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.

Quote of the Day (Masha Gessen, on How Midcentury Totalitarianism Led to Unusual Soviet Population Policies)

“For decades now, the Soviet Union had been trying, and failing, to recover from the catastrophic population loss caused by the Second World War and the Gulag extermination system. The thrust of the population policies initiated by [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev was to get as many women as possible to have children by the comparatively few surviving men. The policies dictated that men who fathered children out of wedlock would not be held responsible for child support but the state would help the single mother both with financial subsidies and with childcare: she could even leave the child at an orphanage for any length of time, as many times as she needed, forfeiting her parental rights. The state endeavored to remove any stigma associated with resorting to the help of orphanages, or with single motherhood and having children out of wedlock. Women could put down a fictitious man as the father on the child's birth certificate—or even name the actual father, without his having to fear being burdened with responsibility.”— Russian-American journalist, author, translator, and activist Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017)

The massive Soviet casualties in WWII (27 million) and the Gulag, labor colonies, and prisons from 1931 to 1953 (1.7 million) are only dimly known to the wide American public. Even less understood are the consequences of this for subsequent government policy.

Masha Gessen’s careful analysis of all this, in the broader context of the broad-based psychological despair experienced by so many in Russia, reveals something eye-opening about how totalitarian rule (in the form of one country waging war not only on another but even on its own citizens) creates ripple effects that need to be analyzed and absorbed. 

It may be some time before we can fully grasp what is going on now in Russia under Vladimir Putin and China under Xi Jinping. But it is surely not the "strength" that they proclaim or their acolytes in the West blindly accept.

This Day in Cold War History (Khrushchev Denounces Stalin’s Terror in ‘Secret Speech’)

Feb. 25, 1956—In an address that shredded the hopes placed in the Soviet Union by believers around the world, Nikita Khrushchev (pictured) disclosed to the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party that the nation’s former leader, Joseph Stalin, had subjected opponents of his rule to “moral and physical annihilation.”

The night before the speech, Khrushchev faced down high-level Soviet leaders who did not want any news of this kind to come out. They rightly feared that some would ask why they had not acted to stop the terror.

Khrushchev may have wondered the same thing about his own role. His decade as First Party Secretary would be characterized by a hypomania marked by what one psychoanalyst described in a 1960 CIA assessment as exuberance coupled with feeling “covertly ... guilty about aggression towards others, incapable of being alone ... corruptible and lacking a systematic approach in cognitive style.” He improvised a great deal of the speech, even appearing overwrought at times, maybe remembering his own role in carrying out Stalin’s tyranny. (As Moscow leader in the 1930s, Khrushchev ordered the shooting of more than 55,000 officials, according to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.)

During Stalin’s nearly three decades as Soviet dictator, it was suicide to criticize or even joke about him. Nearly three years after his death, nobody still dared to breathe a word about his crimes. Nor, even now did Khrushchev address Stalin’s brutality against the Soviet people at large, let alone other nations undermined and absorbed within the Soviet empire. (Moreover, the first Soviet leader, V.I. Lenin, was upheld as a shining example of everything Stalin had destroyed, with his own crimes not detailed until Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in the 1970s.)

So when Khrushchev now got around to denouncing Stalin, it was in the context of what mattered most to his immediate listeners, for having “ignored the norms of party life and trampled on the Leninist principle of collective party leadership.” Tumult broke out in the hall when Khrushchev laid out, in categorical detail, a particular example of this:  “of the 139 members and candidates of the party's Central Committee who were elected at the 17th congress, 98 persons, that is, 70 percent, were arrested and shot (mostly in 1937-38).”

Like so much about the Iron Curtain, these shattering revelations were made behind closed doors and initially unbeknownst to most Soviet citizens, leading it to be dubbed “The Secret Speech.” But even as it was being delivered (estimates I’ve seen vary as to its length, ranging from four to eight hours), Khrushchev’s belated denunciation of his predecessor’s “cult of personality” had an immediate impact.

The delegates present uniformly listened in shocked, numb silence. The editor of Pravda, concerned that he might have a heart attack, gulped down five nitroglycerin pills, while the head of the Polish Communist Party, being treated in the U.S.S.R. for pneumonia, did suffer a fatal heart attack right after reading it. Still other delegates are believed to have killed themselves afterwards.

In terms of Communist believers beyond the walls of the Kremlin, the effects were not as visceral but ultimately more important for the propaganda war that the U.S.S.R. was waging against the United States and its allies in the Free World. The speech was read once only to party members throughout the Soviet Union in factories, farms, offices and universities.

