Mayday

Khrushchev’s Ultimatum

Thursday, November 27, 1958. At one minute after four, Nikita Khrushchev stepped into the oval mahogany chamber of the Council of Ministers for what was billed as the first formal press conference ever held in the Kremlin. Reporters had been called at the last moment; Americans had raced here from Thanksgiving tables. They noticed that in the lapel of his dark blue suit Khrushchev was wearing a new emblem—a gold dove of peace.

“West Berlin,” he declared, “has become a sort of malignant tumor. If the tumor is not removed, the situation is fraught with such danger that there might be quite undesirable consequences. Therefore we have decided to do some surgery.” He noted that thirteen years after the war, there was still no German peace treaty. If the West did not leave Berlin and sign one within six months, he would sign a separate peace allowing the East Germans to govern access routes to West Berlin. Khrushchev had just set down perhaps the gravest challenge to the West since the Berlin Blockade of 1948.

Eisenhower received the news at Augusta, Georgia, where he and his family were spending Thanksgiving. He told his son that he would never bargain under such an ultimatum. If the United States abandoned West Berlin, “then no one in the world could have confidence in any pledge we made.” If the West were compelled to crash through an East German blockade, it could escalate to nuclear war. “In this gamble, we are not going to be betting white chips, building up gradually and gradually. Khrushchev should know that when we decide to act, our whole stack will be in the pot.”

Why had Khrushchev chosen this moment to push the world toward the brink? Western leaders were hard-pressed to know; most thought the Soviet leader a bizarre, dangerous, mercurial figure risen far beyond his cultural and intellectual limits, pledging world destruction one moment and peace talks the next. From their week’s encounter in Geneva, Eisenhower recalled Khrushchev as the Russian version of a “drunken railway hand.”

Psychological profiles of Khrushchev by Western intelligence could not have provided much reassurance. Khrushchev’s behavior at diplomatic gatherings did not reinforce his image as a leader of gravitas. Khrushchev was said to have once barreled across a crowded room to an aloof foreign woman, nuzzled her bare neck and said, “My little white pigeon!” When someone praised the large number of Soviet working women, he said, “Not like the women in France, who are all whores!” During Suez, Khrushchev announced, “I’ve just heard a good joke. Eden is sick. Do you know what he’s suffering from? Inflammation of the canal!”

At a Kremlin fete, he denounced the Third World as “unimportant.” And why were the French still pretending to be a great power? The British (waving his glass) had nothing to offer but “diplomatic cleverness.” As Khrushchev blustered on, one of his minions muttered, “It’s about time we closed this and got Nikita Sergeyevich out of here.” Marshal Zhukov flicked his hand and told Chip Bohlen to ignore the scene: “It’s the way things are done around here.”

Khrushchev did not resemble the other Soviet leaders to whom the West had tried to accustom itself. Waddling as he walked, the oversize suit coat flapping over the medicine ball stomach, he looked like a Botero come to life, with darting bullet eyes that gave him the aspect of a naughty child. Whether dancing with Ukrainians, presenting a tiger cub to the Queen of England, exhorting farmers to hasten production or shouting of his ability to drop nuclear weapons on London and Paris, he was an unforgettable walking demonstration of the triumph of the Russian underclass.

Richard Nixon later recalled that “few foreigners had been invited to meet Khrushchev, and those who did were often deeply disturbed by him. At times, he was almost seductively charming. At other times, he was boorish and obtuse. Some visitors came away swearing that he was the devil incarnate. Others came away swearing that he was just a drunk. All thought he was a bully.”

Born in 1894 in Kalinovka, a Russian village near the Ukrainian border, Khrushchev was one of the hundred million Dark People who constituted eighty percent of imperial Russia. The Khrushchevs were lords of great estates who served the Czarist court—but not these Khrushchevs. The Soviet leader’s grandfather was probably a serf owned by the Khrushchevs who took his owner’s surname. There were rare and slanderous rumors that Khrushchev’s ancestors were landowners, but perceptive observers noted that peasant characteristics like Khrushchev’s took more than two generations to learn.

In a wooden hut with icons and the fumes of oil lamps, the boy grew up poor and often hungry. He herded sheep and won prizes as an altar boy in the Russian Orthodox Church. Until the end of his life, he always felt most at home among farmers and embodied their stubbornness, crudeness, cunning, stoicism, exuberance, hostility to officialdom and love of talk. But Khrushchev’s father never managed to scrape a living from the land. In 1908, he moved his family south to a workers’ colony and consigned himself to work the coal pits in the Donbas region of the Ukraine.

Nikita found a job fixing machinery. He later said, “I worked at a factory owned by Germans, at pits owned by Frenchmen, at a chemical plant owned by Belgians.… All they wanted from me was the most work for the least money that would keep me alive.… If Gorky’s university was his life among the people, mine was those pits. They were a working man’s Cambridge, the university of the dispossessed people of Russia.”

The dispossessed were in upheaval. Accounts vary on Khrushchev’s role. The Soviet historian Roy Medvedev has written that Khrushchev joined illegal Bolshevik units in the coalfields and showed off the agitative skills that came from the cradle. In March 1917, workers at the local railway station intercepted telegrams announcing the fall of the Czar. Khrushchev was said to have overseen the arrest of the local police and founded a workers’ militia. But none of this appeared in Khrushchev’s official biographies while he was in power; one might presume that if it were true, it would have been printed in boldface type.

After revolution was civil war. Leading a metalworkers’ battalion, Khrushchev helped to defeat a Cossack army; when Germans occupied the Ukraine, he reputedly crawled for miles through a mine tunnel and barely escaped alive.

The cannons fell silent in 1920. Trains, mills and factories were destroyed. The people of the Donbas, the nation’s key source of coal, were freezing and starving to death. Khrushchev’s young wife apparently died of scarlet fever, leaving their children Leonid and Julia. Political leader of sixteen mines, the illiterate Khrushchev entered a school for miners. Like other ambitious Bolshevik activists, he was backed and monitored by Cheka, the internal police created by Lenin to extrade subversives and counterrevolutionaries by search, arrest and execution. Among the students, Khrushchev evidently served as local commissar, police informer, interpreter of the news and whip, shouting, “All you demand you must get with your own hands. No manna from heaven is going to fall on you. So beat on your picks with all your might!”

