CHAPTER 2
The Fifties Unfold
GIANTS DRESSED THE WORLD’S STAGE. At least that’s the way it looked to me from the ivy-covered portals of Cornell in the 1950s. During those years, Eisenhower made his entrance, Stalin made his exit, and Khrushchev postured. It was a great show, although we could not see the ropes and pulleys, the levers of power that would let these men change the world. But they did, for once they had taken over, Eisenhower and Khrushchev changed the rules of engagement by which the Cold War would be fought. It all started with some mysterious goings-on at Stalin’s Nearer Dacha.
STALIN CHECKS OUT
Joseph Stalin’s winter of 1952–53 was rife with conspiracy. First of all, he was growing senile. At age seventy-three, he was forgetful of names and confused about events. By a series of ongoing purges he had reduced his inner circle to just four: Georgi Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, and Nikolai Bulganin. He was probably preparing another purge to replace those four.
Khrushchev’s memoirs confirm that Stalin feared Beria most of all: “The practical means for achieving Stalin’s goals were all in Beria’s hands. . . . If Beria could eliminate anyone, then Beria could eliminate those of his own choosing. . . . Stalin feared that Beria would choose [Stalin himself] for elimination.” Secondly, there is some evidence that Stalin was planning to complete his career with a final apocalyptic World War III. In a conversation with Andrei Vyshinsky in the presence of others on February 7, 1953, Stalin is alleged to have said: “If the imperialist gentlemen feel like going to war, there is no more suitable moment for us than this.” A retired military hero had been elected President of the United States. Stalin’s paranoia was growing.
Let us add the H-bomb dimension to this story, a hypothesis that seems reasonable to me and to my colleague John Nuckolls, a former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In August 1949 the Soviets detonated their first A-bomb. From conversations with Yuli Khariton, scientific director of Arzamas-16 (the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos), we now know that first Soviet bomb was an exact copy of the U.S. “Fat Man,” dropped on Nagasaki during August 1945 to end World War II. Both U.S. and Soviet editions of Fat Man gave yields of twenty kilotons. The Soviet explosion, years earlier than expected by the West, was the product of Klaus Fuchs’s and Ted Hall’s espionage at Los Alamos. Our Russian peers, as well as the Venona transcripts, confirmed the role of the Rosenbergs and others as couriers for this valuable information.
The U.S. responded to the troubling events of 1949, including this Soviet test, by starting work on H-bomb technology. These latter monsters are as different from A-bombs as the sun is from the moon. A-bombs get their energy from the fission, or splitting, of uranium or plutonium nuclei. H-bombs use the energy from an A-bomb to light different thermonuclear fires, releasing energy when two hydrogen nuclei fuse to make helium. Thermonuclear reactions are the source of the sun’s energy, and they produce energy that is typically a hundred times that of an A-bomb. The technology to achieve such a yield is also a hundred times more complicated.
On November 1, 1952, the U.S. detonated the world’s first thermonuclear. It was known as the Mike device, and it gave a ten megaton yield—five hundred Nagasakis—which vaporized a good bit of Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific. At that time, the Soviets were only thinking about H-bombs. They had detonated a home-designed A-bomb, a significant improvement over Fat Man, but an H-bomb was beyond their understanding.
Stalin was a man who made it his business to know a lot about things that affected his personal security. He paid close attention to the matter of nuclear explosions, and he seemed to know about them even before official messengers brought him the news. At Potsdam, in July 1945, President Truman took Stalin aside the day after the first, secret U.S. A-bomb test in New Mexico to tell him about the super weapon. Stalin already knew. Lavrenti Beria was in charge of the Soviet nuclear weapons program as well as its intelligence service. Yet when Beria called Stalin from Semipalatinsk early on the morning of August 29, 1949, to report the successful first Soviet test, again Stalin already knew. He had informants everywhere. As to the events of November 1952, however, our Russian scientific colleagues try to paint a different version of Stalin’s network. They maintain that neither they nor Stalin had any idea of the size or significance of the U.S. Mike test in the Pacific. Some claim that while they had collected radioactive fallout samples, a technician washed them down a drain and lost them. Others, to this day, deny that U.S. press reports of the monster shot made any impression in the Soviet Union.
Nuckolls and I doubt this Soviet claim of perceptory impairment. Consider, for instance, the firsthand information from one of Soviet academician Isaak Kikoin’s associates about his unique diagnostic tools. In 1952, when Kikoin was a department head at what is now the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, he was in charge of research on isotopic separation, the difficult but essential process of separating bomb-usable U-235 from the far more prevalent but nearly useless U-238.
