An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

  Kennedy’s chief worry about Khrushchev was that after the Bay of Pigs, he would not believe JFK’s resolve on Berlin or anything else. De Gaulle had urged Kennedy to be firm but to understand that the Soviet leader had no intention of going to war over the status of the city: “Khrushchev has been saying and repeating that his prestige is engaged in the Berlin question and that he will have to have a solution of it in six months, and then again in six months and then still in six months. This seems to indicate that Mr. Khrushchev does not want war. If he had wanted war about Berlin he would have acted already.” De Gaulle further said that when he asked Khrushchev if he wanted war, he had replied no. “In that case,” de Gaulle had told him, “do nothing that can bring it about.”

  “For domestic political reasons,” Kennedy had wanted to announce specific subjects on which he and Khrushchev would confer and make progress. Although the Soviets resisted this request, Kennedy decided to go ahead anyway, believing that a summit could reduce differences and help avoid a nuclear war. The State Department encouraged Kennedy’s hopes: “Khrushchev would prefer that the talks end on a note of accord, and may make some conciliatory gestures for this reason,” a background paper advised the president. Ambassador Thompson in Moscow echoed the point: “Believe Khrushchev will wish meeting with President to be pleasant one and that he will desire if possible to make some proposal or take position on some problem which would have effect of improving atmosphere and relations.” Even the Soviets had told him that there was no “unbridgeable gulf” between them.

  George Kennan was less sure. He saw the Soviets in conjunction with the Chinese as primarily intent on shattering America’s “world position and influence” and undermining NATO by a “series of sharp indirect political pressures, ruthless exploitation of colonial issue, and all-out propaganda attack.” Kennan urged Kennedy to tell Khrushchev that “a political program founded on such calculation is not only wholly inconsistent with any attempt to improve international atmosphere” but seemed certain at some point to create a military confrontation beyond anyone’s control. Such an approach represented “a grievous disservice to any efforts to improve world situation” and played into the hands of those who opposed any improvement in Soviet-American relations.

  Initially, Kennedy’s arrival in Vienna and first exchanges with Khrushchev promised to make the summit another public relations triumph for JFK. A tepid turnout for Khrushchev on the afternoon of June 2 as he rode in an open car from the Vienna railway station to the Soviet embassy contrasted with the excited crowds greeting Kennedy the next morning on his route from the airport to the U.S. embassy. Kennedy’s pleasure at the reception registered on Rusk, who sat beside him in the car. “You make a hell of a substitute for Jackie,” the president joked. The placard-waving crowd at the airport gave the feel of a political campaign rally for JFK: “Give ’em hell, Jack,” “Lift the Iron Curtain,” “Innocents Abroad Say Howdy.”

  The first encounter between the two leaders also favored Kennedy. Bounding down the steps of the American embassy, where the first meeting occurred at 12:45 P.M. on June 3, the youthful Kennedy towered over the short, squat sixty-seven-year-old Khrushchev. When photographers asked for more shots of the two shaking hands as they turned to go inside, Kennedy seized the initiative: “Tell the Chairman,” he said to his interpreter, “that it’s all right with me if it’s all right with him.” The smiling Khrushchev agreed. As they were led into the embassy’s music room, where the two seated themselves on a rose-colored sofa, Khrushchev bantered with the president, who, as the morning’s host, expressed pleasure at seeing the chairman and recalled a 1959 meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where they had met. Kennedy expressed the hope that a better understanding of the problems confronting the two nations would emerge from the meeting. Khrushchev also “wished the conversation to be useful,” but he picked up on Kennedy’s recollection of their first meeting to score a point against the president: Khrushchev remembered him as “a young and promising man in politics.” Eager to mute the differences between them in age and experience, JFK replied, “He must have aged since then.” Reflecting on how the young want to look older and older people want to look younger, Khrushchev said that “he would be happy to share his years with the President or change places with him.”

