of the decade, he was on the Moscow fast track as a senior researcher at the Academy of Sciences.

At thirty, he was recruited to help fill the enormous new vacuum in the Soviet diplomatic service. In the spring of 1939, Stalin was mowing through the first postrevolutionary generation of Soviet diplomats; many were executed or sent to labor camps. His Jewish, anti-Fascist Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov had negotiated the first Soviet-American diplomatic ties with Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Stalin replaced him with Molotov, who on taking power said, “Enough of Litvinov liberalism! I am going to tear out that kike’s hornet nest by the roots!”*

As Stalin and Molotov renounced their pact with Hitler and then spun around into alliance with the United States and Britain, Gromyko’s sea legs kept him on the winning side of the diplomatic bureaucracy. He was appointed as Counselor in Washington, where Litvinov had been sent as Ambassador to help weld together the Allied war machine. In 1943, more confident of victory and eager to fight for Soviet power in the postwar world, Stalin fired Litvinov and called Gromyko to Moscow. Stalin’s aides reputedly joked that Gromyko would either be sent west, back to Washington, or east, to Siberia.

At thirty-four, Gromyko became Ambassador to Washington, where he fought for Stalin’s interests in the postwar firmament.† During talks on a United Nations, he insisted that every major power have a veto, thus ensuring that the Soviet Union would not be thwarted as it did its business in Eastern Europe.

Stalin made him a Deputy Foreign Minister and his first permanent representative to the UN Security Council. Western reporters called him “Mr. Nyet” and “Grim Grom.” So many times did he stalk out of the chamber that when American baseball players walked off the field, radio commentators began to say that they were “pulling a Gromyko.”

By 1949, Gromyko was back at the Foreign Ministry. Molotov was replaced by the rabidly anti-American Andrei Vishinsky, who charged that Gromyko was too mild and had used official workmen and materials to build a weekend dacha. This practice was hardly unusual, but Vishinsky managed to have Gromyko censured and shunted off to the Court of St. James’s in 1952. The next year, after Stalin’s death, Molotov and Gromyko were restored to their old jobs.

Convinced that Khrushchev was conceding too much to the West, Molotov tried to block the Austrian State Treaty and improved Soviet relations with Japan and Yugoslavia. In 1956, Khrushchev fired him as Foreign Minister in favor of a young man in a hurry, Dimitri Shepilov. Then Shepilov betrayed his benefactor by joining Molotov and others in the Anti-Party Coup. Gromyko was not unsettled by the newest shake-up. In a rare effort at wit, he once said, “It’s a bit like the Bermuda Triangle. Every now and then one of us disappears.”

Appointed Foreign Minister, he remolded himself to serve Khrushchev as he had Stalin. The Chairman teased him as an “arid bureaucrat.” He once told a young Soviet diplomat in Gromyko’s presence, “Andrei Andreyevich is an excellent diplomat and tactician.… But as an ideologist and theoretician, he’s rather poor.… We’ll make something of him yet.”

Gromyko hated being ridiculed in front of an underling but bore it in silence. When Khrushchev pounded his fists on his UN desk in 1960, Gromyko manfully did the same. As he pounded, the sides of his thin mouth were curled downward in distaste.

Arriving at the Stalinist tower that housed the Foreign Ministry, Gromyko rose in a private elevator to a seventh-floor office whose desk and walls were bare but for the portrait of Lenin facing his chair. A visitor to the family’s Moscow flat found it “so impersonal as to be modest.” He relaxed by playing chess with his congenial wife, Lidiya, or reading Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Twain, and the confidential archives of the czarist diplomatic service. He had Western films screened at home and, like Stalin, offered running commentaries on the actors and their performances.

Gromyko’s passion was not to reshape the world but political survival. This was not easy in the subculture of the Bermuda Triangle. He recoiled from Soviet domestic issues, concluding no doubt that more Soviet political careers had been broken by the economy and intra-Party feuds than by shifts in foreign policy. One aide noted that whenever a conversation threatened to grow personal or ideological, Gromyko changed the subject.

He lacked the sentimental idealism of Khrushchev and Mikoyan about the 1917 Revolution or their emotional commitment to communism. Still, Gromyko was a champion of his system and its spread throughout the world. Living in New York after the war had confirmed his view of capitalist America. “Profit is the pitiless filter through which everything to do with culture and art and the country’s spiritual life has to pass,” he wrote in memoirs late in life. “Only that which promises a return on capital can survive.”

His relations with Khrushchev were probably the unhappiest of those with any of the five Soviet leaders he ultimately served.* The Chairman very likely suspected that Gromyko had not entirely surrendered his loyalty to Stalin and Molotov. He knew that Gromyko was quietly cultivating Brezhnev, a not unlikely future leader of the Soviet Union. As human beings, Khrushchev and Gromyko were oil and water.

The Chairman felt he must take audacious gambles if he was to advance the Soviet cause without bankrupting the economy with vast military spending. Gromyko looked on many of Khrushchev’s bright ideas as those of an amateur who had to be watched to avoid serious damage to Soviet interests. If Khrushchev ever thought of firing Gromyko, he presumably concluded that it was not worth losing his expertise or the patina of continuity that Gromyko brought to his tumultuous foreign policy.

His impatience with Gromyko resembled nothing so much as Kennedy’s impatience with Rusk. Kennedy and Khrushchev both solved their problem in the same way. The President increasingly relied on his brother, White House aides, and other loyalists for advice on foreign policy, using Robert Kennedy and others as emissaries for private communication with the Russians. Khrushchev increasingly relied on his son-in-law, political aides, and Mikoyan for advice, using Adzhubei and others to communicate with the Americans.

Born within five months of each other, Gromyko and Rusk each felt in the early 1960s that part of his task was to keep a theatrical, inexperienced, sometimes erratic boss on track. Each was privately irritated by the meddling of “amateurs” like Robert Kennedy and Adzhubei in foreign policy. More than one diplomat noted that Gromyko seemed to feel a unique professional empathy with his American counterpart. When a Soviet diplomat once needled Rusk on some minor technical point, Gromyko cried, “Leave the Secretary alone!”

The President took Gromyko to the upstairs Oval Room and showed him the dazzling view of the Washington Monument and Potomac beyond the Truman Balcony. He said, “I’m sorry Mrs. Kennedy isn’t here. She’s up in Rhode Island with the babies.”

The Foreign Minister consumed an hour reading from a position paper on Berlin. Smoking a cigar, Kennedy felt there was nothing new but that Khrushchev seemed more resigned to accept the status quo. He told Gromyko that while he sensed a “softening” in the Soviet position, the Soviet Union had still made no acceptable proposal for negotiations on Berlin.

Gromyko mentioned the Chairman’s stale offer to internationalize West Berlin in exchange for ill-defined access guarantees. Kennedy shook his head: “You’re offering to trade us an apple for an orchard. We don’t do that in this country.” He suggested that Gromyko confer with Thompson in Moscow about a Berlin settlement that would lead to a “clear and stable relationship” between their countries.

Gromyko declaimed on the virtues of a troika. The President was prepared. At the suggestion of a Polish-born congressional aide, he picked up a Russian-language book and turned to a fable by the Russian Aesop, Ivan Krylov:

A swan, a pike, and crab once took their station

In harness, and would drag a loaded cart;

But when the moment came for them to start,

They sweat, they strain, and yet the cart stands still.

Gromyko replied, “But those are animals. We are talking about people.” Kennedy said, “It’s a delightful little book. I want you and Mr. Khrushchev to share it as a gift.” He gave his visitor two leather-bound copies.

That evening, at a dinner for the Sudanese president, Kennedy told Lippmann that he had gotten “nowhere” with Gromyko. Lippmann said, “Gromyko is the most wooden man you’ll ever have to deal with.” Kennedy agreed: “I don’t like him.” Later, exact quotations from the meeting were leaked to the press to show that the President had not been soft with Gromyko.

After the Foreign Minister stopped to see Macmillan in London, the Prime Minister wrote, “I think the Russians are looking for a way out (as we are) if they can do so without too much loss of ‘face.’”

At Hyannis Port, on the weekend of Saturday, October 14, Kennedy polished his reply to Khrushchev’s private letter, working from drafts supplied by Sorensen and Bundy. Starting “Dear Mr. Chairman,” he wrote of his retreat, his children, and their cousins: getting away from Washington gave him a clearer, quieter perspective. He tried to make the tone cordial and hopeful, using first-person references that he eschewed in speeches.

