Leaders

by Richard Nixon

  Khrushchev then complained that I was opposed to his visit and was trying my best to spoil his welcome, pointing to one of my recent speeches as evidence. “After having read that speech,” he said, “I am surprised to find on arriving here that people in the United States welcome us with such tolerance and obvious friendliness. In the Soviet Union there would have been no welcome whatsoever if I had, in advance, publicly spoken against the visitor.” I reminded him of the vitriolic attacks he had made on me in speeches upon my arrival in Moscow. Khrushchev claimed that mine were worse and then asked Eisenhower to be the referee in deciding whose speech had been more provocative. Eisenhower and I signaled to each other that matters would be better off if they were alone, and I soon found an excuse to leave.

  When we were planning Khrushchev’s tour around the United States, I felt it was imperative that his escort be someone who could effectively answer the outlandish attacks that Khrushchev was bound to make on our policies. Eisenhower enthusiastically agreed with my recommendation that our Ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge, was the best man for the job. He was a skillful diplomatic speaker who had handled himself well in East-West debates in the United Nations, and he had a sufficiently high rank to act as Khrushchev’s official escort. Lodge did a highly effective job. At almost every stop he was called on to blunt one of Khrushchev’s arrogant statements, and he did this in a hard-hitting but always courteous manner.

  After his tour was over, Lodge told me that Khrushchev was the “Harry Truman of the Soviet Union.” While both men were simple, direct, and earthy, I am sure that neither would have appreciated the comparison. Lodge felt that Khrushchev had received a real education during his cross-country trip. He told me the Soviet leader’s lower jaw hung open when he saw the thousands of workers’ automobiles in the parking lots of California factories and the tremendous productivity of the cornfields of Iowa. It is no wonder that after his visit he warned Mao that the United States was not a paper tiger.

  After Khrushchev’s tour of the country, he and Eisenhower went to Camp David to try to hammer out some agreements on bilateral issues. Eisenhower asked me to sit in on the conference’s first plenary session in the living room of Aspen Lodge. Khrushchev, who clearly had no intention of reaching any agreements, quickly zeroed in on me. Looking directly at me, he said that many members of the Eisenhower administration wanted to improve relations with the Soviet Union, but that others hoped to continue a policy of confrontation. The implications of his unbroken stare were unmistakable, but he gave me no reason to respond. Therefore Eisenhower broke in to say that he believed that his administration was united behind the current foreign policy.

  Khrushchev’s uniquely Russian sense of inferiority and his obsession about Soviet prestige made him constantly see slights to his honor where none could have possibly been intended. At the luncheon following the plenary session, I tried to lighten up the conversation by asking Khrushchev about his vacation preferences. He said that he liked to go swimming in the Black Sea or hunting in the country. Eisenhower remarked that he liked to get away for fishing and golf, but that he found it difficult to escape the constant interruptions of phone calls. After hearing the translation, Khrushchev took umbrage, saying, “We have telephones in the Soviet Union too. As a matter of fact, we will soon have more than you have in the United States.” Eisenhower, who realized that his guest was serious, could hardly suppress his smile.

  After the lunch Eisenhower and I agreed that I should return to Washington in the hope that with me out of the picture, he and Khrushchev might have some constructive talks. The President did his best to win over the Soviet leader with his reasonable attitude and contagious charm. But Khrushchev was feeling cocky about the recent Soviet successes in space exploration and needled Eisenhower more than he negotiated with him. By the time Eisenhower concluded his discussions with Khrushchev, the President recognized that all the toasts, dinners, and nice diplomatic talk in the world would not budge Khrushchev an inch on the adamant positions he was taking. Khrushchev at least learned, however, that beneath Eisenhower’s outward geniality was a man of steel.

  The last time I saw Khrushchev was at the reception he gave at the Soviet embassy shortly before returning home. I told him that I believed his visit had gone well and that he had received a very courteous and often very warm welcome. He indignantly snapped back, “If it has gone well, it isn’t because you wanted it to. From the reports I have had, you wanted the visit to be a failure.”