In 1952 the Soviet scientific community was aware that the United States was at work on an H-bomb and that test preparations were under way in the Pacific. In anticipation of the U.S. test shot, Kikoin built an acoustic sensor with which to detect that test. This was a unique idea, as nuclear tests had previously been detected by seismic sensors— listening for earthquakelike shock waves reverberating through the earth’s core—not sound waves in the atmosphere. He hung the device in his office at what was then called Laboratory Number 2. On the evening of October 31–November 1, 1952, this instrument recorded a significant signal. Because it was nighttime, Kikoin was not there. In the morning, when he saw the paper tape, he concluded that while that signal might indicate an American test, it also could be a disturbance caused by someone bumping the instrument. Kikoin calculated that if it were a real signal from a real test, a second wave, traversing the globe in the other direction, would arrive at midafternoon the following day. At the predicted moment there was another signal.
On a secure KGB telephone line, Kikoin called Efim Slavsky, the minister of Medium Machine Building, as the nuclear weapons ministry was then known. Kikoin was questioned and requestioned on the reliability of his findings and threatened with great bodily harm if he were wrong. Kikoin stuck to his guns to the end of the conversation. Thereafter one must assume Slavsky proceeded to Stalin’s office to advise the dictator of this development.
Consider, as well, the reaction of the British and French, with whom the United States did not share nuclear secrets in 1952. Both countries now confirm that, from their own instruments, they promptly deduced what had gone on at Eniwetok in November 1952.
Nuckolls and I believe that when Stalin heard about the huge American test explosion, he summoned his nuclear weapons and intelligence chief, fellow Georgian Lavrenti Beria, for an explanation. The latter was unable to provide one. We hypothecate a grim exchange: Stalin’s hard questions, Beria’s admissions of ignorance, Stalin’s recounting of history—all previous KGB chiefs had been executed by their successors.
Yet on December 2, 1952, a full month after the Mike shot, Beria prepared an “all is well” memorandum to his scientific deputies, Kurchatov in Moscow and Khariton at Arzamas-16. In this memo, Beria states that “according to some information we have obtained, the U.S. is working on a Sloyka-type device.” In fact, Sloyka was a dead-end Sakharov design, not a true H-bomb. The device, formally named RDS-6s, was scheduled to be tested shortly afterward, but it never went into production. Thus, in that December 2 memo, Beria was telling his underlings that the American Mike test represented nothing new. This must have been the position he was taking with Stalin at the same time; we doubt Stalin believed him.
In addition, RDS-6s was not ready for testing as planned. At the end of 1952, Beria had already agreed to one postponement of its test; the shot date was moved to March 1953. But RDS-6s was not fired then either. Stalin knew of these missed deadlines, and they must have added to his aggravation with Beria. By the end of 1952 he and Beria were like two scorpions in a bottle. Both were men of enormous power, no scruples, and extreme cruelty. Both were the epitome of evil. And both knew that each would not tolerate the other’s survival much longer. Beria may well have decided to strike first, to knock off Stalin before Stalin got him, before the postponed test of RDS-6s displayed the inadequacy of the Soviet thermonuclear program and/or before Stalin could start World War III. The details of what happened during that last week of Stalin’s life emerge from the notes taken at a reunion of his death-bed guards held on March 5, 1977, and from a more recent examination of Soviet archives by Vladimir Naumov and Jonathan Brent.
On Saturday night, February 28, 1953, the Politburo Four—Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev, and Bulganin—watched a movie at the Kremlin. Then they were driven out to Stalin’s Nearer Dacha, located in Kuntsevo, about ten miles west of Red Square. They remained there until 4:00 A.M. Sunday, March 1, dining and consuming large quantities of Madzhari, a light Georgian wine. During that gathering, Beria apparently added an extra ingredient to Stalin’s wineglass—a hefty, or repeated, dose of warfarin, which is a tasteless and odorless blood thinner that can induce severe intestinal hemorrhaging. Fittingly, in large doses it is used to kill rats.
When Stalin’s four guests left, the leader allegedly told a guard named Khrustalev: “I am going to bed. I shan’t be wanting you, you can go to bed too. . . .” Stalin had never given an order like that before. He expected at least two armed guards on duty at all times. But Khrustalev was the only one to hear this supposed order. He passed it on to the watch commander, who promptly and happily dismissed the other guards for the evening, leaving only Khrustalev on duty—as the warfarin did its work.
