Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  “They look fine,” LBJ said, in surprise or perhaps satisfaction. Van asked if he could relate the story, and Johnson, scenting good publicity, readily agreed.

  “Mr. President,” Van said as he got ready to leave, “I’ll return this suit, but I will not return this stud. I hope you’ll hold it for a minute, and then give it back to me—and it will be something for me to treasure the rest of my life.” He left at 7:50 p.m., barely in time to make the concert.

  The episode was reported in virtually every news outlet.

  With the help of the Texas takeover at the White House, Van had become an institution in his early thirties. Thanks to his example, American performers now rubbed shoulders with the power elite, their artistry appreciated as part of the idea of America. Time pronounced him a cultural hero “right up there with the Beatles and Marshall McLuhan.” He was impersonated in the Marilyn Monroe vehicle Let’s Make Love, was a regular on What’s My Line?, and was name-dropped in Bewitched. In 1966 he was given an hour-long profile on NBC’s Bell Telephone Hour and featured on a CBS tribute to Sol Hurok. He endowed scholarships at Juilliard, Cincinnati, Louisiana State, Interlochen, Texas Christian University, and the Liszt Academy in Budapest; played fund-raisers for orchestras and venues; and accumulated honorary degrees from Baylor, Loyola, TCU, Michigan State, and Cincinnati University, where he made a pitch that his mother should get one, too: “I was moved,” noted president Warren Bennis, “but declined.” By late 1968, his My Favorite Chopin disc had been on the classical best-seller list for 138 weeks, and Van had all together sold three million albums at a time when five thousand was a good result for a classical LP; he could have sold more, but his contract, which tied him to making two records a year, did not bind him to approve any for release, and he was notoriously skittish about doing so. His audiences were loyal, his reviews often glowing, some placing him, according to one Los Angeles Times critic, “unmistakably in the ranks of the greatest pianists of this or any other era.” He was still playing more than a hundred concerts a year, at fees starting at $7,500 for a recital. With memories of Moscow barely dimmed a decade on, to many he was a true American hero.

  Yet America was changing, and one man’s hero was no longer his neighbor’s. The 1960s youthquake was erupting, Vietnam was burning, and the cultural outlaws were about to storm the picket fence fortresses.

  THE VIETNAM War began because America, like the Soviet Union, had tethered its credibility to weak client states in the name of building alliances. When their clients strained in inconvenient directions, the superpowers were tugged along, absurdly but inevitably locked into unwanted conflicts that were easier to escalate than escape. At first the war attracted widespread support among Americans, but beginning with the major troop increase of February 1965, it seared itself into the national conscience. A month later the first teach-in paralyzed the University of Michigan, and the Beat Generation’s barely concealed unease pushed to the surface in an upsurge of activist energy. As the war laid waste to lives and regions, for many, protest was a necessary human response that trumped Cold War geopolitics and fears of communism.

  The Johnson administration had been focused on domestic reform: civil and voting rights, the war on poverty, and federal funding for education and health care—the “Great Society” agenda that banned racial discrimination, lifted millions off the bread line, and significantly extended the reach of the federal government. LBJ had deep misgivings about the Vietnam conflict even as he broadened it: “I don’t think it’s worth fightin’ for and I don’t think we can get out,” he told his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, after a sleepless night. As a mounting chorus of criticism kept him virtually a prisoner in the White House, his large, friable ego crumbled. He began conceiving of his opponents as traitors and slipping back into the crude worldview of his time as a rising Texas senator, where the “mad masters of the Kremlin” conspired to advance “the surging blood-red tide of communism.” Increasingly paranoid and self-pitying, he ordered CIA director Richard Helms to find proof that the antiwar movement and the urban race riots that broke out each summer were Red plots directed from Moscow or Beijing. “The communists already control the three major networks and the forty major outlets of communication,” he lectured his staff, singling out the “bunch of commies” running the New York Times and fuming that the “communist way of thinking” had even infected the West Wing. By the time Van played at a White House state dinner for the chancellor of Austria in April 1968—the month Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and riots broke out in a hundred U.S. cities—Johnson had announced that he would not seek another term. After Robert Kennedy was assassinated, the Democrats nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, while Richard Nixon came back from the wilderness to clinch the Republican nomination.