By 1925, Khrushchev was said to be wholly literate and adept in discerning the distinctions between loyal Leninists and the Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, anarchists and others branded enemies of the people. He married a young party lecturer called Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk, and caught the attention of the Ukraine’s boss, Lazar Kaganovich. In 1929, he followed Kaganovich to the national capital, enrolled at the Moscow Industrial Academy and then thrust himself into Moscow city politics.

In the late 1920s, impatient with lagging farm and factory production, Stalin declared war on his own people, forcing whole villages into collectives at gunpoint: all but the ablest were deported, starved or murdered. By the time Khrushchev arrived in Moscow, Stalin’s methods were on display. He did not turn back. By 1935, Khrushchev was first secretary of the Moscow Party, effectively the Mayor of Moscow: “I was literally spellbound by Stalin, by his attentiveness, his concern.… I was absolutely overwhelmed by his charm.”

Stalin’s rivals had been largely vanquished, but opposition remained. In 1934, he used the assassination of the Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov as a pretext to finish off real and imagined enemies. Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, colleagues in the post-Lenin troika, were tried and put to death on well-fabricated charges. In 1937 and 1938, supporters of Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin and other public nuisances were put on show trial and executed. Stalin ordered the murder of nearly anyone who had ever opposed him—and tens of thousands more. Almost the entire Party establishment over thirty-five and much of the Red Army were arrested, charged with espionage and sabotage and liquidated.

Where was Khrushchev during the Great Purge? As a minor member of Stalin’s band, he was lashing crowds of Muscovites into frenzy: “We will uncover and annihilate them and reduce to dust every one of them and scatter them to the four winds!” He was aiding the show trials: “They raised their villainous heads against Comrade Stalin.… Stalin is our will! Stalin is our victory!” And inside the Kremlin, he mutely watched as hundreds of top Party leaders were put to death. Unlike Kaganovich, Khrushchev apparently refrained from drafting death lists and argued to save some Party colleagues’ lives, but in public he was a cheerleader against hundreds of thousands of innocent Russians. “I don’t know where these people were sent,” he later said, “I never asked.”

Khrushchev was handsomely rewarded. In 1938, he went to Kiev as Stalin’s viceroy over 44 million Ukrainians. Over two thirds of the Ukrainian Central Committee elected in 1937 had been eliminated. Khrushchev’s job was to purge remaining allies of the purged. On arrival he declared, “For every drop of the honest blood of workers that has been shed, we shall draw a bucketful of the black blood of our enemies.” Stalin made him a full member of the Politburo.

In September 1939, the Second World War began. After the Nazis crushed Poland, Hitler and Stalin divided the spoils. When Red Army tanks rumbled into eastern Poland, Khrushchev was close behind to accept the submission of local officials; he saw to it that businesses were nationalized, new Communist leaders anointed, a puppet regime established and oversaw the region’s incorporation into the Soviet Union. A million fresh enemies of the people were deported to Siberia. Fifteen thousand Polish soldiers vanished, many into mass graves.

In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands of Soviets were captured and killed. The Ukraine was in retreat. Khrushchev went to Stalin’s command post in a Metro station in Moscow. By Khrushchev’s account, the leader complained, “They used to talk of Russian gumption. Where is it now, that Russian gumption?” By November, the Nazis had fought their way to the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad and beyond the western Ukraine. Khrushchev moved Ukrainian industry to the East to keep building Soviet mines, tanks, artillery, munitions, rifles and planes. With Lend-Lease help from Britain and the United States, these new plants helped to turn the tide. Appointed a Red Army lieutenant general, Khrushchev went on radio to exhort Ukrainian resisters: “We are straining every nerve to liberate you.”

In 1942, he helped plan the disastrous assault on Kharkov, in which a hundred and fifty thousand Soviets were captured; he was political adviser and man-on-the-spot when the Soviets defeated the Germans at Stalingrad and when they won the largest tank battle in history at Kursk. In November 1943, in his military greatcoat and fur collar, he marched with Soviet troops into Kiev and, by his own account, later told Stalin, “Kiev is like a city of the dead.”

More than anyone near the top of the Soviet leadership, Khrushchev had seen war at first hand. Unlike comrades who had stayed in Moscow, he must have known how many soldiers had fought not for Stalin but Mother Russia, how able commanders were hamstrung by irrelevant Kremlin orders, the bravery of Kursk and Stalingrad, where his flier son Leonid was killed. After the German surrender, he called Stalin with congratulations: “He acted as though he weren’t in the least surprised by our victory.… But I knew better.”

The war had killed twenty million Soviets. The Ukraine, breadbasket of the Soviet Union, had been largely destroyed. Khrushchev’s mandate was to rebuild the Ukraine and restore Party dominance. In 1949, Stalin restored him to his old post as Moscow Party leader and made him secretary of the Central Committee, one of the half dozen most powerful men in the Soviet Union.

Life was lonely at the top. As Khrushchev recalled, the Great Father said in his last years, “I trust no one, not even myself.” Khrushchev shuddered when the old man peered at him and asked, “Why don’t you look me in the eye today?” By Khrushchev’s account, Stalin often gathered his courtiers for a late-night cowboys-and-Indians film in the Kremlin, cursing the ideology between reels. Then the motorcade left the Kremlin for Stalin’s dacha; routes were varied to avoid assassins. In the wee hours, they dined and drank themselves under the table at the leader’s vehement bidding. Stalin asked “Mikita” to dance the gopak, and Khrushchev somehow squatted and kicked out his heels, Ukrainian-style.

When the merriment was over, Stalin fired off orders until daybreak. Heads swimming, the men ran from the room and called waiting bureaucrats. As Khrushchev recalled, Bulganin once told him, “You come to Stalin’s table a friend. But you never know if you’ll go home by yourself, or you’ll be given a ride—to prison!”

Stalin’s paranoia grew. In 1952, alleged conspirators in the so-called “Doctors’ Plot” against Kremlin officials were arrested. There were rumors of an imminent purge at the Kremlin’s highest level. During a meeting in February 1953, Stalin used a red pencil to draw pictures of bloodthirsty wolves. The peasants knew how to deal with wolves, he said. They killed them.

