by Nigel Cliff
Spy planes returned with new images showing the missile sites nearing operational readiness, with fuel tankers and command trailers standing by. For the first time ever the Strategic Air Command’s state of alert rose to DEFCON 2, one step below maximum readiness for nuclear war. B-52s carrying thermonuclear weapons took to the skies on continuous airborne alert, some patrolling near the borders of the USSR. Smaller B-47s were dispersed around civilian and military airfields, ready to take off on fifteen minutes’ notice. More than one hundred ICBMs were readied for launch. In prospect was the first direct military confrontation between the two superpowers since the start of the Cold War.
Kennedy replied to Khrushchev that his hand was being forced after repeated assurances that no offensive weapons were being deployed in Cuba had turned out to be lies. Huddled in gruelingly long sessions with his advisers, Kennedy listened closely to Tommy Thompson, the only one with deep personal knowledge of the Soviet leader. Thompson was convinced that Khrushchev could be persuaded to remove the missiles, and stood firm against proposals for air strikes and amphibious invasions, warning that they could push the impulsive premier into making a move against West Berlin or Turkish bases that could lead ineluctably to nuclear war. Kennedy had begun to believe that an invasion was unavoidable, but he agreed to give diplomacy more time. As if to amplify the possibility, the previous night Van had played Rachmaninoff with the National Symphony at Washington’s Constitution Hall, while that night, the twenty-fifth, the Leningrad Philharmonic began its first American tour at New York’s newly opened Lincoln Center, the first foreign orchestra to play there.
The next afternoon, ABC News correspondent John Scali contacted the White House with startling information. A Soviet agent had tipped him off that the Kremlin would remove its missiles under UN supervision in return for an American commitment never to invade Cuba. The agent was the same Alexander Feklisov who had once listened to Rachmaninoff’s choir at the New York baths, now promoted to KGB station chief in Washington. White House staffers were scrambling to verify the back-channel offer when a letter from Khrushchev clattered over the Teletype from the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Sent at 2:00 a.m. Moscow time, it was rambling and emotional but contained the seed of a solution that mirrored Feklisov’s information. “If there is no intention . . . to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war,” wrote Khrushchev, “then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.”
Intelligence experts pronounced the letter genuine, and Thompson’s long game seemed vindicated. Yet the morning brought news that Radio Moscow was broadcasting a harsher message, demanding that the United States remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey in return for the Soviet missiles leaving Cuba. The different style led analysts to question whether Khrushchev was still fully in command; at the least there was clearly dissent in the Presidium, if not outright chaos. The new proposal put Kennedy in an awkward position: it was hard to dismiss it as unreasonable when the United States was anyway planning to remove the missiles from Turkey, but to accept would make it look as if he had capitulated to blackmail. Soon a new letter from Khrushchev came through, essentially repeating the morning’s offer, which now appeared to be the agreed-upon Kremlin position.
An hour later a Soviet surface-to-air missile launched from Cuba shot down a U-2, killing its pilot. Kennedy told the chiefs of staff to be ready to attack within days, but he also plied Thompson with questions about Khrushchev’s likely intentions and state of mind and how far the premier might have to go to appease hard-liners in the Soviet government. Thompson suggested responding to Khrushchev’s first letter and ignoring the second, and he sat down to help draft the reply. The letter, which was sent later that night, included a series of suggested measures for the removal of the Soviet missiles under UN auspices and a pledge that the United States would not invade Cuba. Thompson also suggested sending Robert Kennedy to meet secretly with the Soviet ambassador; given the Soviets’ conspiratorial concept of American power, he argued, they would have more faith in the president’s brother than in anyone except JFK himself. Coached by Thompson, Bobby passed on the message that the Soviets could either remove the missiles or watch the Americans do it, but that the president was keen to avoid war. As for the missiles in Turkey, he added, they were already obsolete and vulnerable to Soviet attack and would soon be gone anyway, but this could not publicly form part of a settlement.