At 10:00 A.M. that Sunday morning, the guards reassembled in the dacha kitchen. They observed no activity from Stalin’s quarters. At 6:00 P.M. one guard saw a light go on, confirming that things must be all right and thus it would be unwise to enter. By 10:00 P.M.,however, when there was still no movement inside, guard Lozgachev was elected by his peers to enter Stalin’s quarters. He found Stalin on the floor, conscious but mostly paralyzed, with one arm raised in the air. Lozgachev assumed a stroke had felled the Soviet leader; a broken pocket watch on the floor had stopped at 6:30, suggesting that Stalin had lain there for three and a half hours, unattended. Lozgachev called the other guards, who entered the suite along with the housekeeper. The four of them lifted Stalin onto a sofa and then put in calls to Beria and Malenkov. They first connected with Malenkov, but he referred the matter to Beria, who called back a half hour later to tell the guards, “Don’t tell anybody about Comrade Stalin’s illness.” No medical help was requested. Five hours later, at 3:00 A.M. on Monday, March 2, Beria and Malenkov showed up at the dacha. The guards told them the whole story. Beria said, “Don’t cause a panic, don’t bother us. And don’t disturb Comrade Stalin.” The two then left, again leaving Stalin without any medical help. At 8:00 A.M., Khrushchev made his first appearance at the dacha, and at 8:30 A.M. the doctors finally arrived, fourteen hours after the dictator’s collapse to the dacha floor.
At 9:50 P.M. on Thursday, March 5, four days after the alleged “stroke,” Dr. A. L. Myasnikov pronounced Stalin dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. But a first draft of the autopsy report, only recently unearthed, describes a major stomach hemorrhage as the most likely cause of Stalin’s death. During his death throes, on March 4, the attending physicians noted that Stalin was vomiting blood. As usual, the Soviet News Agency Tass misinformed the world, announcing that Stalin had died in his Kremlin apartment.
Beria was there at the Nearer Dacha at the time of death. According to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, Beria “called out in a loud and undisguisedly triumphant voice, ‘Khrustalev, the car!’ ” Note that Khrustalev was the one called, and Beria was the first to leave. And it was Khrustalev who was on hand for the embalming of Stalin’s remains. Strangely, he fell ill and died shortly afterward.
Stalin’s remains were embalmed by the special laboratory at the Lenin Mausoleum. They were interred next to the body of Lenin in the red marble mausoleum that protrudes out from the Kremlin’s walls and into Red Square. Stalin was to be immortalized, buried in his uniform with shoulder boards, buttons, and hero’s stars made of gold. Later that spring Beria said to Molotov: “I took him out.”
On June 26, 1953, three months after Stalin’s death, Lavrenti Beria came to a meeting of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers with a scheme to accumulate more power. Khrushchev and Malenkov had other plans. By prearrangement, Minister of Defense General Georgi Zhukov and a handful of his army (not KGB) troops were waiting in an adjacent room. On a signal from Khrushchev, they stormed in to arrest Beria. He was taken to an army prison and nominally charged with planning to overthrow the Soviet government. Counts against him went back to his dealings with Hitler in 1941. 4 The real issue, however, was the survival of Khrushchev, Malenkov, and the other Politburo members. After a pro-forma trial, Beria was shot, on December 23, at the headquarters of the Moscow Military District. His execution was not entrusted to an underling. It was carried out by a three-star general, Pavel Batitsky, as Beria pleaded for his life.
Georgi Malenkov fared better. After attempting an abortive coup against Khrushchev in 1957, Malenkov was consigned to manage a power station in remote Kazakhstan. Nikolai Bulganin was promoted to Premier for a while, until he was of no further use to Khrushchev. He was dismissed into comfortable retirement in 1958. Khrushchev was the one left standing. With the real power in his hands, he installed himself as General Secretary of the CPSU and eventually as premier as well.