As Khrushchev later told the story, on Sunday evening, the first of March, he went to bed, surprised not to be called for dinner with Stalin. Then Malenkov called him to the dacha, where the old man was lying half-paralyzed and speechless. Khrushchev was less worried about Stalin than about Beria, the internal police chief who once said he could take an innocent man for one night and “have him confessing he’s the King of England.” When Stalin regained consciousness, Beria threw himself on his knees and kissed his hand; when the coma resumed, Beria stood up and spat. Later, when Stalin’s breathing finally stopped, a hulking Russian pounded on the leader’s heart. “Can’t you see the man is dead?” cried Khrushchev. According to him, a smiling Beria got into his car and drove away.

“I wasn’t just weeping for Stalin,” Khrushchev said later. “I was terribly worried about the future of the Party and the future of the country.” Leadership fell to the troika consisting of Premier Malenkov, Beria and Molotov. But not even a week after Stalin’s funeral, Malenkov was forced out of the Secretariat; in all but title, Khrushchev became head of the Party. In July, the Kremlin announced Beria’s arrest and charged him with sowing discord among Soviet allies and—of all things—links with foreign agents. By one account, the police chief flung himself about and begged for mercy before being shot to death. Later Khrushchev told a Kremlin visitor that he was sitting on the exact spot on which Beria had been executed.

In February 1955, Malenkov was demoted to Minister of Electric Power. The West did not fully know it yet, but Khrushchev had become the supreme leader of the Soviet Union.

In February 1956, at a secret session of the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev turned Stalin’s picture to the wall and gave the most important speech of his career: “It is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person and transform him into a superman with supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god.”

Astonished delegates broke down and cried as Khrushchev used secret documents to expose the transgressions of the father-god—the disloyalty during Lenin’s last months, “intolerance, brutality and abuse of power,” paranoia, mistakes in farming and foreign policy. Stalin’s cult had caused “grave perversions” of Party principles: “Lenin often stressed that modesty is an absolutely integral part of a real Bolshevik.”

Twenty-five years later, Roy Medvedev called Khrushchev’s Secret Speech “the principal feat of his life, overshadowing all of his mistakes, both before and after.” With this speech, Khrushchev exposed himself to grave risk: the Soviet people might well have cut off the feet of the bearer of bad tidings. Why did he go through with it?

The Secret Speech was the culmination of reforms that had been carried out almost from the moment of Stalin’s death. As early as the spring of 1953, many of the tyrant’s favorite witch hunts, notably that of the “Doctors’ Plot,” had been shut down; political prisoners had begun to be released from labor camps. Beria’s Ministry of Internal Security had been divided into a unit for internal affairs and one for state security, the KGB. By calling for liberalization, Khrushchev could not have been too far ahead of his colleagues: the speech must have been approved by a Presidium majority.

Tarring Stalin allowed him to tar rivals like Molotov and Malenkov more closely tied to Stalin than he was. By presenting the case against Stalin, he was able to minimize his own complicity in Stalin’s crimes. The speech established Khrushchev and Party leadership as the central alternative to the personality cult. He gave every sign of genuinely believing that Communist ideology would work once freed from Stalinist dogmatism. He had seen how state terror had paralyzed the bureaucracy. He must have wished the Soviet people to begin living like human beings again—as long as it did not threaten the regime.

The speech was read aloud at closed meetings of shocked Party members throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Allen Dulles got word and cabled CIA station chiefs to obtain a copy. Six weeks later, they did, apparently from a Polish official in contact with the Israeli Secret Service. For Dulles, the speech confirmed what the West had charged for years—that Stalin’s rule had been as arbitrary and bloody as Hitler’s. The full text was conveyed to the New York Times and published on the first page. Western reporters asked Khrushchev whether it was authentic. He told them to go ask Allen Dulles.

Alongside his indictment of Stalin, Khrushchev had declared that there could be more than one road to socialism and even included the independent-minded regime of Yugoslavia on the approved list. Satellite governments were encouraged to liberalize. Eastern Europeans exploited the new mood with a burst of nationalism.

June 1956 brought the rebellion of East Germans and Poles. By fall, the danger of revolution was spreading so fast that Khrushchev was nearly ousted. He evidently saved himself only by flying to Warsaw, demanding a crackdown, and sending the troops into Hungary for which the world reviled him. By January 1957, Khrushchev was a straitened man. He declared, “When it is a question of fighting against imperialism, we can state with conviction that we are all Stalinists.”

With Khrushchev’s blood on the water, Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and Bulganin saw their opportunity. In June 1957, while their leader was in Finland, they convened the Presidium and demanded his resignation: rapid liberalization had harmed the world Communist movement. Arrest was not ruled out. But Khrushchev refused to quit until the verdict was ratified by hundreds of members of the Central Committee. This was a Khrushchev stronghold: party officials were grateful for his efforts against centralization and the arbitrary terrors of Stalin’s day. With Zhukov’s help, Army planes ferried Khrushchev supporters to Moscow from every corner of the Soviet Union.

The second echelon overturned the will of the first. The men whom Khrushchev now branded the “Anti-Party Group” had tried to kill the king and failed. Khrushchev exiled Malenkov to a Siberian power plant, Molotov to Ulan Bator. Zhukov’s decisive aid during the Anti-Party Coup had shown Khrushchev the potential danger of his national influence: Khrushchev cried “Bonapartism” and fired him. He replaced Ivan Serov, the secret police chief, with a loyalist and Bulganin with himself.

Hence by 1958, as only Lenin and Stalin had been before, Khrushchev was head of Party and government. Men he treated as handservants stood at the helm of the Army and KGB. Khrushchev knew that the illusion of absolute authority conferred power: asked during a foreign trip who was minding the Kremlin store, he said, “My grandsons!” But privately he knew there might be further threats to his political life. The majority of Presidium and Central Committee leaders retained reservations about the shape and tempo of his reforms. They were willing to go along with Khrushchev—as long as his programs remained a success.

