“The Peace Speech”
In January 1963, in the Cabinet room, Kennedy told the nsc of his recent correspondence with Khrushchev about a nuclear test ban: a treaty affecting only the United States and Soviet Union would have “limited value,” but “if it can help in keeping the Chinese Communists from getting a full nuclear capacity, then it is worth it.”
The President was concerned about euphoric New Year’s stories suggesting that the United States had stopped the advance of Soviet power in 1962. In a a background session, he told reporters that Khrushchev had been shown that in some areas America would do whatever was necessary: he might be more averse to future risky ventures like Cuba, but he had not abandoned his commitment to world communism.
While swimming with Dave Powers, Kennedy said, “Things are not as bad as they might be.… I only have to worry about Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and NATO.” Arthur Schlesinger wrote Sorensen, “We are for the moment between the acts, as far as the Cold War is concerned.”
On Wednesday, January 9, Kennedy received a new letter from Khrushchev on nuclear testing. Despite the Chairman’s anger about the confusion over verification, he agreed to relocate two of the ground stations in the Soviet Union if the Soviets could help decide where such installations would be located in the United States.
The CIA gave the President a message from a Soviet official that there was “simply no question” of improving Khrushchev’s offer of two to four on-site inspections: since the Missile Crisis and the November elections, Kennedy enjoyed “great personal strength and prestige and hence can afford to circumvent Congress.”
The President postponed a new series of underground tests in Nevada to allow American and Soviet test ban negotiators in New York to feel one another out. After the talks failed, he authorized the tests and privately resolved that six inspections would be “our rock-bottom number.” He told Rusk and McNamara that a test ban wouldn’t be worth the fight with Congress except for the chance to arrest the spread of nuclear weapons to other nations, especially China.
The chief American test ban negotiator, William Foster, told Kuznetsov in Geneva that if the Soviets accepted American ideas for inspection procedures, the United States could accept seven on-site inspections per year.
Foy Kohler complained by cable from Moscow that he was being kept in the dark about the test ban discussions: “I was considerably handicapped when I encountered Gromyko at an Indonesian reception last night.” After consulting Kennedy, Rusk politely wired the Ambassador to butt out. When he saw Soviet officials, he should not bring up Cuba or Berlin, but was welcome to “express hope that current discussion on an atomic test ban will succeed.”
Laconic and birdlike, Kohler moved about the Moscow Embassy with the gait of a cautious man. On weekends, a net was strung across the Spaso House ballroom, and he played badminton with his wife or members of his staff. When he left for Moscow, Rusk had reminded him that he would be “sitting on our Nuclear Target Number One.” Kohler replied, “If I am, I only hope you don’t miss.”
Born in 1908, Kohler had joined the diplomatic service after graduation from Ohio State. He first served in Moscow in the late 1940s under Ambassador Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s wartime chief of staff. Making use of Soviet eavesdropping on their telephones, Kohler would call his boss to say that a cable had come in asking him to see Molotov about such-and-such a matter. “About what?” asked the vinegary Ambassador. By the time Smith went to the Foreign Ministry, Molotov was fully prepared.
Kohler’s wife, Phyllis, produced an English-language edition of the letters written by the Marquis de Custine about his Russian travels in 1839. The Soviets did not overlook her tacit suggestion that their government was just as despotic as that of Czar Nicholas I.
In 1952, Kohler’s career was almost destroyed. Speeding home with his wife from a Washington dinner party at two in the morning, he lost control of his car and sheared off a telephone pole. Kohler was arrested for drunken driving. Police found classified documents in his possession that should not have been taken out of the State Department. Washington tabloids fanned the incident into a minor scandal.
Kohler had not spent years building alliances within the Foreign Service for nothing. Suspended for a month without pay, he was exiled to Ankara, where he helped to arrange the Voice of America’s Russian-language service and eavesdropping stations along the Soviet border. In 1959, he was brought back to Washington as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and the Soviet Union.
The Kohlers had first met John Kennedy in Athens in the late 1930s, when the son of the London Ambassador came through town and they were assigned to give him lunch and show him the local sights in an embassy car. After the 1960 election, Kohler assumed that he was too closely identified with Eisenhower to keep his job, but the President-elect thought it useful to keep a high official at State who had been deeply involved in Eisenhower’s Berlin Crisis.
Kohler knew that in the Kennedys’ struggle to bring the Foreign Service to heel, the President maintained civilized relations with the diplomats and let his brother lay down the law. Kohler met with Robert Kennedy alone only once, to discuss the government’s secret plans for surveillance and, if possible, recruitment of Soviet officials in Washington. But as he recalled, during the Berlin Crisis, “Bobby would sit there across the table and look at me with those cold blue eyes as if to say, You son of a bitch, if you ever let my brother down, I’m going to knife you.”
Like John Foster Dulles, Kohler believed that Khrushchev was more dangerous than Stalin; where Stalin had been a cynical, careful realist, Khrushchev was a Communist true believer and gambler. The Soviets were not happy that Kennedy had ignored their pleas to send them someone who had his ear: with Kohler in Moscow, was Dulles going to rule foreign policy from the grave?
The Senate confirmed his appointment after he answered questions about the old drunk-driving incident: “I don’t make such mistakes a second time.” Rusk told one diplomatic wife that he did not want a “cat session” but wanted to know whether Kohler had a drinking problem. When Kohler went to the Oval Office for a brief farewell talk before the President’s noontime swim, Kennedy gave him no specific instructions and no private message for Khrushchev.
Kohler insisted on knowing what covert operations the CIA was running out of his Embassy: “It was standard for any self-respecting Ambassador.” During a briefing at Langley, he learned that the United States had bugged the limousines of Khrushchev and other high Soviet officials. This exposed no vital secrets—the Soviets were too security-conscious—but did produce what Kohler considered “titillating stuff” on the personal relationships among those who ruled Russia.
Arriving in Moscow, the new Ambassador marveled that it was “an entirely different Soviet Union” from Stalin’s day, with much more freedom of movement. He presumed that the Soviet servants in Spaso House were still working for the KGB. Sometimes he gave them copies of his invitation lists “so they wouldn’t waste so goddamned much time finding out who the guests were.”
In January 1963, the Soviets tried to recruit the sergeant who ran the U.S. Embassy’s bachelor quarters. Four agents took him off to a militia station, where they accused him of sleeping with one of his Soviet maids and giving her forty rubles for an abortion. Following age-old custom, they showed him photographs of himself with the woman: since he had always been “proper” toward the Soviet Union, they were willing to forget the matter.
Kohler had the sergeant flown out of Moscow immediately. The President read his cables on the incident but was in no mood to sour the climate with the Soviets by making an issue of it. The episode remained unpublicized, one more of the many secrets jointly kept by the two governments.