Polish printers, having obtained the full text meant for distribution to Central European communist allies, printed thousands more than the authorized number. One of these copies came into the hands of Israeli intelligence, who, in the early spring, gave it to the CIA, which in turn leaked it to The New York Times and the British Kremlinologist (and eventual Khrushchev biographer), Edward Crankshaw. After the Times printed it in early June, the speech became fodder for the Voice of America and the U.S. Information Agency in their campaign against “Red Colonialism.”

In Poland and Hungary especially, the speech catalyzed resentment against Soviet puppet regimes, and though this unrest was smothered in the former and brutally crushed by Soviet troops in the latter, ordinary citizens now knew the extent of the crimes of their Communist overlords.

For longtime American apologists of the Soviet regime, the speech put them face to face with what they had long tried to avoid.  As Harvey Klebr, John Hayes, and Kyrill Anderson write in The Soviet World of American Communism:

“For more than 20 years, both the mainstream press and scholarly books had carried hundreds of stories, refugee accounts, and exposes of the nature and horrors of Stalin's regime. Yet although the insistence of American Communists that the news was a revelation was literally false, it was psychologically true. Since the beginning of the movement, American Communists had worn special glasses that allowed them to see only what Moscow saw and that rendered all else invisible. But when Moscow finally opened its own eyes, when Khrushchev pointed to the bodies of Stalin's victims littering the Soviet landscape, American Communists saw those bodies as well. And this vision offered a shattering revelation.”

Like Mikhail Gorbachev three decades later, Khrushchev mistakenly believed that the Soviet Union could be reformed from within. The revelations about Stalin were meant to energize a rank and file still suffering from the impact of Stalinist terror. As painful as his knowledge of his complicity was, he felt, light had to be shed on this shadowy past. "All of us were involved in this,” he recalled in his memoir. “And we have to tell the truth about everything."

This Day in Cold War History (Berlin Wall, Symbol of Division, Built)

August 13, 1961—As more and more of their own citizens chose to vote with their feet rather than live under Soviet domination, the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—a contradiction in terms if there ever was one—acted swiftly to stop the mass emigration by building the Berlin Wall. In a move that must have taken weeks to plan but only 24 hours to implement, the GDR tore up streets, erected barricades of paving stones, placed tanks at strategic junctures and interrupted subway and local rail service. In virtually no time, the estimated 1,500 people fleeing East Germany daily came to a halt.

The move capped a spring and summer of escalating tensions between the U.S.S.R.’s leader, Premier and First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev, and American President John F. Kennedy. It was the first season of what historian Michael Beschloss would call “The Crisis Years” of confrontation between the American—elegant, aristocratic, young, inexperienced, and battling ill health—and the Soviet—crude, of peasant stock, aging, wily, and eager to exploit the slightest sign of weakness in an adversary.

Still less than half a year in office, JFK had hoped to ease the tensions mounting between the two nations since the end of the Eisenhower presidency by meeting Khrushchev in Vienna in early June. But that summit was disastrous, for reasons barely understood at the time.

To relieve the ferocious pain and exhaustion springing from a longstanding degenerative back problem and Addison’s Disease (a condition in which the patient’s adrenal glands don’t produce the adrenaline needed to get through the day), the President had been secretly receiving injections from Dr. Max Jacobson, the quack of preference for such celebrities as Yul Brenner, Mickey Mantle, Truman Capote, Eddie Fisher, and Nelson Rockefeller. JFK requested more of these “medical cocktails” from “Dr. Feelgood” so he wouldn’t seem exhausted to Khrushchev. He was cavalier about the side effects of these injections on his physical and mental health, telling brother Robert: “I don't care if it's horse piss. It works."

The upshot was that Kennedy encountered his Soviet counterpart, in arguably the most high-stakes summit of the Cold War up to that time, relatively high on speed.

Kennedy should have asked for his money back. Khrushchev went at him with no holds barred, blustering in every way possible, climaxing with a threat: settle Berlin’s future with an agreement within six months, “or else.”

Later, JFK confided his serious concern to New York Times columnist James Reston. The Soviet, Kennedy reasoned, thought that "anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess [the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba] could be taken. And anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts. So he just beat the hell out of me…I’ve got a real problem.”

Summing it up, the young father, brother, and leader who had already lost a brother and sister to death, a baby in his wife’s miscarriage, and sailors under his watch in the South Pacific—not to mention more days of sickness than he cared to admit—called the bullying at the hands of the Soviet “the worst thing in my life.” Given what would happen over the next year and a half—especially the Cuban Missile Crisis—the normally cool, ironic Kennedy was not exaggerating.