  Fresh-faced, God-fearing, and wholesomely Texan, Van had suited the 1950s as surely as chrome fenders fitted a Cadillac. Now, like many Americans in their mid-thirties, he was out of tune with the radical mood of young America, the angry generation that spurned the old values of hard work, discipline, and patriotism in favor of campus protests, pot, rock, and permissive sex. While he was never seen without his dapper off-work uniform of dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie, hippies were dripping beads and beards and letting it all hang out. While he adopted a gracious but stiff public persona that made him a gentlemanly throwback to an age of all of a few years ago, rebels dropped LSD and tripped out from stifling conformity. While he was utterly discreet about his personal life, Allen Ginsberg wrote openly about homosexuality and listed his partner in Who’s Who as his spouse. While the children of the Cold War chanted, “Down with the U.S.!” and “America stinks!” Van wore his patriotism on his sleeve. Even at Carnegie Hall, audiences began to object: “Many in the full house were startled, and some annoyed, when Mr. Cliburn opened the program with the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’” reported the Times, adding that “one woman in a stage seat pointedly refused to rise, and a few listeners were rude enough to hiss.” Undeterred, he sang the national anthem at Constitution Hall with the Johnsons watching. Yet as coffins rolled in, carpet-bombing spread, and college students burned their draft cards, the country had stopped believing in the old heroes.

  Van had raised the profile, status, and salaries of pianists and performers across America and had shown infinite grace under unrelenting pressure. Still, like a latter-day Paderewski, his incredible popularity had always attracted enemies, and now the chorus of complaints grew louder. Critics accused him of coasting, his rangy restlessness distracting him from sinking into the ultimate simplicities of great art. They complained that his repertoire had not expanded fast enough, though with an orchestra it stretched to Beethoven’s Third, Fourth, and Fifth Piano Concertos; Rachmaninoff’s Second and Third Concertos and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini; both Brahms concertos; both Liszt concertos; Chopin’s First; MacDowell’s Second; the Schumann; the Grieg; Mozart’s C Major (K. 503); and Prokofiev’s Third. (His recital program was longer.) A Houston Post writer sniffed that his once-golden tone had become “a bit ticky-tacky.” Others carped that Van’s interpretations were getting stale and had not matured. Privately and not so privately, some suggested that this was because he had not matured as a person, either. He was still reliving his Moscow triumph, they said, or even further back, a sanctified childhood of which he’d never let go. In interviews, he rarely mentioned Rosina Lhévinne now, only Mother, prompting a friend to dash off a furious letter accusing him of extreme ingratitude, which “shows both in your character and in your development as an artist.” Perhaps it was true that with Rildia Bee eternally at his side, he stayed in the sky and never came down to earth, with its compromises and nakedness and fears learned through joy. But that was who he was.

  He smarted at the criticism, but he saw nothing wrong with the way he played. As for his choice of music, it had been set in stone when he was eighteen, and during his first summer vacation, he had gone through the entire piano literature, deciding there
and then which pieces were for him. Or perhaps it had been even earlier, when with his mother’s guidance his keen musical instincts unfolded the plan of the great concertos to him. “Choose carefully which works to learn, and never let them go,” Rildia Bee had said. “They will always be your friends.” So they had been, and he saw nothing wrong with that, either.

  ON JULY 20, 1969, America landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, fulfilling the pledge JFK had announced and LBJ had upheld. Yet the space race continued: within two years the Soviets launched the first crewed space station, Salyut 1, and three top-secret military stations followed between 1973 and 1976. Nor was the arms race in retreat. Punching through a loophole in the 1963 test ban treaty, both superpowers developed sophisticated underground testing techniques that led to an increase in U.S. detonations. By 1970 the USSR was fast closing the real missile gap, and attention moved to new destruction-enhancing innovations such as fitting many independently targetable warheads to a single missile.

  From his small dacha near Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev followed events as best he could. He had spent the last few years dictating his memoirs in his usual crude, self-justifying, colorfully charismatic style. His son, Sergei, had smuggled some tapes to the West, and in 1970 they were transcribed and published under the title Khrushchev Remembers. In response, the Sovet authorities demoted Sergei and made Khrushchev sign a statement denying any knowledge of the work. When Moscow Radio broadcast the disavowal, it was the first time the former premier’s name had been heard in six years.

  On September 11, 1971, Nikita Sergeyevich suffered a heart attack and died in a suburban hospital. He was denied a state funeral or burial in the Kremlin Wall. There was no orchestra to play him on his way; instead, Chopin’s “Funeral March” hissed from the speakers of the brick morgue, where he was laid out with his twenty-six military and state medals, including three stars denoting a Hero of the Soviet Union, incongruously pinned to velvet cushions at his feet. In place of a solemn funeral procession, there was a bus painted with a black border that bore the coffin and the family members sitting around it on the bumpy thirty-minute ride to the Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow’s second best.