  • • •

  I sensed that there might be purpose behind this continual belligerency. Khrushchev was aware that a presidential election was coming in 1960 and that I was probably going to be a candidate. The surge in my popularity following the “kitchen debate” obviously galled Khrushchev. The way he fought back is a tribute to his skill.

  First of all, he tried to undermine the reputation of the Eisenhower administration. He was right in concluding that he could affect my popularity through Eisenhower’s. If the American people believed the President could make progress in relations with the Soviet Union, he must have reasoned, they would see his chosen successor as their best bet. If the President appeared ineffective, the American people might reject me. When his military shot down an American U-2 spy plane over Russia in 1960, he aborted the four-power Paris Conference and shamelessly exploited the incident to try to make Eisenhower look like a fool. It obviously served his interest to embarrass the United States, but he was also not one to pass up an opportunity to damage an adversary’s electoral chances.

  Some may argue that Khrushchev was genuinely upset by the violation of Soviet airspace. But except for the U-2 incident, I cannot remember his ever adopting the sanctimonious hypocrisy that the Soviet Union did not engage in espionage. During the lunch at his dacha in 1959, he whispered to me that he had acquired a copy of the “United States Operational Plans for War” and that he suspected our spies had obtained the Soviet plans as well. He even joked about espionage. During the White House dinner in Khrushchev’s honor in 1959, he was introduced to Allen Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Khrushchev quipped that “I read the same reports you do” and then proposed that our two countries save money by combining intelligence networks “so we don’t have to pay twice for the same information.” I could not resist the temptation to introduce the Soviet leader to J. Edgar Hoover. Upon hearing Hoover’s name, Khrushchev, with a leer in his eyes, said, “I imagine that we know some of the same people.”

  His perpetual bellicosity toward me also served a purpose. He made sure the press heard of the antagonism between us, and soon many stories appeared about how “Khrushchev just doesn’t like Nixon.” These stories had the intended result. Shortly before the election, Mrs. Christian Herter, the wife of the Secretary of State, urged me to do something about them. She said her friends were telling her that they might vote for Kennedy because he could “get along” with Khrushchev, whereas I could not. After the election Khrushchev openly bragged to newsmen that he had done everything within his power to contribute to my defeat. Years later he even claimed to have told Kennedy, “We made you President.”

  Whether Khrushchev’s strategy actually helped Kennedy and harmed me is a matter of speculation. But in an election as close as that of 1960, small numbers of votes could have made a big difference in the outcome. And almost all observers agreed that Khrushchev’s actions did not help me, and they certainly were not intended to.

  • • •

  Khrushchev’s foreign policy could be as subtle as his meddling in American politics or as straightforward as a division of Soviet armor. His goal—world conquest—remained constant, inspired as much by his Russian heritage as by his Communist ideology. As Konrad Adenauer told me, “There’s no question but that Khrushchev wants to rule the world. But he does not want war. He does not want a world of ruined cities and dead bodies.”

  Khrushchev paraded around the world under the banner of “peaceful coexistence,�
� but the sincerity of his desire for peace was always dubious. Ambassador Charles Bohlen once told me that, after the Geneva Conference in 1955, many American officials were greatly mistaken in believing that Khrushchev was “sincere” in his desire for peace. I asked if this meant Khrushchev did not want peace.

  “That isn’t the question,” he replied. “Khrushchev wants the world. But he knows the consequences of modern war as well as we do. He wants to accomplish his objective without war. In that sense he wants peace. The mistake is saying he is sincere. We are idealists. They are materialists.” Pointing at a coffee table in front of us, he added, “You can no more describe Khrushchev or any other Communist as being sincere than you can describe that coffee table as being sincere. He is for peace not because he is sincere but because he believes that his objective, world conquest, can best be furthered without war—at this time.”