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV REBURIES STALIN, AND STALIN’S APPROACH TO THE COLD WAR
By mid-February 1956, Khrushchev felt secure enough in his position to open the Pandora’s box of Stalinist history. He convened the Twentieth Communist Party Congress, not a trivial undertaking in itself. The prior nineteenth congress had been Stalin’s swan song, held in October 1952 as a vehicle to restructure the Politburo and to purge some old-timers. Khrushchev’s closing address to the twentieth congress was four hours long, delivered in secrecy and at night on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of February. In that speech he began to reveal and condemn the brutality of the Stalin years. He described Stalin as “sickly and suspicious . . . a flawed leader,” incompetent in his anticipation of and in dealing with the German invasion of 1941. He referred to Stalin as “a pathological criminal, guilty of administrative violence, mass repression, and terror.” He called the system itself the “cult of the individual.”
The Soviet leadership tried to control distribution of the anti-Stalin speech, issuing it only to the nomenklatura and key military officers, but the word got out. Rumors appeared in the Western press within a month. A text broke in late spring and was publicly reprinted on June 5, 1956. With that, a new era in Soviet history began. The irrational brutality of the Stalin era was replaced with a still mindless bureaucracy that continued to rely on terror to keep itself in power, but with Khrushchev’s address, things began to open up.
Before the speech, Khrushchev had shifted military policy away from Stalin’s reliance on the massed power of the Red Army, preferring the muscle afforded by thermonuclear weapons and their supporting rockets. Eisenhower adopted a similar new look in the United States. Khrushchev shifted his state’s emphasis from the promotion of armed might to his hopes for a burgeoning economy based on technology. Today, when Russians are asked, “When were the golden years of the Soviet Union?” most will cite the Khrushchev speech in 1956 or the launch of Sputnik a year later. Most younger Russians welcomed the move away from military posturing. They looked forward to challenging the United States in the more productive arenas of technology and economic progress.
KHRUSHCHEV—THE MAN
I never spoke with Nikita Khrushchev, but my father did. In 1959, Eisenhower invited Khrushchev to visit the United States, the first Soviet leader ever to do so. His September visit started in New York with an impressive performance at the UN. Khrushchev promoted nuclear disarmament, asked for better U.S.-USSR relations, and forecast a Soviet economy surpassing that of the United States. In 1956, Khrushchev had expressed these latter thoughts more bluntly. “We will bury you,” he said then. He also had accepted an invitation from the New York Economic Club. My father was part of the club’s host committee. He found Khrushchev to be a brittle, ill-informed, and doctrinaire peasant, devoid of the charm one usually expects from a visiting head of government. He thought that much of Khrushchev’s rigidity, however, came from the shock he felt at being exposed to a free and prosperous society so at odds with the picture painted by Soviet propaganda.
My father’s initial impressions were dominated by what he saw. When he entered Khrushchev’s hotel suite, the man was barefoot and in shirtsleeves, sporting a pistol in a holster around his chest. After some confrontational capitalist-communist exchanges, he dressed and readied himself to go downstairs. Only the soothing words of his security aide convinced Khrushchev to leave his pistol on the table as he left the room.
This habit of Soviet leaders remaining personally armed when visiting outside the USSR was reconfirmed during the Brezhnev years. A film clip of that aging dictator shows him handing his pistol to an aide as they board their Aeroflot plane for home.
Once Khrushchev and his party arrived in San Francisco a week later, the security detail was a little more relaxed. Perhaps they had developed a greater confidence in the U.S. Secret Service and FBI men that surrounded him like a blanket. Or perhaps they adjusted to Western lifestyles. Whatever the reason, once Khrushchev began his speech to the World Affairs Council in San Francisco, his security detail slipped into camaraderie with the locals and then into alcoholic oblivion.
By 1961, Khrushchev felt confident enough to complete the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union by moving Stalin’s remains—at night and in great secrecy—to a lesser grave outside the Kremlin wall. He did it, fittingly, on Halloween. On October 31, 1961, the militia cleared Red Square and closed off all entrances. Without fanfare, Stalin’s body was removed from the mausoleum, the environmental systems were switched off, and the gold buttons and stars were replaced with brass. At 10:00 P.M. the survivors of the Communist party leadership arrived. None of Stalin’s relatives were present. The remains of Joseph Stalin were moved to a simple grave outside the Kremlin’s walls and covered with dirt.
IN THE UNITED STATES, EISENHOWER TAKES OVER
Dwight David Eisenhower was elected President in November 1952. The war in Korea was grinding on; Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury after testifying falsely to Congress about his communist espionage activities; there were clouds of scandal hanging over Truman’s White House. After twenty years of continuous Democratic administration, many voters felt it was time for a change. Eisenhower’s election was not a repudiation of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Rather, it was a demand to end the Korean War honorably and to rearm the country, morally and militarily, for the challenges that lay ahead.
