The Culmination
After the kennedy funeral, lyndon johnson gave mikoyan only thirty-five seconds in the State Department receiving line, one of the new President’s shortest encounters. Soviet diplomats worried that Johnson might be demonstrating American indignation about Lee Harvey Oswald’s Soviet history.
They were relieved the next day when Johnson saw the Deputy Premier in the Oval Office. He promised to live by whatever pledges the late President had made to Khrushchev on Cuba. He wished to continue their private correspondence. He gave Mikoyan a letter reminding the Chairman that he had “kept in close touch” with the improvement in American-Soviet relations and was “in full accord with the policies of President Kennedy.”
Nevertheless Khrushchev remained “worried” about Kennedy’s murder and “how events would develop.” He thought Johnson “reactionary” and “inflexible.” As his son Sergei recalled, “We didn’t believe Johnson, didn’t trust him.” The Chairman’s advisers reminded him of Johnson’s intimacy with Texas oil and gas interests, which they considered to be anti-Soviet, perhaps a party to the assassination. They warned that Johnson “smells oily.”
On the morning after New Year’s 1964, Dobrynin gave Rusk the first major letter for the new President from Khrushchev. The long, rambling screed was a condescending lesson in history and geopolitics evidently intended to educate a foreign policy novice from Texas.
Denouncing “colonializers” and “imperialism” as the causes of war, it insisted that Taiwan was an “inalienable part” of People’s China and that all “war bases” on foreign lands should be “liquidated.” The Italian Fascists had christened the Mediterranean “mare nostrum” to pose as the heirs of the ancient Romans. So much blood had been spilled in nineteenth-century Paraguay that its population was “still smaller than before this war.” All territorial disputes should be settled “exclusively by peaceful means.”
Reading the letter at the LBJ Ranch, the disappointed Johnson thought it “designed for propaganda purposes rather than serious diplomacy.”* He replied by urging that in settling territorial disputes they consider not only established borders but such internationally recognized features as the demilitarized zones in Korea and Vietnam and the access routes to Berlin. Use of force should be considered to include “aggression, subversion, or clandestine supply of arms.”
McNamara suggested reduction of U.S. production of fissionable materials for nuclear weapons to demonstrate his peaceful intentions to Khrushchev. In his first State of the Union message, Johnson announced a 25 percent cutback in enriched uranium production. He told the Russians in February that he would make a further cutback and urged them to do the same. He negotiated with Khrushchev by letter and through Dobrynin and Kohler.
When the talks were stalled in mid-April, he informed the Chairman that he would announce his new reduction three days hence at a New York press luncheon. As he was about to speak, he was handed a message from Khrushchev allowing him to announce that the Soviet Union would stop construction of two new plutonium reactors and “substantially reduce” enriched uranium production.
Dobrynin suggested that a Johnson-Khrushchev summit “could be useful for both countries.” The new President replied that a summit would raise “unrealistic expectations.” There were “distinct disadvantages to my leaving the country during my first year in office.” With no Vice President to share the “burdens of leadership,” he was trying to persuade Congress to pass Kennedy’s tax cut, civil rights, and other legislation. He told friends, “Khrushchev didn’t think I was going to be a sap.”
Soon after Johnson’s return from Dallas, McCone had quietly shown him evidence of the Cuban arms cache and Venezuelan coup plans that Helms had shown the late President three days before his murder. Johnson warned Mikoyan during their meeting that Castro’s campaign to subvert Latin America was straining American-Soviet relations. Mikoyan’s black eyes flashed: Cuba had no desire to subvert anyone! How could a tiny nation bother anyone, let alone a great power?
The United States gave the evidence from the Venezuelan beach to President Betancourt, who at the end of November demanded a partial air and naval blockade of Cuba to prevent the export of weapons. Nervous after the Kennedy assassination that the warlike Johnson would use any pretext to invade, Castro charged the CIA with “faking” the evidence as part of a “plot” against him. He warned Venezuela and other “lackey” nations that if they tried to invade his island, “they would not last twenty-four hours.”
Speaking before the Central Committee, Khrushchev agreed that the evidence had been “invented”: “I want to tell you frankly, gentleman aggressors: do not play with fire! You must realize that if tension is fanned and a threat against Cuba is created, it cannot but affect the entire international situation.”
Had Kennedy lived, the Venezuelan evidence might have forced him to choose between suffering election-year charges of appeasement or taking action against Cuba that could reignite the Missile Crisis. Helms believed that had Kennedy not been killed, the pro-Castro revolutionaries would have proceeded with their plot against Betancourt. If it had succeeded, Kennedy would have been under ferocious pressure to act boldly and stop the overthrow of other Latin American governments.