He welcomed the idea of a personal, informal, but meaningful exchange of views in frank, realistic, and fundamental terms. It could supplement official channels, but he would want to show the correspondence to his Secretary of State. Their letters could never convert each other, but at least they would be free from the polemics of Cold War debate. That debate would, of course, proceed, but they would direct their messages only to each other.

He liked the Chairman’s reference to Noah’s Ark: of course they must collaborate if they were to avoid destroying everything. He agreed with Khrushchev’s emphasis on their special obligation. They two were not personally responsible for the events at the end of World War II that led to the current Berlin situation, but they would be held responsible if they could not deal with it peacefully.

He chose points from Khrushchev’s letter with which he could agree, sometimes restating them to his own liking, but pulled no punches: the Chairman’s suggestion to station Soviet troops in West Berlin was “not acceptable to the United States, nor to the other two Powers whose troops are in that City.” He closed with best wishes from his family to Khrushchev’s; through these letters and otherwise, he hoped for concrete progress toward a just and enduring peace. This, he wrote, was their greatest responsibility and their greatest opportunity.

The Chairman liked Kennedy’s reply enough to pursue the secret correspondence, which Bundy dubbed the “pen pal letters.” To avoid Foreign Ministry channels and underscore the notion that he was offering the President access to his private thoughts, Khrushchev sent later letters with the same aura of mystery as the first. Someone from the Soviet Embassy would meet Robert Kennedy, Sorensen, or Salinger on a street corner or in a saloon and slip a manila envelope out of his trench coat or folded newspaper.

Bundy gave the President a mid-October “report from Charlie Bartlett on his meeting with Smirnovsky. This is worth reading because it implies that the Soviets are hoping you will be ‘reasonable.’ Be wary!”

In the Kremlin’s vast new red-and-gold Palace of Congresses, Khrushchev opened the Twenty-second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party with a six-hour speech. Of Gromyko’s meeting with Kennedy he said, “We hear the reproach that someone is trying to give an apple for an orchard in settling the German question. This figure of speech may please its authors, but it does not reflect the true picture.”

The new Soviet nuclear tests were “coming along very well.… We shall probably wind them up by detonating a hydrogen bomb with a yield of fifty million tons of TNT.” The Soviet Union also had a hundred-megaton bomb. “But we are not going to explode it, because even if we did so at the most remote site, we might knock out all our windows!” Resounding applause.

“May God grant—as they used to say—that we are never called upon to explode these bombs over anybody’s territory. This is the greatest wish of our lives!” More resounding applause.

A White House statement called on the Russians not to test the fifty-megaton bomb because it would add more radioactive fallout to that “unleashed in recent weeks.” It noted that the United States had the “technical know-how and materials to produce bombs in the fifty-to one-hundred-megaton range and higher.”

Another passage in Khrushchev’s speech disturbed the President: “We believe that the forces of socialism … are today more powerful than the aggressive imperialist forces.” A German peace treaty “must and will be signed,” making West Berlin a “free, demilitarized city.” This passage suggested that the West would now accept Khrushchev’s demands on Berlin out of fear that the world power balance had shifted toward the Soviet Union.

At a press conference just the week before, Kennedy had been asked about recent charges that he had not maintained the “strength and credibility of our nuclear deterrent” or convinced Khrushchev “that we are determined to meet force with force in Berlin or elsewhere.” The President had replied by describing the military buildup since January. He skirted the issue of which superpower was stronger.

If he allowed Khrushchev to go unchallenged now, as he intimidated the world with the most powerful nuclear tests in history, any negotiation over Berlin might be viewed as a sign of American weakness. The Allies might reassess their dependence on the United States. Kennedy’s Republican opposition would tear him to shreds.

At a White House luncheon that autumn, the venomous publisher of the Dallas Morning News, E. M. “Ted” Dealey, shocked those present by reading out a challenge to the President: “We can annihilate Russia and should make that clear to the Soviet government.” Unfortunately “you and your Administration are weak sisters.” What was needed was “a man on horseback.… Many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”

Flushed with anger, Kennedy replied, “Wars are easier to talk about than they are to fight. I’m just as tough as you are—and I didn’t get elected President by arriving at soft judgments.”*

Since February, McNamara and others around the President had periodically assured the public that American strength was second to none. These assurances had always been deliberately imprecise. Like Eisenhower, Kennedy did not want to provoke the Soviets into a massive buildup. Nor could he be absolutely certain what the Russians did and did not have.

When McNamara told reporters in February that the missile gap was in the American favor, he was relying largely on primitive spy satellite photographs of Soviet territory, which were often dark and ill-defined. That spring, Western intelligence asked its agent Penkovsky for new information on the Soviet missile program. Using three rolls of microfilm passed by Penkovsky as well as other intelligence sources, the CIA concluded in June that the Russians had fifty to a hundred operational ICBMs.

In August, as the President grappled with Berlin, he asked the CIA for a new emergency assessment. On September 6, the Agency reported that its June estimate had been too high: the Soviet Union in fact had fewer than thirty-five operational ICBMs. Briefing Kennedy one week later, General Lemnitzer put the figure at ten to twenty-five. Unlike America’s, none were in hardened silos; all were cumbersome to launch.

As long as their locations were secret, the Soviet missiles had been usable for a Pearl Harbor–style attack and a retaliatory second strike against the United States. But now that satellites had shown the Pentagon the location of virtually every Soviet ICBM, the system had only limited value for a first strike and almost none for a second. As the State Department intelligence chief Roger Hilsman recalled, “The whole Soviet ICBM system was suddenly obsolescent.”

Kennedy knew that if the United States revealed Soviet inferiority, Khrushchev might speed up his ICBM program. Nevertheless, letting the Chairman know that the United States had absolute faith in its own superiority might make him less cavalier about pressing his Berlin demands to the point of war. For the President, Khrushchev’s opening speech to his Party Congress demonstrated the danger of allowing him to keep spinning public fantasies about Soviet dominance in nuclear weapons.

Kennedy decided to let the world know who was the dominant power but would not say so himself: “When I get up and say those things, it sounds too belligerent.”

McNamara’s deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, was scheduled to speak on Saturday, October 21, to the Business Council in Hot Springs, Virginia. The fifty-five-year-old Gilpatric was a Wall Street lawyer, by way of Hotchkiss and Yale, who had served as Truman’s Undersecretary of the Air Force.

Time said, “In many ways Gilpatric is McNamara’s personality opposite—he is socially gregarious and skilled in the ways of handling admirals, generals, and politicians.” Joseph Alsop told the President that Gilpatric provided a “badly needed human lubricant” at the Pentagon. Kennedy joked that Jacqueline thought him the “second most attractive man” at the Pentagon—after McNamara. She invited Gilpatric to small White House dinners and Camp David without his wife and visited his Maryland farm. Kennedy told her, “I think it’s that father image of yours.”

The President, Bundy, Rusk, and McNamara collaborated with Gilpatric on a text for his Business Council speech. The address would reveal more explicitly than ever before the immense nuclear superiority of the United States.

As Gilpatric said years later, it was designed “to convince the Soviet Union that we were ready to take on any threat in the Berlin area” and to persuade the West Germans and other allies “to beef up the conventional forces of the alliance.” In the wake of the new Soviet nuclear tests and before the expected Berlin talks, Kennedy wished to remind the American people of the military might that had been preserved and enhanced under his administration.

Hilsman recalled that the President decided to authorize the address “only after much agonizing, since everyone involved recognized that telling the Soviets what we knew entailed considerable risk. Forewarned, the Soviets would undoubtedly speed up their ICBM program.” Nevertheless, if Khrushchev “were allowed to continue to assume that we still believed in the missile gap, he would very probably bring the world dangerously close to war.”

Drafting of the speech was assigned to Daniel Ellsberg, the young Pentagon strategist who a decade later disseminated the “Pentagon Papers” on Vietnam. Ellsberg asked Kaysen why Kennedy instead did not privately inform Khrushchev that he knew the full facts of Soviet nuclear inferiority. He could send the Chairman the precise coordinates of the Soviet ICBMs of Plesetsk or copies of satellite photos. Kaysen told him, “John Kennedy isn’t going to talk that way to Khrushchev.”