General Eisenhower was the hero of the Normandy invasion and the defeat of Nazi Germany. He went on to serve as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, then as the first Supreme Allied Commander in Europe upon the creation of NATO. 5 He returned to the United States to serve as the president of Columbia University, and soon afterward responded to a political draft. Eisenhower was seen as a centrist who could win the Republican nomination, then pull the country together to win the presidency itself in November 1952. He carried thirty-nine of the forty-eight states, with 55 percent of the popular vote. His coattails were modest but adequate. Republicans also gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time in a quarter century. They won the House by three votes, and achieved a 48-48 tie in the Senate. With Vice-President Nixon’s tie-breaking vote, that was enough for the Republicans to prevail. The Truman-to-Eisenhower transition was cold in the extreme. The formal ceremonies on January 20, 1953, were devoid of any oral communication or other indications of warmth between the two men.
Eisenhower made good on his promise to go to Korea, to look into the situation there and end the war honorably and promptly. Employing some visible and some veiled threats to the communist government of China, and benefiting from the recent changes in Moscow, the new President achieved a cease-fire along a line not too dissimilar from the prewar boundary between North and South Korea. The cease-fire was signed on July 27, 1953. The Cold War could cool off. The conflict would turn to other battlefields.
Upon Stalin’s death, the new President began a full review of the U.S. defense posture. Since the start of the Cold War, “containment” had been the policy set forth by Truman. It was to be supported by a massive U.S. military buildup across the board. Eisenhower was not sure the economy could or should carry that burden. He wondered how the passing of Stalin and the coming of the thermonuclear age should refocus America’s defense posture.
The initial thinking was done by about forty of the new government’s leaders. The Secretaries of State and Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with their second- and third-tier deputies, plus a few wise men from earlier times, gathered for five weeks of discussion, off and on, at the stiflingly hot National War College in Washington, D.C. The advisers broke into three teams. The first, led by George Kennan, was to review the containment option—waiting the communists out. A second, led by Major General James McCormick, was to explore the possibility of drawing lines on the globe, with the threat of massive nuclear retaliation should the Soviets cross those lines. The third, led by General Andrew Goodpaster, was to consider the rollback option. Should the United States try for a “win” during the Eisenhower years?
Some ideas sank without a trace. Others seemed to make sense. By midsummer each team had reached some conclusions. They prepared briefings, and each was allocated an hour and a half to present their conclusions to the Commander in Chief. That meeting occurred in the White House solarium during July 1953. After listening to the discussions, Eisenhower took the floor for forty-five minutes to review what he had heard. He displayed a marvelous grasp of the details and brought his wartime and NATO experiences to bear.
His first conclusion: containment of the Soviet Union was the only sensible alternative. An immediate victory was not in the cards, and trying for one could unleash a nuclear holocaust. Second, during the containment years to come it would be important to understand what was going on inside the Soviet Union. Eisenhower wanted transparency. That meant an active and high-tech approach to penetrating and circumventing the Iron Curtain. He was concerned about the possibility of surprise attack, now that the Soviets had nuclear weapons. He also wanted to make sound decisions about the allocation of U.S. resources.
As a result of that meeting, Eisenhower instituted a long range plan to modernize the armed forces. It was a modernization based on technology and on the new thermonuclear weapons. In the collection of intelligence, he wanted overhead photography, signals intelligence from a variety of platforms, and new surveillance radars. Armed with the facts, he believed he would be able to strike the right balance between rebuilding the military and protecting America’s powerful economy, since the latter was the engine that ultimately would tip the balance at the end of the containment game. Soviet leaders failed to understand that economic fact of life. With that mistake, they condemned the USSR to a forty-year death spiral into bankruptcy and defeat.
One of Eisenhower’s first steps was to augment the use of Air Force and Navy aircraft in top-secret overflights of both the territorial waters and the heartland of the Soviet Union and China. Although each flight was a risky violation of the target nation’s sovereignty, Eisenhower thought the flights were essential. They were executed only after a careful weighing of the pros and cons of each one. In time, those inquisitive U.S. fliers were joined by their brethren under the sea. Specially equipped submarines, some with detachable underwater minisubs, patrolled the edges of the Soviet empire. Some deployed ELINT 6 antennae, others took pictures through periscopes, and still others deployed underwater crews to tap into the Soviet undersea telecom cables. As a result of those sailors’ and airmen’s courage and skills, the United States got its first glimpse of Soviet strengths and weaknesses. It would be half a century before some of these men would tell their story. Others did not live to do so.