Johnson did not wish to start his Presidency and run for election by renewing the crisis over Cuba. He knew that Americans, still numb and mourning, were not likely to be responsive to Republican slurs against the sainted President’s policies. Thus he contented himself with lobbying OAS members to condemn Castro’s efforts against Venezuela with a threat to use “armed force.”
The new President read a memo from William Attwood on his efforts to see Castro, but Johnson was not interested in a Cuban rapprochement. He told Attwood merely that he had read his account “with interest.” Later Attwood heard from Gordon Chase that there was “no desire among the Johnson people to do anything about Cuba in an election year.”
Helms found that Johnson lacked Kennedy’s emotional commitment to covert action against Castro. The new President ordered the CIA to halt the sabotage program. As Helms recalled, “He saw little point in pressing Cuba.” Helms found Johnson more absorbed in “Vietnam, whether or not the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy, civil rights, and the 1964 election. Maybe he saw Cuba as an obsession of Robert Kennedy’s.”
Desmond FitzGerald told his agents in 1964 that “if Jack Kennedy had lived, I can assure you we would have gotten rid of Castro by last Christmas.”
Returning from a Saigon trip in March, McNamara recommended new assistance to South Vietnam. He told the President that since Diem’s murder, the situation had “unquestionably been growing worse.” Roughly 40 percent of the countryside was under Viet Cong “control or predominant influence.”* The political fate of General Nguyen Khanh, who had overthrown the military junta, was “uncertain.”
Johnson approved a document pronouncing Vietnam a “test case” of American capacity to cope with the wars of national liberation proclaimed by Khrushchev. Worried that the Republicans might use the Vietnam issue against him, he authorized his aides to draft a bipartisan congressional resolution allowing him to run the war as he saw fit and to remove the issue from the fall campaign.
On Sunday, August 2, in the Gulf of Tonkin, the U.S. destroyer Maddox zigzagged along the bays and islands on the North Vietnamese coastline. Loaded with eavesdropping devices, the ship gathered information on Soviet-built SAMs and radar stations. The Maddox was also in contact with South Vietnamese commandos who had raided nearby islands two nights before. It sailed outside the three-mile territorial limit established by the French colonials but inside the twelve-mile limit set by China and other Communist nations.
Three North Vietnamese boats fired torpedoes at the ship. Maddox gunners and jets from the nearby Ticonderoga fired back, crippling two of the vessels and sinking the third.
President Johnson rejected further reprisals. Using the hot line to Moscow for the first time, he cabled Khrushchev that he did not wish to widen the conflict but hoped that North Vietnam would not attack other American vessels in international waters.
The Maddox and another destroyer, the C. Turner Joy, were ordered to sail eight miles off the North Vietnamese coast, four miles off the offshore islands. The commandos from the South resumed their operations. On Sunday evening, intercepted radio messages gave the Maddox commander, Captain John Herrick, the “impression” that Communist patrol boats were about to attack. With air support from the Ticonderoga, the Maddox and Turner Joy began firing.
Maddox officers reported twenty-two enemy torpedoes, none of which scored a hit, and two or three enemy vessels sunk. But when the firing stopped, Herrick warned his superiors that the “entire action leaves many doubts”; no sailor on either destroyer had seen or heard enemy gunfire. An “overeager” young sonar operator who had counted torpedoes may have been misled by “freak weather effects.”
Nevertheless the President ordered bombing of North Vietnam for the first time and unveiled the document now christened the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Language was broadened to authorize Johnson to “take all necessary measures” to protect American forces and “prevent further aggression.” The Senate passed it with only two dissenters.
Eager to preserve the American détente, Khrushchev evidently privately urged Hanoi to stop trying to “liberate” the South. He responded to pleas for new military help by advising negotiation.
Kennedy had told Mansfield, O’Donnell, Bartlett, and others that he planned to withdraw American forces from Vietnam after he was reelected and the political risks diminished. But as January 1965 came about, Kennedy might have worried that cries of “Who Lost Vietnam?” would undermine his other ambitions with the Soviet Union, the second-term domestic program he had so long postponed, and his ability to name his successor in 1968.
Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, and the other advisers who guided Lyndon Johnson into major involvement in Vietnam might have done the same with the President who four years earlier had brought them to power.* Rusk noted years later that had Kennedy “decided in 1963 on a 1965 withdrawal, he would have left Americans in a combat zone for political purposes, and no President can do that.”
