Berlin 1961 (34 page)

Vienna basked in the competition for its attention. Never had a high-level meeting between heads of state attracted so much international media attention. At least 1,500 reporters with all their equipment and supporting staff would be on hand to cover the two men and their meetings.

Photographers furiously snapped shots of the two men’s historic first encounter at 12:45 p.m. on the red-carpeted steps of the U.S. ambassador’s residence, where they posed under the canopy of the gray stucco building with its brown stone columns. A small, circular graveled courtyard stood behind them, blocked from public view by thick firs and weeping willows heavy with the day’s rain.

Just minutes earlier, the Soviet premier had swung his squat legs out of his black Soviet limousine while Kennedy had bounded lightly down the steps to retrieve him. Kennedy showed no sign of his chronic pain, which was dulled by shots, pills, and a tightly strung corset. After so much anticipation, the initial Kennedy–Khrushchev encounter was unavoidably awkward.

In the practiced tone of the political campaign trail, Kennedy issued a reflexive greeting in his Boston bray, “How are you? I’m glad to see you.”

“The pleasure is mutual,” said Khrushchev through his interpreter.

The bald top of the communist world leader’s head reached only to Kennedy’s nose. O’Donnell would later recall how sorry he was that he had not brought a movie camera to record the moment. It struck him that Kennedy was studying “the stubby little Soviet leader” a little too obviously.

Kennedy stood back, one hand deep in his jacket pocket, and slowly looked Khrushchev up and down with unconcealed curiosity. Even as photographers shouted requests for more posed handshakes, Kennedy continued ogling Khrushchev as if he were a game hunter stumbling upon a rare beast after years of tracking.

Khrushchev muttered something to Foreign Minister Gromyko and then moved inside.

I
n chronicling the first Kennedy–Khrushchev encounter,
New York Times
reporter Russell Baker wondered how much the greetings had differed in Vienna 146 years earlier as Metternich, Talleyrand, and other European leaders gathered to build a century of European stability at their Congress of Vienna. “Here in the home of the waltz, schmaltz, hot dogs and Habsburgs, the two most powerful met today in a music room,” he wrote.

The
Wall Street Journal
introduced the two men as boxers coming into a heavyweight ring: “The American President is a younger man by a generation, highly educated, while Khrushchev was brought up in the school of hard knocks, his main political ambitions ahead of him rather than behind him. The confrontation of these two men, as powerful in their time as Napoleon and Alexander I were when they met on a raft in the river Niemen to redraw the map of Europe in 1807, against the background of old Vienna, once a power center in its own right, now the capital of a small state that only desires to be left alone in peace, clearly possesses the element of drama.”

The
Journal
opined that “the least worst” outcome would be if Kennedy simply stuck to his commitment that he had come only to acquaint himself with Khrushchev and would not negotiate with him over Berlin or anything else.

European newspapers rang with the historic consequence of it all. The influential Swiss newspaper
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
regretted that, against its advice, Kennedy had come unprepared to meet with an unrepentant Kremlin boss. The German intellectual paper
Die Zeit
reported from Vienna, “The question that the West faces is the same as the one Demosthenes described in his speech to the Athenians against Philip of Macedonia: When another man stands before you with a weapon in his hand and at the head of a great army claiming to come in peace but really intent on war, what can you do but assume a defensive position?”

Six years earlier, the Austrians had signed their state treaty with the four wartime Allies, which allowed them to escape the fate of neighboring Warsaw Pact states and establish a free, sovereign, democratic, and neutral country. So the Viennese were particularly taken with their newly found stage as neutral ground for a superpower powwow. Herbert von Karajan was conducting Wagner at the Staatsoper, and Viennese cafés and streets overflowed with locals out for a gossip and in hopes of a glimpse of their visitors.

