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EXHIBITS
The heads of countries with vastly different political and economic ideologies, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev faced the challenge of maintaining a fragile peace between their two nations in the early 1960s. Any progress towards a resolution to the Cold War, a decades-long ideological struggle and arms buildup between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R, would require successful communication between these two leaders. The stakes were high. As President Kennedy put it, “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness.”
Avoiding such a catastrophe meant understanding the enemy. Kennedy was fascinated by Khrushchev. Kennedy personally knew a wide range of international leaders and luminaries, but Kennedy and Khrushchev met only once in person, at a summit meeting in Vienna, Austria in June, 1961.1 Overall, the meeting was frustrating, unproductive, and characterized by disagreement between the two leaders. Little progress was made on a number of important issues, including restrictions of nuclear arms testing. After the summit ended, James Reston of the New York Times reported the limited success of the meeting, and Kennedy’s “solemn mood” at its conclusion. He noted the “two leaders’ differences on the control of nuclear testing…[and] on the means of controlling disarmament” as two key points of disagreement between Kennedy and Khrushchev.2
Kennedy attempted to make up for his lack of in-person contact with the Soviet Premier by consulting with those who had had recent meetings with him. By merging these accounts and comments about Khrushchev made to Kennedy, it is possible to construct a nuanced portrait of the Soviet leader, and his relationship with the Kennedy administration.
Kennedy and Khrushchev, on the surface, were very different men. Kennedy came from an extremely affluent upbringing, while Khrushchev worked his way up from a modest, working-class background. Age and experience were also key differences between Kennedy, in his mid-40s, and Khrushchev, in his late 60s.
State Department briefings for President Kennedy regarding Khrushchev described the Soviet Premier, among other things, as crude, frank, bold, intelligent, a skilled politician, misleading, hard to read, a gambler, and sensitive.
On April 22, 1963, after a 1962 meeting with Khrushchev, Norman Cousins reported back to Kennedy regarding the Soviet Premier’s physical condition.3 Khrushchev told Cousins:
Listen:
Norman Cousins: In the morning when I get up I have a little exercise, play badminton with my gymnasium teacher, sometimes with my doctor, have a massage, go for a long walk, take a swim in the pool, and then I go out and think a bit, then I come back and I dictate, get tired, go out for a walk again, dictate again, lay down, have a massage. He was in extremely good physical condition. I heard in Moscow that his blood pressure had been troubling. That may well be and I can only say that after 10 or 12 minutes of badminton he didn’t seem unduly out of breath for a 69-year-old man.
From the other side, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko’s briefing for Khrushchev about the relatively unknown Kennedy described the President as cautious, dispassionate, deliberative, energetic, sociable, charming, a good judge of people, yet someone who “while not a mediocrity,” lacked the necessary attributes of originality, philosophical depth and “breadth of perception” to be considered “an outstanding person.”
Khrushchev later noted that, on Kennedy’s inauguration, “we had little knowledge of John Kennedy,” other than that he was “a young man, very promising and very rich—a millionaire … distinguished by his intelligence, his education, and his political skill.”4
The inherently different political systems and philosophies of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were one key factor in communications problems between the two countries, and often led to misunderstandings. Kennedy, Charles Bohlen, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Llewellyn Thompson touched on this issue during a White House meeting on the Soviet Union on September 29, 1962.
Listen:
Charles Bohlen: I think this is one of the things…that Khrushchev has the most distorted picture of the way American democracy or any democracy operates. I think this is one of the great inefficiencies in his whole complex.
Kennedy: Do you think that Khrushchev says all this business about him finding inexplicable congressional action and the de jure power and all the rest because he really does…astonished at that or is it because this is this . . . What?
Bohlen: He probably thinks in the bottom of his heart that you put them up to it.
President Kennedy: Put the Congress . . . [Laughter]
Bohlen: Well, I’m kidding—actually, I’ve always . . . Well, you see, up to very recently, I don’t know whether it’s changed so much now, no Soviet Embassy in this town even bothered to read the Constitution of the United States. I’ve talked to some of them, and they said, “We don’t want [unclear] to read that.” And they literally didn’t understand anything about the operation of our own system and any democratic system because of the main thesis that this is just a flimflam to delude the people.
Thompson: Or they’ll say a different thing. I’ve argued with a lot of them and they’ll say, “Well, the President can’t help with these pressures on him; they’ll force him to do things, even if he doesn’t want to.” So that you get both these images [unclear]—
In a meeting with the president on August 21, 1962, Adlai Stevenson discussed the pressures that the Soviet system placed on Khrushchev as a leader.
Adlai Stevenson: And he [Italian Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani] thought that Khrushchev had nowhere near as much freedom of action as we in the West generally think he has within the Soviet scheme. In the Soviet Union, he points out, there’s no outlet for an opposition party, which makes possible a chance to express these different points of view and that Khrushchev continues under very great pressure.
Lack of understanding between the two countries also manifested itself in terms of American views of the U.S.S.R. Norman Cousins expressed his frustration regarding this issue to Khrushchev.