During the years spent consolidating power, Khrushchev had lacked the breathing space and self-confidence for a dramatic new initiative that would recast relations with the West. The ultimatum on Berlin was issued only months after dislodging his rivals. Like the Secret Speech, this was presumably a calculated gamble designed to win several aims at once.

Since 1945, the Western presence in Berlin had been a “malignant tumor” on the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. The Western sector harbored what was often called the world’s greatest concentration of Western espionage and propaganda agents. The postwar miracle of West Berlin’s revival was a shining capitalist monument in the bleak heart of Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of doctors, engineers, scientists, teachers and other East Germans each year were escaping to the West.

If Khrushchev succeeded in driving the Americans from Berlin, he might shatter faith in American protective power and divide the Western alliance. By demanding talks on a German peace treaty, he hoped to force the West to approach and tacitly recognize his East German client regime. He could not forget that the 1956 rebellions had almost toppled him. Llewellyn Thompson thought he was determined to “nail down the eastern frontiers of Germany and of Poland, and thus remove these sources of future trouble.”

Perhaps most of all, Khrushchev feared the prospect that Eisenhower and his allies might arm the West Germans with nuclear weapons. Centuries of Russians had been animated by fear of Germany. Now West Germany was being rearmed as a keystone of NATO. Despite his public braggadocio, Khrushchev presumably knew that U-2 and other intelligence had shown Eisenhower that he had no need to quake before the Soviet military machine. If Khrushchev could not use strategic strength to compel serious bargaining on a German peace treaty and a pledge to keep Bonn from gaining nuclear weapons, he would therefore have to do it by threatening the West with nuclear war over one of its most vulnerable protectorates. “Berlin,” he once said, “is the testicles of the West. Each time I give them a yank, they holler.”

Eisenhower met Khrushchev’s bluff, knowing that he might be “risking the very fate of civilization.” He reinforced American troops in Europe, but only enough so that Soviet intelligence would know the United States meant business. For the event that someone tried to stop a Western convoy moving toward West Berlin after Khrushchev’s deadline of May 27, 1959, the President considered plans to stage a new Berlin airlift, break diplomatic relations with Moscow and prepare the American people for possible world war.

Congressmen demanded mobilization of American armed forces and a surge in defense spending, but Eisenhower refused to alarm the public. He thought that one purpose of “Khrushchev’s manufactured crisis” was to “frighten free populations and governments into unnecessary and debilitating spending sprees.” With his gift for defusing crises, the President calmly proceeded with a planned reduction of thirty thousand Army men.

Public tremors over Berlin gave new life to the Missile Gap debate. Neil McElroy was defending Eisenhower that winter against congressmen who charged the President with accepting faulty intelligence that underrated Soviet missile strength. After an NSC meeting on February 12, 1959, the Defense Secretary stayed behind with his deputy, Donald Quarles, and General Nathan Twining to ask the President for more U-2 flights. Now that war seemed closer than ever, the Pentagon must know whether the Russians had built any first-strike ICBMs. McElroy said that the Joint Chiefs felt “our planes will not be shot down.”

Eisenhower demurred. He wanted U-2 flights “held to a minimum” until reconnaissance satellites were ready. Besides, he doubted that the Russians could build a first-strike ICBM force any time soon. The President reminded McElroy that the CIA had warned him four years before that by 1959, the Russians would build a huge bomber force. Where was it? U-2 flights now would be an “undue provocation.” Nothing would make him ask Congress to declare war “more quickly than violation of our airspace by Soviet aircraft.”

Twining said, “The Soviets have never fired a missile at one of our reconnaissance aircraft.” McElroy and Quarles repeated that more flights were critically necessary. Eisenhower backed down: one or two flights “might possibly be permissible” but not “an extensive program.” He reminded the three men of “the close relationship between these reconnaissance programs and the crisis which is impending over Berlin.”

The Berlin crisis did not abate. Several weeks later, Andrew Goodpaster called Twining to say that “the President has decided to disapprove any additional special flights by the U-2 unit in the present abnormally tense circumstances.”

In London, Harold Macmillan feared that the crisis was sliding into war. On February 21, with Eisenhower’s lukewarm consent, he flew to Moscow. As he stepped off of the Queen’s Flight and shook hands with Khrushchev, the Prime Minister wore the black coat and white astrakhan hat he had worn as a junior minister in Finland during the Winter War of 1940.

Even when he laughed, Macmillan gave off an aura of sadness. The drooping, hooded eyes, walrus mustache, graying pompadour and rumpled suits from the 1920s added to his air of languor and diffidence, but close advisers knew his capacity for shrewd maneuver. They chuckled about the time the P.M. shuffled down a railroad platform with his normal semi-elderly gait. The whistle blew and the train pulled out. Macmillan broke into a sprint and hopped aboard.

Born sixty-six days before Khrushchev in 1894, he was the great-grandson of a Scottish tenant farmer whose son founded the Macmillan publishing house in 1843. Like Churchill, his mother was an American and he too cherished the Anglo-American relationship. Macmillan was an Edwardian figure, a Trollope addict who punned in Latin, hated television, loved club gossip and, even while Prime Minister, sat down at the common table at the Beefsteak or Buck’s.

After Eton and Oxford, he had fought in France; his pelvis was shattered by gunfire and he lay abed in excruciating pain for twenty months. For years, he could not bear to return to Oxford because it aroused memories of so many classmates who had been killed. In 1920, he married the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire with Macmillan authors Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy in attendance. As a Tory member of Parliament, he was rarely one of the boys. Hidebound colleagues were outraged by his extended essay The Middle Way (1938), which espoused a synthesis of British capitalism and British socialism. Appalled by Munich, he did not join the Cabinet until the rise of Churchill in 1940.

Churchill sent him to Algiers as resident minister, where he worked alongside de Gaulle and Eisenhower. He found the American General “openhearted and generous,” an “American Duke of Wellington,” and was amused by Eisenhower’s visible relaxation after he told him that his mother was American. In 1943, Macmillan was badly burned and almost killed in a North African airplane crash. After the war, he went to the Ministries for Housing and Defense, the Foreign Office, the Exchequer and then to Number Ten.

