Part 12 (1/2)

At the end of the first dayas talks, Kennedy returned to the subject of Poland and argued that democratic elections there might well replace the current Soviet-friendly government with one that was closer to the West. Khrushchev feigned shock. It was not respectful, he said, for Kennedy ato speak that way about a government the U.S. recognizes and with which it has diplomatic relations.a He argued that Polandas aelection system is more democratic than that in the United States.a Kennedyas subsequent effort to differentiate between Americaas multi-party system and single-party Poland was lost on Khrushchev. The two men could not agree on the definition of democracy, let alone on whether Poland had one.

Kennedy and Khrushchev circ.u.mnavigated the globe geographically and philosophically with Khrushchev thrusts and Kennedy parries on issues ranging from Angola to Laos. Khrushchevas biggest concession of the day would be agreement to accept a neutral, independent Laosa”a deal that their underlings would negotiate on the Viennese sidelines. Uncharacteristically, he demanded little from Kennedy in exchange.

Khrushchev was clearing out the underbrush for what he wanted to be the next dayas all-consuming focus: Berlin.

Kennedy declared an evening break at 6:45, after six hours of nearly uninterrupted discussion. Weary and drawn, Kennedy noted the lateness of the hour and suggested that the next agenda item, the question of a nuclear test ban, could be discussed that night over dinner with the Austrian president, so that most of the following day could be given over to Berlin. Kennedy also gave Khrushchev the option of discussing both issues the following day.

Kennedy wanted to ensure that Khrushchev didnat stray from his pre-summit commitment to discuss a test ban, something he knew was of little interest to Moscow, before they took on Berlin.

With Kennedy glancing at his watch, Khrushchev pounced on the mention of Berlin. He said he would agree to discuss nuclear testing only in the context of general disarmament issues. That was an approach Kennedy opposed for the simple reason that a test ban could be agreed upon quickly, while concluding far-reaching arms reduction agreements could consume years of negotiation.

Regarding Berlin, Khrushchev said his demands would have to be satisfied the following day or he would move unilaterally. aThe Soviet Union hopes that the U.S. will understand this question so that both countries can sign a peace treaty together,a he said. aThis would improve relations. But if the United States refuses to sign a peace treaty, the Soviet Union will do so and nothing will stop it.a After a Soviet limo drove Khrushchev away, a dazed Kennedy turned to Amba.s.sador Thompson on the U.S. residence steps and asked, aIs it always like this?a aPar for the course,a said Thompson.

Thompson restrained himself from telling the president how much better matters might have gone had he taken the advice he had been given to avoid ideological debate. Thompson knew the next dayas Berlin discussion was likely to be even more difficult.

It was only the halftime break at the Vienna Summit, but it was already clear that Team USA was losing.

Kennedy had reinforced Khrushchevas impression of his weakness. aThis man is very inexperienced, even immature,a Khrushchev told his interpreter Oleg Troyanovsky. aCompared to him, Eisenhower is a man of intelligence and vision.a In the years that followed, then Vienna-based U.S. diplomat William Lloyd Stearman would teach students about the summitas lessons in a lecture he called aLittle Boy Blue Meets Al Capone.a He thought that t.i.tle captured the naive, almost apologetic approach Kennedy had followed in the face of Khrushchevas brutal a.s.saults. He believed the Bay of Pigs had cut into the presidentas confidence at the summit and had made Khrushchev feel that aKennedy was now his pigeon.a Stearmanas insights were better informed than most observersa because he was regularly briefed in Vienna by his friend Martin Hillenbrand, who was the note-taker at the Kennedya”Khrushchev meeting. Stearmanas view was that the talks had gone astray partly because Kennedy had been so ill served by his key advisers.

Stearman dismissed Secretary of State Rusk as an Asia expert who lacked sufficient judgment on Soviet issues. National Security Advisor Bundy was more cerebral than decisive, Stearman believed. Missing at the heart of the administration were advisers who could bring Kennedy the sense of historic moment and accompanying strategic direction that Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles had supplied Truman and Eisenhower.

By Stearmanas account, Kennedy had also hurt his chances of success during the pre-summit planning by going around his national security staff and doing much of the planning secretly between Bolshakov and his brother Bobby. When the talks began to head in the wrong direction, Kennedy lacked backup staff with adequate knowledge of the preparations to help him change direction.

Mercifully, the U.S. emba.s.sy residence where Kennedy was staying also had a bathtub, though it was more modest than the gilded basin of Paris. As Kennedy soaked, OaDonnell asked the president about the awkward moment at the beginning of the day when he was sizing up the Soviet leader on the residence steps.

aAfter all the studying and talking Iave done on him in the last few weeks, you canat blame me for being interested in getting a look at him,a he said.