Viennese teenager Monika Sommer scribbled in her diary that she and her friends regarded Kennedy as a “pop idol.” She had tacked his photograph on her bedroom wall, sorry that her country didn’t provide such role models. Teenager Veronika Seyr was more unsettled by all the hoopla surrounding the summit. Having witnessed Soviet brutality in Budapest during the crackdown just five years earlier, the increased police presence all around Vienna frightened her. Perched in a cherry tree, she watched Soviet fighter planes and helicopters circle the city as Khrushchev arrived. Terrified by the prospect of a new invasion, she fell to the ground and lay on her back for some time “like a beetle,” still watching the helicopters overhead.

A
nticipating two long days of exchanges, Kennedy opened his discussions with Khrushchev with some small talk about their first meeting at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1959 during the Soviet leader’s first visit to the United States.

In an initial thrust of one-upmanship that would come to characterize their talks, Khrushchev said he remembered the meeting as well, though he had “no opportunity to say much except hello and good-bye” to Kennedy because the then senator had arrived so late. The Soviet leader reminded Kennedy that he had remarked at the time, showing his foresight, that he had heard Kennedy was a young and promising politician.

Kennedy reminded Khrushchev that he also had said at the time that Kennedy looked too young to be a senator.

The Soviet leader questioned Kennedy’s memory. Normally, Khrushchev said, he “did not say such things because young people want to look older and older people like to look younger.” Khrushchev said he also had looked younger than his age before graying prematurely at age twenty-two. Khrushchev laughed that he would “be happy to share his years with the President or change places with him.”

From that opening exchange, Khrushchev was setting the tone and pace of their conversations by answering Kennedy’s short statements and questions with his longer interventions. To gain an early upper hand, the U.S. side had wanted the first day’s talks to be at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, and the Soviets had accepted that the two men would move to Soviet territory on Day Two. However, it was Khrushchev who was making himself most at home.

In an attempt to reassert some control, Kennedy outlined his hopes for their talks. He said he wanted their two powerful countries—though “allied with other countries, having different political and social systems, and competing with each other in different parts of the world”—to find ways to avoid situations that could lead to conflict.

Khrushchev responded by detailing what he called his long-standing efforts “to develop friendly relations with the United States and its allies.” At the same time, he said, “the Soviet Union did not wish to reach agreement with the U.S. at the expense of other peoples because such agreement would not mean peace.”

The two men had agreed to leave any discussion of Berlin to their second day, so their initial talks focused on the general relationship and disarmament issues.

Khrushchev said his greatest concern was that the U.S. was trying to leverage its economic superiority over the Soviets in a way that could prompt conflict, a veiled reference to the Soviet world’s growing dependence on Western trade and credits. He said he would make the Soviet Union richer than the U.S. over time, not by acting as a predator, but by better tapping its own resources.

Khrushchev took little note of Kennedy’s brief comment on how impressed he had been by improving Soviet economic growth rates before the Soviet leader took charge of the conversation again. He complained that John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state from 1953 to 1959 and a Soviet opponent, had tried to liquidate communism. He said Dulles, whose name he spat out like a curse, resisted “both
de facto
and
de jure
” the recognition that both systems could continue to exist beside each other. Khrushchev told Kennedy that during their talks he “would not try to convince the President about the advantages of Communism, just as the President should not waste his time [trying] to convert him to capitalism.”

In pre-summit conversations, Ambassador Thompson had warned Kennedy to avoid ideological debate with Khrushchev, a course that would consume valuable time and one that he believed Kennedy could not win against a lifelong communist with years of experience in dialectical debate. However, Kennedy came to Vienna much too convinced of his own powers of persuasion to resist the temptation.

Khrushchev’s remarks raised “a very important problem,” said Kennedy. The president called it a matter of “very serious concern to us” that Khrushchev believed it was acceptable to try to eliminate free systems in countries associated with the United States but objected to any efforts by the West to roll back communism in the Soviet sphere of influence.

Employing his calmest voice, Khrushchev told Kennedy this was “an incorrect interpretation of Soviet policy.” The Soviet Union was not imposing its system on others but merely riding the wave of historic change. With that, Khrushchev launched into a history lecture on everything from feudalism to the French Revolution. He said the Soviet system would triumph on its merits, although he added that he was certain Kennedy thought just the opposite. “In any event, this is not a matter for argument, much less for war,” he said.