In the wake of his Cuban failure, Khrushchev was fighting off a new challenge to his leadership by opponents in Moscow and Peking. In February, the Soviet government veered away from his policy of heading toward an open divorce from the Chinese, who were now asked for a conciliatory meeting “at any level and at any time.”*
That month, the Soviets broke off their talks with the West on a test ban, the Chinese bête noire. The Soviet press increased its anti-American propaganda. Kohler cabled Rusk that there would be no progress on testing until the Soviet leadership “decides how to deal with the Chicoms and starts to do so.”
Khrushchev’s internal enemies had thrown a brake on his anti-Stalinist drive. Avant-garde music, art, and literature were denounced as a threat to Soviet national security. Out of his own philistinism and to buy support on more vital issues, Khrushchev had aligned himself with this new campaign. At a December closed-door meeting with four hundred writers and artists, he had castigated abstract painters (a “bunch of pederasts” who “wouldn’t die for the Motherland”) and quoted the Russian proverb that hunchbacks were straightened by the grave.
Leonid Ilyichev of the Central Committee stepped forward to denounce Yevtushenko’s cry against anti-Semitism, “Babi Yar.” When he insisted that there was no anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, the artists and writers guffawed. Not to be outdone, Khrushchev declared, “Too many Jews in power always cause trouble. That is what happened in Hungary in 1956, and we had to go in and straighten out the mess.”†
The Kremlin also turned its back on the Chairman’s efforts to decentralize the economy, restrain the defense industry, and increase funding for agriculture. Key economic posts were assumed by men considered to be his foes. The French Kremlinologist Michel Tatu called it “Khrushchev’s surrender.”
In February, “campaigning” for reelection to the Supreme Soviet, the Chairman seemed at the end of his rope: “You know how old I am going to be soon.* Thank you for having gathered here to cheer me up.” He warned that “enormous” sums would have to be spent on “military might.” If defense were shortchanged for food and housing, Soviet voters should “condemn this as a crime.”
Kohler cabled Washington that Khrushchev had seemed “listless and dispirited.” He had denounced “the idea of making unrealizable promises,” which the Ambassador considered “unconscious self-criticism.”
The Gallup Poll found that Americans still considered Cuba and Castro to be the most important problem facing the country. Most Republicans disapproved of Kennedy’s current handling of the matter. The Republican chairman in Houston, George Bush, demanded that Kennedy “muster the courage” to attack Cuba.
Senator Keating promised to “eat my hat” on the Capitol steps if the President could prove that all the offensive weapons were gone. Kennedy asked McCone for a “penetrating inspection which would probe the entire island.” The CIA Director reminded him that it was impossible to “prove a negative.”
When the inspection was done, McNamara gave a two-hour briefing on the results that was broadcast live by all three American television networks. Using pictures taken by U-2s and low-level Navy and Air Force planes, he declared that all the missiles and Il-28s were gone. Of Keating he said, “I don’t own a hat and I hope he does, because he is going to have to eat it, based on the evidence that we presented today.”
Dropping his claim about offensive weapons, Keating denounced the “sizable number of Soviet troops and military equipment” still on the island. Eisenhower wrote McCone that the Soviets were clearly “intent on making Cuba a much more formidable military power than any other Latin American nation.” Goldwater demanded that the President “do anything that needs to be done to get rid of that cancer. If it means war, let it mean war.”
Kennedy’s advisers estimated that there had been twenty-two thousand Soviet military men, technicians, and other personnel in Cuba at the close of the Missile Crisis: if Khrushchev had kept his promise to withdraw those associated with the offensive weapons, seventeen thousand remained. (We now know that there were actually forty-two thousand Russians in Cuba at the end of the crisis and thus perhaps as many as thirty-seven thousand in February 1963.)
In his November 6 letter to Khrushchev, the President had asked Khrushchev to withdraw the four reinforced Soviet regiments from Cuba. In his letter delivered November 20, the Chairman had promised to remove Soviet troops from Cuba in “due course.” Kennedy did not press him about how many Soviets would remain on the island. As Bundy recalled, “We did not think some numbers of Soviet ground forces were a serious matter.”
At a press conference on Thursday, February 7, the President was asked, “Are you just going to let them stay there?” He replied that the “kind of forces we are talking about” were not a “military threat” and noted that Khrushchev had promised to take them out in due time: “The time was not stated, and therefore we’re trying to get a more satisfactory definition.”
Over dinner with the Ben Bradlees, Kennedy said that seventeen thousand Soviet troops in Cuba was one thing viewed by itself, but something else again when one knew there were twenty-seven thousand American troops in Turkey, on the Soviet border. He warned the Newsweek man not to publish this information: “It isn’t wise politically to understand Khrushchev’s problems in quite this way.”
Before another small dinner that month, the President complained to Bradlee, Theodore White, and Harry Labouisse, Ambassador to Greece, that he was “taking a beating” on the Soviet troops issue; soon Cuba would be like China in Truman’s time. “Can you imagine the Russians backing up like this and not seeing it as a victory? We would never be allowed to back down like this. If we did, you can imagine what Congress and the press would say.” Of the Republicans he carped, “Did you ever see such a rotten party?”
For reasons not apparent to the guests, the talk of Cuba moved Kennedy once again to talk about Turkey. Labouisse reminded him of a NATO Nike-Zeus program just begun on Crete: wait until the Russians described that as anew American missile base. Exasperated, Kennedy pulled out a card and scribbled a note. Bradlee told him that the working day was over; take it easy. The President replied, “If anything goes wrong, it’s me they’ll blame.… What the hell do we need those missiles for anyway?”
Kennedy’s new interest in removing the Soviet troops from Cuba was rooted more in politics than national security. The CIA advised him that they might actually have the positive effect of restraining “Castro adventurism.” Robert Kennedy privately said he would “rather have the Russians running the SAM sites than the Cubans running them.”
The Attorney General and Rusk told Dobrynin that the American people were concerned that the Soviet forces on Cuba were being used to build an island “fortress” shielded by SAMs. On Monday, February 18, Dobrynin gave them Khrushchev’s pledge to remove several thousand more troops within a month.
The President was able to announce by mid-March that four thousand more Russians had departed Cuba. Unless there was some great change in Soviet strategy, he told aides, the Cuban issue would be unimportant by 1964: not even the cleverest politician could easily revive an issue once the people had put it aside. As Bundy later recalled, “We did not think some numbers of Soviet ground forces were a serious matter.”
But in April, Hanson Baldwin reported in the New York Times that “some intelligence experts” believed there to be as many as thirty to forty thousand Soviets still on the island. Baldwin’s sources were probably officials disgruntled by the administration’s effort to cool the issue.*
Furious, the President demanded to know who had talked to Baldwin. McCone’s aide Walter Elder reported to Bundy that “no senior CIA officer has seen Baldwin socially for some time.” (The relevant words in this sentence were probably “senior” and “socially.”)