Dictating his memoirs in the late 1960s, Khrushchev noted that Johnson “got sucked in up to his neck in the Vietnam War, but that was his personal stupidity. Perhaps Kennedy would have been equally stupid. I’m not in a position to judge that now.” In 1966, the Soviet government declared that America suffered a “strange and persistent delusion” if it thought that relations with the Soviet Union could be improved despite the war in Vietnam.
In April 1964, when Khrushchev turned seventy, President Leonid Brezhnev led a large official group to the Chairman’s residence in Moscow. Wiping away a tear, he kissed the guest of honor and read out a proclamation: “We wish you at least as many more years and hope that you will live them as brilliantly and fruitfully as you have those already passed.” Pravda devoted seven of its eight pages to Khrushchev’s birthday.
By now, the Chairman was thinking about retirement: “We’re oldsters. We’ve done our bit. It’s time to yield the road to others.” Sergei Khrushchev noticed that his father’s strength was waning: “His eyes ached from the endless reading, and more and more frequently he asked one of his assistants, or one of his children, to read to him aloud.”
Khrushchev’s colleagues were growing ever more indignant about the Chairman’s personality cult and the Chinese quarrel, his agricultural failures, and his military meddling and arbitrary decision-making. With Kennedy gone, Khrushchev could no longer cite his personal relationship with the President as evidence of his indispensability. They wondered whether Johnson’s accession would doom the American détente the Chairman had so touted, but which had so far brought the Soviet Union so relatively little.
In July, Khrushchev sent Adzhubei to West Germany, where he met with Ludwig Erhard and Willy Brandt to pave the way for an official visit by the Chairman. Having shown the East Germans eighteen months before that he was unwilling to initiate another Berlin crisis, Khrushchev now had high hopes for rapprochement and lucrative trade with Bonn. Moscow rivals were shocked by what they suspected to be his impending sellout of the GDR and the use of his widely disliked son-in-law for secret diplomacy.*
Rumors were spread that in Bonn, when Adzhubei was privately asked how better relations would affect the Berlin Wall, he had replied that when Khrushchev came and saw what good guys the West Germans were, the Wall would disappear without a trace. Told of the rumors, the Chairman asked Adzhubei to “write an explanation for the Presidium.”
Two months after Adzhubei’s Bonn visit, a West German technician, Horst Schwirkmann, came to Moscow to check the FRG Embassy for eavesdropping devices. When he found them, he sent a high-voltage jolt through the lines, which gave KGB listeners a painful shock. The secret police saw their opportunity to sabotage Khrushchev’s rapprochement with West Germany. While touring the Zagorsk Monastery, Schwirkmann was shot in the buttocks with nitrogen mustard gas that could have killed him.
The outraged West Germans announced that Khrushchev could not visit Bonn until the case was satisfactorily resolved. The Soviet apology in October was unusually specific: “Those who indulge in such actions are trying to undermine the good relations between our two countries.” But it was issued too late. By then, Khrushchev had been ousted by men who had other ideas about relations with West Germany.
John Kennedy’s near-canonization and Barry Goldwater’s nomination prevented the campaign of 1964 from becoming the rancorous struggle over foreign policy that the late President had feared. Contrasting himself with Goldwater and his “Why Not Victory?” platform, Lyndon Johnson campaigned as a centrist.
The President asked Khrushchev through Norman Cousins to “keep out of the election”: he wished to defeat Goldwater soundly and must not appear to be the Kremlin’s candidate. During a Moscow visit, David Rockefeller of the Chase Manhattan Bank told the Chairman of Johnson’s hope that they could establish “relations of the sort which you had with President Kennedy,” which were “very useful in times of conflict.”
Khrushchev felt that Johnson had “turned out to be a clever man.” He was relieved that the President had not reversed Kennedy’s policies, even under pressure from Goldwater. He presumed that once the Texan was elected by a landslide, he and Johnson could resume and augment the détente begun with Kennedy.
The Chairman did not know that his closest colleagues had been plotting against him for months. According to the KGB chief Vladimir Semichastny, Brezhnev asked him in June 1964 whether Khrushchev could be poisoned or his plane sabotaged when he returned from a visit to Nasser in Cairo.