  Perhaps the best explanation of Khrushchev’s doctrine of peaceful coexistence came in my last meeting with John Foster Dulles, four days before he died of cancer. I was preparing for my trip to the Soviet Union in 1959, and I went to Dulles’s bedside in Walter Reed Hospital to seek his counsel. I told him that a number of people had urged that I try to convince Khrushchev that we had no aggressive designs on the Soviet Union and that we sincerely wanted peace. I asked him what point he believed I should emphasize to Khrushchev above all others.

  Dulles usually paused to think about an answer before starting to speak. This time he waited longer than usual. He then said, “Khrushchev does not need to be convinced of our good intentions. He knows we are not aggressors and do not threaten the security of the Soviet Union. He understands us. But what he needs to know is that we also understand him. In saying that he is for peaceful competition, he really means competition between his system and ours only in our world, not in his. The peaceful coexistence which he advocates represents peace for the Communist world and constant strife and conflict for the non-Communist world.”

  Probably no other comment I have ever heard captured quite so trenchantly the nature of Khrushchev’s policy of “peaceful coexistence.” He zealously played the game of power politics in the free world, but considered the countries of the Communist bloc to be strictly out of bounds. The rules of Khrushchev’s game were fundamentally unfair, but unfortunately he had the military might to enforce this self-proclaimed rule.

  • • •

  Khrushchev’s bombast covered but did not conceal a pervasive sense of insecurity. But that self-uncertainty was also peculiarly Russian, with antecedents in the days when Peter the Great opened up Russia to Europe, only to demonstrate that his nation was centuries behind in virtually every area. The Russians have been trying to catch up ever since.

  British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had told me before my trip that Khrushchev took a particular pride in showing off Russian state treasures, especially the jewels and gold of the czars. Macmillan sensed that Khrushchev desperately wanted to be “admitted to the club”—accepted and respected as a major world figure in his own right and not simply because he controlled the great military power of the Soviet Union. We agreed that he should be admitted into “the club,” but only if he agreed to abide by the rules.

  Khrushchev and his successor, Brezhnev, have gone a long way toward making Russia a truly European country. It could be said that Stalin, like Mao, was basically a nationalist, and that Khrushchev, like Zhou, was an internationalist. Stalin rarely left the Soviet Union, but Khrushchev was a world traveler, taking fifty-two journeys abroad in his eleven years in power. Stalin was an Asian despot looking east, but Khrushchev and Brezhnev both looked to the West. In his discussions with me about China, Brezhnev often would lean toward me and say in a low voice, as if we were confidants, “We Europeans must join together in building barriers against potential Chinese aggression.”

  I think that much of Khrushchev’s attraction to the West resulted from his enormous respect for its economic success. He desperately wanted economic progress for the poverty-stricken Soviet people. He also knew that without this progress his goal of world domination would be a pipe dream. But while he wanted western progress, he insisted on retaining Communist policies. The two are simply irreconcilable, as he discovered when he tried to incorporate western economic ideas into the rigid Soviet ideological system. He wanted the progress of the West, without its ideas. As a result, he got neither.

  • • •

  Khrushchev’s political career ended with an abruptness matched only by his personal style. In October 1964, shortly before the launching of a three-man crew at the Baikonour space center, Khrushchev telephoned the cosmonauts to wish them good luck and tell them of the grand welcome he was preparing for their return. After Khrushchev hung up, Leonid Brezhnev also called the crew to wish them luck, an unprecedented act for a Khrushchev subordinate.

  Midway through the spaceflight, Khrushchev talked to the cosmonauts in the Voskhod spaceship by radiotelephone. He signed off with strangely prophetic words: “Here is Comrade Mikoyan. He is literally pulling the telephone from my hands. I don’t think I can stop him.” When the three cosmonauts returned from their seven-day flight, Khrushchev was conspicuously absent from the festivities. He had been ousted into the oblivion of the pensioner’s life of a disgraced politician.