Five hundred miles from Cuba a Soviet submarine skirted the exclusion zone. Only the objection of a single officer prevented the use of a nuclear torpedo when a U.S. Navy vessel attacked the sub with signaling depth charges. Far away over the east coast of the USSR, a U-2 pilot accidentally trespassed into Soviet airspace for ninety minutes. The Soviets scrambled a squadron of MiGs, and the Americans dispatched nuclear-armed F-102 fighters across the Bering Sea. The world was teetering on the brink of a potentially devastating nuclear exchange.
With no reply forthcoming from Moscow, ABC’s John Scali arranged another meeting with Alexander Feklisov. Scali asked the spy why Khrushchev’s two letters were so different; Feklisov unconvincingly blamed poor communication. Scali shouted that it was a “stinking double cross” and that the United States would invade within hours. Feklisov replied that Khrushchev would soon send a new response and that Scali should assure the administration that no deception was intended. No one would believe him, the journalist retorted, but after they separated, he delivered the message.
The next morning, October 28, Radio Moscow broadcast a statement from Khrushchev declaring that the Soviet missiles would be dismantled and repatriated. If Feklisov was acting on his own initiative, as it appears, his intervention bought desperately needed time.
The worst crisis of the Cold War had lasted thirteen days. Tommy Thompson took off for the funeral of his mother, who had died in its midst. Robert Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later called him the unsung hero of the hour.
One by one the missiles were taken down, packed up, and loaded onto eight ships, which were scrutinized by the U.S. Navy as they crossed the never-declared blockade. The line stayed in place while the Soviets tried to remove their bombers, which required the cooperation of Fidel Castro. The Cuban leader was incensed at the Soviet climbdown. He had been minimally consulted on the weapons’ installation and not consulted at all about their removal. At the height of the crisis, he had goaded Khrushchev to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on the United States, intimating that he was ready to die in a nuclear inferno. Even the Soviet leader, whose romantic attachment to Castro had blinded him to the folly of his scheme, thought he was crazy. “Can you imagine!” he marveled to Mikoyan’s sons. “As if he doesn’t understand it would mean a global catastrophe!” On November 3, Khrushchev dispatched their ever-reliable father to manage the delicate feat of getting the planes back while keeping Cuba as an ally. After meeting Mikoyan at the airport, Castro refused to see him for three days. A few minutes into their talks, Mikoyan received news that his wife had died. Castro suggested postponing the discussion, but Mikoyan demurred. The situation was too grave, and he asked for the funeral to take place without him. Finally, Castro saw the writing on the wall and agreed to the withdrawal of the forty-one Il-28 bombers; the rest of the armaments stayed in Cuba, though not the large cache of tactical nuclear weapons that the Soviets had secretly planned to leave until Castro provoked them into changing course.
On his way home Mikoyan stopped over in Washington and switched effortlessly from arm-twisting Castro to sweet-talking Kennedy. The Bolshoi Ballet had also arrived in town, after playing to empty houses in San Francisco, and for their first social outing after the crisis, the First Couple attended the opening night, which for lack of a suitable stage took place in an old movie theater. Reporters noted that the president “applauded louder and longer than anyone in his section.” At intermission he accompanied the Soviet ambassador backstage to greet the dancers, who gave Jack
ie a portrait miniature of Tchaikovsky. She invited them to the White House and took young Caroline to watch a rehearsal with their star ballerina, Maya Plisetskaya. JFK’s mother and his brother Teddy invited the whole company to Cape Cod for a dinner in honor of Plisetskaya’s birthday, and Bobby Kennedy commenced an affair with her. The arts were useful for patching up broken friendships as well as making new ones.
Six months later the United States quietly removed its missiles from Turkey. His authority boosted by his handling of the crisis, JFK committed America to landing a man on the moon before the decade was out and traveled to Berlin to crow that the West had not had to build a wall to keep its people in.