General Goodpaster, often Eisenhower’s chief-of-staff, recently summarized the meaning of the Eisenhower intelligence programs:
Ike knew that a strong and healthy economy was more than important; it was the key to the ultimate success of the West. America’s economic power had provided the margin of victory in World War II. Ike did not want the U.S. to become an armed camp. He wanted to spend enough, on the right things, but not too much, especially not on huge land armies. Overflights of the Soviet Union helped him avoid unnecessary expenditures. They gave Ike confidence in the adequacy of the U.S. deterrent.
MY FIRST STOP: EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE
As a newly commissioned officer in the U.S. Air Force, my first duty station was at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert northeast of Los Angeles. It was a marvelous time to be there, for Edwards was the Air Force Flight Test Center, home of the boys with the “right stuff.” Chuck Yeager was there. So was Ivan Kinchloe and a host of others. They were handsome, athletic, and incredibly bright human beings, scornful of the rules other than those they had learned the hard way in the skies over Korea. They flew to the ragged edge of their aircraft’s performance—and sometimes a little beyond.
Edwards was the home of amazing technology, such as the first Atlas missiles brought to the rocket stands for engine tests. It also was to be the home of one of the silliest airborne ideas ever—a 300-ton nuclear-powered bomber. This aircraft, known as Weapon System 125A, was to cruise the borders of the Soviet Union like an airborne submarine: always on patrol, immune to surprise attack, and ready to go to war at a moment’s notice. There were just a few problems. The first was this behemoth’s size—substantially larger than the B-52s then entering the Air Force inventory. Another was the limited number of missions any given crew could fly before reaching their maximum lifetime radiation dose. And at the heart of the concept was the prospect of dozens of such hot reactors roaming the skies while awaiting their inevitable crash.
I was put to work scoping the real estate needed for a safe engine run-up by this aircraft. It soon became clear that we would need much of San Bernardino and Kern counties, even by the comparatively lax safety standards of the 1950s, just for the flight test program In the operational world, every engine start could be an environmental disaster. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. By the end of the decade, WS-125A had been cancelled, but only after fifteen years of engineering and a billion dollars of expense. The good news was that the new successes, such as the U-2s, were soon to arrive at Edwards. Their presence was denied, and they flew mostly at night, but the young technical officers like myself prepared their way and were dazzled when they did arrive.
WHERE DID THEY ALL GO?
In 1956, Eisenhower was reelected to the American presidency by an even bigger margin than his first victory—58 percent of the vote and forty-one states. His party lost control of Congress, however, and in time his Vice-President would be unable to hold the White House for the Republicans. Nixon’s 1960 loss was due, in part, to his hesitation to run on the Eisenhower coattails, and in part to his reluctance to abuse his inside knowledge of Soviet weakness.
In the go-go sixties and the crisis-laden seventies, Eisenhower was viewed as a nice old man who presided over a wonderful postwar boom in a detached sort of way. At the end of the century, however, historians are coming to appreciate his genius. Eisenhower knew exactly what he was doing. Instead of supporting his old comrades with huge land armies, he turned to the new thermonuclear technology. He beat the Soviets at their own long range rocket game, proposed modest defense budgets, and then unleashed the American economy to play its defining role in winning the Cold War. And through it all he had enough selfconfidence to keep his intelligence coups to himself. He died at Walter Reed Hospital outside Washington, D.C., on March 28, 1968. He and his wife Mamie were buried at Abilene, Kansas.
With the events of 1960, Nikita Khrushchev shifted to a policy of confrontation. His follow-up visit to the UN, on October 12, 1960, was the occasion of unbridled abuse, table-thumping, and shoe-pounding on the lectern. It was but prologue to his even more confrontational approach to John Kennedy. Khrushchev’s antics made his peers in the Politburo nervous. He was removed from power in 1964, gracefully, with his skin intact and with time to dictate his memoirs. He died of old age in Moscow on September 11, 1971. His remains are buried in the Novodevichi Cemetery outside Moscow.
I completed my tour as an engineering officer at Edwards Air Force Base in the summer of 1957, with orders to return to Los Angeles. It would be there that the struggle for the high ground of technology would be fought by some of the brightest scientific minds in America.