The day after Baldwin’s story appeared, Richard Nixon told the American Society of Newspaper Editors, “We have goofed an invasion, paid tribute to Castro for the prisoners, then given the Soviets squatters’ rights in our backyard.… We must no longer postpone making a command decision to do whatever is necessary to force the removal of the Soviet beachhead.”
Richard Rovere wrote in the New Yorker that there was little doubt that “Cuba will be the principal issue in American politics between now and the next election.”
Since March, Khrushchev had been staying in Pitsunda, where, as Michel Tatu observed, he “appeared more and more in disgrace.” As during the Twenty-second Party Congress, his leading antagonist was evidently Frol Kozlov.
Born in 1908 to poor farmers, Kozlov liked to refer to himself as a “homeless waif.” Trained as a metallurgical engineer, he had served as party leader of a steel plant and with the Central Committee in Moscow during the war. Kozlov concealed his ambition under a suave Leningrad manner. A British diplomat observed, “He is probably the only citizen in the entire Soviet Union who wears a button-down shirt.” Once a Malenkhov protégé, he was one of the few high Soviet officials to come to Khrushchev’s aid in 1957.
The Chairman made him a Deputy Premier, along with Mikoyan, after which he served as a secretary of the Central Committee. He told Harriman in 1959 that Kozlov was his most likely successor: “Despite his white hair, which ladies love, Kozlov is young, a hopeless Communist. When we pass on, we will rest easily because we know Kozlov will carry on Lenin’s work … I recommend him. He is modest and not such a brute as we.”
Thompson cabled home that if Kozlov ever took power, he was not likely to keep it: Khrushchev had probably chosen him “as a front man while the power struggle would be decided behind the scenes.”
Despite the Chairman’s near-endorsement, Kozlov had carved out a position to Khrushchev’s right. By April 1963, his platform of neo-Stalinism, increased military spending, conciliation with Peking whatever the cost to American relations, and reversal of Khrushchev’s “one-man rule” was coming into vogue.
On Wednesday, April 3, in Washington, Dobrynin reflected his country’s new hard line when he handed Robert Kennedy a scathing indictment of American foreign policy. Kennedy read it and said it was “so insulting and rude” that he would not give it to the President; if Dobrynin wanted to “deliver that kind of message,” he should “go to the State Department and not talk to me again.” Dobrynin thrust out the paper and said, “Take it!”
Kennedy refused. Dobrynin took his advice and went to the State Department. Their angry encounter may have occasioned the moment when, as Jacqueline recalled, the Attorney General telephoned the Kremlin late at night “in a rage about something.” He was apparently trying to reach Bolshakov and received no answer.
Never again did the President’s brother assume the role of chief intermediary with the Soviet Union. He recalled, “That really was the end of our relationship.” Increasingly engaged by the gathering storm over civil rights, he continued to advise the President on Soviet affairs but for the most part gave up his Soviet portfolio.
That same week Khrushchev sent the President his first private letter in three months. In it, he discussed the Soviet troops on Cuba and complained about the American position on on-site inspections. A week later, the President sent a three-page reply.* He told Bohlen, who was briefly back from Paris, “I don’t see any reason for me ever to see Khrushchev again. There is nothing to be gained from it. But I am glad I saw him once. It was valuable in terms of the effect on me.”
In Moscow in early April, eight full members of the Presidium appeared together in Moscow without Khrushchev, ostensibly to greet visiting French Communists. Not since Stalin’s death had so many high officials gathered in public in the Chairman’s absence. It has been speculated that Kozlov used the occasion to convene the Presidium meeting for a move against Khrushchev.
On Wednesday, April 10, Pravda announced that the Central Committee would meet in May to examine “current ideological tasks.” Kozlov was said to have ordered this meeting in the Chairman’s absence, upending Khrushchev’s plans. There were rumors that at the May session Khrushchev would be forced to resign.
Within twenty-four hours of Pravda’s announcement, Kozlov suffered a near-fatal seizure. Some called it a heart attack, some a stroke. Whatever kind of seizure it was, it was so severe that Kozlov was removed from Soviet politics forever. Twenty-one months later, he died.†
Once Kozlov was gone from the Soviet political scene, Soviet policy toward the United States showed immediate signs of softening. Pravda reprinted a Washington Post article hailing President Kennedy’s “sincere efforts” for peace. Kommunist published a “long-lost” Lenin document sanctioning the occasional need to make concessions to the “bourgeois powers” for the sake of Soviet economic development.
On Friday, April 12, less than two days after Kozlov’s incapacitation, Khrushchev received the Saturday Review editor and old champion of détente, Norman Cousins, at Pitsunda. Before Cousins’s departure, Kennedy had told him that Khrushchev no doubt sincerely believed “that the United States reneged on its offer of three inspections. But he’s wrong.”
Perhaps Cousins could convince the Chairman that it was an honest misunderstanding: “I genuinely want a test ban treaty.” Rusk added that the United States could not reduce its demand for eight inspections.* Perhaps American and Soviet negotiators could resolve everything else and then let Khrushchev meet with the President to work out this final issue.
When Cousins and his two daughters arrived at Khrushchev’s estate, the Chairman was standing in the driveway, wearing a large gray fedora and a green-and-tan tweed cape. As the girls swam in the indoor-outdoor pool, he and Cousins sat on the adjoining glass-enclosed terrace. Cousins did not know about the drama between Khrushchev and Kozlov but noticed that, unlike December, when he had called on the Chairman in Moscow, Khrushchev seemed “weighted down, even withdrawn,” and “under considerable pressure.”
Leaning forward, the Chairman said, “If the United States really wanted a treaty, it could have had one.… We wanted a treaty and the United States said we couldn’t get one without inspections. So we agreed, only to have you change your position.”
Cousins reported the President’s position. Khrushchev said, “A misunderstanding?” He cited Wiesner’s assurance “that the United States was ready to proceed on the basis of a few annual inspections. Ambassador Dean told Khrushchev the same thing.” After Cuba, there had been a “real chance” for both countries to advance the peace. He had thought they were close to agreement on nuclear testing. He had persuaded the Council of Ministers to offer two to three inspections. Kennedy had made him look “foolish.”
Cousins said, “The President would like to hold the question of inspections for last, and then you and he would work out this problem together.”
Khrushchev shook his head: “For various reasons I cannot go to Washington,* and I would assume that the President right now has good reasons for not coming to Moscow.… If you go from three to eight, we can go from three to zero.” His scientists and generals were pressing for a green light for a new series of nuclear tests. “I think I might decide to give it to them.”