THE FIRST sign that Khrushchev had ushered his nation into the world fold had been his hearty celebration of Van’s victory. The first sign that his tumultuous cavalcade had hit the skids came that December, at two cultural events. Touring an exhibit of avant-garde art in the Manezh on December 1, 1962, Khrushchev furiously denounced the paintings as “dog shit” and the artists as “faggots” whose “asshole art” was fit only for urinals. Meanwhile, at his elbow, emboldened hard-liners hooted for the artists to be arrested, or strangled. What seemed like an intemperate outburst, or a cheap attempt to garner support by playing the simple man taking on the cosmopolitan elite, looked far more ominous when the authorities did everything they could to sabotage the premiere of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 13 on December 18. The choral setting of poems, beginning with a lament for a massacre of Jews by Nazis and collaborators at Babi Yar, near Kiev, purportedly offended by putting Jewish suffering before Russian. Two singers and a conductor backed out before Kirill Kondrashin took up the baton. Like Shostakovich, he had long nursed deep contempt for the Soviet system.
Both events were roaring successes, and no one was arrested or exiled, but the campaign escalated. The Central Committee set up a commission to crack down all over again on “formalist tendencies.” Leading artists were hauled into the Kremlin and given stern lectures that brought back unpleasant memories of the late 1940s. In March 1963 the intelligentsia was summoned to a Kremlin meeting with Khrushchev himself. “The thaw is over,” he thundered. “This is not even a light morning frost. For you and your likes it will be the arctic frost.” In case anyone doubted his resolve, he reminded them that his regime had “helped smash the Hungarians.” The echoes of Stalinism were unmistakable: “Society has a right to condemn works which are contrary to the interests of the people,” he warned. As for avant-garde composers, having allowed them access to Western innovations, he turned on them. “We flatly reject this cacophonous music,” he declared of twelve-tone compositions. “Our people can’t use this garbage as a tool for their ideology.” Once again, artists began to live in fear of intimidation, but the about-face was a sign of weakness, not strength.
IN COLD War politics, there were no villains or heroes. Neither side was innocent or entirely to blame. Khrushchev and his opposite numbers in the White House did not have a fetish for needless confrontation: even as they authorized espionage, nuclear blackmail, subversion, and proxy wars, they knew how severely the rivalry drained their domestic programs. They knew the arms race was a nonsensical game of numbers; that regional conflicts could drag them into a tit-for-tat exchange that could escalate into nuclear war. Yet the revolving gears of international allegiances had their own inexorable logic. Every crisis averted created another. Public opinion, entrenched bureaucracies, and powerful interest groups exerted their pull, as did the same shifting forces in their allies and client states.
Of all the dangers, ignorance was the greatest. To cut through the confusion of voices that had bedeviled the Cuban crisis, the White House and the Kremlin established a telephone hotline. The two sides moved to prevent emerging powers from developing atomic technology; a test ban treaty was signed in August 1963, though it failed to stop China from exploding its first nuclear device the following year. The glimmer of hope that Churchill had foreseen in an equality of annihilation, that Eisenhower had understood when he insisted on planning only for total nuclear war, was enshrined in the theory of mutual assured destruction, or MAD, whereby the superpowers targeted each other’s cities with first- and second-strike weapons of such destructive capacity that their survival depended on there being no war at all. The Dr. Strangelove–style acronym made the case that when humanity’s propensity for violence had reached the point where annihilation rested on the flick of a switch, the only sane response was one that, to an average person, closely resembled insanity. Khrushchev knew this as well as anyone.
In September 1963, President Kennedy took the rostrum at the United Nations and proposed that the United States and the USSR join forces to reach the moon. Khrushchev categorically dismissed the idea, but over the following weeks he concluded that the Soviets might benefit economically and technologically from a joint venture. He was on the point of changing his mind when the president was assassinated in Dallas. Khrushchev, on a visit to Ukraine, wired the usual protocol telegram to the White House, but he and his wife also sent personal letters to Jackie. The next day, they cut short their trip to visit Spaso House, passing through Soviet mourners gathered outside the gates, and signed the book of condolences with tears in their eyes. Mikoyan, who had carried Lenin’s coffin, attended the American president’s funeral. Jackie wrote touchingly to Khrushchev, saying that she was very moved by how upset Anastas Ivanovich had looked as he came down the line, and how much her husband had wanted to work with him for peace.