  There were two basic reasons why Khrushchev’s colleagues deposed him. First, even though almost all of them owed their success to him, they were increasingly uncomfortable with his erratic, unpredictable management of the country. Whenever Stalin adopted a dramatic new set of policies, he wiped the slate clean of all those who had supported the old ones. Khrushchev’s own purges lacked the finality of those he himself had helped to carry out for Stalin. Party bureaucrats might lose their standing but rarely lost their heads. “In the end,” observed Soviet expert Robert Conquest, “he antagonized his subordinates without sufficiently terrorizing them, a fatal lapse.”

  Second, the Russian leadership was simply ashamed of him. His clowning and his insulting of foreign guests amused them for a while and delighted the hierarchy for a time. But the Russians, with their deep sense of inferiority, wanted acceptance on the international scene. Khrushchev, as several Soviet officials implied to me during our summit meetings, was seen as tarnishing their prestige. “Thank God we’re rid of that idiot,” one Soviet diplomat said when he heard of Khrushchev’s ouster. “He was making us look like fools all over the world.”

  From absolute leadership of the second most powerful nation in the world, he was reduced to the status of what the Soviets call a “nonperson.” Khrushchev lived under perpetual house arrest, confined to his nondescript apartment or modest country residence except for brief and closely supervised auto trips. Being out of power was difficult for many great leaders, but for Khrushchev it was a fate almost worse than death. When he appeared in public occasionally, it was obvious that the pensioner’s life was torture for him. He had lost his electric dynamism; his eyes had lost their sparkle. His voice was little more than a whisper, trailing off to nothing before he completed his sentences.

  While I was in Moscow on a personal trip in 1965, I was having dinner with my two Soviet guides when a Canadian newspaperman suggested I call on Khrushchev at his apartment. My guides were supposed to stay with me at all times. But I told them I was going to the men’s room, and my Canadian friend and I slipped out the back door and took a cab to the shabby apartment house where Khrushchev lived. When we arrived, two big, burly women barred the door. One had a pail of water in one hand and a mop in the other. I asked if I could see Khrushchev. She answered through my friend, who was acting as my translator, “He’s not here. I don’t know where he is.” As far as she was concerned, he could have been on the moon with his Lunik.

  I left a handwritten note for him, saying that I hoped someday we would meet again. I assumed that he probably never received it. Years later, after his death in 1971, I learned that Khrushchev had been told of my attempt to see him and that he regretted very much
having missed me.

  • • •

  While Khrushchev and I were engaged in our heated “kitchen debate,” I felt someone bump into me as he pushed through the crowd to take a spot along the railing separating the kitchen from the hallway. I glanced at him momentarily as he listened attentively to the debate. He reacted to our exchange only once. He nodded his head vigorously when Khrushchev shouted, “We, too, are giants.” I did not think twice about him at the time. But the man’s name, I would later learn, was Leonid Brezhnev. Thirteen years later we met again—not in another chance encounter, but in a summit conference as leaders of the two most powerful nations in the world.

  Brezhnev greeted me in the same Kremlin office where I had first met Khrushchev. He was cordial as we shook hands. His square, wide face with its icy blue eyes was impassive except for a fixed and rather wary smile. Just as Khrushchev had done, he gestured for me to take a seat opposite him at a long table at one side of the room. He then began by complaining about our actions in Vietnam, but he spoke in an almost perfunctory manner. He warmed perceptively after this pro forma statement. He said it was necessary for us to develop a personal relationship like the one between Roosevelt and Stalin during World War II.

  I said that after studying the history of the relationships between the Allied leaders, I found that during the war disagreements between lower-level officials were often overcome by agreements at the top. “That is the kind of relationship that I should like to establish with the General Secretary,” I added.

  “I would be only too happy, and I am perfectly ready on my side,” he responded with obvious delight. I then remarked that if we left all the decisions to the bureaucrats, we would never resolve anything. “They would simply bury us in paper!” he replied, laughing heartily and slapping his palm on the table. On that pleasant, hopeful note—a stark contrast to my first meeting with Khrushchev—we ended our first, brief encounter.