Khrushchev knew that of all the chief Western leaders, Macmillan was the most eager for a summit and some compromise on Berlin. The Prime Minister was greeted warmly. Outside Moscow, he rode through snow in a troika and huddled with Khrushchev in a wicker basket spinning down an icy slope as startled Russians and Britons looked on. In his diary, Macmillan wrote that Khrushchev was “a curious study. Impulsive, sensitive of his own dignity and insensitive to anyone else’s feelings, quick in argument … vulgar, and yet capable of a certain dignity when he is simple and forgets to ‘show off.’ Ruthless but sentimental—Khrushchev is a kind of mixture between Peter the Great and Lord Beaverbrook.”

Khrushchev was shocked when (as agreed with Eisenhower beforehand) Macmillan offered nothing more than a Big Four foreign ministers meeting to discuss Berlin and other issues. What could foreign ministers achieve? If he asked Gromyko to take down his pants and sit on a block of ice, Gromyko would have to obey. Khrushchev revoked his public invitation to escort Macmillan to Kiev and Leningrad, explaining that a filling had fallen out of his tooth. Teeth didn’t grow back at his age, and what good was a premier without teeth? British papers decried “THE TOOTHACHE INSULT.”

Macmillan thought of going home “in a mood of affronted dignity,” but decided instead to “enjoy ourselves, see the sights and wait upon events.” Returned to Moscow, he improved his offer and told Khrushchev he would not object if the foreign ministers meeting led to a full-fledged summit. For his part, Khrushchev replied that his ultimatum had not been intended to “put pressure on anyone.” May 27 had no special significance. It could be June 27 or August 27 or any date Macmillan wanted, but the West had better hurry!

“Mr. Khrushchev is absolute ruler of Russia and completely controls the situation,” Macmillan wrote in his diary. “The uneasy period after the death of Stalin is now over.… He is the boss, and no meeting will ever do business except a Summit meeting.”

On March 20, Macmillan went to Camp David for a weekend with Eisenhower. “We had a film called The Great Country or some such name,” he wrote in his diary. “It was a ‘Western.’ It lasted three hours! It was inconceivably banal.”

The President was angry when he learned that Macmillan had told Khrushchev he would support a full-fledged summit. Privately he was worried that his old friend’s “desperation” to end the Berlin crisis would cause him to go his own way—especially because Macmillan faced elections in the fall. With tears in his eyes, Macmillan told Eisenhower that the British people must not be subjected to nuclear attack for the sake of two million of their former enemies in West Berlin. Eight nuclear bombs could kill thirty million Englishmen. “World War One, the war which nobody wanted, came because of the failure of the leaders at that time to meet at the summit.”

The President tartly replied that in a nuclear war, more Americans would die than Englishmen. He would not be “dragooned” into a summit by Khrushchev’s ultimatum. After further talks, he and Macmillan reached a compromise: a summit with Khrushchev might be scheduled, but only after serious progress at a Big Four foreign ministers meeting at Geneva. On March 30, Khrushchev agreed to the meeting.

On April 6, the President approved more U-2 flights into Russia, but the next day, he called McElroy and Bissell to the Oval Office to say he had changed his mind: “As the world is going now, there seems no hope for the future unless we can make some progress in negotiation. It is already four years since the Geneva meeting.” He was concerned about the “terrible propaganda impact” if a plane crashed. “We cannot in the present circumstance afford the revulsion of world opinion against the United States that might occur.”

Eisenhower agreed that new intelligence was needed, especially given the “distortions several senators are making of our military position relative to the Soviets,” but did not think the information “worth the political costs” of U-2 flights now.

McElroy said it was “far easier for Cabinet officers to recommend this activity than for the President to authorize it” and that he accepted the decision “very willingly.” But a few days later, the CIA, Pentagon and Joint Chiefs were back to ask for more U-2 missions.

In the spring of 1959, John Foster Dulles was dying of cancer. Ann Whitman wrote, “Mostly the President does not dwell on death and indeed I have seen him rarely shaken by the death, or thought of death of any of his close friends.” Not so with Dulles. After Eisenhower returned from a visit with the Secretary of State at Walter Reed, she wrote, “The President was in a queer mood, seemed to want only to be left alone, said he was ‘talked out,’ that he wanted to ‘mope’ around alone.”

Between radiation treatments, calls to Foggy Bottom and hours spent reading and sending cables on the Berlin crisis, Dulles dictated memos on American foreign policy for his successor. In April, he resigned and recommended his deputy, Christian Herter, for his job. The President complied, although he worried about Herter’s crippling arthritis and metal crutches. Before Dulles sank into a coma, his aide William Macomber came to his bedside, and Dulles said, “Bill, just remember this: if the United States is willing to go to war over Berlin, there won’t be a war over Berlin.”

The state funeral was attended by Churchill, Macmillan, Adenauer and the French, British and Soviet foreign ministers, who flew in with Herter from their initial sessions in Geneva. As fate would have it, the date was May 27, 1959—Khrushchev’s deadline on Berlin. There was no Third World War, but Khrushchev’s ultimatum remained. Eisenhower asked the Big Four foreign ministers to lunch at the White House and told them not to land in Geneva until they reached an agreement: “I will provide the services of an American tanker airplane to extend your flight time indefinitely.”

But they remained in deadlock. Khrushchev was obviously resolved to avoid hard bargaining at anything less than a summit meeting, Eisenhower to eschew a summit until the foreign ministers made progress. Here the story might have ended but for a fateful accident of history.

In July 1959, Khrushchev was relaxing in Czarist splendor at his dacha on the Moscow River when he received a call from his Deputy Premier, Frol Kozlov: “I have a special message for you from President Eisenhower.” The message was an invitation to visit the United States.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Khrushchev later said. “We had no reason to expect such an invitation—not then, or ever, for that matter. Our relations had been extremely strained … and now, suddenly this invitation. What did it mean? A shift of some kind?… It occurred to us that part of the reason may have been that public opinion in the United States had begun more and more to favor an improvement in relations with the Soviet Union.”