After Kennedy’s vice president, the former majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson, took over the presidency, the leaders exchanged letters. Yet they never got to take each other’s measure in person, which was perhaps a pity, because the ambitious Johnson, “cunning yet insecure, imposing yet ungraceful . . . the shrewd peasant come to shake up a nation and rule a superpower,” was in some ways the American Khrushchev. After a decade in power the Soviet leader’s overreaching had finally caught up with him. There had been no joyous explosion of energies to fire the USSR’s economy into catching up with that of the West, let alone overtake it. His bureaucratic meddling had brought the economy to a virtual standstill, and after a promising start his grand agricultural schemes had proved an epic disaster. There were riots over food prices, and rebellions over radical reforms of party structures that weakened the powers of functionaries, whom Khrushchev belittled as “dogs peeing against curbstones.” China finally broke off relations with the Soviets, and Mao took to insulting Khrushchev at every turn. Ten years of unrelenting activity had made an adversary of nearly every person he counted as a friend.
As so often, the protégé wielded the knife. On October 12, 1964, Leonid Brezhnev called his mentor at his Black Sea villa and notified him that a special Presidium session was to be held the next day to discuss agricultural issues. Khrushchev suspected the worst but flew back. At the meeting, his peers took turns denouncing him for fostering a cult of personality, flouting collective government, cozying up to the West, creating the Sino-Soviet split, embarrassing the state, behaving waywardly, governing incompetently, permitting nepotism, and nearing his dotage. That night, he called Mikoyan. “I’m old and tired,” he said. “Let them cope by themselves. I’ve done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn’t suit us anymore and suggesting he retire? Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. Now everything is different. The fear is gone, and we can talk as equals. That’s my contribution. I won’t put up a fight.” He was glad, he later vowed in his habitual barroom language, that the party had advanced to the point where it could fire its first secretary: “You smeared me all over with shit, and I say, ‘You’re right.’”
The next day, the Presidium and Central Committee voted to accept his retirement. Shortly before his ouster, he had spoken with the Soviet cosmonauts aboard the Voskhod 1 orbiter, during the seventh manned Soviet space flight, the first to carry an engineer and physician as well as a pilot and to dispense with space sui
ts. At their homecoming ceremony there was no mention of the premier who had overseen the entire Soviet space program. Khrushchev was dispatched on a modest pension to his dacha, where he suffered from depression, cried a lot, and slept badly. The pension was later reduced, the dacha was exchanged for a smaller one, and the leader who for all his faults had saved his nation from the ravages of Stalinism was airbrushed from Soviet history.
Mikoyan, the great survivor, outlasted the latest upheaval and was appointed president of the Soviet Union before retiring the following year. The stolid Brezhnev became first secretary and put up the shutters on reform. His government spent vast sums on music, literature, and art in the same way that it invested lavishly in gymnastics and weight lifting, as ideologically useful tools. “In order to be victorious,” the reempowered Composers’ Union leader, Tikhon Khrennikov, commanded his troops, “we must strictly obey the party line and guide our youth.” Those few Moscow nights that had transfixed the world in 1958 now belonged to a less predictable, more innocent age.
THIRD MOVEMENT
Pianoforte
• 19 •
America’s Pianist
ON DECEMBER 20, 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson put in a telephone call to J. Edgar Hoover to ask if Van Cliburn was politically sound.
The nation was still officially in mourning for JFK, but President Johnson was preparing to receive his first head of government. The summit was to take place at LBJ’s ranch, near the tiny farmhouse where he was born in the Texas Hill Country west of Austin, and its centerpiece was to be a luncheon in a converted school gymnasium in nearby Stonewall. “Cactus” Pryor, a Texas entertainer and Johnson family friend, had been tapped as master of ceremonies, and he had called Liz Carpenter, the First Lady’s press secretary, to suggest an alternative to the usual country music outfit.