Was he different than forecast? asked OaDonnell.

aNot really,a said Kennedy, but then he corrected himself. aMaybe [he was] a little more unreasonable [than expected]a. From what I read and from what people told me, I expected him to be smart and tough. He would have to be smart and tough to work his way to the top in a government like that one.a Dave Powers told the president that he and OaDonnell had watched from the second-floor window as the Soviet leader went after him during their walk in the garden. aYou seemed pretty calm while he was giving you a hard time out there.a Kennedy shrugged. aWhat did you expect me to do?a he asked. aTake off one of my shoes and hit him over the head with it?a He said Khrushchev had been battering him on Berlin in an effort to wear him down over the issue. Khrushchev had questioned how the U.S. could support the notion of German unification. The Soviet leader had said he lacked all sympathy for Germans, who had killed his son in the war.

Kennedy had reminded Khrushchev that he had lost his brother as well, but the U.S. would not turn its back on West Germany nor pull out of Berlin. aAnd thatas that,a Kennedy had told Khrushchev.

Kennedy told his friends about Khrushchevas tough response to his concerns about the possibility of miscalculation on either side leading to war. aKhrushchev went berserk,a he said. He told OaDonnell that he would make a mental note to stay away from the word during the rest of their talks.

Austrian President Adolf Schrf had a protocol problem to solve before his grand gala dinner that evening at Schnbrunn Palace. Which of the two leadersa wives should sit at his right? he wondered.

On the one hand, Khrushchev had freed Vienna from the possible fate of a divided Berlin by allowing it to embrace independence and neutrality through the Austrian state treaty of May 15, 1955. Because of that, Khrushchevas wife, Nina, had earned pride of place. Yet the Viennese loved the Kennedys, and Austrians, despite their neutrality, felt that where they belonged was the West.

In a diplomatic compromise, Schrf would seat Madame Khrushchev to his right at the dinner, and Mrs. Kennedy would have the honored position for the second half of the evening, during performances in the music room.

It was Austriaas coming-out party. More than six thousand Viennese crowded around the floodlit gates of the 265-year-old palace to watch Kennedy and Khrushchev arrive. The palace staff had waxed the parquet floor to a perfect sheen and scrubbed the windows until they sparkled. The most valuable of the antiques were removed from the museumas display rooms and positioned for use. Staff collected flowers from the palace gardens and arranged them so generously on the tables that they perfumed the entire hall. The tables were set with the aGold Eagle Service,a a priceless porcelain collection with the Austrian double-headed eagle embossed on a white background that had been used by Emperor Franz Joseph.

Aside from the fact that the meals were served cold, the Austrians patted themselves on the back on an evening well done. The eveningas guests noticed how Jackie and Nina had hit it off. Jackie wore a floor-length pink sheath dress. Designed by Oleg Ca.s.sini, the gown was sleeveless and low-waisted. Nina dressed in a dark silk dress laced with a faint golden threada”a more proletariat choice.

Their husbands struck the same contrast. Kennedy was in black tie and Khrushchev in a plain dark suit and checkered gray tie. Waiters in white gloves, knee breeches, and gold braid moved through the corridors and across the s.p.a.cious rooms bearing silver trays laden with drinks.

aMr. Khrushchev,a a photographer asked, awonat you shake hands with Mr. Kennedy for us?a aIad like to shake her hand first.a Khrushchev grinned and nodded to the presidentas wife.

a.s.sociated Press reporter Eddy Gilmore scribbled that beside Jackie athe tough and often belligerent Communist leader looked like a smitten schoolboy when the ice thaws along the Volga in springtime.a Khrushchev went out of his way to sit beside Jackie while the chamber ensemble of the Vienna Philharmonic played Mozart and then the Vienna State Operaas dance company performed the aBlue Danubea waltz.

Kennedyas performance was not nearly as graceful. Just before the music began, he lowered himself onto a chair, only to find that it already held Khrushchevas wife. He stopped just short of landing in her lap.

He smiled an apology. The Vienna Summit wasnat going well at all.

11.

VIENNA: THE THREAT OF WAR.

The U.S. is unwilling to normalize the situation in the most dangerous spot in the world. The USSR wants to perform an operation on this sore spota”to eliminate this thorn, this ulcera.

Premier Khrushchev to President Kennedy, Vienna, June 4, 1961.

I never met a man like this. I talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes and he just looked at me as if to say, aSo what?a My impression was he just didnat give a d.a.m.n if it came to that.

President Kennedy to reporter Hugh Sidey, Time, June 1961.

SOVIET EMBa.s.sY, VIENNA.

10:15 A.M., SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1961.

Standing before the Soviet emba.s.sy, Nikita Khrushchev s.h.i.+fted from side to side like a boxer eager to come back out of his corner after having won the opening rounds. A wide grin revealed the gap in his front teeth as he thrust out his small, plump hand to greet Kennedy.

For all the Soviet stateas working-cla.s.s pretensions, Moscowas emba.s.sy was unashamedly imperial. Acquired by Tsarist Russia in the late nineteenth century, its neo-Renaissance facade opened up to a grand entry hall of natural granite and marble. aI greet you on a small piece of Soviet territory,a said Khrushchev to Kennedy. He then threw out a Russian proverb whose meaning escaped Kennedy: aSometimes we drink out of a small gla.s.s but we speak with great feelings.a After some nine minutes of small talk, none of it memorable, Khrushchev took his American guests through a pillared corridor to a wide staircase that led to the second floor. There they sat on sofas in a twenty-foot-square conference room with red damask walls.