By Semichastny’s account, he replied that he was “not a murderer.” Not only were the Chairman’s crewmen devoted to him but Gromyko and others would be aboard the plane. There was further talk of stopping Khrushchev’s train and arresting him on his way back from a Swedish visit in July.*
That same month Khrushchev asked Brezhnev to resign the Presidency in favor of Mikoyan in order to “concentrate” on his Central Committee duties. Brezhnev may have taken this as Khrushchev’s signal that he would not be the Chairman’s successor.†
Brezhnev may have felt even more unsettled by Khrushchev’s call for a November Central Committee meeting. A Western reporter was told that the meeting would see “many changes at the top. Almost all the leaders except Khrushchev will be affected.” Sergei Khrushchev recalled that his father was planning to add younger men to the Presidium “who would one day take over.” These included Adzhubei, Kharmalov, and Yuri Andropov, who had served as Ambassador to Budapest during the Hungarian revolution.
In September, Sergei was called by a security agent named Vasily Galyukov: “I’ve found out that there is a plot against Nikita Sergeyevich! I wanted to tell him about it in person.… I can’t go to Semichastny. He’s actively involved in the plot himself, along with Shelepin, Podgorny, and others.”
Sergei picked up Galyukov at a Moscow street corner. At dusk, walking through a glade outside the city, Galyukov told him of “innuendos, hints, tête-à-têtes” and repeated references to “November.” Sergei hoped that “this bad dream would pass, that everything would be cleared up and life would roll along again as before.” Yet he knew that “things would never be the same again.”
The Chairman did not normally discuss high politics with his son. When Sergei criticized Lysenko’s approach to genetics, the father said, “Don’t stick your nose into what isn’t your business.” As Sergei recalled, “Not only would I have to violate this taboo, I was intending to accuse his closest associates and comrades-in-arms of conspiracy.”
On Sunday, September 27, after breakfast at the dacha, he strolled with his father through a meadow: “You know, an unusual thing happened.… Maybe it’s nonsense, but I don’t have the right to keep it to myself.” After hearing the story, Khrushchev told his son that he had been right to tell him, but he could not believe that Brezhnev, Podgorny, and others could unite against him: “They’re completely different people.”
The next evening, the Chairman told him that he had shared the tale with Podgorny, who had laughingly said, “How can you think such a thing, Nikita Sergeyevich?” Sergei was mortified. His father asked him, as a precaution, to bring Galyukov to see Mikoyan, who would “take care of everything.” Mikoyan duly interviewed the security agent and assured Khrushchev that there was nothing to worry about.
Sergei concluded that his father “did not want to believe that such a turn of events was possible. After all, the people accused had been his friends for decades! If he couldn’t trust them, whom could he trust? What’s more, my seventy-year-old father was tired, tired beyond measure, both morally and physically. He had neither the strength nor the desire to fight for power.”
Oh Monday evening, October 12, as the sun sank into the Black Sea, Khrushchev was strolling along his beach with Mikoyan when called back for an urgent telephone call from Mikhail Suslov of the Presidium. Into the receiver he barked, “I’m on vacation. What could be so urgent? … What do you mean, you all ‘got together’? We’ll be discussing agricultural questions at the November plenum. There’ll be plenty of time to talk about everything!”
Suslov persisted. Khrushchev agreed to fly the next day to Moscow. Resuming their stroll, he told Mikoyan, “You know, Anastas, they haven’t got any urgent agricultural problems. I think that call is connected with what Sergei was telling us.” He told his ancient comrade that if it turned out to be like 1957, he would not put up a fight.
Nina Petrovna was relaxing at a Czechoslovak spa with Viktoria Brezhnev. It was later said that Brezhnev had arranged the vacation to deprive Khrushchev of advice from his perceptive wife.
When Khrushchev and Mikoyan landed in Moscow, they were met only by Semichastny, who said, “They’ve all gathered at the Kremlin. They’re waiting for you.” At the old fortress, Khrushchev was indicted for rashness, egotism, nepotism, confusion, “harebrained scheming,” and mismanagement of farming and industry. He had been undignified in public and had damaged relations with China.
Mikoyan courageously proposed that Khrushchev keep one of his posts. Someone said, “You’d better keep your mouth shut or we’ll take care of you too.” Mikoyan replied, “We’re not carving up a pie here. We’re deciding the fate … of a great country. Khrushchev’s work is the party’s political capital. Kindly do not threaten me.”
According to one account, Khrushchev said, “I ask you to forgive me if I ever offended anyone.… I can’t remember all the charges, nor will I try to answer them. I’ll just say one thing: my main failing … is being too good, too trusting, and perhaps also that I myself didn’t notice my own failings. But you, all of you present here, didn’t tell me openly and honestly about my shortcomings.”
