This Day in Cold War History (Tensions Spike at JFK-Khrushchev Vienna Summit)

June 3, 1961—Any hopes that John F. Kennedy harbored for easing superpower tensions were quickly discarded when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev badgered and bullied the inexperienced American President in their first and only face-to-face meeting.

The importance of the Vienna Summit did not lie in any agreements concluded, but instead in the attempt made by the cool, aristocratic, 43-year-old JFK and the volatile, 67-year-old former peasant to take the measure of the other. The differences between the democracy and the Communist dictatorship they headed were heightened by their temperaments.

When the talks, conducted in the US and Soviet embassies in this nonaligned Central European city, ended the following day, Kennedy noted carefully to the pack of reporters that no issues had been settled. Privately, to those he trusted more, he was blunter.

“He just beat the hell out of me,” JFK told influential New York Times columnist James Reston. “It was the worst thing in my life. He savaged me.”

Kennedy was unprepared for this diplomatic drubbing. Suffering from intense back pain and Addison’s Disease (an adrenal insufficiency that causes persistent fatigue and muscle weakness), he had brought with him to the summit a physician to celebrities, Dr. Max Jacobson.

Injections administered by “Dr. Feelgood” temporarily relieved the President’s symptoms (even giving him such a sense of euphoria that he bounded down steps to greet Khrushchev on the first day).

But the mixture of “vitamins” may have contained amphetamines, which, diplomatic historian Michael Beschloss observed in his superb The Crisis Years, can cause “nervousness, garrulousness, impaired judgment, overconfidence, and, when the drug wears off, depression.” 

Did Khrushchev, who had risen into Joseph Stalin’s inner circle by staying alert to threats and weaknesses of rivals, notice any of these signs of the drug in the man facing him?

While Kennedy carried with him to Vienna physical problems that could have hampered his performance, Khrushchev brought psychological ones that complicated the talks.

Psychiatrists have formulated “the Goldwater rule” to warn against assessing the mental health of a candidate without examination by a professional.

But, given totalitarian regimes’ barriers to unfettered access to information, the US Central Intelligence Agency may have come as close as anyone ever will in a 1961 “personality sketch” which concluded that Khrushchev suffered from “hypomania,” associated with “lability of mood and with rapid shifts to anger or depression.”

That condition would explain many, if not all, of Khrushchev’s shifts from earthy humor to violent outbursts like his notorious shoe-banging episode at the United Nations, as well as impulsive tactical moves that caught both Western adversaries and ostensible Kremlin colleagues off guard.

The failed American-backed invasion of Cuba only six weeks before the summit furnished Khrushchev with a cudgel against Kennedy—a pointed reminder that the U.S. had not only interfered with another country in the Western Hemisphere but that it had been inept and impotent in doing so.

But Khrushchev also sought to convert a Soviet disadvantage—a swelling exodus of refugees from Communist-controlled East Berlin to the Western-oriented sector of the city—into yet another weapon against JFK. The US must either agree to a settlement favorable to East Berlin in six months, he insisted, or the USSR would forge its own agreement with it that would leave it free to cut off Western access to the city.

"Force will be met by force. If the US wants war, that's its problem. It is up to the US to decide whether there will be war or peace,” Khrushchev told JFK.

“Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be war,” Kennedy answered. “It will be a cold winter."

Khrushchev’s ultimatum and loose talk about nuclear weapons stunned the American. I wrote earlier that no agreement was reached in Vienna, but it would be a mistake to say there were no consequences. JFK went home and, after consulting with advisers, delivered a televised address to the American people in which he called for:

*an additional $3.25 billion in defense spending,
*doubling and tripling of draft calls,
*calling up reserves,
*raising the Army's total authorized strength,
*increasing active duty numbers in the Navy and Air Force,
*reconditioning planes and ships in mothballs, and
*minimizing the number of Americans that would be killed in a nuclear attack through a new civil defense program.

Under intense internal pressure from the Politburo, Khrushchev erected the Berlin Wall and resumed above-ground nuclear testing after the summit. The most dangerous period of the Cold War, climaxing over a year later in the Cuban Missile Crisis, ensued.