  Moving to a large table for their more formal conversation, Khrushchev turned what Kennedy had hoped might be a discussion of current issues into a philosophical debate about the virtues of their respective systems. Kennedy began the exchange by suggesting that they needed to find “ways and means of not permitting situations where the two countries would be committed to actions involving their security or endangering peace.” In response, Khrushchev seized on Kennedy’s friendly, essentially innocuous opening to begin a hectoring attack on America’s past failures to advance Soviet-American friendship, emphasizing that the United States wanted to reach agreements with Moscow that would be “at the expense of other peoples.” He would not agree to this, Khrushchev said. He also emphasized that there was no inherent conflict of economic interests between the U.S. and the USSR, and though the Soviet Union intended to eclipse America economically, it had no intention of standing “in the way of U.S. economic development.” Kennedy, who had not yet realized the extent to which Khrushchev was intent on beating up on him, answered Khrushchev’s insupportable claims by remarking how the Soviet growth rate had impressed him and “that this was surely a source of satisfaction to Mr. Khrushchev, as it was to us.”

  Khrushchev ignored Kennedy’s polite affirmation of what JFK knew were false assertions to complain about America’s anti-Soviet policies. He asserted that Eisenhower secretary of state John Foster Dulles had aimed to liquidate communism and that good relations between the two countries depended on a mutual acceptance of each other’s systems. Kennedy, now rising to the challenge, declared that it was not the United States that was unsettling the global balance of power or seeking to overturn existing spheres of control but the Soviet Union. “This is a matter of very serious concern to us,” Kennedy said. Kennedy’s rejoinder seemed to incense Khrushchev or give him an excuse to follow through with his planned assault on the president. He disputed the assertion that Moscow aimed to impose its will on any country. Communism would triumph, he said, because history was on its side. Kennedy retorted that Americans did not share the chairman’s view of an inevitable communist victory. But, trying to move the discussion back to current realities, Kennedy said that the problem was to find means of averting conflict in areas where the two sides had clashing interests.

  Khrushchev acknowledged JFK’s point but reverted to arguing that they faced a contest of ideas that communism would win. When Kennedy tried to restate the point that the clash of ideas should not produce a conflict of interests that could lead to a military confrontation, Khrushchev asked him if he was suggesting that any expansion of communist influence would be seen as a reason for Soviet-American conflict. Before Kennedy could answer, Khrushchev dismissed the president’s view that the spread of communist ideology would threaten the peace. When Kennedy again tried to divert Khrushchev from his philosophical ruminations to worries he had about international “miscalculations,” the chairman contemptuously dismissed the talk of “miscalculation” as an excuse for getting the “USSR to sit like a schoolboy with his hands on his desk.” Talk of “miscalculation” was a means of trying to intimidate the Soviet Union and inhibit it from freely voicing ideas that would outstrip those advocated by the United States. After Kennedy countered by giving an example of miscalculation—the U.S. failure to anticipate Chinese intervention in the Korean war—Khrushchev conceded that their purpose was not to worsen but to improve relations.

  The atmosphere eased a bit at lunch. When Kennedy asked about two medals on Khrushchev’s jacket, he described them as Lenin Peace Prizes. “I hope you get to keep them,” Kennedy answered. Khrushchev joined in the laughter, and Salinger had the sort of delightful anecdote for the press that adde
d to the Paris image of the president as poised and quick-witted.

  During the meal, Khrushchev alternated between being pleasant and combative, purposely encouraging impressions of himself as erratic and maybe dangerous—the leader of a country convinced it could outdo the United States in peace and war, if necessary. Exchanges about Soviet space gains brought a Kennedy suggestion that they might go to the moon together. Caught off guard, Khrushchev commented on the military advantages attached to space travel and then added weakly, “All right, why not?” Khrushchev advised Kennedy that he had voted for him by not releasing the RB-47 fliers until after the election and made fun of Nixon, bringing smiles to everyone’s face when he declared that a lot of people thought that the dour-looking Andrey Gromyko resembled the former vice president. Khrushchev followed a brief, gracious Kennedy toast with a rambling performance marked by professions of Soviet desire for peace, expressions of regard for Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the American people, additional harsh words about Nixon, denials that Moscow was responsible for communist insurgencies in other countries, and assertions of his readiness for a continuing competition with the much younger American president.