What Kennedy, not to mention the American public, did not realize was that Khrushchev was operating from a position of considerable vulnerability himself. Some members of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee had been plotting his ouster for several years. By the late 1950s, China’s Mao Tse-tung was openly challenging Soviet leadership of worldwide Communism.

Now, the pressure was being exerted against him immediately in Berlin, with that massive outflow. GDR leader Walter Ulbricht begged for something to be done to reduce this threat to the size of the East German labor force (not to mention the country's image to the willfully ignorant as a workers‘ paradise). Khrushchev granted the request by putting into motion plans for The Wall.

In a way, it was appropriate that the Berlin Wall ran across cemeteries, for it represented a form of death: death to hundreds of thousands who hoped for a better life in the non-Communist West, death to the hope that Khrushchev could transform the Soviet Union from the mold created by Lenin and Stalin, and the death of illusion.

Kennedy had been so concerned about the possibility of war coming from the Soviet threat to cut off access to West Berlin that, at first, he was relieved by the building of the wall. It might have been a wall, he said, but at least it wasn’t a war.

The issue didn’t receive itself quite so easily, however. Kennedy was so determined to show Khrushchev that he couldn’t be intimidated that he authorized Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric to deliver a speech that frankly contradicted the claim made by the JFK Presidential campaign the year before: that the U.S. was facing a “missile gap” as it confronted its adversary.

On the contrary, Gilpatric claimed in his October 21, 1961, speech, “The Iron Curtain is not so impenetrable as to force us to accept at face value the Kremlin's boasts."

There are certain points and people in history that deserve to be better known because of their subsequent impact on far-more-famous matters. Gilpatric’s speech in Hot Springs, Va., was one of these. It exposed Khrushchev to the world as a bluffer, at the exact moment that the Communist Party Congress was meeting. Three events followed, in escalating order of importance:

* Khrushchev immediately authorized plans to detonate the largest hydrogen bomb ever tested;
* An American diplomat was blocked on his way to an opera in East Berlin, creating a situation in which 30 tanks from each side faced each other at a distance of only 100 yards from each other, before Kennedy and Khruschchev finally resolved the matter through back channels;

* In 1962, welcoming the opportunity of “ throwing one of our hedgehogs down the pants of Uncle Sam,” Khrushchev ordered that missiles be secretly shipped to Cuba, triggering the closest the war has come to Armageddon: the Cuban missile crisis.

Even after the resolution of that threat, the Berlin Wall lasted till the end of the larger Cold War. It became a visible reminder to objective people all over the world that the Iron Curtain regimes could only maintain their grasp on power, not to mention their economies, by restricting their own citizens’ freedom to move. It also provided two American Presidents--one Democratic, one Republican--the opportunity for some of the most memorable moments of their years in office.

In 1987, the world was transfixed by Reagan’s simple demand of Mikhail Gorbachev: “Tear down this wall!” But 24 years before, JFK--who had endured “the worst thing in my life” over Berlin--now electrified an enormous crowd on the West Berlin side of the wall with four words of his own: “Ich bein ein Berliner.”

Most of the fragments of the Berlin Wall remain in the city, but some have landed in unusual places. One is in West Point, but another, surprisingly enough, is in Paley Park, a "vest-pocket" urban oasis on East 53rd Street in New York City. When I used to work across the street from there in the 1990s, I was astonished not simply to see it but also to observe that virtually nobody in the park paid any attention to this hideous structure that, for nearly 30 years, represented for all too many totalitarianism, the failure of international politics, and death.

This Day in Cold War History (Paris Summit Collapses Over U-2 Flap)

May 16, 1960—On the first day of an international summit in Paris meant to lower Cold War tensions, Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, brought up a spy plane shot down over his country to launch into a tirade against President Dwight Eisenhower, then stalked out of the much-anticipated confab, dealing a grievous blow to the American President’s hopes for a nuclear test-ban treaty.

The disastrous aftermath of the shoot-down of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 plane did more than throw a monkey wrench into Ike’s plans to de-escalate the arms race. It also began what historian Michael Beschloss called “The Crisis Years,” the three-year period of near-constant military and diplomatic thrust and parry that climaxed with the Cuban Missile crisis. It also brought to an end any hope that the U.S.S.R. would be reformed from within until the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev a quarter-century later.

The origins of the U-2 incident lay in the growing Soviet technological capabilities of the early 1950s. By 1954, they had demonstrated a thermonuclear bomb, and the following year they had rejected Eisenhower’s “Open Skies” proposal that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. conduct surveillance overflights of each country’s territory to eliminate the possibility of surprise attacks.