Khrushchev accepted at once. What he did not know was that the blanket invitation was almost as much of a surprise to the host as it was to the guest. All year Eisenhower had been dodging a summit until progress was made at a lower level. In the Oval Office, told that an unqualified invitation had been issued in his name, he blew up: now he must personally “pay the penalty” of going through with a meeting which would be “a most unpleasant experience” and “subject to serious misinterpretation.” What had gone wrong?

Through the spring of 1959, despite the Berlin crisis, the American and Soviet governments had proceeded with plans for art and technology exhibitions in each other’s largest cities. Khrushchev asked Kozlov to open the New York show; Eisenhower asked Nixon to go to Moscow. At the same time, Khrushchev dropped numerous public hints that he wished to come to the United States; he told visiting American governors in Moscow that he was “ready for travel.”

Christian Herter and Douglas Dillon suggested to the President that he meet with Khrushchev “in a fairly secluded spot” to break the Geneva stalemate. Eisenhower wished it the other way around: a qualified invitation might lead Khrushchev to break the stalemate. He assigned Robert Murphy of State to meet Kozlov at Idlewild Airport before he returned to Moscow on July 12. Murphy should say that if the foreign ministers made progress, the President and Khrushchev could hold informal talks in the United States. If Khrushchev wished to tour the country, the President would make arrangements.

On July 21, Eisenhower received Khrushchev’s note that he would be delighted to come for a ten-day visit; there was much he wished to see. He called in Dillon and Murphy and said, “Someone has failed.” Murphy said he hadn’t understood the linkage between the invitation and progress at Geneva. The President said he was “staggered”: when Foster Dulles was alive, he would put such things on paper and send them to the White House to correct or confirm! As John Eisenhower later recalled, “Dad felt he was left holding the bag.”

The accidental invitation transformed Richard Nixon’s Russian journey from a goodwill gesture into the prelude to the talks between Eisenhower and Khrushchev. The President kept the strings in his own hands: he told a press conference that constitutionally the Vice President was not a part of the negotiating machinery and he was simply going to Moscow as the President’s envoy.

Nixon plunged into briefing books on more than a hundred topics in Soviet-American relations. He went to HTAUTOMAT to be briefed by Lundahl’s men on intelligence targets to watch for in the Soviet Union. When the State Department sent him drafts of speeches for use in Russia, he thought the language sounded suspiciously like that of his old nemesis Dean Acheson. By memo he told his military aide, Major Robert Cushman, that the speechwriters “are never again to use, ‘We endorse the principle of peaceful coexistence.’… I realize that this is the Acheson line in the State Department and I will not put it out!!!!!! Cushman, tell all of them—it is never to be used again … or whoever does it will be shipped back from Russia on the next plane.”

H. R. Haldeman, not yet a Watergate conspirator but an advertising man doing advance work on Nixon’s unannounced Presidential campaign, wrote the staff that “if RN is looking for a thoroughly-experienced non-professional staff man for the Moscow journey, give me shout.” No one gave him shout, but Nixon’s party did include Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the American nuclear navy, Professor William Yandell Elliott of Harvard, other officials and businessmen interested in Soviet trade.

At the President’s request, Nixon was also accompanied by Milton Eisenhower. President of Johns Hopkins University, Milton was the President’s most confidential adviser: the President perennially called him “the smartest one in the family” and touted him for a future Presidential nomination. Vice Presidential aides (wrongly) suspected Milton of abetting the “Dump Nixon” movement in 1956 and (perhaps rightly) that the President had assigned him to keep an eye on their boss in Russia.

At Wednesday noon, July 22, Nixon went to the Oval Office for final instructions. Eisenhower gave him a letter from Macmillan which noted that Soviet leaders “want to be accepted as members of the club.” The President recommended “a cordial, almost light atmosphere, on the basis that once the Soviets get us worried, they act tough.” Nixon said that he intended to debate with Khrushchev and try to cause some “blurting out” of his “real feelings.” He hoped to “lay to rest some of Khrushchev’s misconceptions about America,” especially “the familiar line that the American people want peace but their leaders do not.”

The President had received Khrushchev’s shocking letter just the night before. “So that you will not be astonished or feel let down by your own government,” he told Nixon that Khrushchev was coming and would arrive in September. He intended to write Khrushchev suggesting a return trip to Russia later in the fall. Nixon should not raise the matter; if Khrushchev did, he should simply say that the President intended their American talks to hasten progress at Geneva.

That evening, the Nixons and their party took off in an Air Force jet. As the Vice President said later, he was “keyed up and ready for battle as the flight neared Moscow.” Reporters in a backup plane sang,

Moscow Kremlin, here I come.

What a place to campaign from!

After they arrived, as Jane Thompson recalled, Mrs. Nixon asked, “Why were there no people on the streets? Why was no one waving? Where was the advance party?” The Ambassador’s wife was astonished that her guest had not been better briefed. Later Mrs. Nixon won her over when, after making sure she was out of reporters’ eyesight, she borrowed a cigarette and told her, “You don’t know what it’s like to be a politician’s wife. I’d only voted once in my life—and that was for Roosevelt!”

On their first night in Moscow, Nixon slept fitfully and awoke before dawn. With a Secret Service man, he strolled through Danilovsky Market. People recognized him and asked for tickets to the American exhibition. Having none, he offered them a hundred-ruble note with which to buy some. Pravda, Izvestia and Trud headlined Nixon’s attempts to “bribe” and “degrade” Soviet citizens.

With his subtle sense of how to make a point, Khrushchev just happened to be examining a model of a Soviet rocket when Nixon walked into his Kremlin office later that morning. “I could sense that he was in a testy mood,” Nixon recalled. “He kept looking me up and down from head to toe as a tailor might estimate a customer’s size … or perhaps more as an undertaker might view a prospective corpse with a coffin in mind.”

The U.S. Congress had lately passed its annual Captive Nations resolution exhorting Americans to work for the liberation of Eastern Europe. Despite Nixon’s explanation that the bill was routine and that Presidents couldn’t tell Congress what to do, Khrushchev took it as a personal insult timed for Nixon’s arrival: “It appears that though Senator McCarthy is dead, his spirit still lives. For this reason, the Soviet Union has to keep its powder dry.… This resolution stinks. It stinks like fresh horse shit—and nothing smells worse than that.”

