Part 4 (1/2)

Nikita Khrushchev summoned the U.S. amba.s.sador to Moscow, Tommy Thompson, to the Kremlin at ten a.m., or two in the morning in Was.h.i.+ngton, where President Kennedy had not yet returned to the White House from his inaugural revelry.

aHave you read the Inaugural Address?a Thompson asked. Khrushchev appeared weary to Thompson, as if he had spent the entire night awake. His voice was hoa.r.s.e.

Not only had he read the speech, Khrushchev said, but he would ask Soviet newspapers to print the entire text the following day, something no Soviet leader had done for any previous U.S. president. aIf they will agree to do so,a Khrushchev said with the satisfied chuckle of someone who knew Soviet editors did as he dictated.

Khrushchev then nodded to Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov, signaling that he should read Thompson the English version of an aide-mmoire that contained his inaugural gift for Kennedy: aThe Soviet Government, guided by a sincere desire to begin a new phase in relations between the Soviet Union and the U.S., has decided to meet the wishes of the American side in connection with the release of two American airmen, members of the crew of the RB-47 reconnaissance airplane of the U.S. Air Force, F. Olmstead and J. McKone.a Kuznetsov said the Soviets would also transfer to the U.S. the body of a third airman that had been recovered after the plane was shot down.

Khrushchev had carefully calculated precisely how and when to execute the offer, timing it on Kennedyas first day in office for maximum impact to demonstrate to the world his goodwill for the new administration. However, he would at the same time continue the incarceration of U-2 pilot Gary Powers, who, unlike the RB-47 fliers, had already been convicted of espionage and sentenced to ten years after a show trial in August. The cases couldnat have been more different in Khrushchevas mind. For him, the U-2 incident was an unforgivable violation of Soviet territory that had undermined him politically and humiliated him personally ahead of the Paris Summit. He would exact a higher price for Powers at another time.*

Back in November and just after Kennedyas election, when asked by an intermediary how the Soviet leaders.h.i.+p could best pursue a afresh starta in relations, former U.S. Amba.s.sador to Moscow Averell Harriman had urged Khrushchev to release the airmen. In any case, Khrushchevas thoughts had been running in that direction. The pilots had served their electoral purpose. They could now play a diplomatic role in jump-starting a more positive U.S.a”Soviet relations.h.i.+p.

The aide-mmoire said Khrushchev wanted to aopen a new page in relations,a and that past differences should not interfere with aour joint work in the name of a good future.a Khrushchev said he would release the airmen as soon as Kennedy approved the draft Soviet statement on the matter and promised to prevent future aerial violations of Soviet territory and ensure the freed airmen would not be used for anti-Soviet propaganda. If Kennedy did not accept his terms, Khrushchev made clear he would try the two men on espionage chargesa”as he had done with Powers.

Thompson improvised a response without seeking instructions from Kennedy, whom he would not disturb during his first night in the Lincoln Bedroom. Thompson said he appreciated the offer, but the U.S. maintained that the RB-47 had been shot down outside Soviet airs.p.a.ce. The U.S. thus could not accept wording in the Soviet draft that amounted to a confession of a deliberate incursion.

Khrushchev was in a flexible mood.

aEach side is welcome to maintain its own view,a he said. The U.S. could make whatever statement it wished.

With that settled, Thompson and Khrushchev then engaged in one of their frequent exchanges on the merits of their respective systems. Thompson complained about a January 6 speech in which Khrushchev had portrayed the U.S.a”Soviet struggle as a zero-sum game of cla.s.s struggle around the world. Yet the two men tangled in an amicable manner that reflected an improved atmosphere of cooperation.

Khrushchev joked that he would cast his vote for Thompson to stay on as amba.s.sador under Kennedy, an extension Thompson wanted but had not yet received. The Soviet leader winked that he was unsure whether his intervention with Kennedy would be helpful.

Thompson laughed that he also had his doubts.

When Khrushchevas offer to release the airmen reached Kennedy, the new president was suspicious. He asked National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy whether he was amissing a trick.a After weighing the dangers, however, Kennedy concluded he could not pa.s.s up the opportunity to bring the American airmen home and show such dramatic results with the Soviets in the first hours of his presidency. He would take Khrushchevas offer.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent Thompson the presidentas positive response two days after Khrushchev made his offer.

