Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  His trip had nearly ended on his first day in California, when Khrushchev struck back at conservative Los Angeles Mayor Norris Poulson during a late-night speech at a star-studded banquet. Looking to score domestic political points, the mayor had refused the appeal of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.—the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and Khrushchev’s companion throughout the trip—that he remove anticommunist lines that the Soviet leader would find offensive. “It took us only twelve hours to get here,” Khrushchev said in response, asking that his plane be prepared for departure. “Perhaps it will take us even less time to get back.”

  The climactic Camp David meeting began badly, as Khrushchev and Eisenhower engaged in two days of acrimonious talks over everything from the threat of nuclear war (Khrushchev said he didn’t fear it) to discriminatory rules on what technology Americans could sell Moscow (Khrushchev sneered that he didn’t need low-tech U.S. help to make shoes or sausages). Eisenhower prevented a breakdown in talks when he flew his guest by helicopter to his Gettysburg ranch and presented him with one of his cattle as a gift. In return, Khrushchev invited Eisenhower and his grandchildren to visit the Soviet Union.

  The following morning, Khrushchev agreed to abandon his Berlin ultimatum of the previous year in exchange for Eisenhower’s commitment that he would enter talks on Berlin’s status with the aim of achieving a solution that would satisfy all parties.

  With unusual candor, Khrushchev shared with Eisenhower that he had only issued a Berlin ultimatum as “the result of the high-handed attitude of the U.S. toward the USSR, which had led the Soviets to think that there was no alternative.” He said he needed a disarmament agreement with the U.S., as it was hard enough to feed his country without having to bear the costs of an arms race. The two men then compared notes about how their military establishments were pushing them each toward ever larger arms purchases, always blaming the aggressive posture of the other country.

  Talks nearly collapsed again when Khrushchev insisted on a joint communiqué to capture their agreement on Berlin negotiations, but demanded the U.S. side take out language that “there would be no time limit on them.” After a difficult exchange, Eisenhower accepted Khrushchev’s terms as long as he could mention at their joint press conference the Soviet leader’s agreement to abandon his Berlin ultimatum, which Khrushchev would confirm if the media asked.

  For his part, Eisenhower agreed to what Khrushchev had most wanted: a four-power Paris Summit on Berlin and disarmament issues. For Khrushchev, the agreement immunized him against critics who argued his “peaceful coexistence” policy toward the West had been without result—and provided incontrovertible proof that his course was improving the Soviet Union’s global standing.

  Elated by the U.S. trip and the prospect of a summit, Khrushchev preemptively cut Soviet armed forces by a further 1.2 million men in December, the largest-percentage reduction since the 1920s. Reports that France’s Charles de Gaulle and West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer were rolling back Eisenhower’s willingness to negotiate Berlin’s status did not dampen Khrushchev’s self-congratulatory optimism.

  SVERDLOVSK, SOVIET UNION

  SUNDAY, MAY 1, 1960

  Just eight months after his American journey, what Khrushchev heralded as the “spirit of Camp David” exploded over Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains when a Soviet surface-to-air missile brought down a spy plane.

  Initially, Khrushchev celebrated the incident as a triumph of Soviet anti aircraft technology and a change of luck. As recently as three weeks earlier, his air defense forces had failed to bring down the advanced, high-altitude CIA plane even though the Soviets knew exactly where it was flying. While in pursuit on that earlier occasion, a MiG-19 Soviet fighter had crashed in Semipalatinsk near a secret nuclear testing site that the U-2 plane was photographing. Two newly developed high-altitude interceptors also could not catch up to the U-2 as it collected images of the Tyumatom ballistic missile site.

  Up until that point, a frustrated Khrushchev had kept the U.S. intrusions secret from the world so as to avoid having to admit Soviet military failure. Now that his forces had shot down the U-2, he gleefully toyed with the Americans by saying nothing about the incident while the CIA put out a false cover story—one it would later be forced to withdraw with embarrassment—that a weather plane had gone missing over Turkey.