Cousins said, “Your final response is that you are probably going to resume atomic tests.… This destroys any possibility that other nations can be persuaded not to test.… Last summer, President Kennedy was informed by a. Soviet representative that missile bases were not being installed in Cuba. Perhaps it will be said that this was a misunderstanding.… Perhaps one misunderstanding can cancel out another.”
Khrushchev said, “You want me to accept President Kennedy’s good faith? All right, I accept President Kennedy’s good faith.… You want me to set all misunderstandings aside and make a fresh start? All right, I agree to make a fresh start.… And we will give you something you don’t really need. We will give you inspections inside our country to convince you we aren’t really cheating. We make our offer, you accept it, and there’s no more nuclear testing. Finished. If the President really wants a treaty, here it is.”
Cousins said, “The President has come down a great deal from the original twenty-two inspections, but he knows of no way he can come all the way down to three. The Senate would never accept it.”
Khrushchev pulled a watch out of his breast pocket and toyed with it. “I cannot and will not go back to the Council of Ministers and ask them to change our position to accommodate the United States again. Why am I always the one who must understand the difficulties of the other fellow? Maybe it’s time for the other fellow to understand my position.”
On Monday, April 22, Cousins went to the Oval Office. Kennedy asked him whether Khrushchev’s “place on the Black Sea” was “as nice as they say.” When the editor described their badminton game, the President said, “Sounds as though he’s in good condition.” Cousins related the internal pressures on Khrushchev to take a hard line on nuclear testing.
Kennedy replied that the CIA was telling him the same thing. “One of the ironic things about this entire situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd.… I’ve got similar problems.… The hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another, each using the actions of the other to justify his own position.”
The President understood Khrushchev’s difficulties but could not “cut down” the number of inspections: “As it is, we’d have a real battle on our hands to get a treaty through the Senate, even if the Russians agreed to everything we asked.”
In September, when the two sides had seemed deadlocked on nuclear testing, Bundy had written Kennedy, “I do think it is getting to be time to consider a top-level and politically savvy visitor to Moscow, and my own candidate would be Harriman.”
Now the suggestion was revived. In late April, Harriman went to see Khrushchev as the President’s emissary. For the seventy-one-year-old man, it was the triumph of his efforts to work his way back into the center of American-Soviet affairs.*
Born in 1891, he was the son of Edward H. Harriman, the Union Pacific railroad baron who amassed a fortune of more than $70 million. After Groton and Yale, the young man had combined casual investment banking with serious polo playing. In 1924, when the newborn Soviet Union was seeking foreign capital, he secured a manganese concession; when it flagged, he renegotiated the franchise with Leon Trotsky.
Harriman’s liberal older sister, Mary, and Governor Al Smith helped to bring him into the Democratic Party. In 1940, he went to Washington as a dollar-a-year man to help improve American rail capacity in preparation for war. He persuaded Harry Hopkins to let him carry his bag on his famous visit to Churchill in January 1941. Franklin Roosevelt appointed him “expediter” of aid to Great Britain.
That August, Harriman and Churchill’s supply minister, Lord Beaverbrook, went to see Stalin about aid to the Soviet Union. The dictator accused them of wishing to see Hitler destroy the Soviet regime, then struck the best deal he could. A grinning Litvinov said, “Now we shall win the war!” In the tradition of Rooseveltian statecraft, Harriman bypassed the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, Laurence Steinhardt, and commiserated with Stalin about the poor quality of both of their countries’ envoys.
In 1943, Harriman took over the embassy in Moscow. With immense distaste, his aide George Kennan brought him morning cables at Spaso House, where Harriman worked in his dark bedchamber, wearing a silk dressing gown and red Morocco slippers. No longer in such desperate need of Western help, the Russians were already growing more bellicose. In March 1945 at Warm Springs, Roosevelt banged his fist on his wheelchair: “Averell is right. We can’t do business with Stalin.”
Under Truman, Harriman was Ambassador to London, Secretary of Commerce, and a White House foreign policy aide. In 1954, he overcame his wooden oratory and near-indifference to state issues to be elected Governor of New York. With Truman’s support, he ran vainly for the 1956 Democratic nomination. Defeated for reelection by Nelson Rockefeller, he planned a regenerative trip to the Soviet Union.
He asked Llewellyn Thompson by letter to tell the Russians “that I would like to come to the Soviet Union if I can have a talk with Khrushchev.”* In June 1959, Harriman arrived in Moscow, ostensibly as a commissioned writer for Life. As he did with other American leaders who resisted Cold War dogma, Khrushchev granted him a well-publicized audience that would strengthen him politically. That September, he gave Harriman an additional boost by allowing him to host his famous New York encounter with the American ruling class.
Harriman’s support for Kennedy in 1960 was in no way sentimental. He had first met the young man in 1945 at the UN conference in San Francisco. With characteristic foresight, he invited him up for a drink. But his attitude toward the candidate was tinctured by his old antipathy toward Joseph Kennedy and the son’s failure to oppose Joseph McCarthy.
Worried about a Catholic nominee, Harriman wrote Galbraith, “There won’t be the same vindictive talk as in ’28, but what will happen when they get in that booth and commune with their faith (or prejudices)?” When he learned of Kennedy’s success in the West Virginia primary, he told his wife, Marie, “It’s just shocking.… They have just used their money to buy their way. They simply bought the election.”
Like other frugal, rich men in politics, Harriman wanted to be wanted for himself, not his money. But in early October, the Kennedys used a middleman to suggest that they expected thirty-five thousand dollars for the fall campaign. To avoid jeopardizing his chances to return to government, he ponied up.
After the election, he wrote Kennedy, “Yours was a great victory, even though it was a bit close in some states.… I glad that New York gave you a good solid majority of over 400,000 (not quite the 500,000 that I had been predicting).” He kept the President-elect well abreast of his November meetings with well-placed Russians and the messages from Khrushchev.
But Kennedy saw Harriman mainly as a rich, stubborn, slightly deaf old man, a failed politician and, perhaps, too soft on the Russians. When James MacGregor Burns in 1959 imagined who might get key diplomatic jobs in a Kennedy government, Sorensen advised him that Harriman’s inclusion in the list was “farfetched.” Robert Kennedy asked Harriman’s friends Galbraith and Schlesinger, “Are you sure that giving Averell a job wouldn’t be just an act of sentiment?”*
The most the new President would offer was an ill-defined job as “roving ambassador.” Harriman told a friend in April 1961, “I am not yet in the inner circle of this administration.… I started as a private with Roosevelt and worked to the top. That is what I intend to do again.”†
To almost everyone’s surprise, he turned out to be right. Impressed by his successes on Laos, Kennedy promoted him in November 1961 to Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East. Harriman said, “Damn, I was hoping it was Europe.” That month, when Khrushchev congratulated him on his seventieth birthday, Harriman replied that if the Chairman would agree with the Americans on Laos, this would “release me to work on other situations.” In 1962, he wrote Beaver-brook, “I seem to be thriving on what little work I am doing.”