In the meantime, Khrushchev had served up a menu of other unilateral conciliatory gestures. As promised, Pravda and Izvestia ran the full, uncensored text of Kennedyas inaugural address, including even the parts Khrushchev did not like. Khrushchev reduced the jamming of Voice of America radio. He would allow five hundred elderly Soviets to join their families in the U.S., he approved the reopening of the Jewish theater in Moscow, and he gave the green light for the creation of an Inst.i.tute for American Studies. He would allow new student exchanges and would pay honoraria to American writers for their pirated and published ma.n.u.scripts. The state and party media reported in a celebratory chorus on the Soviet peopleas agreat hopesa for improved relations.

Thompson saw how delighted Khrushchev was at having taken the initiative in U.S.a”Soviet relations. What he didnat antic.i.p.ate was how quickly Kennedy would come to dismiss Khrushchevas gestures, partly on the basis of a misreading of one of Thompsonas own cables.

It would be the first mistake of the Kennedy presidency.

NEW STATE DEPARTMENT AUDITORIUM, WAs.h.i.+NGTON, D.C.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 1961.

Even as the thirty-fifth president of the United States prepared to trumpet the release of the U.S. airmen at the triumphant first press conference of his five-day-old presidency, he had also received new information from Moscow that made him question Khrushchevas true motivations. Eager to be useful to Kennedy, Amba.s.sador Thompson, in a cable designed to prepare the president for his first media encounter, had drawn attention to the inflammatory language of a secret Khrushchev speech on January 6: aI believe the speech should be read in its entirety by everyone having to do with Soviet affairs, as it brings together in one place Khrushchevas point of view as Communist and propagandist. If taken literally, [Khrushchevas] statement is a declaration of Cold War and is expressed in far stronger and more explicit terms than before.a What Thompson failed to tell Kennedy and his superiors was that there was nothing at all new in what Khrushchev had said. The Soviet leaderas so-called secret speech was little more than a belated briefing to Soviet ideologists and propagandists on the conference of eighty-one Communist Parties the previous November. The Kremlin had even published a shortened version two days before Kennedyas inauguration in the party publication Kommunist, though that had gone unnoticed in Was.h.i.+ngton. Khrushchevas call to arms against the U.S. in the developing world was less an escalation of the Cold War, as Thompson suggested, than it was the result of a tactical agreement with the Chinese to prevent a diplomatic breakdown. Lacking that context, Kennedy concluded Khrushchevas words were agame changing.a He thought he had found the clue to unlock, to paraphrase Churchill, the enigma inside the riddle of Khrushchev.

Kennedyas interpretation of the speech was prompting him to devalue and distrust all of Khrushchevas conciliatory gestures.

The president had initially responded to Khrushchevas moves with positive signals of his own. The U.S. had lifted a ban on Soviet crabmeat imports, it had resumed civilian aviation talks, and it had ended U.S. Post Office censoring of Soviet publications. Kennedy had also ordered his most senior military officers to tone down their anti-Soviet rhetoric.

Beyond that, President Kennedy was learning from his initial intelligence briefings that Moscow wasnat as threatening an adversary as the candidate Kennedy had said it was. He had learned in ever greater detail how wrong his charges had been that the Soviets had created a amissile gapa in Moscowas favor.

Yet none of that altered Kennedyas conviction that Khrushchevas speech was profoundly revealing and aimed quite personally at him. Though that s.h.i.+ft in thinking would significantly color his State of the Union message in five daysa time, Kennedy was not yet ready to volunteer his s.h.i.+fting thoughts on Khrushchev at his press conferencea”and no one asked. Reporters had not antic.i.p.ated much news that day, since it was a sufficient sensation that Kennedy was hosting the first presidential press conference ever to be broadcast live on television and radio across the nation. It was a dramatic departure from Eisenhoweras practice of recording his press conferences and then releasing them only after careful editing.

Given the unprecedented media demand to attend, Kennedy staged the gathering in the newly built State Department auditorium, a cavernous amphitheater that the New York Times called aas warm as an execution chamber,a with its deep well between the presidentas raised podium and the reporters. He saved the news from Moscow for the last of three prepared announcements. The Times would report the next day that a low whistle of astonishment rose from the room when Kennedy said two RB-47 fliers, who had been imprisoned and interrogated for six months, already were en route home from Moscow by air.