Gilpatric told his Business Council audience that the President was “determined that our strategic power must be sufficient to deter any deliberate nuclear attack on this country or its allies by being able to survive a first strike by the enemy with sufficient arms to penetrate his defenses and inflict unacceptable losses upon him.”

He listed the conventional measures taken to deal with Berlin but argued that the “fundamental question” was the nuclear balance of power: “This nation has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power that an enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of self-destruction on his part.

“The U.S. has today hundreds of manned intercontinental bombers … six Polaris submarines at sea, carrying a total of ninety-six missiles, and dozens of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Our carrier strike forces and land-based theater forces could deliver additional hundreds of megatons.

“The total number of our nuclear delivery vehicles … is in the tens of thousands, and, of course, we have more than one warhead for each vehicle.” Even if the Russians tried to wage a Pearl Harbor–style assault, they could not hope for victory: “Our forces are so deployed and protected that a sneak attack could not effectively disarm us.

“The destructive power which the United States could bring to bear even after a Soviet surprise attack upon our forces would be as great as, perhaps greater than, the total undamaged force which the enemy can threaten to launch against the United States in a first strike. In short, we have a second-strike capability which is at least as extensive as what the Soviets can deliver by striking first. Therefore, we are confident that the Soviets will not provoke a major nuclear conflict.”

Gilpatric taunted Khrushchev further by showing that the United States knew about the growing Sino-Soviet split: threatening to set off a fifty-megaton bomb was “the Soviet Union’s answer to the discordant voice from its populous neighbor to the south.”*

To show that Gilpatric was not speaking merely for himself, Rusk gave a television interview the next morning: “Mr. Khrushchev must know that we are strong.… When we talk about exploratory talks or about contacts with the Soviet government on one or another point, there is no problem that turns on whether we feel that we are weak or not. We are not weak.”

Asked if the President had not recently conceded that American and Soviet power were equal, Rusk said, “Well, I think when we use the word equal, what is meant there is that in this confrontation of two great power blocs, each side has a capacity to inflict very great damage upon the other.… But that does not necessarily mean that, in the total situation, the two situations are equal.”

That week McNamara said, “I believe we have nuclear power several times that of the Soviet Union.” Classified briefings were given to allies that the United States knew to be penetrated by Soviet moles in order to strengthen the effect of Gilpatric’s message.

At a news conference, in reply to a question, the President declared that the United States would “not trade places with anyone in the world.… I’ve stated that I thought that the United States was in a position that was powerful—Mr. Gilpatric said ‘second to none.’ I said it was our obligation to remain so. And that is what we intend to do.”

Christian Herter wrote Eisenhower that “if what is now being said by the Administration had been said by the Democrats during the last two years, as it should have been, then … Khrushchev’s present attitude might well be quite different from what it is.” The General replied, “Amen. I marvel at how the opposition manages to get away with its switch in position without once being called on it or being reminded of previous statements.”

By asking Gilpatric to make this speech, Kennedy may have strengthened his own domestic political standing and reassured American allies, but he also provocatively undermined Khrushchev’s position in the Kremlin and in the world.

The Chairman’s entire domestic and foreign strategy was based on creating the illusion of Soviet nuclear might. Now, as the world learned that the emperor had no clothes, Khrushchev must have imagined that the Third World and perhaps even Soviet allies, previously mesmerized by Soviet power, might begin turning away from Moscow. The Chinese would crow that his fakery and softness on capitalism had been revealed once and for all. His Kremlin rivals would ask why he had spent on consumer goods and agriculture at the cost of leaving the Soviet Union in such a humiliating position.

Khrushchev had fashioned an illusion of Soviet strength most of all so that the United States would treat his country as an equal. Now Kennedy seemed to have deliberately chosen to humiliate him—and in the middle of a Party Congress at which he was already under fire by the Chinese and more hard-line Soviet leaders.

He may have wondered whether the “madmen of the Pentagon” might now press a President worried about his own domestic political weakness to order a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. The Kremlin had worried for years about Pentagon demands for a nuclear “bolt out of the blue.” Soviet intelligence almost certainly picked up some hint of the daydreaming in Washington about an American first strike. Even if Kennedy stood up to his generals, who could say that he would not now exploit his nuclear advantage to demand that Cold War disputes be resolved on American terms?

To remedy the immediate damage of Gilpatric’s speech, Khrushchev approved the detonation of a thirty-megaton nuclear blast. Two days after the speech, the world heard the shattering roar of the most mammoth explosion yet unleashed by man against the earth.

Defense Minister Malinovsky told the Party Congress that Gilpatric had “addressed a meeting of the Business Council in Virginia, presumably not without President Kennedy’s knowledge, and, brandishing the might of the United States, threatened us with force. What is there to say to this latest threat, to this petty speech? Only one thing: the threat does not frighten us!

“They are threatening to reply with force to our just proposals for a German peace treaty and the ending of the abnormal situation in West Berlin.… A realistic assessment of the picture would lead one to believe that what the imperialists are planning is a surprise nuclear attack on the U.S.S.R. and the socialist countries.”

Malinovsky insisted that America’s claim of nuclear superiority was erroneous: Gilpatric’s assessment was based on five-megaton warheads. The Soviet Union, he said, had many warheads from twenty to fifty megatons that could be delivered “to any spot on the globe.” The Americans “must obviously make fundamental corrections” in their estimates. As for Western Europe, “You must understand, madmen, that it would take really very few multimegaton nuclear bombs to wipe out your small and densely populated countries and kill you instantly in your lairs!”

The thirty-megaton blast and Malinovsky’s tough language may have temporarily consoled the Party Congress delegates, but the deeply serious problems created for Khrushchev by Gilpatric’s speech remained. It pressured him to do something spectacular to change the world’s perception of the nuclear balance between the Soviet Union and the United States.

On the day after the Gilpatric speech, Allan Lightner, the senior American civilian in West Berlin, and his wife were headed into the Eastern sector along Friedrichstrasse to see a Czechoslovak theater company perform. At Checkpoint Charlie, the East German police, the “Vopos” (Volkspolizisten—“People’s Police”), refused to let the Lightners’ Volkswagen into East Berlin without scrutinizing their passports. Lightner retorted that official American license plates had always been considered sufficient identification.

Since the United States did not recognize the GDR or its authority over East Berlin, Lightner demanded to see a Soviet official. The Vopos refused. Lightner referred the matter to Lucius Clay, now in Berlin as Kennedy’s resident personal representative.

On leaving his post as chief of the Continental Can Company, Clay had won Kennedy’s consent to have him report directly to the President. “I’m the President’s man,” he told a friend, “but I cannot abide that little brother of his.” Bundy feared that the General might at some point resign in protest over Kennedy’s moderation on Berlin. He found Clay “difficult. At least once a week, he would send a cable saying if A, B, or C didn’t happen or if the current instruction or intent to do D and E should persist, he couldn’t answer for the consequences.”

By Clay’s order, American troops armed with rifles escorted Lightner’s car into East Berlin. As Lightner recalled, if the Vopos had tried to stop it “by shooting one of us, we would have had to kill all of them.… All hell would have broken loose.”

In Moscow, Khrushchev may have wondered whether, in the wake of the Gilpatric speech, Lightner’s display was the harbinger of new American belligerence around the world. He could not have known that authority for Lightner’s stand came from the strong-minded General Clay, not the White House. When Kennedy was told about the incident, he reputedly carped, “We didn’t send him over there to go to the opera in East Berlin.”

The next day, with Soviet approval, the East Germans announced that only Allied personnel in uniform would be allowed into East Berlin without identity papers. Clay called the President and said that something had to be done or else the Communists would keep nibbling away at Western rights. Reluctant to provoke the General, Kennedy consented.

On Wednesday morning, October 25, two young members of the American military police drove through Checkpoint Charlie in an Opel sedan with official American plates. They refused to show their passports. When Vopos stopped them, three U.S. Army jeeps with battle-ready soldiers escorted them into East Berlin, defying the East German decree.

Taking up positions at the boundary line were three armored personnel carriers and ten American tanks equipped with bulldozer blades serviceable for an attack on the Berlin Wall. American jeeps escorted more civilian vehicles in and out of East Berlin in the most important Communist setback since the border closing.

On Friday, ten Soviet tanks rolled up to the boundary, facing the American tanks one hundred yards away. This was the first time in history that American and Soviet tanks had ever confronted each other. The U.S. tank commander, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Tyree, feared an unexpected event that would touch off open military conflict with the Russians, “such as a nervous soldier discharging his weapon” or “some tanker stepping accidentally on his accelerator leading to a runaway tank.”