Listen:
Cousins: I said incidentally, I’m interested in—as I travel around the United States in my lectures—in advancing peaceful relations with your country, but it becomes very difficult for me or others who do so when you keep talking about “I will bury you.” He said, “Once and for all let me make one thing clear.” He said, “I don’t mean that I will bury you, I mean that history will bury you. I mean that history will bury you because Marx is right, and if Marx were alive today he would say that everything that he predicted is now coming about. And the American people themselves will bury their own system.”
The buildup and testing of nuclear weapons was a defining feature of the Cold War, and one which made the significance of achieving agreement between the two nations all the more imperative.
In a meeting on September 10, 1962, between President Kennedy and former President Dwight Eisenhower, Eisenhower described an exchange he had had with Khrushchev regarding the high costs associated with a nuclear conflict.
Listen:
Eisenhower: And I said, “I’ll tell you. I don’t propose to fight a conventional war. If you declare . . . if you bring out war, bring on war of global character…There are going to be no conventional, nothing conventional about it.” And I told him flatly. And he said, “Well,” he said, “That’s a relief. Neither one of us can afford it.” “Yes,” I said that, and I said, “OK, so I agree to that, too.” [Laughing]
In reality, the threat of nuclear conflict remained a primary concern for Kennedy throughout his administration, and the idea of a nuclear test ban treaty was one way he addressed this issue. Kennedy himself was strongly in favor of a comprehensive test ban treaty in order to stop the threat of nuclear proliferation. He faced strong domestic opposition, however, from those who believed a test ban treaty would discourage scientists from working in government laboratories, or that a test ban was unenforceable. Undeniably, the enforcement of such a treaty did raise a number of issues, such as what types of arms inspections to allow and how often inspections would take place. For his part, Khrushchev remained opposed to any foreign arms inspection on Soviet soil.
A number of Khrushchev’s aforementioned personality traits can also be linked with difficulties in relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, not the least of which was Khrushchev’s acute sensitivity. One main source of distrust for Khrushchev regarding the United States government was the U-2 episode of May, 1960, in which an American U-2 plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. Although President Eisenhower initially denied that the U-2 was a spy plane, he was eventually forced to admit that it was when the Soviets revealed they had the pilot in their custody. The event caused Khrushchev to cancel a planned summit meeting with the U.S., Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The impact of this U-2 episode can be seen in comments that Khrushchev made to Norman Cousins regarding his reluctance to agree to arms inspections.
Listen:
Cousins: What, what happened? He said, I ran into considerable opposition at the time. I was told that this would weaken my position inside the Communist world, I was told, too, that if I proposed three the Americans would change and ask for six and I was told that this could be a U-2 episode all over again. I was reminded of the fact that I said I trust Eisenhower, he didn’t know about it, I would give Eisenhower an out, Eisenhower humiliated me. In any event, once again I put the full weight of my, of my prestige on the Council of Ministers. I got them to accept, but the next thing I knew, things changed. So he said it was a humiliating experience for me, a very, very deep humiliating experience for me, it’s not going to happen again.”
Khrushchev’s characteristic stubbornness also often got in the way of negotiations, including those regarding arms inspections. During an August 1, 1962 meeting on a nuclear test ban, Robert Lovett, former Under Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense commented on the difficulties of negotiating with the Soviet Union.
Listen:
Lovett: . . . the Soviets have consistently said they will permit no inspection, no verification of any sort. I read the quotation from Khrushchev which was two weeks ago. And [Andrei] Gromyko and Zorin have consistently taken his position. Now, if they say, “none at all” and then we go over there and then say, “Well, will you consider 10, 13, 20, 6?” . . . whatever it may be, it seems to me that they will continue to say no while we have given rather important evidence . . .
Norman Cousins also recognized Khrushchev’s stubbornness as an obstacle towards nuclear test ban negotiations.
Listen:
Cousins: I said but surely there are other places, or other ways of communicating, and other ways of getting together if you, if you want to get together. He said no, he said, you’ve got to take my word for it. He [Khrushchev] said, I went as far as I can go, this is the end of the line for me, those were his words, this is the end of the line for me… I said well, Mr. Chairman, you’ve broken my heart… If this thing, if this opportunity is missed, there may never be another. He said, “That’s right.” He said, “Maybe not for 20 years. Maybe we’ll go on for 20 years this way, but tell the President I tried. As for your broken heart, he said I’m sorry that you have to—but you’re not the only one who’s had a broken heart.”
Over the following months, however, diplomacy paid off. On August 5, 1963, President Kennedy achieved partial success when a Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed in Moscow between the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. The treaty banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water, but not underground weapons testing.
1 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917–1963, Boston: Little, Brown, 2003. (↑)
2 James Reston, “Vienna Talks End: Meeting Closes With Hard Controversy, Kennedy Solemn,” New York Times, 5 June 1961. (↑)
3 Norman Cousins was the editor of the Saturday Review from 1942–1971. He strongly opposed nuclear testing, and in 1963 he was one of the founders of the Citizens Committee for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In the early 1960s, Cousins acted as an unofficial diplomat between the Soviet government, the United States government and the Vatican. (↑)
4 Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970). (↑)
Juliet Sullivan was a an intern with the Presidential Recordings Program. She graduated from the University of Virginia in May 2007, majoring in History and Economics and minoring in Spanish.