Kennedy lied that he had promised nothing in return to Khrushchev for the airmenas release. The truth was that he had agreed to Khrushchevas demand to extend the ban on spy flights over Soviet territory and, once the airmen landed, to keep them away from the media. Kennedy radiated calm self-satisfaction. His first public encounter with the Soviets had ended well. His statement contained much the same language he had cabled to Khrushchev: aThe United States Government was gratified by this decision of the Soviet Union and considers that this action of the Soviet Government removes a serious obstacle to improvement of Soviet-American relations.a But among friends and advisers, Kennedy was growing so fixated on the January 6 Khrushchev speech that he would read loudly and frequently from a translated version he carried around with hima”at Cabinet meetings, at dinners, and in casual conversationsa”always requesting comments afterward. Thompson had advised Kennedy to distribute the speech to his top people, and Kennedy did so, instructing them to aread, mark, learn and inwardly digesta Khrushchevas message.

aYouave got to understand it,a he would say time and again, aand so does everybody else around here. This is our clue to the Soviet Union.a The text spoke of Kremlin support for awars of liberation or popular uprisingsaof colonial peoples against their oppressors across the developing world.a It declared that the Third World was rising in revolution and that imperialism was weakening in a ageneral crisis of capitalism.a In one of the lines Kennedy most liked to quote, Khrushchev said, aWe will beat the United States with small wars of liberation. We will nibble them to exhaustion all over the globe, in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.a Referring to Berlin, Khrushchev promised he would aeradicate this splinter from the heart of Europe.a With its timing just ahead of his inauguration, Kennedy falsely concluded that Khrushchevas policy s.h.i.+ft was designed specifically to test him and thus required a response. Thompson had fed that thinking in his advice to the president on how to handle potential media questions. aSolely from a tactical point toward the Soviet Union,a Thompson had said, ait might be advantageous for the President to take the line that he cannot understand why a man who professes to wish to negotiate with us publishes a few days before his inauguration what amounts to a declaration of Cold War and determination to bring about the downfall of the American system.a It was true enough that the Soviets and Chinese had agreed on a more active and militant policy toward the developing world. Then Secretary of State Christian A. Herter had told President Eisenhower that the communist gathering sounded aa number of danger signals which the West would do well to heed, such as a call for the strengthening of the might and defense capability of the entire socialist camp by every means.a Herter, however, dismissed the ritual call for a continuation and intensification of the Cold War as anothing new.a Eisenhower had heard so much similar bl.u.s.ter from Khrushchev during his presidency that he had shrugged off this latest version. Lacking this experience and overly confident in his own instincts, Kennedy magnified what Eisenhower had dismissed. He thus overlooked the most important point of the communist gathering, and one that would have been far more helpful to understanding Khrushchevas predicament than his rhetoric. Herter had told Eisenhower that what was most significant was the unprecedented measure of success the Chinese had achieved in challenging Soviet leaders.h.i.+p of world communisma”despite four months of Moscowas lobbying to contain Maoas views.

Kennedyas first miscue in office regarding the Soviets had several sources. Thompsonas cable had played a role. Kennedy was also drawn instinctively to a more hawkish approach to the Soviets due to the popularity of such a course among American voters, his fatheras anticommunist influence, and his search for a rallying cause around a presidency he had promised would be aa time for greatness.a His personal take on history had also played a role. His senior honors thesis at Harvard, published in July 1940, had been about British appeas.e.m.e.nt of the n.a.z.is at Munich. Playing on his hero Churchillas book While England Slept, he had called it Why England Slept.

Kennedy would not be caught napping.

The president was seeking a great challenge, and Khrushchev seemed to be providing it. His administration had not formally reviewed its policy toward the Kremlin nor held a major policy meeting on how to deal with Khrushchev. Despite that, Kennedy was sharply altering course from his inaugural speechas studied ambiguity toward the Soviets ten days earlier to the drafting of one of the most apocalyptic State of the Union messages ever delivered by an American president.