He defended his settlement of the Caribbean crisis: “You accuse me of pulling out our missiles. What do you mean, that we should have started a world war over them? How can you accuse me of undertaking some sort of Cuban adventure when we made all decisions relating to Cuba together?
“Or take the erection of the Berlin Wall. Back then, you all approved the decision, and now you’re blaming me. For what, for goodness’ sake? … Anyone can talk. But to decide what to do concretely—none of you could suggest anything then, and you can’t even now.” Relations with China were “quite complex, and they’ll get even more sticky. You’re going to come up against great difficulties and complexities in four or five years.”
He said this would be his last political speech—“my swan song, so to speak.” When he asked to make one request of the November Central Committee plenum, Brezhnev interrupted: “There will be no request!”
Khrushchev evidently broke down and cried. Then he composed himself. “Obviously it will now be as you wish. What I can say—I got what I deserved. I’m ready for anything.… We face a lot of problems, and at my age, it isn’t easy to cope with them all. We’ve got to promote younger people. Some people today lack courage and integrity.… But that’s not the issue now. Someday, history will tell the whole, profound truth about what is happening today.”
That evening he told Mikoyan, “Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn’t suit us anymore and suggesting that he retire? Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. Now everything’s different.… That’s my contribution.”
On Wednesday morning, Khrushchev faced the Presidium for the last time. He was stripped of his Party and government posts, which went to Brezhnev and Kosygin. As Adzhubei recalled, Khrushchev sat slumped in a chair, “hanging his head, not raising his eyes, seeming very small, as if the force had suddenly gone out of his strong body.”
Before noon, he returned home, saying, “That’s it. I’m retired.” He handed his briefcase to Sergei and never opened it again.* The spurned leader and his son walked in silence, followed by Yelena Khrushchev’s dog Arbat. Sergei recalled that previously Arbat had not shown much interest in his father, but from this day forward the dog never left his side.
That evening, Mikoyan came to assure Khrushchev that he would have a pension, a dacha, and a city house for life: he had suggested his hiring as a consultant, but that was rejected. Khrushchev thanked him: “It’s good to know you have a friend at your side.”
The Armenian seized his old partner and kissed him on both cheeks. Then Khrushchev watched him walk quickly to the garden gate. He never saw Mikoyan again.
On Thursday, Lyndon Johnson was riding through noisy campaign crowds in Brooklyn. With complex irony, he had come to aid Robert Kennedy’s campaign for the New York Senate seat held by Kenneth Keating. Over the President’s limousine radio came a TASS report that Khrushchev had abruptly “resigned” for “reasons of health.”†
On Friday, the Chinese detonated their first nuclear weapon. Unlike his predecessor, Johnson remained calm. From a CIA briefing, he knew that the Chinese would have to travel a long and expensive road before they developed accurate ICBMs; some future President would have to deal with that problem.
A fortnight later, Johnson kept his office by the greatest majority in a contested Presidential election. No longer so beholden to his predecessor’s legacy, he now confronted two Soviet leaders who would not allow their predecessor’s name to be publicly spoken or published. The years of Kennedy and Khrushchev were over.
Twenty-five years to the week after Johnson’s election, the Berlin Wall collapsed. The close of the Cold War epoch allows us to see more clearly than ever the chief importance of the Kennedy-Khrushchev period.
These were the years in which humankind came closer than any other time to nuclear incineration, and in which the United States and the Soviet Union began the greatest arms race in human history. Both leaders ended their two nuclear crises without war and took steps to control nuclear weapons, but these achievements are not mitigated by the darker side of their legacy.
More than perhaps any other man who might have dominated the Soviet government during the decade after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev was committed to improving the lot of the Soviet consumer by holding down military spending. The problem was that, in contrast to the late 1980s, no Soviet leader of that era could have renounced Soviet imperial ambitions in favor of stengthening the domestic economy and kept power. Nor was Khrushchev willing to relinquish the dream of world communism.
Thus he had to resort to a combination of public lies about Soviet military predominance and to nuclear blackmail. This strategy was not so dangerous when waged against Eisenhower. The old General’s profound understanding of the actual correlation of forces enabled him to operate in private from a presumption of American preponderance. His domestic prestige allowed him to refrain in public from shattering Khrushchev’s assertions about Soviet strength, to keep down American defense spending, and to respond to such challenges as Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum with poise.