He channeled his restlessness into sporadic attacks on the permanent bureaucracy and demands for “young blood,” which further endeared him to the Kennedy brothers. In April 1963, he became Under Secretary for Political Affairs, the number-three officer in the State Department. After being sworn, he said privately, “This place is dead, dead, dead. What I want to do is to give it a little of the crusading spirit of those earlier times.”
Jacqueline Kennedy wrote Marie Harriman, “Isn’t it marvelous about Averell—everybody is so happy. Now that he has had more government jobs than anyone else since John Quincy Adams, don’t you think we should hang his picture in the Green Room?”
Despite this comeback, the Kennedys had seemed to keep Harriman at arm’s length from his first love. The President consulted him on Khrushchev and Soviet affairs before Vienna largely because his sister Eunice twisted his arm. During the Berlin Crisis, Harriman’s arguments for diplomacy before tanks were sent down the Autobahn were ignored. His views were not asked during the Missile Crisis; he had been forced to call Schlesinger in hopes of getting advice to Kennedy.*
Overimpressed by quickness, the President may have mistaken Harriman’s bad hearing and sluggish speech for dimwittedness, which he may have deemed fine for negotiation but not for policy-making. Before October 1962, he may have been chary to be seen soliciting advice from someone known to be close to the Russians.
But after earning his spurs in the Missile Crisis, Kennedy could afford to use Harriman on the Soviet Union. He knew that Kohler had no particular commitment to improved relations and that Khrushchev did not especially like him. Just as Roosevelt had used special envoys to circumvent Joseph Kennedy in London, the President sent Harriman to Moscow. He wrote Khrushchev, “You and your colleagues have known him well and I put great hope in the results of his discussions with you.”
Through the early spring, Kennedy and Khrushchev had complained to each other through Dobrynin and the State Department about Laos. The Soviet Ambassador noted that in defiance of the Geneva agreement, American troops and planes were still operating in Laos, along with “adherents of Chiang Kai-shek.”
The President had replied that the North Vietnamese were defying the pact by sending “large numbers” of troops into Laos, from which to interfere in the “internal affairs” of South Vietnam. He said that all American military personnel, except for a handful of diplomatic attachés, had been withdrawn by the agreed-upon deadline of October 1962.*
Khrushchev now told Harriman that the deterioration in Laos was unpleasant for the Soviets, who had a “very limited” ability to influence the situation. Harriman reminded him that the United States had twisted General Phoumi’s arm to accept the 1962 agreement. Khrushchev replied, “In Russia, the expression is that one twists something else.” Laughing, Harriman conceded that if Washington-had “followed the Russian method, Phoumi would have agreed sooner.”
Harriman told Khrushchev that nothing would please Kennedy more than to relax tensions everywhere: “The President looks upon Laos as a symbol.… If we can’t cooperate in that case, how could we hope to cooperate in other fields?” He said that the United States had “definite information” that the Viet Minh were operating in Laos.
The Chairman asked, “Are you a religious man?” Harriman replied that his grandfather was a minister. Khrushchev said, “Will you swear on a Bible that the Viet Minh are there?” Harriman agreed: “Would Mr. Gromyko be willing to swear on a Bible that the Chiang Kai-shek forces are there?”
Khrushchev reminded him that Gromyko was a nonbeliever: perhaps he could instead use a copy of Das Kapital or “swear by the beard of Karl Marx”: “Let’s each bet a million dollars on whether or not the Viet Minh are there. You have many millions and would not mind losing one.”
Harriman said that he would be willing to give a million dollars to get the Viet Minh out of Laos. He reminded Khrushchev that when he was Ambassador to Moscow, he had seen Stalin in this same office to talk about the Poles. Stalin had cried, “The Poles! The Poles! Can’t you think of anything to talk about except the Poles? They have made trouble all through history and they always will.” He said that he suspected the Chairman felt the same way about the Laotians.
Khrushchev responded by raising the subject of Germany. Harriman said, “Germany? Can’t you think of anything else to talk about? The President is concerned about Cuba.” Khrushchev ridiculed Kennedy’s worry about troops in Cuba and rattled off a list of countries where the United States kept forces. For the millionth time, he warned that if the West tried to cross the GDR after a peace treaty, the rockets would fly and the tanks would burn.
By Harriman’s account, he laughed, saying, “I know you’re too sensible a man to want to have war.” The Chairman replied, “You’re right.”
Harriman went on, “We want to advance our mutual good, but Cuba is a case in point. There are many foolish voices in the United States calling for rash action. The President needs help in keeping those sentiments under control. We would appreciate anything you could do to help him … if you can do it without hurting your own national interests. You should know that the President has been quite willing to help you personally, provided it does not hurt our national interests.” He said that he had a “very serious suggestion to make.”
Khrushchev slapped the table. “Out with it!”
“Come to an agreement on the test ban. This would enable you to devote much more of your resources to civilian production.” Harriman said that Berlin should be “put on ice”: “Why don’t the Soviets want to get on with important things, such as a test ban?”
The Chairman said that he and his comrades regarded Harriman with highest esteem. “We would like to return our relations to the state they were in during the period when you served here.… So I will propose a deal with you.” Why not combine a test ban with a German settlement? Harriman replied that the United States could not buy a “pig in a poke” but was “always ready to talk about both the test ban and about the German settlement.”
Smiling, Khrushchev told Harriman he was an “old diplomat” who knew “how to talk without saying anything.”
In early May, Georgi Bolshakov wrote Robert Kennedy that wherever he spoke, “everybody is anxious to get an answer to only one question: can we live in peace with you? And everyone I’ve met gives only one answer: we not only can, but must.… Now, as before, I am with Novosti Press Agency and I am taking care of the ‘New Frontiers’ in television. My friends jokingly call me ‘Telstar.’ Anastasia … thanks you both for the gift.*
“Greetings and best wishes to you from Maya [Plisetskaya]. We share your desire to have a get-together.… We hope to have a chance to see each other, to chat, to sing together, and let those who can, dance.† Our greetings to Ethel and to your large family. We were glad to learn that your family is due to increase around June, so we’ll be delighted to send to you one more Matrushka for the new arrival.”
Bolshakov added a jarring note: “Rest assured, Robert, we are doing our best to secure peace. Speaking quite frankly, certain hopes were set on your brother, but now these hopes are diminishing.”