The President called Clay in Berlin. By Clay’s account, as he and Kennedy talked, he was handed a slip saying that twenty more Russian tanks had rolled up to the boundary. He told the President, “This proves they are good mathematicians.… We have thirty tanks in Berlin, so they brought up twenty more tanks so that they will have a tank for every tank that we have.” He called it further evidence that “they don’t intend to do anything.”

“Well, I’m glad of that,” said Kennedy. “I know you people over there haven’t lost your nerve.” Clay boldly replied, “Mr. President, we’re not worried about our nerves. We’re worrying about those of you people in Washington.”

Without telling Clay, Kennedy had the Attorney General inform Bolshakov that he would like the Russians to remove their tanks within twenty-four hours. Valentin Falin, later Soviet Ambassador to Bonn, insisted years afterward that the American message included a suggestion that if the American and Soviet tanks “parted without damage to each other’s prestige,” the President would evince “certain flexibility” on the Berlin issue in a “productive, purely political exchange of opinions.”*

Bolshakov relayed Robert’s message to Khrushchev. Adzhubei later recalled that while the American tanks made Soviet generals nervous, the Chairman himself was calm. By Khrushchev’s own account, he told his commander in Berlin that the Americans “can’t turn their tanks around and pull them back as long as our guns are pointing at them.… They’re looking for a way out, I’m sure, so let’s give them one.”

The next morning, the Soviet tanks left the border. The United States followed suit. Robert may have offered Bolshakov another face-saving concession: American civilians were asked, for the time being, to keep out of East Berlin.

Falin later said that Moscow had information that American tank officers had been given orders “to destroy the Berlin Wall.” The Soviets suspected that Clay favored an assault upon the Wall. Unbeknownst to Washington, the General had overseen Army plans to set up walls in a West Berlin forest and practice knocking them down.

As Falin recalled, had there been a move against the Wall, Soviet tanks would have opened fire, bringing the United States and Soviet Union “closer to the third world war than ever.… Had the tank duel started then in Berlin—and everything was running toward it—the events most probably would have gone beyond any possibility of control.”

Khrushchev had hoped that the Twenty-second Party Congress would enshrine him as the full successor to Marx, Engels, and Lenin and architect of full-scale communism by 1980, at which time Soviet sporting events, national defense, and other public functions would be conducted by the spontaneous initiative of the masses. Instead, he had to cope not only with the Gilpatric speech but also with Soviet, Chinese, and Albanian critics.

Before the Congress ended, the Chairman tried to strengthen himself by resuming the anti-Stalin campaign begun with his Secret Speech in 1956. On Monday evening, October 30, the old dictator’s mummy was evicted from the monument now no longer called the Lenin-Stalin Tomb. New place names were ordered for the Soviet Union’s sixty-two Stalinskis, seven Stalinos, two Stalinsks, and one Stalingrad.

Almost none of the Party Congress speakers, save Khrushchev in his opening address, mentioned the Berlin Crisis. Demands for a UN troika were dropped; the Soviets accepted the election as Secretary-General of U Thant of Burma, who was confirmed unanimously.*

On Tuesday, November 7, at a Kremlin celebration of the forty-fourth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Khrushchev told reporters that he would not “wait indefinitely” to solve the Berlin problem, but that “for the time being, it is not good for Russia and the United States to push each other.”

Two days later, he told the West German Ambassador, Hans Kroll, that relations between their countries must be improved: “Final reconciliation of the German and Soviet peoples would mean the crowning of my life’s work in the field of foreign policy.” He was playing for time.

In Washington, Bolshakov reported to Robert Kennedy on the Party Congress. The Chairman was “Kennedyizing” the Soviet government, “bringing in young people with new vitality, new ideas.” Robert told this to the President, who laughed: “We should be Khrushchevizing the American government.”

On November 9 and 10, Khrushchev sent the President two more private letters, a tough message on Berlin and a softer one on Southeast Asia. Bundy thought the Berlin letter a natural “raising of the price before negotiations begin.” Bohlen advised Kennedy to let it “cool off a while.”

The President agreed, responding instead to the letter on Southeast Asia: “I am conscious of the difficulties you and I face in establishing full communication between our two minds. This is not a question of translation but a question of the context in which we hear and respond to what each other has to say. You and I have already recognized that neither of us will convince the other about our respective social systems and general philosophies of life.

“These differences create a great gulf in communications because language cannot mean the same thing on both sides unless it is related to some underlying common purpose. I cannot believe that there are not such common interests between the Soviet and the American people. Therefore, I am trying to penetrate our ideological differences in order to find some bridge across the gulf on which we could bring our minds together and find some way in which to protect the peace of the world.”

A Laos agreement “ought to be possible” if he and Khrushchev took the “necessary steps” for the country’s neutrality and independence. “I have explained to you quite simply and sincerely that the United States has no national ambitions in Laos, no need for military bases or any military position, or an ally.”

Kennedy said that he had agreed to the formation of a coalition government headed by Prince Souvanna Phouma and was “pressing the leadership of the Royal Laotian Government to negotiate these questions in good faith.” In contrast, the Communist Prince Souphanouvong had “remained consistently at a distance from these discussions”: “I can only venture to hope that you, for your part, will likewise exert your influence in the same direction.”

Khrushchev’s letter had also criticized America’s dealings with its ally, the President of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, and dismissed Kennedy’s complaints about North Vietnamese action against the South.

In April 1961, after the Bay of Pigs, while Laos was referred to the conference table, Kennedy’s preoccupations about Vietnam had shifted from aiding the counterinsurgency to finding ways of showing that American willingness to compromise on Laos did not portend a similar retreat from Vietnam.

Robert Kennedy was advised that the best place to stand and fight in Southeast Asia was not Laos but Vietnam. It was a more unified nation, its forces were larger and better trained, it had direct access to the sea, its geography made it more subject to American air and naval power. When Lyndon Johnson visited the area in May, he took a letter from Kennedy to Diem pledging American readiness to “join with you in an intensified endeavor to win the struggle against communism.”

At Vienna, just after the final bruising talk with Khrushchev about Berlin, the President told James Reston, “Now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.”

Walt Rostow wrote him several weeks later that Khrushchev’s strategy was to exert pressure “on our side of the line” to “create a situation in which we can only reply at the risk of starting a nuclear war or escalating in that direction. Faced with this prospect, we look for compromise. He backs down a little, and a compromise is struck which, on balance, moves his line forward and shifts us back.”

This was “the essential point of the exercise on Berlin, from Khrushchev’s perspective, and before very long we shall be offered a ‘compromise’ on Vietnam in which a relaxation of guerrilla warfare will be offered for Vietnam’s ‘neutrality.’” Rostow suggested that they consider putting Moscow, Peking, Hanoi, and the world on notice that “expansion of the attack on Diem may lead to direct retaliation” against North Vietnam.

By September, the Viet Cong were inflicting military defeats that devastated the morale of the Diem regime, which asked for a defense treaty with the United States. Kennedy sent General Taylor and Rostow on a fact-finding mission to Vietnam. They reported that Saigon was suffering a crisis of confidence. The Laos experience had made the South Vietnamese worry that the United States would not stand by them. Viet Cong successes suggested that Diem’s corrupt, unpopular, and inefficient government could not repel the enemy in any case.

Taylor and Rostow recommended that the President approve a U.S. military commitment to Vietnam and a generous infusion of Americans at all levels of the Saigon government to reform it “from the bottom up.” Taylor proposed sending a task force, mainly of Army engineers, to the Mekong Delta, where there had been a major flood and where the Viet Cong guerrillas were strongest. He warned that the force would have to run some combat operations and expect to take casualties.

McNamara and the Joint Chiefs doubted that eight thousand men would show the Communists “we mean business.” They would consent to Taylor’s proposal only if the United States pledged to defend South Vietnam “by the necessary military action,” requiring as many as 205,000 ground troops if North Vietnam and China should openly intervene.

Kennedy worried that sending combat troops might upset the Laos cease-fire and risk escalation in Vietnam. He told Schlesinger, “It will be just like Berlin. The troops will march in, the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.”