  Within days, however, Khrushchev recognized that the U-2 incident posed greater dangers to him than to the Americans. Political enemies whom he had neutralized after putting down the 1957 coup against him began to regroup. Mao Tse-tung publicly condemned Khrushchev’s wooing of the Americans as “communist betrayal.” Though still speaking privately, Soviet party officials and military brass more confidently questioned Khrushchev’s troop reductions. They argued that Khrushchev was undermining their ability to defend the homeland.

  Years later, Khrushchev would concede to the American physician A. McGhee Harvey, a specialist who was treating his daughter, that the U-2 incident proved to be the watershed event after which he “was no longer in full control.” From that point forward, Khrushchev found it harder to defend himself against those who argued that he was too weak in the face of the militaristic and imperialist intentions of duplicitous Americans.

  At first, Khrushchev tried to keep on track the Paris Summit that was scheduled to occur two weeks after the U-2 event—a meeting that he had worked so hard to organize as a crowning moment of his rule. Khrushchev told domestic critics that if they pulled out, they would only be rewarding U.S. hard-liners like CIA chief Allen Dulles, who, he argued, had ordered the flights to undermine Eisenhower’s genuine peace efforts.

  Eisenhower removed Khrushchev’s last political cover at a press conference on May 11, just five days ahead of the summit. To reassure Americans that their government had acted responsibly and under his complete control, Eisenhower said he had personally approved Gary Powers’s U-2 flight—as he had with each and every one of the sensitive missions. Such risks were necessary, he said, because Soviet secrecy made it impossible to assess Moscow’s intentions and capabilities through any other means. “We are getting to the point where we must decide whether we are trying to prepare to fight a war or prevent one,” he told his national security team.

  By the time he landed in Paris, Khrushchev had concluded that if he couldn’t get a public apology from Eisenhower, he would have to prompt the collapse of the Paris talks. It was politically safer for him to abandon the summit than to go ahead with a meeting that was destined to fail, and by then it also was clear the U.S. would offer none of the concessions he was seeking on Berlin.

  Though Eisenhower refused to apologize in Paris for the U-2 mission, he tried to avoid a summit collapse by agreeing to stop the flights. He went an important step further and proposed an “open skies” approach that would allow United Nations planes to monitor both countries with over-flights. Khrushchev, however, could never accept such a proposal because it was only secrecy that protected his exaggerations about Soviet capabilities.

  In what would be the one and only session of the summit, Khrushchev uncharacteristically stuck to the language of a prepared forty-five-minute harangue that proposed a six- to eight-month postponement of the conference so that it would resume only after Eisenhower had left power. He also withdrew his invitation for Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union. Without forewarning the other leaders at the summit, Khrushchev then petulantly refused to attend the second session the following day. He instead retreated with Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky to the French village of Pleurs-sur-Marne—where Malinovsky had stayed during World War II—to drink wine, eat cheese, and talk about women. Well lubricated, the Soviet leader returned to Paris that afternoon to declare the summit’s collapse.

  His crowning public act came during a nearly three-hour farewell press conference at which he slammed his fist so hard on a table that it toppled a bottle of mineral water. Assuming the catcalls that followed came from West German reporters, he called them “fascist bastards we
didn’t finish off at Stalingrad.” He said if they continued to heckle him, he would hit them so hard “there won’t be a squeal out of you.”

  Khrushchev was so unhinged by the time he debriefed Warsaw Pact envoys in Paris that he employed a crude joke in relating to them the outcome of the summit. It concerned the sad story of a Tsarist soldier who could fart the melody to “God Save Russia” but experienced an unfortunate accident when forced to perform the tune under duress. Khrushchev’s punch line was that the ambassadors could report to their governments that his own pressures applied in Paris had similarly made Eisenhower shit in his pants.

  Poland’s ambassador to France, Stanislaw Gaevski, concluded from the session that the Soviet leader “was just a bit unbalanced emotionally.” For the sake of East–West relations, Gaevski wished Khrushchev had never come to Paris.

  For all his theatrics, however, Khrushchev had too much at stake to abandon his course of “peaceful coexistence” with the U.S. He had given up on Eisenhower but not yet on America. Though the U-2 had undermined his summit, he could not let it undercut his rule.