Since the previous autumn, Alpha 66, Commandos L-66, and other free-lance radical exile groups had conducted hit-and-run strikes against Cuban installations. Operating from Florida and the Bahamas, they also fired torpedoes against Cuban and Soviet ships. The Soviet government complained in late March that U.S. “encouragement of such actions” violated the settlement of the missile crisis.
Rusk told Kennedy that the raids “may complicate our relations with the U.S.S.R. without net advantage to us”: “Better if they are going to be done that we do it.” The President authorized a statement that the United States would “take every step necessary” to stop raids from its territory. Exiles were detained and speedboats impounded. Nelson Rockefeller told the press he hoped Kennedy had not made his decision to “appease the Soviets,” but “what other reason” could there be?
The NSC’s new Standing Group on Cuba, successor to Ex Comm, considered what Bundy called the “gradual development of some form of accommodation with Castro.” In April, the Cuban leader announced that “U.S. limitations on exile raids” were “a proper step toward accommodation.”
Castro was still unhappy with the Russians. After Khrushchev learned that he had gone so far as to schedule a meeting with Chinese officials, he invited Castro to the Soviet Union and gave him one of the warmest welcomes ever granted a foreign leader. During his forty-day visit, Castro inspected the Northern Fleet and Soviet missile bases, reviewed the May Day parade from the Lenin Tomb, and spent dozens of hours with Khrushchev at the Kremlin and Pitsunda. In Kiev, he was provided with a voluptuous blonde who caught his eye.
Defending his settlement of the Missile Crisis, the Chairman noted that Stalin would never have taken such a risk as sending missiles to defend the island. According to Khrushchev, he did not tell Castro about Kennedy’s secret Turkish missile concession because the President had “asked me to keep it secret.” He increased Cuban sugar subsidies and promised to forget about the old-line Cuban Communists who had given Castro so much trouble. By the end of his trip, Castro openly praised the Russians for risking “a severe war in defense of our little country.… That is communism!”
In April, the CIA predicted to Kennedy that the Soviet Union would “maintain some sort of a military presence” on Cuba as a “tripwire deterrent against a U.S. invasion” and turn their attention to the subversion of Latin America: “There is a good chance that Castro’s position in Cuba a year from now will be stronger than it presently is and that in Latin America the Communists will have recovered some of the ground lost in the Missile Crisis.”
The President knew that Castroite revolutions throughout the hemisphere could not only endanger Western security but cause him grave political problems when he ran for reelection—especially because he had inspired the false impression in November that his Cuban settlement included a ban against Cuban subversion of Latin America.
During a November Ex Comm meeting, Kennedy had asked for a long-range plan to “keep pressure on Castro and to bolster other regimes in the Caribbean.” He knew that new American covert action against Castro would force him to worry about his internal stability and relax his hemispheric ambitions.
Bundy warned that “useful organized sabotage is still very hard to get.” Nevertheless Robert Kennedy told the Standing Group in May that the United States “must do something against Castro, even though we do not believe our actions would bring him down.” The following month, the President approved a new CIA program to sabotage Cuban power stations, petroleum refineries, storage facilities, factories, railroads, and highways.
Kennedy and Macmillan were worried that time was running out if they were to achieve a test ban treaty that might keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of China and other countries. They sent Khrushchev a joint letter saying that the difference between his proposal of three inspections and theirs of seven “should not be impossible to resolve.” On the automatic seismic stations, their differences appeared “fairly narrow.”
The President and the Prime Minister were prepared to send “very senior representatives who would be empowered to speak for us and talk in Moscow directly with you.” They hoped to bring the matter “close enough to a final decision so that it might then be proper to think in terms, of a meeting of the three of us at which a definite agreement on a test ban could be made final.”
On Wednesday, May 8, Khrushchev wrote Kennedy that he had learned the President’s test-ban proposals by heart “just as we used to learn ‘Pater Noster.’” He had already once agreed to two or three inspections in order to help him with his Senate. For this all he had gotten was Western haggling over numbers and conditions.
Was the President just going through the motions for domestic political reasons? If there was no real hope for an agreement, the Soviet Union would have no choice but to strengthen its security. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union was willing “to receive your highly placed representatives.”
The harshness of Khrushchev’s response grew partly from his genuine exasperation and partly from his own domestic anxieties. He felt that Kennedy had already bamboozled him once over a test ban. In the wake of his recent political scare with Kozlov, he was hardly going to go on the written record with language that would allow the President to make him look “foolish” before his colleagues again.
In Washington, Dobrynin privately suggested that the Chairman was willing to be more flexible. He told Wiesner that there had been too much public discussion about numbers: five or six inspections “might have been acceptable, had things gone differently.” He told Chester Bowles that if they could not agree on a test ban now, “it would be tragic and the rift would last for many years”: perhaps they could agree on a “lump sum” of inspections—“say, twenty-five or twenty-seven over a period of five years.”
Kennedy and Macmillan proposed to Khrushchev that their special envoys arrive in late June or early July. The Chairman agreed but was impatient and worried that his diplomatic bureaucracy might sabotage the bargaining. He would have preferred a summit with the President. He was willing to take Rusk.
In February, Alexander Fomin had renewed his connection with John Scali and suggested that Rusk visit the Kremlin.* Gromyko reminded Kohler that he had traveled to the White House three times, but the Secretary of State had never been to Moscow. In mid-May, Khrushchev himself raised the suggestion in a letter to Kennedy.
The President did not want to undercut his test ban negotiator or involve his Secretary of State in bargaining that might fail. He replied that Rusk was “prepared to come at any time in July or August that is convenient to you.”
After seeing Khrushchev in April, Norman Cousins had urged Kennedy to make some kind of dramatic peace offer to the Soviets. In early May, Sorensen asked him for ideas for a June commencement speech the President was scheduled to deliver at American University in Washington.
Kennedy had decided that the time had come for a major address on peace. Coming just before the bargaining in Moscow, it would show the Russians his sincerity and prepare Congress and the American people to support the test ban treaty that emerged. He would emphasize the peaceful and positive in the American-Soviet relationship, unleavened by threat, boast, or lecture.
Bundy asked the White House staff to send their best thoughts to Sorensen and say nothing to anyone else. They did not solicit official suggestions from other departments. Sorensen drew on contributions from Cousins, Bundy, Thompson, Kaysen, Bowles, Schlesinger, and others, language deleted from the Inaugural Address and Kennedy’s 1961 UN speech as well as that drafted for the ill-fated 1962 television exchange with Khrushchev.
As Sorensen worked on the text, the President flew westward. On Wednesday, June 5, he stopped in El Paso, where he met at the Cortez Hotel with the new Governor of Texas, John Connally, and the Vice President. O’Donnell later recalled the stop with “no pleasure.”