Continuing to disregard his experts’ advice, Kennedy decided again to lock swords with the Soviet leader on ideology. The president would later explain that he believed he had to successfully engage Khrushchev in ideological debate if he was to be taken seriously on other issues. “Our position is that people should have free choice,” Kennedy told Khrushchev. What concerned the president was that minority governments that did not express the will of the people—governed by friends of Moscow—were seizing control in places of interest to the U.S. “The USSR believes that is a historical inevitability,” Kennedy said, while the U.S. did not. Kennedy worried that such situations could bring the USSR and the U.S. into military conflict.

Khrushchev wondered whether Kennedy “wanted to build a dam preventing the development of the human mind and conscience.” If so, Khrushchev said, it “is not in man’s power. The Spanish Inquisition burned people who disagreed with it, but ideas did not burn, and eventually triumphed. Thus if we start struggling against ideas, conflicts and clashes between the two countries will be inevitable.”

The Soviet leader was savoring the exchange. In an awkward effort to find a point of agreement, Kennedy argued that communism could remain lodged where it was now, namely places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, but could not be accepted anywhere the Soviets were not already installed. American officials who would read the transcripts later would be shocked that Kennedy was going further than any president before him in his expressed willingness to accept the existing division of Europe into spheres of influence. Kennedy seemed to be suggesting that he would mortgage the future of those seeking freedom in Warsaw Pact countries if the Kremlin would abandon hope of expanding communism elsewhere.

Khrushchev challenged Kennedy’s apparent belief that the Soviet Union was responsible for all communist development in the world. If Kennedy was saying that he would oppose the advance of communist ideas anywhere they did not currently exist, Khrushchev argued, then indeed “conflicts will be inevitable.”

Initiating yet another tutorial for his wayward student, Khrushchev reminded Kennedy that it was not, after all, Russians who had originated communist ideas but rather the German-born Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He joked that even if he should renounce communism—something he made clear to Kennedy that he had no intention of doing—its concepts would continue to develop. He asked Kennedy to agree that it was “essential for the peaceful development of the world” that the president recognize communism and capitalism as being the world’s two primary ideologies. Naturally, Khrushchev said, either side would be happy if its ideology spread.

If the summit was going to be decided by which side controlled more of the conversation, Khrushchev had taken a commanding early lead. Nothing in Kennedy’s past had prepared him for Khrushchev’s immovable force. Yet Thompson, who watched with other senior U.S. officials from the sidelines, knew from previous experience that the Soviet leader was just warming up.

“Ideas should not be borne on bayonets or on missile warheads, bayonets now being obsolete,” Khrushchev said. In a war of ideas, he said, Soviet policy would triumph without violent means.

But wasn’t it true, Kennedy said, that “Mao Tse-tung had said that power was at the end of a rifle”? Kennedy had been briefed on growing Sino–Soviet disagreements, and he was probing.

“I don’t believe Mao could have said that,” Khrushchev lied, having experienced himself Mao’s lust for war with the West. He said Mao “was a Marxist, and Marxists are always against war.”

Trying to get back to his agenda of reducing tensions and securing peace, Kennedy said what he wanted to avoid was a miscalculation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that would cause both countries to “lose for a long time to come,” a reference to the long radiation afterlife following a nuclear exchange.

“Miscalculation?”

Khrushchev spat out the word like a terrible taste.

“‘Miscalculation’! ‘Miscalculation’! ‘Miscalculation’! All I ever hear from your people and your news correspondents and your friends in Europe and every place else is that damned word ‘miscalculation.’”

The word was vague, Khrushchev sputtered. What was the meaning of this word, “miscalculation”? He kept repeating the word for effect. Did the president want him “to sit like a schoolboy with hands on top of the desk”? he asked. Khrushchev protested that he could
not
guarantee communist ideas would stop at Soviet borders. Yet, he said, “we will not start a war by mistake…. You ought to take that word ‘miscalculation’ and bury it in cold storage and never use it again.”