  During a stroll in the garden after lunch, Kennedy tried to establish greater rapport with Khrushchev. But the Soviet premier was unrelenting. O’Donnell and Powers watched them from an upstairs embassy window: “Khrushchev was carrying on a heated argument, circling around Kennedy and snapping at him like a terrier and shaking his finger.” Later, while an exhausted Kennedy soaked in a tub, Powers said, “You seemed pretty calm while he was giving you a hard time out there.” They had been arguing over Germany and Berlin. “What did you expect me to do?” Kennedy said with some exasperation. “Take off one of my shoes and hit him over the head with it?” Eager to end their stroll on a more positive note, Kennedy asked how the chairman found time to hold prolonged, uninterrupted meetings with American visitors. Khrushchev, still looking to score points, described a system of shared power that freed him from distractions. When Kennedy complained that the American governmental system imposed on him a “time-consuming process,” Khrushchev shot back: “Well, why don’t you switch to our system?”

  The afternoon’s formal conversations produced more sparring and antagonism. Kennedy began the second round of talks by coming back to his concern that the present competition between the U.S. and the USSR not lead to war. He tried to clarify what he meant by “miscalculation.” He had made a “misjudgment” over Cuba, he acknowledged. It was essential that their discussions “introduce greater precision in these judgments so that our two countries could survive this period of competition without endangering their national security.” Although Khrushchev agreed that this was a good idea, he seized upon Kennedy’s admission of a mistake as an expression of weakness. He attacked the United States for seeing people’s revolutions as communist plots. This was dangerous, he said, because the Soviets were on the side of anticolonialism not for self-serving reasons but out of an understanding that these were “holy wars.” The United States, which had once sided with democratic revolutions, now favored the status quo and mistakenly, as in Cuba, tried to suppress the aspirations of the people and threaten Moscow with war when it objected to U.S. imperialism. Moscow, by contrast, Khrushchev asserted, wanted only to keep the peace. Kennedy replied that America ruled out war for the simple reason that the current balance of military power between East and West meant that both sides would be losers in a nuclear conflict.

  Kennedy’s admission of Soviet strength equal to that of the United States exhilarated Khrushchev, who took it as another reason to press the case for superior Soviet morality in international affairs and greater devotion to democratic hopes and world peace. After the afternoon meeting ended, Khrushchev told his comrades about JFK: “He’s very young . . . not strong enough. Too intelligent and too weak.” Khrushchev’s gamble—that he should take advantage of the USSR’s current prestige (the result of its perceived missile superiority, the rise of procommunist insurgencies in Asia and Africa, Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs failure, and the success of the Soviet space program) and attack his American counterpart—seemed to be paying off. Khrushchev believed that if he bested JFK at the Vienna summit, it would undermine U.S. political standing. He had not come to negotiate. He had come to compete.

  The afternoon meeting had ended on an ominous note. When Kennedy suggested that they discuss nuclear tests, disarmament, and Germany later that evening over dinner or the next day, Khrushchev said that he intended “to connect the questions of nuclear tests and disarmament.” The main problem with Germany was the need for a peace treaty, which he hoped both countries could sign. “This 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.”

  Khrushchev’s behavior irritated and frustrated Kennedy. A British journalist who saw him as he escorted Khrushchev to his car thought he looked “dazed.” Pacing the floor of his bedroom in the embassy, he exclaimed, “He treated me like a little boy, like a little boy.” He asked Llewellyn Thompson, “Is it always like this?” The ambassador replied, “Par for the course.” Bohlen thought that the president was “a little depressed.” And though he tried to comfort him by declaring that “the Soviets always talk tough,” he believed that Kennedy had gotten “a little bit out of his depth” by being drawn into an ideological debate. Kennan thought that Khrushchev had tied the president in knots and that Kennedy appeared hesitant and overwhelmed. Kennedy himself may have wondered what Harriman could possibly have meant when he used the word fun.