Kennedy said, “Well, Lyndon, do you think we’re ever going to have that fund-raising affair in Texas?” Connally said, “Fine, Mr. President, let’s start planning your trip.”
Kennedy flew on to Honolulu, where he addressed the U.S. Conference of Mayors about civil rights and approved a draft of what he had now taken to calling “the Peace Speech.” A copy was transmitted to the White House, where Carl Kaysen was told to clear it with Rusk, McNamara, and Taylor. Not by accident, it was too late for their bureaucracies to dilute the rhetoric.
While the President was in Hawaii, Khrushchev sent him and Macmillan an irascible letter designed probably to soften them up before the test ban negotiations. He questioned their sincerity and complained once more about inspections: success would depend on what their envoys brought in their baggage to Moscow.
On Sunday night, June 9, the President flew eastward, scrawling last-minute changes into his text. By telephone, Kaysen suggested minor revisions to respond to Khrushchev’s latest letter. Arriving at Andrews on Monday at 8:51 A.M., Kennedy was rushed to the White House, where he changed his shirt, and then to American University. Tired reporters on Air Force One and the Washington diplomatic corps had been told that this address would be “of major importance.”
The President began by saying that world peace was “a topic on which ignorance too often abounds.… What kind of a peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.
“I am talking about genuine peace—the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children.… Not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.”
He spoke of peace “because of the new face of war.” Total war made no sense in an age when great powers had “relatively invulnerable nuclear forces,” when one nuclear weapon had “almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all of the Allied air forces in the Second World War,” when deadly nuclear poisons could be carried “to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.”
Some counseled delay until the Soviets became more enlightened: “I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it.” But assuming that peace was impossible was “a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable—that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.… Our problems are manmade. Therefore, they can be solved by man.* And man can be as big as he wants.… Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.”
Therefore, “let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union.… As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant.… But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and acts of courage.”
Both the American and Soviet peoples abhorred war: “Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other.” No nation had ever suffered more than the Soviet Union during the war. At least twenty million had died. A third of its territory “was turned into a wasteland, a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.” Their most basic link was “that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.
“Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Cold War.” The one place where “a fresh start is badly needed” was a test ban treaty, allowing the nuclear powers to deal with “one of the greatest hazards which man faces in 1963, the further spread of nuclear arms. It would increase our security. It would decrease the prospects of war.”
Near the end of the speech, Kennedy announced that the United States would not test in the atmosphere “so long as other states do not do so.” Khrushchev, Macmillan, and he had agreed on high-level test ban discussions in Moscow: “Our hopes must be tempered with the caution of history, but with our hopes go the hopes of all mankind.”
This lyrical address was easily the best speech of Kennedy’s life. Read three decades later, the words do not exert the power they did at the time. The reason for that power was their startling dissonance with the shrill alarums of the President’s first two years in office. The speech was light-years from Kennedy’s Salt Lake City jeremiad of the 1960 campaign and his muscle-flexing Inaugural Address.
No Cold War President, save Eisenhower after Stalin’s death,* had so publicly endorsed the need to find a way out of the conflict. Even during the détente of 1959–1960, with no need to worry about reelection, Eisenhower had been too timid about raising public expectations to educate Americans about why better Soviet relations were in their interest.
Later historians have cited the American University speech as evidence that Kennedy’s turbulent experience managing Soviet relations, especially through the Missile Crisis, had brought some kind of epiphany, showing the error of his ways, allowing his idealism to prevail at last over caution and political calculation.
Certainly Berlin and Cuba had shown him the dangers of eternal Cold War, but there was not a sentence in this speech with which he would have privately disagreed in 1960. The change was not in Kennedy but in what he perceived to be his political environment.
In 1960, he had had to win an election at a time of high tension with Moscow. During his first two years, he had felt compelled to demonstrate to the American people, Allied leaders, and Khrushchev that he was capable of tough leadership of the Free World. By 1963, most Americans felt he had proved his mettle by facing down the Russians over Cuba. Now he could advocate better relations without fear of being branded a “weak sister.”
The American University speech, though deeply felt, was as much the product of political calculation as any address Kennedy ever gave. It was designed to build public support for the test ban treaty he hoped to achieve, to mollify Khrushchev after the misunderstanding over inspections, and overcome any Soviet skepticism that he was willing to jeopardize his domestic position in order to push a controversial agreement through the Senate.
The speech may also have been intended to offer the Chairman a shining inducement for an American-Soviet entente. In early June, Chinese officials were about to descend on Moscow in hopes of resolving their Soviet quarrel at the expense of the United States.
The following week, the President’s speech brought 896 letters to the White House: only 25 were hostile. During the same seven days, 28,232 people wrote Kennedy about a bill on the cost of freight. He told aides, “That is why I tell people in Congress that they’re crazy if they take their mail seriously.”
When the Voice of America broadcast the speech to the Soviet people in Russian, the Soviet government jammed only one paragraph, which mentioned “baseless” Soviet claims about American purposes. Kennedy’s text appeared in the Soviet press. Citizens tore out copies and carried them in wallets and purses.
When the British Labour leader Harold Wilson called on Khrushchev, he found the Chairman deeply impressed that the President had been willing to say such things in public. Khrushchev later said that it was “the best speech by any President since Roosevelt.”*
Robert Kennedy read intelligence reports saying that the speech had changed Khrushchev’s opinion of American aims. The new British Ambassador in Moscow, Humphrey Trevelyan, felt that “for the first time” Soviet leaders now felt that Kennedy “was someone who was genuinely working for a détente and with whom they could do business.”
The President’s first choice to be his Moscow test ban negotiator had been McCloy. The Chase Manhattan Bank chief had acquitted himself well in the New York talks after the Missile Crisis, Khrushchev liked him, and, best of all, he was an eminent Republican. But McCloy declined, pleading the call of business for oil clients.
With great ambivalence, Rusk nominated Harriman. He was worried about Harriman’s aversion to the bureaucracy and his sentimental attachment to the Soviet Union. Kennedy felt this was exactly the right set of messages to send to Khrushchev. The day after Rusk made his suggestion, George Ball, perhaps acting on the Secretary’s behalf, told the White House that Harriman might not be such a good idea after all. Resorting to one more Trollope ploy, Kennedy ignored the second message from State and told Rusk that he accepted his suggestion.
Dutifully Rusk cabled Kohler, “We now propose to send Harriman.” He cabled Bohlen that the President had chosen Harriman “because of his tested diplomatic skill and his ability to get past technical obstacles to agreement.” A Soviet diplomat in Washington told an American, “As soon as I heard that Harriman was going, I knew you were serious.”
On Thursday, June 20, the United States and the Soviet Union signed an agreement in Geneva establishing a “hot line” for messages between their two heads of government. Washington had proposed such a channel since early 1961 without success.