Determined to match him point for point, as Nixon recalled, he looked Khrushchev in the eye: “I am afraid that the Chairman is mistaken. There is something that smells worse than horse shit—and that is pig shit.” For a second, Khrushchev hovered on the edge of rage, then burst into a smile and changed the subject.

Soon they were off in a Zil limousine to the American Exhibition in Sokolniki Park. Housed mainly in a fan-shaped glass pavilion and geodesic dome by Buckminster Fuller were a seven-screen film by Charles Eames, a 360-degree American travelogue, a beauty salon, Edward Steichen’s photographs of “The Family of Man,” an IBM computer programmed to answer four thousand questions about America, a Pepsi-Cola stand, Singer sewing machines, Polaroid cameras, Fords, Chryslers and contemporary art which Khrushchev found “revolting” and “perverted.” He was “especially upset” by the Gaston Lachaise sculpture “Standing Woman”: “I’m simply not eloquent enough to express in words how disgusting it was.”

Khrushchev and Nixon went to an RCA color television studio, where their twenty-minute exchange was videotaped for American broadcast. Lambasting the consumer gimmickry and “aggressive” foreign policy of the United States, Khrushchev caught Nixon off guard. William Safire, not yet a Nixon aide or New York Times columnist, was there to publicize the display of a fourteen-thousand-dollar American house with the latest appliances and furniture. As he later recalled, “Nixon came out of the TV studio sweating profusely, knowing he had ‘lost’ and anxious to find a way to make a comeback.”

Safire saw his chance and cried, “This way to the typical American house!” Nixon led Khrushchev into the display and they stopped at the “Miracle Kitchen.”

The Kitchen Debate soon entered American folklore. Photographs wired back to the United States showed Nixon calmly refuting Khrushchev’s barbs as the two men leaned over a railing beside a washing machine crowned with a box of Dash detergent. Time found this Nixon “the personification of a kind of disciplined vigor that belied tales of the decadent and limp-wristed West.” Adlai Stevenson told a friend that Nixon had indeed “scored heavily” and would doubtless be “a formidable candidate” in 1960—“all of which fills me with a feeling that must be nausea and wonder about the new image of the American hero to inspire our little boys.”

Khrushchev surprised his guest by insisting that the Nixons spend the night at his dacha. (Jane Thompson understood that the house had once been Beria’s.) The next morning, he took them with Milton Eisenhower in a speedboat up the Moscow River “so that you can see how the slaves live.” Time after time, he stopped the boat and called out to bathers, “Are you captive people?”

“No! No! Peace and friendship!”

Finally Nixon said, “This is the eighth time you’ve stopped at the right place. You never miss a chance to make propaganda, do you?”

Khrushchev said, “I never make propaganda. I make only truth.”

At three-thirty, he gave the Americans a whitefish lunch on his lawn under a magnificent stand of white birch planted at the time of Catherine the Great. Khrushchev noted that whitefish was “Stalin’s favorite dish—he said it put steel in his backbone.”

For nearly six hours, he bragged about Soviet power and willingness to use it. He demanded that the West get out of Berlin and lauded Soviet missiles: “Missiles are much more accurate and not subject to human failure and human emotions. Humans are frequently incapable of dropping bombs on assigned targets because of emotional revulsion.”

Near the end of the long meal, Nixon told his host that he could assure a warm welcome in the United States by making progress at Geneva. Khrushchev was noncommittal. At midnight, Nixon cabled the President, “I met for eight hours with Khrushchev today in what can only be described as an extraordinary experience.… I repeatedly emphasized that the element of crisis, for which he was responsible, must be removed from the picture by Geneva if there were to be fruitful further negotiations.”

Years later, Nixon said that of all the leaders he had met, none had a “more devastating sense of humor, agile intelligence, tenacious sense of purpose and brutal will to power” than Khrushchev.

The Vice President flew by Soviet jet to Leningrad, Novosibirsk and Sverdlovsk. Rickover presumably looked for information of use to American intelligence while touring the Soviet icebreaker Lenin. Nixon’s party was equipped with dosimeters to measure atomic radioactivity. Rickover thought their readings indicated “some sort of an atomic explosion.” Before leaving the United States, the Vice President had wired Ambassador Thompson to remind the Russians “we have offered to let Mr. Kozlov see our missile launch sites, etc., and the V.P. would like to see theirs. Emphasize that we offered this to them. Now I want to see theirs.”

The Russians refused. But at Sverdlovsk, Nixon reportedly saw evidence of a new missile defense site near an industrial complex. The site was said to be unusual because it had hemispherical, domed launch points—not the herringbone pattern of old Soviet ground-to-air missiles. This information was transmitted to U-2 mission planners.

“Crowds along the city streets and in country villages were unboundedly enthusiastic,” Nixon cabled the President. “At every opportunity, I have brought them your best wishes and presented Milton, with enormously enthusiastic response to the name Eisenhower.… Ambassador Thompson and the other senior officers with me are greatly encouraged by this favorable popular reaction. They consider it demonstrates the really fervent desire of the Soviet people for peace, the counterproductive effect of Moscow’s constant pounding of the line that the U.S.A. is the target to emulate, to ‘overtake and surpass.’”

Khrushchev had offered Nixon the chance to address the Soviet people on television and radio at the end of his trip. Thompson told Nixon that his first draft was too belligerent and oriented toward domestic American politics: “You are the first American Vice President to address the Soviet people. You’ve got to make sure that you are not the last.” Thompson, Professor Elliott and Nixon worked late to revise the text. The next evening, after Nixon’s speech, the Thompsons gave a small dinner at Spaso House for his party and senior people at the Embassy and their wives.

In 1983, shortly before his death, Milton Eisenhower recalled, “He made the speech. It was all right and he came back terribly upset, terribly nervous and high-strung from the nervous situation he’d been through. So he drank about six martinis before we sat down to dinner.… As soon as we sat down, he started going around the table to see what everyone thinks about the speech. And he’d keep interrupting the person: ‘Did you hear me say this? Did you hear this?’ And then he began using abusive—well, not abusive, but vulgar swear words and everything else in this mixed company. Well, I wasn’t terribly surprised. He was a strange character and still is.”