Rusk and McNamara warned the President in a joint memo that a Communist victory in Vietnam would probably move the rest of Southeast Asia “to complete accommodation with communism, if not formal incorporation in the Communist bloc.” Losing South Vietnam “would not only destroy SEATO but would undermine the credibility of American commitments everywhere.” Coming at the same time as the Berlin Crisis, such a defeat would “stimulate bitter domestic controversies in the United States and would be seized upon by extreme elements to divide the country and harass the Administration.”

Kennedy approved their recommendation to send U.S. military advisers to the South. Lemnitzer reminded McNamara that the Joint Chiefs saw the war as “a planned phase in the Communist timetable for world domination”; if the new program failed, he and his colleagues saw “no alternative” to sending in American combat troops.

Lunching with his father’s old friend, the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, in mid-October, Kennedy said he believed American troops should not be involved on the Asian mainland, especially in a country whose people cared neither about the Cold War nor about issues like freedom and self-determination. The United States couldn’t interfere in civil disturbances created by guerrillas, and it was “hard to prove” that this wasn’t largely the situation in Vietnam.

He doubted the continuing validity of the “domino theory,” which held that one country’s fall to communism would condemn the others in the region. “The Chinese Communists are bound to get nuclear weapons in time. And from that moment on, they will dominate Southeast Asia.” It was “a hell of a note” to handle Berlin at the same time the Communists were “encouraging foreign aggressors all over the place.” He said he was thinking of urging Khrushchev by letter to call off these aggressors in Vietnam, Laos, and elsewhere.

Now he wrote the Chairman that South Vietnam was suffering “a determined attempt from without to overthrow the existing government, using for this purpose infiltration, supply of arms, propaganda, terrorization, and all the customary instrumentalities of Communist activities in such circumstances, all mounted and developed from North Vietnam.”* This was “completely at variance” with the 1954 Geneva accords.

Kennedy asked Khrushchev to persuade North Vietnam to observe the accords. “This would be a great act in the cause of peace which you refer to as the essence of the policies of the Twenty-second Party Congress.” He asked him “to insure that those closely associated with you leave South Vietnam alone.” In return, the United States would “insure that North Vietnam will not be the object of any direct or indirect aggression.… I am leaving for a few days for a visit to the western part of our country and will be in touch with you on other matters when I return.”

One reason for Kennedy’s western speaking tour was to prepare American opinion for the negotiations on Berlin that he expected to begin soon. Polls showed voters in the region to be more resistant to talks with Moscow than any other Americans outside the South.

In a speech at the University of Washington in Seattle, Kennedy reminded his audience, “We must work with certain countries lacking in freedom in order to strengthen the cause of freedom.… We must face problems which do not lend themselves to easy or quick or permanent solutions.… As long as we know what comprises our vital interests and our long-range goals, we have nothing to fear from negotiations.…

“With respect to any future talks on Germany and Berlin, for example, we cannot, on the one hand, confine our proposals to a list of concessions we are willing to make. Nor can we, on the other hand, advance any proposals which compromise the security of free Germans and West Berliners, or endanger their ties with the West.… It is a test of our national maturity to accept the fact that negotiations are not a contest spelling victory or defeat.”

As another precaution before talks with the Russians on Berlin, Kennedy invited Konrad Adenauer to Washington. Restored to power by a Christian Democratic victory in September, the Chancellor and his Ambassador in Washington, Wilhelm Grewe, had been much alarmed by the prospect of Gromyko and Thompson discussing Berlin.

Robert Amory of the CIA refined an oral briefing, which the Agency rehearsed before the President, to calm Adenauer’s fears about the Soviet Union and encourage a larger West German contribution to NATO. Using McNamara’s new systems analysis techniques, the presentation argued that Soviet divisions were only about one third the size of NATO’s and were hence probably only one third as effective. As Amory recalled, it showed “that the Russian armies on the ground in Germany and their potential reinforcements were not invincible in a conventional war.”

Lemnitzer privately complained to General Lauris Norstad at SHAPE that the briefing was “overoptimistic and in many cases overdrawn.” He had had a “considerable argument” with the President about the fact that it included classified information going “far beyond” anything Adenauer had ever been shown. The briefing did not persuade Franz-Josef Strauss. He thought it was “influenced more by wishful thinking than reality.”

In an October letter to fifty-nine British Labour Members of Parliament, Khrushchev had suggested a Berlin settlement including guarantees of Western access to West Berlin, recognition of the Oder-Neisse Line, and UN admission for both Germanys. He had also demanded a ban on nuclear weapons for both the FRG and GDR and military disengagement from Central Europe.

During his White House talks, Adenauer acceded to Kennedy’s insistence on discussing the status of Berlin with the Soviets, as long as Western rights were preserved. He obliged the President’s request to increase Bonn’s investment in NATO from eight to twelve divisions. In return, Kennedy pledged not to bargain with Khrushchev over recognition of the GDR, the Oder-Neisse Line, or neutralization of Central Europe. But he rejected Adenauer’s demand to have a share in NATO decision-making at the moment a European war reached the point of possible nuclear exchange.

During their meeting the night before the President’s September UN speech, Salinger had complained to Kharmalov that all Khrushchev had to do to command a huge American audience was to invite Lippmann or Pearson or Sulzberger to see him. Why couldn’t the Soviets reciprocate?

Kharmalov said it was “a very bad time to ask”; the State Department had just denied visas to fifteen Soviet correspondents. When Salinger corrected the problem, Adzhubei was scheduled to interview Kennedy for Izvestia on Thanksgiving weekend at Hyannis Port. As Adzhubei later recalled, his father-in-law asked him to try to improve relations with the President.

Before Adzhubei went to Hyannis Port, Salinger invited him and Bolshakov for dinner at his Virginia home. Imbibing Armenian brandy, which he had brought from Khrushchev, Adzhubei complained that his father-in-law had not given him and his wife a present in fifteen years of marriage. When Adzhubei was rushed from a hunting trip with the Chairman into the hospital with appendicitis, Khrushchev had merely said he hoped he would be all right: “That was the only personal interest he has ever shown in me.”

Salinger refused Adzhubei’s offer of an advance look at his questions. The Russian told him, “Well, don’t blame me if it doesn’t go your way.” Dining in a Hyannis restaurant the night before his interview with Kennedy, he looked out of the corner of his eye at someone sitting at another table. Finally he spun in his chair and cried, “You agent!”

Before Kennedy’s Oval Office meeting with Adzhubei in June, the CIA had told him that Adzhubei combined “native ability and marriage to Khrushchev’s daughter to climb to the top of the Soviet journalistic profession and to gain … an unofficial position of influence in governmental affairs. Adzhubei doubles as a speech writer for his father-in-law, and during the past two or three years he has become one of the Premier’s closest advisers, particularly in matters relating to the United States.”

He was “ruthless” and “supremely confident of his own position and of the superiority of the Soviet Union.” During his father-in-law’s American trip in 1959, several Americans had insisted he was “the most completely arrogant man they had ever met.” His attitude toward the United States was a “mixture of contempt, admiration tinged with envy, and the devout Communist’s conviction that the capitalist world is doomed.” While drinking heavily, Adzhubei had once argued with an American, saying, “We are so strong that we can crush you like this.” He broke the neck of a wine bottle.

Thompson reported that according to a Soviet Jew who had been a diplomat under Litvinov, Foreign Ministry officials were complaining that they had had “no voice in foreign policy” since Adzhubei’s appointment as a foreign affairs adviser to his father-in-law: “Khrushchev hesitates to grant Adzhubei party or government status commensurate with his advisory responsibilities, if only because he would open himself to charges of nepotism.”

Born in 1924 in Samarkand, Adzhubei grew up in Moscow before joining the wartime Soviet Army and studying journalism and literature at Moscow State University. There he was handed what the Chairman would have called a “lucky lottery ticket”*—acquaintance with Khrushchev’s daughter Rada, whom he married.

He joined Komsomolskaya Pravda, the voice of the Young Communist League, and with no small aid from Khrushchev became editor-in-chief in 1957. After Stalin’s death, Khrushchev had demanded that Soviet papers become more lively and original. After his first visit to the United States in 1955, Adzhubei made his paper more American-looking, with a more eye-catching format, human-interest stories, and letters to the editor.

Smarting from conservative opposition in 1957, Khrushchev made an about-face and declared that originality for its own sake had no place in Soviet journalism. An ordinance was issued against “sensationalism” in Komsomolskaya Pravda. The experience may have shown Adzhubei the danger of depending on merely one political patron. As he continued to cultivate his father-in-law, he made important and lasting connections with Alexander Shelepin, a Komsomol organizer who headed the KGB from 1958 to 1961 and went on to other powerful positions, as well as Shelepin’s KGB successor, Vladimir Semichastny.