The manner in which the two men had spent the morning ahead of their second dayas meeting spoke to their differences. The Catholic Kennedys had listened to the Vienna Boysa Choir and had taken Ma.s.s from Cardinal Franz Knig in the Gothic magnificence of St. Stephenas Cathedral. The First Ladyas eyes had welled up as she fell to her knees to pray. When the Kennedys emerged from wors.h.i.+p, a throng cheered on the cobblestoned square outside. At about the same time, a far smaller and less enthusiastic crowd watched with curiosity as the leader of the atheist Soviet Union laid a wreath at the Soviet war memorial at the Schwarzenbergplatz. Locals knew it bitterly as the amonument to the unknown rapist.a In the conference room where the two delegations gathered, the matching red curtains were pulled shut. They concealed the emba.s.syas tall and broad windows and created an atmosphere of gloom, keeping out the dayas bright sun. Kennedy began with the same sort of small talk he had employed the first day, asking the Soviet premier about his childhood. Khrushchev had no interest in discussing his peasant origins with this child of privilege. So he was curt, saying only that he was born in a Russian village near Kursk, less than ten kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

s.h.i.+fting quickly to the present, he said the Soviet Union had recently found very large deposits of iron ore near Kursk, estimated at 30 billion tons. He said total reserves were likely to be ten times greater than that. By comparison, he reminded Kennedy, total iron ore deposits of the U.S. were only a fraction of that, at 5 billion tons. aSoviet deposits will be sufficient to cover the needs of the entire world for a long time to come,a he said.

In the first minutes of Day Two in Vienna, Khrushchev had turned what might have been a personal exchange about family matters into a boast about his countryas superior resource base. He did not ask about the presidentas upbringing, about which he knew quite enough. Impatiently, he suggested they move on to the dayas purpose: discussing Berlin and its future.

In its edition of that morning, the London Times had quoted a British diplomat on his concerns about the Vienna Summit. aWe hope the lad will be able to get out of the bear cage without being too badly mauled,a he had said. And Khrushchev had come out at the beginning of the second day with his claws bared. Despite progress their delegations had made overnight on Laos, he was unwilling to seize upon the issue as an example of how the two sides could reduce tensions.

U.S. and Soviet foreign secretaries and their staffs had reached agreement that they would accept a neutral Laos. It was a concession that could be politically costly to Khrushchev, as it would be opposed by the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and the Pathet Lao, the Laotian communist movement. Instead of embracing Kennedy over the accord, however, Khrushchev accused him of amegalomania and delusions of grandeura for insisting that the U.S. would continue to safeguard its commitments in Asia.

Beyond that, Khrushchev resisted all of Kennedyas efforts to steer talks toward nuclear test ban issues. He rejected the presidentas logic that only an overall improvement of relations could open the way to an eventual Berlin settlement. For Khrushchev, Berlin had to come first.

Pus.h.i.+ng for the test ban, Kennedy drew upon a Chinese proverb: aA journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.a aYou seem to know the Chinese very well,a Khrushchev said.

aWe may both get to know them better,a responded Kennedy.

Khrushchev smiled. aI know them well enough now,a he said. It was an unusual slip for the Soviet, a brief glimpse into his frustration with Mao.

However, the Soviets would doctor the final transcript, which would be provided to Beijing, adding another sentence that Khrushchev actually had never said to Kennedy: aChina is our neighbor, our friend, and our ally.a The most important exchange of the summit began with a Khrushchev warning. The Soviet leader prefaced his statement by saying Moscow had waited as long as it could for a Berlin solution. He said the position he was about to outline regarding Berlin would aaffect the relations between our two countries to a great extent and even more so if the U.S. were to misunderstand the Soviet position.a At that point, both menas advisers sat forward, knowing that everything else had been foreplay for this moment. aSixteen years have pa.s.sed since World War II,a said Khrushchev. aThe USSR lost twenty million people in that war and much of its territory was devastated. Now Germany, the country which unleashed World War II, has again acquired military power and has a.s.sumed a predominant position in NATO. Its generals hold high offices in that organization. This const.i.tutes a threat of World War III, which would be even more devastating than World War II.a For that reason, he told Kennedy, Moscow refused to tolerate any further delay regarding Berlin, because only West German militarists would gain from it. He said German unification was not a practical possibility and that even Germans didnat want it. So the Soviets would begin to act from the aactual state of affairs, namely, that two German States exist.a Khrushchev told Kennedy that it was his preference to reach agreement personally with him on a war-ending treaty that would alter Berlinas status. If that wasnat possible, however, he would act alone and end all postwar commitments made by the Soviets. He said thereafter West Berlin would be a afree citya where U.S. troops could remain, but only coexisting with Soviet troops. The Soviets would then join the U.S. in ensuring awhat the West calls West Berlinas freedom.a Moscow would also be aagreeablea to the presence of neutral troops or UN guarantees.