Vladimir Toumanoff of the Embassy later said, “The fact that he unwound, that he had a couple of extra drinks didn’t bother me so much as the fact that … he was vicious, he was foul-mouthed, he was coarse, he was riddled with anger and hostility and self-praise and arrogance. There wasn’t an attractive aspect to him that whole evening.”

When Milton returned to the United States, he reported to the President. He felt that Nixon had handled the public part of his trip with “distinction and loyalty,” but not on that final evening at Spaso House. At a stag dinner, the President had once professed to recall having, as a younger officer, carried Franklin Roosevelt off to bed after an evening of excessive drinking—a memory that “appalled” him in the nuclear age. Milton’s report may have provided Eisenhower with an additional reason for his ambivalence toward his Vice President and putative successor.

At a Washington press conference on August 3, the President revealed that he and Khrushchev had agreed to visit each other’s countries. Many Americans praised Eisenhower’s bold step to break the Cold War deadlock. Others remembered only that Khrushchev was the Butcher of Hungary, author of the threat “We will bury you” and the Berlin ultimatum. William F. Buckley, Jr., thought that the visit “profanes the nation” and proposed filling the Hudson with red dye to make it a “river of blood.” Richard Cardinal Cushing implored Americans to “pray in the streets, pray anyplace” while Khrushchev was in their country.

Western European leaders were thrown off balance. Harold Macmillan recorded that Eisenhower’s invitation to Khrushchev “has caused me great annoyance—alarm—and even anger. It is not (as some of my colleagues seem to feel) the result of American bad faith, but rather of their stupidity, naïveté and incompetence.… Everyone will assume that the two Great Powers—Russia and U.S.A.—are going to fix up a deal over our heads and behind our backs.”

The President flew to London, Paris and Bonn to assure Macmillan, de Gaulle and Adenauer that no separate peace was in the offing. John Eisenhower later recalled, “I don’t think he said, ‘I’ve been had by my own people,’ but he said, ‘I’m not going to represent my views without representing yours too.’”

For the President, welcoming the Soviet leader to the White House had little appeal—especially since the world remained under the Damoclean sword of Khrushchev’s ultimatum. Khrushchev stood for everything in government he found “abominable.” Eisenhower worried that Americans’ expectations might rise far beyond what the talks could possibly achieve. If Khrushchev spread “objectionable statements” about the land, he would go on television to correct them before he left the country.

But the President did not restrict himself to damage limitation. When reporters asked what he wished Khrushchev to see, he gave what Ann Whitman later called a “love song to America.” He wanted Khrushchev to see his boyhood home in Abilene and understand how a small-town boy could become President; to fly in a helicopter over Washington and see the office buildings and homes and traffic at rush hour; to see workers on a picket line and parking lots, because Khrushchev had not believed it when Nixon told him there were sixty million cars in the United States. Most of all, “I want him to see a happy people … a free people, doing exactly as they choose within the limits that they must not transgress the rights of others.”

For Khrushchev, the invitation was a personal triumph. No Russian chief of state—not even the czars—had ever been received in Washington. The trip allowed Khrushchev the chance to expand his domestic political technique to Soviet-American relations and gain a palpable sense of the mythical, mystifying land: “I’d been to England, Switzerland, France, India, Indonesia, Burma and so on … but they weren’t America. America occupied a special position in our thinking and our view of the world.”

He remembered meeting Eisenhower atop the Lenin Tomb in 1945: “I frequently heard Stalin speak about Eisenhower’s noble characteristics.… Stalin always stressed Eisenhower’s decency, generosity and chivalry in his dealings with his allies. Stalin said that if it hadn’t been for Eisenhower, we wouldn’t have succeeded in capturing Berlin.”

At the same time, Khrushchev questioned whether Eisenhower had the audaciousness and grasp of world affairs to bargain seriously. He could not forget Eisenhower at Geneva reading notes from Foster Dulles “like a dutiful schoolboy taking his lead from his teacher.” But he hoped to build a close relationship with the President and persuade the businessmen who (he thought) really ran America to trade with Moscow. He no doubt wished to show Americans his sincerity about peaceful coexistence and press them to force their leaders to make concessions at the bargaining table.

Americans who assumed that Khrushchev had absolute power did not know how much of a gamble his American visit might have been. If it brought concrete rewards, he would be celebrated as a statesman and hard-line rivals compelled to bite their tongues. If he somehow wound up appearing a lackey of the West, he would have dealt himself a blow. On Monday, September 14, Khrushchev, his wife, daughter, son-in-law and a large traveling party climbed aboard a Soviet plane for the flight to America. A Kremlin announcement said, “One can hardly overestimate the significance of the forthcoming meetings of the leaders of the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.”

As the silver plane crossed Scandinavia and moved out over the Atlantic, Khrushchev dozed: “When I woke up, the sun had come up. All sorts of thoughts went through my head as I looked out the window at the ocean below. It made me proud to think that we were on our way to the United States in our new passenger plane. Not that we worshipped America.… I’d met some Americans during the first years after the Civil War when I came home from serving in the Red Army.… I’d heard from American workers themselves about the United States and I knew it was no paradise.

“No, the reason we were proud was that we had finally forced the United States to recognize the necessity of establishing closer contacts with us.… We’d come a long way from the time when the United States wouldn’t even grant us diplomatic recognition.”

Khrushchev pondered the meeting with Eisenhower that lay ahead: “It’s not that I was frightened, but I must admit that I was worried. I felt as though I were about to undergo an important test. I didn’t let myself get depressed—in fact, the opposite was true. The challenge of the situation helped me mobilize all my forces to prepare for the meeting. I was about to meet with the leader of the country which represented the biggest military threat in the world to discuss with him the major issues of our times.”

After more hours of sleep and reverie, Khrushchev learned that the plane was about to land. It was Tuesday noon in Washington: “In a few minutes, we’d be face to face with America, the America which I’d read about in Ilf and Petrov and Gorky. Now I’d be able to see it with my own eyes, to touch it with my own fingers. All this put me on my guard and my nerves were strained with excitement.”