In May 1959, Adzhubei became editor-in-chief of Izvestia, long one of the dullest Soviet papers, a digest of bureaucratic decrees under Stalin. He gave it punchier headlines, colloquial language, more pictures and foreign news, a Sunday magazine with cartoons, and letters soliciting Miss Lonelyhearts advice and reporting local malfeasance. Circulation doubled.

Adzhubei had shown Khrushchev color slides of his 1955 trip to the United States. He had found the Americans “exuberant people, easily carried away by novelties. They behave like children who fall for various epidemics, now the hula hoop, now a new movie star.” Their leaders were “weak, stupid men who betray the people.”

He accompanied Khrushchev to Washington in 1959, the UN in 1960, Vienna in 1961. It was said that when the Chairman learned that Adzhubei was involved with a woman not his wife, he merely told him to be more discreet.* Khrushchev basked in the young man’s public devotion. At the Twenty-second Party Congress, Adzhubei boasted of his UN trip with the Chairman: “It may have shocked the ladylike diplomats of the Western world, but it was just great to see Comrade N. S. Khrushchev, when a Western diplomat was delivering one of those provocative speeches, take off his shoe and start pounding on the table with it.”

Adzhubei was the incarnation of the Soviet New Class. The British journalist Edward Crankshaw called him “a most dubious mixture of the ‘jet set’ at its most lurid and the ambitious, intriguing politician: a protector of the very young and talented when it suited him, but also fathomlessly cynical. There must have been times when the young writers, the young painters, economists, and thinkers, would have been happier if Khrushchev had not had in his house a son-in-law who liked abstract painting and understood the problems of contemporary youth; they would have known better where they stood.”

On Friday, November 24, the day before the President was to see Adzhubei, he called McNamara and White House aides to his father’s Hyannis Port living room. Wearing a red jumpsuit, Robert Kennedy was outside playing touch football with his sisters and assorted children. The President called him in. Robert vaulted the porch rail, joined the group and gave what Carl Kaysen recalled as a “passionate speech” about “every citizen’s duty” to build a fallout shelter: “The President metaphorically poured a bucket of cold water on him.”

Then they all heard final arguments about the size of America’s new ICBM force. McNamara considered the ability to destroy 20 to 50 percent of Soviet society sufficient to deter a Soviet attack on the United States. This would require roughly four hundred one-megaton bombs.* Kaysen and Wiesner agreed, but to help protect Kennedy against Congressmen who wished a mammoth buildup, they proposed a force of six hundred ICBMs. Everyone agreed that a thousand was a round number, and thus more salable to Congress.

Sorensen noted that a thousand missiles would spur the arms race. McNamara warned that the Administration would be “politically murdered” on the Hill if Kennedy proposed a smaller missile force. The President agreed that one thousand was “the best that we can live with.”†

On Saturday morning, Salinger brought Adzhubei and Bolshakov to the same cluster of houses where the President and his men had discussed the annihilation of the Soviet Union by ICBMs the day before. In the living room of Kennedy’s cottage, Jacqueline introduced the two Russians to Caroline and John, for whom Adzhubei had brought a doll with a weighted bottom: “Like the Russian people—you can keep pushing it down, but it will always come up.”

With sun shimmering into the room from over Nantucket Sound, Kennedy rocked in his chair and drank coffee. Adzhubei and Bolshakov sat on a facing sofa.

Adzhubei began by recalling Kennedy’s “good intentions” at the beginning of the year to improve relations. The President agreed that relations now were “not as satisfactory as I had hoped when I first took office.… We want the people of the Soviet Union to live in peace.” The “great threat to peace” was “this effort to push outward the Communist system, onto country after country.”

Adzhubei complained that the United States was interfering in many areas of the world: “We would be happy if you, Mr. President, were to state that the interference in Cuba was a mistake.” Kennedy said that the American dispute with Cuba was Castro’s failure to hold free elections.

Adzhubei retorted that when the Bolsheviks came to power, “all the capitalist world was shouting that … there was no freedom in Russia, but in forty-four years our country became a great power.” The President interjected, “You are a newspaperman and a politician.” Adzhubei: “In our country, every citizen is a politician because we like our country very much.”

Kennedy said, “The Soviet Union suffered more from World War Two than any other country.… The United States also suffered, though not so heavily as the Soviet Union, quite obviously. My brother was killed in Europe. My sister’s husband was killed in Europe. The point is that that war is over now. We want to prevent another war arising out of Germany.”

He said that neither he nor Khrushchev was responsible for the postwar arrangements on Berlin: “We have, had peace, really, in Europe for fifteen years.… Nobody knows what is going to happen in the world over the long run, but at least we ought to be able to settle this matter of Berlin and Germany.” Nothing would make Americans more satisfied than to see their two countries at peace, “enjoying a steadily increasing standard of living.”

Adzhubei later recalled that after the interview, Kennedy took him down to the sea: “It was very cold. He’d given me a jacket, but we weren’t very well dressed and shivered. I asked him, ‘You’re not cold here?’ And he said something I’ll always remember.”

By Adzhubei’s recollection, the President said, “When Stalin and Churchill and Roosevelt gained their victory, they were already very old men.… The world was very mixed up when they found it, and they didn’t want to straighten it out. They couldn’t.… But if there’s a chance for us to do it now, we should do it. Otherwise in twenty years it’ll be a world that we can’t undo.”

Kennedy had ordered the Secret Service’s Protective Research unit to equip his living room with a secret taping system to protect himself in case Adzhubei misquoted him. Usually such an assignment would have been given to the Army Signal Corps, but he thought the Secret Service could do the job with fewer people knowing about it.

In time, Protective Research rigged the Cabinet Room, the White House library, the Oval Office, and his bedroom telephone for sound, the wires running to a Tandberg tape recorder in the basement. After each reel ran out it was slipped into a plain brown envelope, sealed, and brought upstairs to Evelyn Lincoln, who locked it in a special safe.

She and O’Donnell were evidently the only staff members who knew the full truth about the system.* One day, the President told Dave Powers, “I want you to be careful about your profanity because I don’t want to hear your bad words coming back to me.” Powers asked O’Donnell, “Kenny, what the hell is he talking about?”

When Kennedy asked for the system, he gave Secret Service men the impression that he wanted to “record understandings that may have been had” in American-Soviet relations. But he used the device on hundreds of conversations on all subjects.

Like his predecessor, who had installed a more rudimentary secret taping system and used it less, Kennedy may have wanted to use this confidential record to keep political antagonists from embarrassing him. After the Bay of Pigs, Pentagon and CIA officials had quietly told reporters that they had advised the President against the fiasco. Tape-recorded evidence could be used to make such people think twice before taking Kennedy’s name in vain. It would allow him to correct the final record in his own favor when he and Sorensen wrote his presidential memoirs.*

Kennedy’s use of electronic means to protect himself against potential foes extended to wiretapping. Taps were placed on the telephone of Robert Amory of the CIA, who was suspected of being too close to an undercover Eastern European agent before he quit in 1962. The military correspondents Hanson Baldwin of the New York Times and Lloyd Norman of Newsweek were evidently also surveilled.

One reason Kennedy may have spoken so freely to reporter friends was that he may have known what they were learning before their editors did. Bradlee years later was evidently convinced that his telephones were tapped: “My God, they wiretapped practically everybody else in this town.”† According to Vernon Walters, later Deputy Director of the CIA under Nixon, those upon whom Kennedy eavesdropped included the Attorney General and Jacqueline.

After Adzhubei left the house, the President told Salinger, “Your arrogant Russian friend got in as many shots as I did.” Bolshakov and Adzhubei lunched with Robert Kennedy, who found Khrushchev’s son-in-law “a tough Communist” and disliked him. When American reporters asked what the President had said, Adzhubei called out, “Subscribe to Izvestia!”

Three days later, Izvestia ran the interview, the first time in history that five million Soviet readers had been exposed to an American President’s extended views on the Cold War, including his complaints that the Soviets lacked “inclination toward serious talks.”‡

In Washington, the President told his staff that the interview had been worthwhile, “if only to try to convince them that we’re not all that bloodthirsty. But it was a propaganda stroke for Khrushchev too. Just by letting the interview run, he took the steam out of the argument that the Kremlin is afraid to let the Russian people hear the truth.… Maybe the biggest plus is that Khrushchev held still for it. Do you think he might be softening up a little?”