Only after the near-fatal hours of delay during the Missile Crisis, when the Kennedy-Khrushchev exchanges depended on Radio Moscow and the Western Union man on the bicycle, did the Russians listen to reason. Kennedy said, “We can’t go through this kind of thing again.”
The two leaders approved a wire-telegraph-teleprinter circuit leading through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki. Messages would be sent in code during crises when every second would count. When the new hot line was tested, technicians in Moscow were baffled by the first message sent from Washington: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
The seventeen years of disarmament negotiations had been so barren that the hot line accord was only the second major agreement to emerge from the talks.* Kennedy promised to “bend every effort to go on from this first step.” Two evenings later, he boarded Air Force One for his first trip to Europe since Vienna.
*The message went on to say that the Chinese must not “overestimate” their differences in the “struggle against imperialism.” The “struggle for peace” and the “prevention of thermonuclear war,” routinely included in such messages since 1960, were unmentioned. Bundy advised Kennedy that the message was “worth skimming through.” On February 9, Khrushchev said, “We shall always be friends with the Chinese.” This was roughly equivalent to his 1957 insistence under similar pressure that “we are all Stalinists.”
†The CIA gave Bundy a report on the meeting, which Bundy found “fascinating.” He asked Kennedy “whether we should find occasion to let the world know of Khrushchev’s anti-Semitism.” Richard Helms asked the President for permission to plant a magazine article “exposing Soviet religious persecution,” including information on harassment of evangelical Christians and forcible removal of Jewish children to boarding schools: “In our negotiations with the writer and publisher, the right of final approval on content of the proposed article would be reserved for this Agency.” Kennedy approved, deciding, as General Clifton told Helms, that “it wouldn’t be too much of a needle to the Soviet Union.”
*He would be sixty-nine in April.
*The Soviet evidence of many years later showed, of course, that these dissenters were correct.
*Both letters are still withheld from public view by the American and Soviet governments as of this writing.
†Had Kozlov not been stricken at this exact moment, Khrushchev might possibly have been ousted so that Kozlov could lead the Soviet Union into a neo-Stalinist age in which he could court the Chinese and renew the old American confrontation. From the closed Soviet society of 1963 we have no concrete evidence of foul play. Kozlov had indeed suffered previous coronaries, the worst in April 1961. One Moscow rumor had it that on the evening of April 10, Khrushchev and Kozlov had a violent telephone argument that brought on Kozlov’s seizure.
The Soviet leader with the most to gain from Kozlov’s removal, of course, was Khrushchev. The Chairman was hardly reluctant to use homocide for political advantage. In the 1930s and 1940s, he had been knee-deep in mass murder in the Ukraine and Poland. As he once told Llewellyn Thompson, he and his colleagues may have caused Stalin to die of his stroke by refusing him proper medical help. Later that year, Khrushchev was only too delighted to have the secret police chief Lavrenti Beria murdered. In 1956, he did not flinch from the slaughter of thirty thousand Hungarians.
Leonid Brezhnev had almost as much to gain. (During this period, he may have been conspiring against Khrushchev’s life. See Chapter 24.) Kozlov’s incapacitation allowed him to take Kozlov’s job as general supervisor of the Party apparatus, while remaining Soviet President. Many presumed that he was now in line to be Khrushchev’s successor, despite the reassignment of Kozlov’s jobs to both Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgorny. Khrushchev was not about to let one man again hoist himself into the position of chief heir and putative challenger. Western intelligence could not conclude for certain whether Brezhnev or Podgorny now ranked higher in the hierarchy of power.
*This was at a time Kennedy had privately told his Secretary of State that six inspections would be his “rock-bottom” position.
*After his close call, he may have been afraid to leave the Soviet Union at this moment. The Anti-Party Coup had taken place while he was out of the country.
*That same month, the last Jupiter missile left Turkey. NATO had formally decided in January 1963 to remove the IRBMs from both Turkey and Italy, to be replaced by ten Polaris submarines. McNamara recalled years later that at the end of the Missile Crisis, “right away I went back to the Pentagon and ordered them withdrawn, cut up and photographed so that I could personally see that those missiles had been destroyed.”
*Thompson replied he had recently seen Mikoyan, who was “very drunk” and said that, while he had disliked Harriman, he had liked his daughter, Kathy. During a wartime discussion of some Lend-Lease request, Mikoyan had been “annoyed” by Harriman’s insistence on being told what the Russians planned to do with the aid. Mikoyan had said that Kathy, on the other hand, “was the only woman he had ever known who could drink like a man and not show any effects of it.”
*A pre-Inaugural note from Robert Kennedy testified to Harriman’s distance from the center of the new government: “My home number is now EL 6–6174. I hope you will have a chance to call me and come out for a meal. Many thanks for all your kindnesses to me over this past year.”
†He indiscreetly went on to say that Kennedy had erred in appointing Bundy; as a Republican he simply would not feel free enough to criticize Eisenhower’s errors. He said that the President had also erred by expressing doubt as to whether the American system or communism would triumph in the end: this might seem reasonable at home but had “unfortunate echoes” abroad.
*The advice was that Khrushchev was not behaving like someone who wanted war: “If we do nothing but get tougher and tougher, we will force them into countermeasures. We must give Khrushchev an out.”
*The only American planes in Laos, he said, were there in response to Souvanna Phouma’s “request for air supply,” carrying “food, clothing, medicines, and other necessities” to people who, through Pathet Lao “intransigence and harassment,” could not otherwise obtain them. As for the alleged supporters of Chiang Kai-shek, these were “small, independent bands of former Chinese Nationalist regulars who wander back and forth in the remote areas of the Burmese-Thai-Lao borders and who are engaged in various types of trade.”
* Launched in July 1962, the thirty-five-pound American Telstar communications satellite had transmitted the first live television broadcast between North America and Europe. The Kennedys had sent Mrs. Bolshakov a pair of shoes.
†This a reference to Robert’s comment in November to the Bolshoi dancers that he could not do the two-step.
* Fomin was clearly well informed on high-level Soviet thinking. He complained that the Kennedy administration had “double-crossed” Moscow by reneging on its promise to accept two or three inspections.
*This sentence was fortunately changed from the earlier draft: “Therefore, they are man-sized.”
*In an April 1953 address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Eisenhower described the price of an eternal arms race: “Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies … a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.… This is not a way of life at all.… Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” These words were also a perfect distillation of Khrushchev’s private feelings on the subject.
*Valentin Falin recalled that Soviet officials in Moscow assumed that the speech would cause the President “enormous troubles in his own country” because it was “totally out of tune with the views of very powerful circles who were seeking a U.S.-Soviet confrontation.”
*The first was a 1959 ban on nuclear explosions in Antarctica, which was ratified in 1961.