Kennedy began by listing all the U.S. domestic challenges, from seven months of recession to nine years of falling farm income. aBut all these problems pale when placed beside those which confront us around the world.a Reading language he had scribbled himself onto a final draft, he said: aEach day, the crises multiply. Each day, their solution grows more difficult. Each day, we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger. I feel I must inform the Congress that our a.n.a.lyses over the last ten days make it clear that, in each of the princ.i.p.al areas of the crisis, the tide of events has been running outa”and time has not been our friend.a Though new intelligence provided him during those intervening ten days had shown him that China and the Soviet Union were increasingly at loggerheads, he insisted, based on the January 6 speech, that both ahad forcefully restated only a short time agoa their ambitions for aworld domination.a He asked Defense Secretary Robert McNamara ato reappraise our entire defense strategy.a Kennedy could not have more obviously linked himself rhetorically to his heroes Churchill and Lincoln in this perceived hour of danger. Churchill had said, aSure I am of this, that you only have to endure to conquer.a Lincolnas Gettysburg Address had framed the Civil War as one that was testing whether aa nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equalacan long endure.a Placing himself directly in the same crosshairs of history, Kennedy told the Congress and the nation: aBefore my term has ended, we shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure.a It was memorable rhetoric based on a false understanding.

THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW.

MONDAY, JANUARY 30, 1961.

Khrushchev was still waiting for an answer to his multiple pleas for an early summit with Kennedy when the presidentas State of the Union address delivered him the first of several perceived indignities. Two days later, Khrushchev suffered what he considered the further humiliation of watching Kennedyas America test-launch its first Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile.

Four days after that, McNamara shamed Khrushchev againa”while at the same time embarra.s.sing the White Housea”by dismissing as afolly,a during a Pentagon press briefing, Khrushchevas declaration that he was expanding his missile superiority against the U.S. In both missile technology and overall striking potential, the U.S. still enjoyed a considerable edge. McNamara said the two countries had about the same number of missiles in the field, and though he didnat mention the U.S. superiority of 6,000 warheads to about 300 for the Soviets, he nevertheless had publicly called Khrushchevas bluff.

After his failed negotiation track with Eisenhower in 1960, Khrushchev had taken significant political risk in openly praising Kennedyas election, freeing the airmen, offering other gestures, and reaching out to the new president for an early summit. Kennedyas dismissive response, his ICBM test launch, and McNamaraas statement reinforced the charges of Khrushchevas enemies that he was naive about American intentions.

On February 11, Khrushchev returned earlier than scheduled from a trip to Soviet farming regions for an emergency Presidium meeting, where his rivals called for a policy s.h.i.+ft to address what they regarded as new American militancy.

The Soviet leader had to rethink his approach. He had failed in his desire to meet with Kennedy before the new president could establish his course toward Moscow. The Soviet leader could not afford to appear weak after Kennedyas startling State of the Union. Khrushchev immediately altered his tone toward Kennedy and his administration, replacing it with aggressive talk about Soviet nuclear capabilities. The Soviet media s.h.i.+fted course as well.

The Kennedy-Khrushchev honeymoon had ended before it had begun. Misunderstandings were souring the relations.h.i.+p between the worldas two most powerful men before Kennedy had even chaired his first meeting on Soviet policy.

CABINET ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE, WAs.h.i.+NGTON, D.C.

SAt.u.r.dAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1961.

Twelve days after his State of the Union, Kennedy called together his top Soviet experts for the first time to lay the groundwork for administration policy. He had placed the horse firmly behind the cart.

He would not be the first or last newly elected U.S. president to be forced through a speaking schedule to set a policy direction before a formal policy review. Though the administration was only twenty days old, those who attended the meetinga”representing both a tougher and more accommodating policy toward Moscowa”realized Khrushchevas early gestures and Kennedyas tough response had already set a lurching train in motion that they now hoped to steer.

The long-awaited meeting would provide insight into both Kennedyas hunger for knowledge and his continued indecision about how to deal with Khrushchev, irrespective of his speechas apparent clarity. The president had summoned to the Cabinet Room Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, U.S. Amba.s.sador to Moscow Thompson, and three former amba.s.sadors to Moscow: Charles aChipa Bohlen, who continued as the State Departmentas resident Russia expert; George Kennan, Kennedyas new amba.s.sador to Yugoslavia; and Averell Harriman, whom Kennedy had made aamba.s.sador at large.a The days leading up to the session had produced a flurry of preparatory cables and meetings. Thompson had been busiest of all, sending in a series of long telegrams designed to educate the new president and his administration on all aspects of his greatest foreign policy challenge. Kennedy had decided to keep Thompson on as amba.s.sador, in large part due to his unique access to Khrushchev. This was his first trip to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., since that decision had been made. Thompson was delighted to serve a president who not only was a fellow Democrat but had already demonstrated he would read his cables far more closely than Eisenhower had ever done.