The next week, Kennedy drafted another private letter to Khrushchev: “As you know, I had an interview with your son-in-law … at my place in Hyannis Port, where I was spending the Thanksgiving weekend.” He was “particularly glad to hear that you had successfully gone through the arduous proceedings of your Party Congress in Moscow and were in good health.”

The Chairman had complained in his November 9 letter that an “aggressive” West Germany wished to upset postwar territorial arrangements by force. In fact, Kennedy wrote, West Germany was “the only nation of any size in the world whose armed forces are entirely under international control.” It “only began rearming in 1955 at a time when it was fully apparent to the entire world that the regime in East Germany had been arming for some time.”

It was the Soviets who had walked out of the four-power Berlin control commission in 1948. “Having incorporated East Berlin into the East German regime, the Soviet Union, in honesty, cannot object to any … status which the Western Powers desire to put in effect in West Berlin.… What is, however, a proper subject for negotiation would be the arrangements for the exercise of our access rights.”

He warned, “I should tell you that we would not be prepared to agree to any renunciation of existing rights and their transference to the East German regime with authority to control, limit, or otherwise inhibit the existing rights of access between West Berlin and the rest of the world.… I fear informal correspondence of the type we are having is not … the proper basis to try and negotiate so complex and serious a problem.… I send you my best regards and hope that the next time we communicate, we shall have somewhat better news to discuss.”

On Saturday, December 9, in a speech to trade unionists, Khrushchev alluded to the private letter he had just received from Kennedy. He wanted “genuine” talks on Germany, but “some statesmen in the West would like to reduce the negotiations to the enhancement of the occupation regime in West Berlin.”

For the first time in public, he showed his own determination to refute Gilpatric’s assertions of American superiority. He warned the West, “Here is the might that will oppose your might—here it is: you do not have fifty- and one-hundred-megaton bombs, and we have them already and even more.” These superbombs would hang over the heads of “imperialist aggressors” like the sword of Damocles.* The same Soviet missiles that put cosmonauts in orbit could strike any point on the globe.

He complained that the West had responded to Soviet proposals on Berlin with “war hysteria and an increase in the arms race. They began to increase their military potential … and to openly threaten us with war if the Soviet Union signed a German peace treaty. But it is impossible to intimidate us!”

At the end of the long year, Thompson told Khrushchev that his family was planning a Christmas skiing vacation: could he please keep things quiet for a while? The Chairman laughed. “You are the ones who are stirring things up.”†

Kennedy flew to Bogotá, Caracas, and a Bermuda conference with Macmillan. He ended the long year in Palm Beach, where his father had been struck mute and crippled by a stroke six days before Christmas. Robert Kennedy later said that the President often spoke of “how he wished my father was well” when there were “matters that he would ordinarily talk to my father about.”

Robert recalled that his brother had found 1961 “a very mean year” because of Berlin “and the fact that the Russians thought they could kick him around.” When he asked his brother how he enjoyed being President, Kennedy replied that it would be the most “fantastic” job in the world “if it weren’t for the Russians.” When a reporter told him that he wished to write a book on his first year, the President shot back, “Who would want to read a book about disasters?”

Bundy argued many years later that during the four months after the Wall, the President displayed no “nuclear pushiness” toward Khrushchev that exploited the new American confidence in its nuclear superiority. In the October tank confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie, Kennedy’s calm supervision and private diplomacy indeed relieved a conflict that could have quickly escalated. Throughout the autumn, he showed an impressive and growing willingness to persuade the allies and the American people that negotiations on Berlin were in their interest.

But his aversion to nuclear pushiness did not extend to his decision to authorize the Gilpatric speech. This was the final expression of Kennedy’s determination to overturn his predecessor’s method of dealing with the Soviet Union. Presented by Khrushchev with a similar Berlin ultimatum in 1958, Eisenhower had muffled his Berlin crisis by refusing to alarm the American people.

He had refused to increase conventional forces out of belief that no war in Europe would be limited to ground forces, because he did not wish to undercut the nuclear deterrent, and in order to hold down the trajectory of the arms race. He had refused to puncture Khrushchev’s public claims of nuclear superiority and hence provoke the Chairman into a mammoth strategic buildup.

Kennedy lacked the Eisenhoverian instinct to muffle foreign policy crises. He did not enjoy Eisenhower’s reputation for firmness and supreme competence on national security. Like Truman in the late 1940s, he knew that generating a sense of alarm would help him to push his defense requests through Congress and, when it came time to negotiate, insulate him against charges that he had not taken the Soviet threat with due seriousness.* And at some level of Kennedy’s thinking there was always the conviction, as he wrote in Profiles in Courage, that “great crises make great men.”

His commitment to flexible response had caused him to dismiss the Soviets’ private pre-Inauguration warnings that if he pursued the conventional buildup he had promised in the campaign, the Soviet Union would not “sit still.” He was far more unsettled than Eisenhower by the prospect of a rapid escalation of a European conflict to nuclear weapons and, unlike Eisenhower, did not feel that Khrushchev would assume that he was willing to use them.

He wished to strip Khrushchev of the benefits employed in courting the Third World of suggesting that the Soviet Union was the mightiest nation in the world and was growing more so. He wished to convince the allies and the American people that if he negotiated with the Soviet Union, it would be out of strength. He wanted to ensure that Khrushchev was not emboldened into truculence over Berlin and elsewhere by the mistaken notion that Kennedy was still fooled into thinking that the Soviets enjoyed a missile gap over the United States.

These were good reasons for Kennedy to authorize Gilpatric to present the most detailed and provocative revelation of American strategic power ever made by a high American official. But, as later events demonstrated, they were not good enough.

The speech violated the President’s own rule against backing an enemy into a dangerous corner.* Kennedy never gave sufficient thought to how Khrushchev might receive the speech. Khrushchev almost certainly wondered why the President had decided to publicly humiliate him by rubbing his nose in the fact of Soviet inferiority, and amid a crucial Party Congress. Did the address foreshadow an American first strike against the Soviet Union?

Khrushchev knew that his Kremlin and military critics would now demand that he relax his opposition to a huge Soviet military buildup. The forces set in motion by the Gilpatric speech and Kennedy’s other efforts to demonstrate superiority compelled Khrushchev to look for a quick, cheap way to remake the nuclear balance of power so that he could genuinely claim that the Soviet Union was the superior force in the world. As Khrushchev might have put it, by authorizing the Gilpatric speech, the President of the United States was playing with fire.

Khrushchev’s Berlin Crisis achieved few of the aims he had hoped for at the beginning of 1961. His threats and demands did not produce Western submission to the Soviet position on Berlin or provide the world with a melodrama of Western deference to Soviet power.

Instead, they provoked what the Chairman did not want: greater Western unity and resolution, the $6-billion American military buildup that shattered his own plans to hold down military spending, West German promises to endow NATO with more divisions, American revelation that his claims about Soviet nuclear power were a fraud. When Khrushchev suspended his six-month peace treaty deadline, just as in 1959, his critics in West and East crowed that once again he had been caught crying wolf.

Bundy marveled at Khrushchev’s rigidity as a negotiator. He recalled that in the White House at the height of the Berlin Crisis, there was greater interest in compromise “than Kennedy ever chose to show publicly.” In late August 1961, Bundy privately suggested a shift substantially toward acceptance of the GDR, the Oder-Neisse Line, and a nonaggression pact. Years later he observed that if Kennedy had “heard proposals of this sort from Moscow, coupled with a prospect of reassurances on West Berlin, we would have had powerful reasons to press Bonn for concessions that did not come for another decade.”

At no time did Khrushchev risk nuclear war over Berlin by seriously challenging the three American essentials. Before allowing the Wall to be built, he took the precaution of moving his two Soviet divisions into positions around Berlin to ensure that Ulbricht did not escalate the crisis beyond his control.

Two days before the border sealing, he used his normal combination of threats against Western Europe and reassurance to put the West off balance and also insist that there would be no war. In October, he withdrew his tanks from Checkpoint Charlie. Khrushchev knew that whatever the nuclear balance, a nuclear war would bring millions of deaths on both sides for which a German peace treaty was insufficient inducement.