Eisenhower needed assurance that the Soviets weren’t leapfrogging the U.S. in missile science. Moreover, despite his credibility as the leader of the military alliance that took down the Axis powers, he needed a check on his own generals when they pressed for costly weapons systems if he hoped to keep the overall American budget in check.

Traditional reliance on spies, he felt, was inadequate toward meeting this threat. He had become enamored of a high-tech means that, the CIA convinced him, would be undetected by the Soviets: a long-range, high-flying reconnaissance plane beyond the reach of detectors. In addition, its state-of-the-art photographic equipment could take high-resolution pictures.

U-2 flights began in 1956. The CIA began to crow immediately that the flights were successful, but that depended on how “success” was defined. True, the planes were taking great pictures from above, but contrary to one of the agency’s central assertions beforehand, the flights were detected from the start by Soviet air-warning systems. Moreover, even boosters didn’t believe that its useful life could extend much beyond eighteen months to two years.

Khrushchev’s trip to America in 1959 had sparked new hopes for peace. But now, he had an additional concern: fending off Democratic charges that a dangerous “missile gap” loomed between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

Eisenhower authorized one more U-2 flight, to be flown no later than May 1 because he didn’t want anything to provoke the Soviets on the eve of the summit. He could not imagine that the young pilot Francis Gary Powers would show up on Soviet air-defense systems; that Khrushchev would feel obliged to issue an order to bring the American plane down at all costs; that the plane would be shredded but that Powers would, amazingly, survive; or that Powers would choose not to use the suicide pill he had been given beforehand.

When Powers disappeared, the CIA reassured the White House that a) the plane would be destroyed if intercepted and b) pilots on such missions had been instructed to kill themselves anyway. So the White House put out a cover story that a weather plane had gone astray over Soviet airspace.

Eisenhower had handed a propaganda coup to Khrushchev, who promptly produced the wreckage of the plane and Powers himself. With egg on his face, Eisenhower had to admit that it was, in fact, a spy plane, though he justified it on national-security grounds.

Nevertheless, the summit planned for Paris—meant to take up the status of Berlin and nuclear-arms control—was set to proceed two weeks later. The Soviet leader had even indicated to his host, French President Charles de Gaulle, that it should continue.

Yet, as soon as the summit began, Khrushchev demanded the floor and began a denunciation of the U.S. that grew more vehement as it went along, at least partly because Ike would not go along with his demand for an apology.

Eisenhower fumed over Khrushchev’s grandstanding while British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was frantic over the end of his best-laid plans to bring East and West together. It was left to de Gaulle to remind the Soviet leader of just how bizarre his behavior looked to the outside world.

After noting that Khrushchev had given his assent to the conference even after the revelation of the plane, even though “You knew everything then that you know now,” he turned on his vitriolic guest in a memorable exchange:

“Yesterday,” deGaulle observed, “that satellite you launched just before you left Moscow to impress us overflew the sky of France eighteen times without my permission. How do I know that you do not have cameras aboard which are taking pictures of my country?”

“As God sees me,” Khrushchev replied (rather ironically, given that he led an avowedly atheist state), “my hands are clean.”

“Well, then, how did you take those pictures of the far side of the moon which you showed us with such justifiable pride?”

“In that one I had cameras.”

“Ah, in that one you had cameras,” de Gaulle concluded with crushing irony.

Khrushchev did not possess Joseph Stalin's murderous paranoia, but his behavior at the aborted Paris summit brought to a head tendencies that might have made him harder for Western leaders to deal with. His wild mood swings would be characterized, in a secret CIA document of the time, as evidence of “hypomania”; nowadays, “manic depression” or “bipolar disorder” might be the operative terms.

Back at the Kremlin and in Soviet diplomatic outposts, people shook their heads over the mercurial leader’s antics. KGB chief Alexander Shelepin was philosophical: “All I know is that there have always been spies and always will be. So there must have been a way for him to find another time and place to tell off Eisenhower.”

Instead of coming away with an agreement that might have assured some progress, Khrushchev had done the following:

* broken with the one American leader with the best credibility of selling a disarmament treaty to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress and the American people;

* solidified Allied support for the U.S;

* discouraged East German intellectuals who badly wanted a thaw in relations with the U.S.; and

* encouraged East Germany’s Communist leader, Walter Ulbricht, to continue to foment a crisis over Berlin.

Even Khrushchev’s wife—who knew his mood swings as well as anyone—was dismayed at the disastrous consequences of his actions. “Why didn’t you correct him?” she upbraided an aide, according to William Taubman's biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. “If you don’t point out his blunders, who in the world will?”