Khrushchev did not comprehend how dangerous his strategy had become once Kennedy had entered the White House. Practiced against a President who lacked Eisenhower’s consistency, his determination to avoid alarming the American people about Soviet behavior, his understanding of the arms race and his domestic political strength, it meant years of almost unrelenting crisis.
Throughout those years, Kennedy showed a fine sensitivity to the dangers of misperception and accident and a talent for intense crisis management. He pushed for a test ban more persistently than almost anyone else who might have been President.
But throughout his term, Kennedy rarely showed the magnanimity that should have been expected of a superior power. Instead he aroused the Western world to an hour of imminent danger that did not exist, provoked the adversary by exposing Soviet nuclear weakness to the world, and unwittingly caused the Soviets to fear that he was on the verge of exploiting American nuclear strength to settle the Cold War on American terms, perhaps even in a preemptive strike.
One effect of this was Khrushchev’s dangerous efforts to assert what power he did have in Berlin and Cuba. The more lasting effect was the Kremlin’s decision, hardened between the summer of 1961 and the end of 1962, to damn the Soviet consumer and make the mighty reach for nuclear parity or superiority. Had Khrushchev or a successor been encouraged to pursue the previous policy of minimum deterrence, the arms race of the next two decades could have been avoided.
We cannot know for certain whether continued nuclear imbalance between the two powers would have brought more dangerous episodes like Berlin and Cuba, or whether a more leisurely arms race would have retarded the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. More conclusive answers to these questions must await the day when historians from all countries gain unfettered access to archives for the period in the Soviet Union and the West.
We do know that by 1970 the Soviet Union could claim rough nuclear equality with the United States. Khrushchev had predicted that by that year the Soviet economy would be the strongest on earth and that by 1980 Soviet sports and national defense would be conducted by spontaneous initiative of the masses. Instead, 1980 found the Soviet economy mired in a terminal stagnation that led to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Berlin never again became a flashpoint between East and West. By 1971, Soviet strategic power was so great that the Kremlin no longer needed to exploit the vulnerable Western position in the city to force the West to move on other Cold War issues. Under the stimulus of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the four occupying powers signed an agreement declaring “the frontiers of all states in Europe inviolable,” in exchange for a Soviet guarantee not to interfere with Western access rights to Berlin.
Fidel Castro claimed credit for the rise of Soviet strategic power in the late 1960s, boasting that were it not for Khrushchev’s humiliation over Cuba, the Russians would never have made the effort to catch up. Brezhnev was displeased by Castro’s economic mismanagement and his support of what he considered to be hapless, unpredictable guerrillas in Venezuela, Colombia, and Guatemala.
But in 1968, Castro was one of the few Communist leaders willing to back the Soviet invasion of Prague. By the mid-1970s, he was siphoning roughly one half of all Soviet economic and military assistance to the Third World. Extending his revolutionary ambitions to Africa, Castro sent Cuban combat forces to Angola and Ethiopia. In the early 1980s he became a political and military godfather to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and the guerrillas of El Salvador.
Kennedy’s death did not halt American assassination attempts against the Cuban leader; these evidently ended only in 1965. A decade later, Henry Kissinger’s State Department contacted Cuban diplomats about relaxing tensions, an effort renewed by the Jimmy Carter administration until Castro in 1980 expressed his feelings toward the United States by sending it tens of thousands of Cuban criminals and mental patients in the notorious Mariel boat lift. The Ronald Reagan administration revived Castro’s anxieties about a new American invasion by threatening to go “to the source” of Central American upheaval.*
Dictating his memoirs after the invasion of Prague, Khrushchev had called Brezhnev’s decision “a mistake” but insisted that “time will heal the wounds.… The Czech people, in the end, will fall into step with the people of the other socialist countries, and especially with the Soviet people.… Our goals are the same—to be side by side in the fight for socialism and communism. I think all will turn out well in the end.”
Khrushchev failed as a prophet. Two decades later, when Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that he would no longer use Soviet tanks and lavish economic aid to prop up puppet governments unsupported by their people, Eastern Europe threw off the shackles of communism and East Germany rejoined the West. In Havana, Fidel Castro gasconaded against Gorbachev’s heresies and agonized over how to preserve his regime in an age in which Moscow no longer had the enthusiasm or the ability to sign his large annual check.
In the Soviet Union after 1964, like the beautiful Lara in Doctor Zhivago, Nikita Khrushchev was as “forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterward got mislaid.” As Sergei recalled, “The new regime didn’t publicly analyze or criticize the decade just past, or even my father’s indisputable errors. He simply vanished—along with all his victories and defeats, all his virtues and shortcomings, all the love of his friends and the hatred of his enemies.”