Sergei Khrushchev recalled his father as “relaxed” throughout the crisis: “All military forces were possessed by you and by us. And since he didn’t intend to take measures from our side which would call forth from you military measures, he therefore believed that the possibility of a military clash was minimal.” Burlatsky years later described the Berlin Crisis as “one more step in the Cold War.… We pressed you, you pressed us, but it was not that dangerous. Only games—political games. That is all.”

On Friday, December 29, Kennedy wired Khrushchev from Palm Beach that 1961 had been a “troubled” year: “It is my earnest hope that the coming year will strengthen the foundations of world peace and will bring an improvement in the relations between our countries, upon which so much depends.”

The Chairman replied, “At the Vienna meeting, we agreed that history imposed a great responsibility on our peoples for the destiny of the world. The Soviet people regard the future optimistically. They hope that in the coming New Year, our countries will be able to find ways toward closer cooperation for the good of all humanity. As always, the Soviet Union will do everything in its power to ensure a durable and lasting peace on our planet.”

For Khrushchev, ensuring a durable peace required doing something dramatic to improve the humiliating picture of Soviet inferiority painted for the world by Gilpatric two months before—especially if he wanted to keep his job and bargain with Kennedy on Berlin and other theaters of the Cold War as an equal power. As 1962 began, Fidel Castro was pleading with Khrushchev to do something to help him resist another American invasion of Cuba.

*Although it never became as, personal as his Kennedy correspondence, Khrushchev and his predecessor as Prime Minister, Bulganin, corresponded with Eisenhower more frequently and substantively than legend has come to suggest. There were twenty-two letters between Eisenhower and Bulganin, for instance, between the Geneva summit of 1955 and Bulganin’s ouster in 1958. In March 1960, before the Paris summit, Khrushchev privately wrote Eisenhower of his anxieties about the possibility of nuclear weapons controlled by Bonn. The President replied by calling for a verifiable test ban and other disarmament measures: “You and I must recognize … that the secrets of the production of nuclear weapons … cannot long remain hidden from many of the states in the modern world which have advanced scientific and industrial resources.”

*This was not the first or last time Kennedy compared Khrushchev to Hoffa. He once told reporters in a background session that “there is nothing like organization and discipline in international affairs, as in politics.… The Communists’ ability to hold power once they have gained it makes them formidable, and the same thing is true here at home in the Teamsters Union.” Just as telling is the President’s comparison of Khrushchev to McCarthy, another erratic figure who had caused him terrible political problems.

*This was said despite the fact that Molotov’s own wife, Paulina, was Jewish. She was sent in 1949 to a labor camp as an “international Zionist” without evident protest from Molotov, who was unwilling to jeopardize his standing with Stalin. The day of Stalin’s funeral in 1953 was Molotov’s sixty-third birthday. Leaving the mausoleum, Khrushchev and Malenkov asked him what he would like as a present. He replied, “Paulina.” One wonders what she said to him after her release.

†Stalin advised him to improve his English by attending American churches and listening to sermons; the dictator had himself been educated by the Russian Orthodox Church while a seminarian. Flustered by the prospect of explaining why an atheist Soviet envoy was attending church, Gromyko committed the rare sin of disobeying Stalin’s order.

*This excludes Mikhail Gorbachev, who fired him as Foreign Minister and gave him the honorific post of President of the Soviet Union soon after taking power. A year before his death in July 1989, Gromyko resigned after a public meeting in which he was heckled as “too old.” The timing of Gromyko’s death was merciful. It came just before the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe which were such a part of his raison d’être.

*The News reported that in response to its account of Dealey’s exchange with the President, it received over two thousand telephone calls, telegrams, and letters, including a tribute from the eccentric right-wing tycoon H. L. Hunt, and that over 84 percent approved.

*At Khrushchev’s opening Party Congress speech, Chou En-lai had been ostentatiously unenthusiastic. When other officials congratulated the Chairman, Chou brushed past him. On October 21, after laying a wreath at Stalin’s tomb, the Chinese leader left Moscow before Khrushchev’s Congress was over. TASS explained this away by saying that Chou had to prepare for a new session of his own National People’s Congress. But this session was not held until March 1962.

*One pattern in Robert Kennedy’s discussion of the meetings with Bolshakov and other Russians in his 1964 and 1965 oral histories is his inclination to suggest that the Soviets caved in at crucial moments to unilateral demands by himself and the President without mentioning American concessions that were actually the key to solutions. The most prominent example of this is his treatment of the bargaining that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis, distorted to suggest that he and his brother were tougher bargainers than they actually were.

In this, Kennedy demonstrates an extreme version of Dean Acheson’s thesis that no diplomat comes out in his own recollection second-best. In his defense, one must recall that Kennedy conducted these interviews not long after his brother’s assassination, at a time when powerful emotions compelled him to try to burnish the Kennedy administration’s historical reputation.

*Rusk privately told Senators that Thant was “an entirely reliable person.… He is strongly anti-Communist domestically, although a neutral internationally, and is a man of very considerable integrity and experience and ability.”

*On December 15, Kennedy replied to a letter from President Diem: “Our indignation has mounted as the deliberate savagery of the Communist program of assassination, kidnapping, and wanton violence became clear. Your letter underlines what our own information has convincingly shown—that the campaign of force and terror now being waged against your people and your Government is supported and directed from the outside by the authorities at Hanoi.”

*This was how Khrushchev described his immensely helpful acquaintance with Stalin’s second wife while in school during the 1930s.

*The CIA reported to Kennedy, perhaps using material transmitted by French Intelligence, that “the only close look at the Adzhubeis together was provided by their visit to Paris in November 1959” The couple had toured Les Invalides, the Louvre, and the Eiffel Tower, attended a midnight Mass at Notre Dame, sat in nightclubs in the Latin Quarter and Montmartre and the Lido, which Mrs. Adzhubei found “boring, not shocking,” and saw a Brigitte Bardot film, which she also disliked. “She arrived in Paris in a mink coat and hat; she and her husband stayed at the Crillon in a suite which reportedly cost an unproletarian $40 a day.”

*McNamara’s aide Alain Enthoven noted that an increase to 2,400, as SAC proposed, would add little to American destructive power and “only make the rubble bounce.” The main reason for this was that almost half of the Soviet population was clustered in a small number of major cities. Before leaving office, Eisenhower had recommended nine hundred Minutemen but left the matter of funding for the new President. Told in April 1960 that some at the Pentagon wanted a production capacity of four hundred ICBMs per year, Eisenhower had replied, “Why don’t we go completely crazy and plan on a force of ten thousand?”

†In January 1962, Bundy set down Kennedy’s thoughts for a talk to the NSC staff: “To be honest with you, we would probably be safe with less.” Congressional demand “for more missiles and more nuclear weapons is pretty strong. I don’t think such sentiment can be rationally defended, but there it is.”

*Years later, when it was revealed that President Richard Nixon had taped people without their knowledge, alumni of the Kennedy government said it was “inconceivable” that their boss would have done such a thing.

*Robert Kennedy used the tapes in exactly this fashion to write his heroic memoir of the Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days.

†A technician Robert Kennedy had met during the Senate labor rackets hearings later claimed that the Attorney General asked him to bug the twenty or thirty telephones in the large room used by the White House press corps during a presidential visit to Newport. According to the man, Robert said he could not entrust the job to the FBI and gave him a “substantial” down payment. The technician said that when he told the Attorney General he was out on bail in a criminal case, Kennedy said, “Try to be as inconspicuous as possible, and if you get into trouble call me at this number and I’ll take care of it.”

‡One alteration was imposed on the text. At Hyannis Port, Adzhubei had mentioned that Khrushchev’s 1959 American visit had not been “completely satisfactory.” In Izvestia’s version, Adzhubei revised his own quote to spare the Chairman any hint of criticism: “The positive results of that trip were wrecked and brought to nothing by the well-known actions of the then American administration.” Salinger later joked that he would have done the same thing had the combustible Khrushchev been his father-in-law.

*He may have lifted the reference to Damocles from Kennedy’s UN speech.

†Thompson did not get his wish. The President asked him to stay in Moscow in case the Russians decided to start talks on Berlin.

*This view may have been influenced by the goodly representation of Truman administration alumni in the President’s immediate circle, including Rusk, Gilpatric, Nitze, and Acheson.

*In a review of Liddell Hart’s Deterrent or Defense in 1960, Kennedy praised the author’s credo: “Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes—so as to see things through his eyes.”