  On his way back to Moscow, Khrushchev stopped in East Berlin, where he replaced his Paris scowl with a peacemaker’s smile. Though originally scheduled to speak to a crowd of 100,000 in Marx-Engels Square, after the Paris debacle East German leaders had moved the event to the safer confines of the indoor Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle, where Khrushchev spoke to a select group of 6,000 communist faithful.

  To the surprise of U.S. diplomats who had expected Khrushchev to escalate the crisis, Khrushchev sounded an unexpected note of patience until the Americans could elect a new president. “In this situation, time is required,” he said, adding that the prospects for a Berlin solution would then “ripen better.”

  Khrushchev then began preparations for his return trip to the U.S. under dramatically changed circumstances.

  ABOARD THE BALTIKA

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1960

  Khrushchev’s damp welcome on a rickety New York dock demonstrated just how much had changed since his grand reception by President Eisenhower at Andrews Air Force Base just a year earlier. Instead of flying to America aboard the Soviets’ most advanced passenger aircraft, which was in the shop for repairs, he had traveled aboard the Baltika, a vintage 1940 German vessel seized as reparations after the war.

  To compensate and send a message of communist solidarity, Khrushchev had drafted as fellow passengers the leaders of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Byelorussia. His mood swings during the voyage were violent. At one point he fought off depression while preoccupied by fears that NATO might sink his unprotected vessel, yet on another occasion he joyously insisted the Ukrainian party boss Nikolai Podgorny entertain fellow passengers by dancing a gopak, a national dance performed with strenuous leg kicks from the squatting position.

  When one of the Soviet sailors jumped ship while approaching the American shore, then sought asylum, Khrushchev shrugged in response, saying, “He’ll find out soon enough how much it costs and what it tastes like in New York.” Other indignities would follow. Khrushchev was received in the harbor by union demonstrators from the International Longshoremen’s Association, who waved huge protest signs from a chartered boat. The most memorable: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, STALIN DROPPED DEAD, HOW ABOUT YOU?

  Khrushchev was infuriated. He had dreamed of arriving like America’s earliest discoverers, whom he had read about as a boy. Instead, the unionist boycott left the Baltika to be moored by its own crew and a handful of unskilled Soviet diplomats on the East River’s dilapidated Pier 73. “So, another dirty trick the Americans are playing on us,” Khrushchev complained.

  The only saving grace was Khrushchev’s control of his home press. Pravda correspondent Gennady Vasiliev filed a story speaking of a happy crowd (there was none) lining the shore on a bright and sunny morning (it was raining).

  None of that dampened the energy Khrushchev would invest in the trip. Speaking before the UN General Assembly, he would unsucessfully demand the resignation of Secretary General Dag Hammerskjöld (who would die the next year in a plane crash in Africa), and be replaced by a troika of a Westerner, a communist, and a nonaligned leader.” On the last day of his stay, in an iconic act that would be history’s primary recollection of the visit, he removed a shoe in protest of a Philippine delegate’s reference to communist captive nations and banged it on his UN table.

  By September 26, only a week into Khrushchev’s trip, the New York Times reported that a nationwide survey showed the Soviet leader had made himself the focal point of the presidential election campaign and had helped make foreign policy the premier concern of U.S. voters. Americans were measuring which of the candidates, Richard Nixon or Senator John F. Kennedy, could best stand up to Khrushchev.

  Khrushchev was determined to use his considerable leverage more wisely than in 1956, when Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin’s praise of the Soviets’ favored candidate, Adlai Stevenson, had helped the winning Eisenhower–Nixon ticket. In public, Khrushchev hedged his bets, saying that both candidates “represent American big business…as we Russians say, they are two boots of the same pair: which is better, the left or the right boot?” When asked whom he favored, he safely said, “Roosevelt.”

  But behind the scenes, he worked toward Nixon’s defeat. As early as January 1960, over vodka, fruit, and caviar, Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Mikhail Menshikov had asked Adlai Stevenson how Moscow might best help him defeat Nixon. Was it better for the Soviet press to praise him or criticize him—and on which topics? Stevenson responded that he did not expect to be a candidate—and he then prayed that news of the Soviet proposition would never leak.