At the beginning of 1965, Brezhnev and Kosygin took away the old man’s houses and banished him and Nina Petrovna to a green log cottage near an apple orchard outside Moscow, a world away from the estate in Pitsunda and the indoor-outdoor pool. Deeply dispirited, he told his family, “I’ve got to learn how to kill time.”
Wrapping himself in a green-and-beige cloak given him by a French textile magnate during his 1960 visit to de Gaulle, he would pick up brushwood and start a bonfire that reminded him of his youth herding sheep and horses in Kalinovka. With Arbat at his side, he stared at the fire for hours and told his son and daughters about his hungry childhood and the nightingales and warm summer nights of the Ukraine.
When Brezhnev heard that he was dictating his memoirs, Khrushchev was called in to the Central Committee. He told them, “You can take everything away from me. My pension, my dacha, my apartment.… So what! I can still make a living. I’ll go to work as a metalworker—I still remember how it’s done. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll take my knapsack and go begging. People will give me what I need.… But no one would give you a crust of bread. You’d starve!”
The first volume was published in the West in 1970 as Khrushchev Remembers. Called in once again by the Central Committee, he roared, “It’s been six years since I was in office, six years since you blamed me for everything. You said that once you were rid of Khrushchev everything would go smoothly.… Our agriculture is foundering.… The stores are empty.… We bought grain from America in 1963 as an exception, but now it’s become the rule. Shame on you!”
On the quarrel with China: “Six years have passed, and relations have only worsened. Now everyone can see the causes are deeper.… It will take new people both here and in China who are able to look at the problem in a new way and throw off old encrusted views.”
Asked to sign a carefully worded statement that he had “never passed on memoirs” to the West, he refused, then reconsidered: “I’ve done what you asked. I signed. Now I want to go home. My chest hurts.” After returning home, he sat down at the edge of the woods and suffered a heart attack. The following spring, he complained, “No one needs me anymore. I’m just wandering around aimlessly. I could go hang myself and no one would even notice.”
In September 1971, Khrushchev died. Sergei wondered whether any high Soviet official would come to call; most of them had at least professed to be close to his family. “Unfortunately a certain degree of culture and intellect is required to understand this,” he wrote. “Not one of them called.” Among the blizzard of messages from Soviets and Westerners were letters from Llewellyn Thompson and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Three years later, a second volume of Khrushchev’s memoirs was published. It included a tribute to the man who in Khrushchev’s memory was no longer the militant Kennedy of early 1961 but the President who conceded at Vienna that American and Soviet power were equal and who collaborated with him to avoid war in Berlin and Cuba and usher in the détente of 1963. Sergei recalled that his father “trusted Kennedy and felt human sympathy toward him, and such likes and dislikes played a big part in Father’s life.”
In the memoirs, Khrushchev conceded that their backgrounds were “poles apart”: “I was a miner, a metal-fitter, who by the will of the Party and the people rose to be the Prime Minister of my country. Kennedy was a millionaire and the son of a millionaire. He pursued the goal of strengthening capitalism, while I sought to destroy capitalism and create a new social system, based on the teachings of Marx and Engels.”
Still, in the Caribbean crisis, the two leaders had found “common ground and a common language.” Kennedy “knew that war brings impoverishment to a country and a disaster to a people, and that a war with the Soviet Union wouldn’t be a stroll in the woods.… He showed great flexibility and together we avoided disaster.”
In September 1959, during their first encounter, Khrushchev had predicted to Kennedy and other Senators that their grandchildren would live under communism. He would have been staggered to learn that his grandchildren would live in a Soviet Union that was lurching, however ambivalently, toward freedom. When Mikhail Gorbachev resolved to improve the Soviet living standard, people remembered where they had heard this before. Many began referring to the Khrushchev decade as “our first perestroika.”
Alexei Adzhubei had been out of public life for years. Returning to Moscow in the late 1960s, Jane Thompson saw him “struggling to get this huge sack of potatoes into the back of a little car.” She did not greet him: “It would have embarrassed the bejeezus out of him. Later we heard that he was sent out to Alma-Ata or Mongolia to run a paper. Then we heard he’d come back.”*
Liberated by glasnost, Adzhubei told a reporter in the late 1980s, “The Khrushchev period was the first act in a great drama—the drama of a society recovering its vision. I’m reminded of one of those Greek tragedies in which the first words shatter the audience. The first words in our drama were spoken by Khrushchev. The culmination is taking place now.”