  A long day under much tension certainly accounts for most of Kennedy’s weariness by the early evening, but we cannot discount the impact of the Jacobson chemicals on him as well. As the day wore on and an injection Jacobson had given him just before he met Khrushchev in the early afternoon wore off, Kennedy may have lost the emotional and physical edge initially provided by the shot. But more important than Kennedy’s energy level was the fundamental difference in approach that each leader brought to the summit. Kennedy’s eagerness to be reasonable and encourage understanding was no match for Khrushchev’s determination to debate and outargue the less experienced president.

  In any case, it was clear that Khrushchev had won the first day’s debate. But to what end? It was absurd for Khrushchev to believe that scoring points against his younger opponent would do anything but stiffen Kennedy’s resolve to meet the communist challenge. Khrushchev may have believed his own rhetoric about Soviet ascendancy over the United States and been unable to resist bragging about it. In response to pressure from comrades in the Kremlin and Chinese efforts to supplant Moscow as the leader of international communism, Khrushchev felt compelled to act more like an aggressive advocate than a conciliator. As Kennan had accurately foreseen, a principal object of the summit for Khrushchev was to sustain Moscow’s momentum at the expense of the United States without driving Washington into a war. But Khrushchev’s actions were miserably shortsighted.

  Today, perhaps, we can have some sympathy for Khrushchev’s dilemma. He presided over an ineffective economic system that had shown little room for improvement. In the long run, there was no escape from accepting the failings of Soviet communism, as Mikhail Gorbachev would understand thirty years later. But in 1961, Khrushchev could not see that far ahead; nor could he discount the possibility that a tough approach to the Americans might intimidate them into selling out Germany and even Western Europe, as de Gaulle feared, to save the United States and the world from nuclear destruction.

  Although Khrushchev was principally responsible for the abrasive tone of the proceedings, no one should see Kennedy as blameless. True, he struck several conciliatory notes in the talks, admitting mistakes in Cuban and Asian policies and placating Soviet amour propre by conceding the equality of their armed might. But he was as intent on the competition for international prestige as the Soviets. It was common knowledge that the president regularly monitored United States Information
Agency (USIA) polls on international opinion toward the U.S. and the USSR. His rhetoric at his Inauguration and in his May address to Congress left no doubt that the new president, if anything, would be more aggressive about asserting U.S. global influence and power than the more mature and secure Eisenhower had been. But however one distributes blame for the harsh Khrushchev-Kennedy exchanges, they marked an unwise escalation in the Cold War, which the talks had been meant to ease.

  Concerned not to impress himself on the Americans and international opinion as simply a scold defending national and ideological interests, Khrushchev tried to produce a charm offensive during a formal dinner party at the Schönbrunn Palace, a seventeenth-century country estate built by the Hapsburgs. But he only went so far: Refusing to wear black tie, Khrushchev and his entourage thumbed their noses at Western imperial decadence by dressing in business suits. Nina Petrovna, Khrushchev’s wife, a matronly woman wearing no makeup, impressed Rose Kennedy, who attended the dinner, as someone who could serve in an American household as an entirely reliable baby-sitter. Sitting next to Jacqueline Kennedy, Khrushchev regaled her with gags and stories that made her feel as if she were watching an Abbott and Costello movie. When Khrushchev, turning serious, tried to educate her on the greater number of teachers per capita currently in the Ukraine than in the tsar’s time, Jacqueline admonished him, “‘Oh, Mr. Chairman, don’t bore me with statistics’—and he suddenly laughed and became for a moment almost cozy.”