  Yet both parties so deeply recognized Khrushchev’s potential to swing votes, either by design or by accident, that each reached out to him.

  Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who had grown close to Khrushchev during his first U.S. trip, had flown to Moscow in February 1960 to convince the Soviet leader that he could work with Nixon. Lodge, who would become Nixon’s running mate, said, “Once Mr. Nixon is in the White House, I’m sure—I’m absolutely certain—he’ll take a position of preserving and perhaps even improving our relations.” He asked Khrushchev to remain neutral, realizing any endorsement would only cost Nixon votes.

  By autumn, the Eisenhower administration had increased its appeals to Khrushchev to release Gary Powers and the RB-47 airmen who had been shot down over the Arctic. Khrushchev recalled later that he had refused after calculating that the election was so close any such move might have swung the outcome. “As it turned out, we’d done the right thing,” he would say later. Given the margin of victory, he said, “The slightest nudge either way would have been decisive.”

  The Democrats were also at work to influence Khrushchev. W. Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s former ambassador to Moscow, recommended through Ambassador Menshikov that Khrushchev be tough on both candidates. The surest way to elect Nixon was to praise Kennedy in public, he said. The timing of the meeting, less than a month before the election and while Khrushchev was still in the U.S., demonstrated the Democrats’ recognition of Khrushchev’s electoral influence.

  As guarded as he was in public, Khrushchev was explicit with underlings. “We thought we would have more hope of improving Soviet–American relations if John Kennedy were in the White House.” He told colleagues that Nixon’s anticommunism and his connection with “that devil of darkness [Senator Joe] McCarthy, to whom he owed his career,” all meant “we had no reason to welcome the prospect of Nixon as President.”

  Though Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric was hawkish against Moscow, the KGB chalked that up less to conviction than to political expedience and the influence of his anticommunist father, Joe. Khrushchev welcomed Kennedy’s calls for nuclear test ban negotiations and his statement that he would have apologized for the U-2 incursions if he had been president when they occurred. More to the point, Khrushchev believed he could outmaneuver Kennedy, a man whom his for
eign ministry had characterized as “unlikely to possess the qualities of an outstanding person.” The consensus in the Kremlin was that the young man was a lightweight, a product of American privilege who lacked the experience required for leadership.

  The candidates continued to shower attention on Khrushchev as he monitored their campaign from his suite at the Soviet Mission at Sixty-eighth Street and Park Avenue, where he would occasionally appear on the balcony of a turn-of-the-century mansion built originally for the banker Percy Pyne. In the initial Kennedy–Nixon debate in a Chicago TV studio on September 26—the first live-broadcast presidential debate ever—Kennedy’s opening statement before sixty million American viewers spoke directly to Khrushchev’s New York stay and “our struggle with Mr. Khrushchev for survival.”

  Though the debate was to have been about domestic issues, Kennedy worried that the Soviet Union was churning out “twice as many scientists and engineers as we are” while the U.S. continued to underpay its teachers and underfund its schools. He declared that he would do better than Nixon in keeping America ahead of the Soviets in education, health care, home construction, and economic strength.

  During their second debate on foreign policy on October 7 in Washington, D.C., the candidates focused squarely on Khrushchev and Berlin. Kennedy predicted that the next president “in his first year is going to be confronted with a very serious question on our defense of Berlin, our commitment to Berlin. It’s going to be a test of our nerve and will.” He said that President Eisenhower had allowed American strength to erode and that he, if elected, would ask Congress to support a military buildup, because by spring or winter “we’re going to be face-to-face with the most serious Berlin crisis since 1949 or 1950.”

  During the campaign, Adlai Stevenson had counseled Kennedy to avoid discussing Berlin altogether because it would be “difficult to say anything very constructive about the divided city without compromising future negotiations.” So Kennedy had raised Berlin in only half a dozen speeches. Yet before a national television audience the subject was impossible to avoid, particularly after Khrushchev had told United Nations correspondents he wanted the U.S. to join a summit on Berlin’s future shortly after elections—to be followed by a UN General Assembly meeting on the matter in April.