Sergei Khrushchev agreed: “Freedom and glasnost are far ahead of those days, but that’s where it all started.” He wrote Gorbachev, “Your style of work, your quick reactions, your urge to see life with your own eyes and to become personally involved and make decisions independently, all remind me a great deal of my father.… Khrushchev is a part of our history and, in my opinion, far from the worst part.”
Asked if his father should be reburied in the Kremlin Wall, the son laughed; buried near him in Moscow were artists, poets, writers, and soldiers alongside whom Khrushchev had fought: “I think it’s better if he stays where he is. He’s in very good company.”
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis flew to Moscow in 1976 for the first time, making the trip she would almost certainly have made with her husband, had he lived. A New York book editor working on a volume called In the Russian Style, she lunched at Spaso House and viewed a Kremlin exhibition of Russian costume from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the period limned by Lesley Blanch in The Sabres of Paradise, which she had recommended to Khrushchev in Vienna.
In February 1989, Sergei Khrushchev arrived in the United States for the first time since accompanying his father on the long-ago American tour. Stopping at Harvard, he lectured one evening in halting English at the Kennedy School of Government. Hecklers took out shoes and banged them on tables.
With his father’s aplomb, Khrushchev did not skip a beat: “Thank God that the only questions that divide us are which shoes, left or right?” The room resounded. He went on: “One should not just criticize a person. One should also study history and understand its origins in order not to encounter it again.… We have come to understand how poorly we know one another. The results of this misunderstanding have led to many missteps, even at the highest level.”
Of that history he said, “For you in the West, it’s interesting information about the guy who lives next door. For us, it’s our future, which has always flowed out of our past.”
*Harlan Cleveland wrote Rusk that as usual Khrushchev “has to tramp through all those familiar themes before getting to what he has to say—just as Beethoven, in opening the fourth movement of his Ninth Symphony, reiterates all the themes from the first three movements before stating the theme of the fourth.” In the Missile Crisis, “the President received a couple of letters from Khrushchev that were full of nonsense.… But those letters contained individual paragraphs, here and there, which we picked up and built on to bring about the great nuclear deconfrontation. Have we lost our touch?”
*The Americans also found that the Diem regime had falsified information on the progress of the war effort to make it seem more hopeful than it actually was.
*The scholar Eliot Cohen makes the argument that their common experience of the Missile Crisis led these men to propose a similar calibrated, gradual application of force to North Vietnam. Cohen does not go so far as to say so, but one suspects that, presented in these terms, the first major bombing plans for Vietnam in 1965 might thus have struck Kennedy, had he lived, as eminently rational.
*Not long afterward Gromyko told a visitor, “Why was Khrushchev overthrown? Because he sent Adzhubei to Bonn, of course.” This comment reflected Gromyko’s tunnel vision more than reality, but the Adzhubei mission no doubt contributed to Khrushchev’s downfall.
*The historian William Taubman correctly suggests that this charge should be treated with some caution: by the time Semichastny made it in 1989, there was considerable political gain to be had from criticizing the by-then-despised Brezhnev.
†Brezhnev may have heard that Khrushchev complained to his son and others that Brezhnev lacked the strength of character to succeed him. Khrushchev recalled that, in the prewar Ukraine, Brezhnev had been nicknamed “the Ballerina”: “Anyone who wants to can turn him around.”
*After his father’s death, Sergei found in it a memo on McNamara’s counterforce doctrine.
†Charles Bartlett called his friend Alexander Zinchuk of the Soviet Embassy. “You can’t let us have an election in peace. Two years ago you messed things up in Cuba, and now we’re trying to decide who’s going to be President, and you’ve thrown Khrushchev out.” Zinchuk noted that Khrushchev’s ouster had deflected attention from the arrest of Johnson’s close aide Walter Jenkins on a morals charge: “When Jenkins got into trouble, we realized that President Johnson was in trouble. So we decided to help. And when a Russian decides to help, no sacrifice is too great!”
*The Cuban official Jorge Risquet argued in 1991 that “at a certain point, the U.S. did not have the forces to wage two wars simultaneously.… Therefore we have always been grateful for the Vietnamese people, who for many years kept away the danger of a war in our area.”
*Actually Adzhubei was asked to leave Moscow for a job in the Soviet Far East. He threatened to write an official complaint to U Thant at the UN. Surprisingly this worked. Sergei Khrushchev later suggested that the authorities also talked to Adzhubei “about some other matters,” implying that Adzhubei may have agreed to distance himself from his father.