  The news had been embargoed until the day of burial, the silence a measure of the current leaders’ lack of confidence in their own popularity, and there was no announcement of the place or time of interment. Even so, dissidents had been rounded up on suspicion of intent to commit an “antisocial act,” and hundreds of soldiers and policemen surrounded the cemetery, the officers shouting into radios, while more waited in reserve in covered trucks. The gates were firmly shut, and stuck next to them was a scrap of paper announcing in red pencil: CEMETERY CLOSED FOR CLEANING. They opened to let in the bus and a group of mourners with passes, then closed again. The bus continued to the farthest and least prestigious corner of the cemetery, passing through a final cordon of plainclothes guards and KGB officers until it was within sight and earshot of the elevated railway that ran outside the walls.

  A fine mist fell as the coffin was placed on a bier. Red-eyed women in black shawls pressed close, weeping and kissing Khrushchev’s bald head. As well as family and close friends, there was a large group of Western journalists and a small crowd of artists and writers who had lately missed Khrushchev’s noisy leniency. Nina Khrushchev stood with her three daughters in a black lace mantilla and dark gray coat, fighting back tears. Sergei, without coat or umbrella, strode to the mound of earth beside the grave and spoke the eulogy.

  “There were those who loved him, there were those who hated him,” he said in distinct, measured tones, “but few could pass him by without noticing him.” The reporters held their whirring cine cameras above their heads as the rain fell harder. “We have lost someone who had every right to be called a man,” Sergei added. The reproach did not need to be said. A few more speeches followed, one from an old revolutionary from Khrushchev’s former hometown, Donetsk. “We remember Nikita Sergeyevich as an unbending proletarian,” she testified, “one who was to us, the younger people, an example of fortitude, of heroism, of unbending will, of unbending passion in defense of the party line.” A young man whose father and grandfather had been executed under Stalin thanked the deceased premier for ending the Terror.

  An official hurried the mourners along as they filed past the coffin. When the final moment came, Nina caressed her husband’s forehead and burst into heaving sobs. A worker in blue coveralls banged nails into the lid as a small brass band struck up a dirge. The black-suited players blared out the Soviet anthem while the coffin was lowered with ropes, and the gravediggers moved in with spades.

  “You must disperse now and go on your way, comrades,” the official shouted. No one moved. A few onlookers who had managed to bluff their way through the security talked in low voices.

  “All the rulers of Russia have been killers,” said one. “Through all our history only two have given us freedom—Alexander II and Khrushchev. And Russia took it out on them for that.”

  “So what do you expect?” someone else asked, “that’s just our traditional way of behaving. But the important thing is that those two acted as they did.”

  “Nikita Sergeyevich wouldn’t have wanted it to end this way,” said an old man. “He’d have invited all Russia to his funeral.”

  Pravda announced the death of “merit pensioner Nikita Sergeyevich” in a one-sentence, seven-line notice. The rest of the world’s media properly commemorated the peasant’s son whose natural wit had taken him to the peak of power; the bluff, bumptious premier who tried to atone for his heinous deeds, who clung to his strong, simple convictions, and who worked in his own magnificently cockeyed way for peace. “Mr. Khrushchev opened the doors and windows of a petrified structure,” veteran Moscow correspondent Harry Schwartz wrote in the New York Times. “He let in fresh air and fresh ideas, producing changes which time already has shown are irreversible and fundamental.” The headline, impossible to imagine just years before: WE KNOW NOW THAT HE WAS A GIANT AMONG MEN.

  • 20 •

  Great Expectations

  RICHARD NIXON had made his name as a foe of communism and had sealed his reputation in the Kitchen Debate. As president, he had begun by escalating the Vietnam War. So it was a startling turnabout when, three years into his first term, he announced plans to visit China.

  The trip was a bold wager in the great game of geopolitical power. Nixon had set himself the perilous task of building a relationship with a nuclear-armed Communist country with ambitions to be a global player, in the hope of playing it off against another nuclear-armed Communist country that was already a global player. He arrived in February 1972, shook hands with Mao Zedong and premier Zhou Enlai, met with both men, and banqueted in the outsize Great Hall of the People. In the most secret session of the trip, so secret that not even the CIA knew what took place, national security adviser Henry Kissinger sat down opposite Liu Shikun’s father-in-law, Ye Jianying, and briefed him on American intelligence of massive Soviet troop deployments along the Chinese border. Unbeknownst to the pianist, who was still in solitary confinement, the general had regained favor and was now defense minister in all but title; he and three other Chinese marshals had boldly advised Mao to play the “American card” against the Soviet Union, believing that the Soviets were a greater threat to China than the Americans.

  Nixon’s visit was in large measure designed to pressure the Soviet Union into restarting détente. The gamble paid off, and negotiations for a presidential visit to the Soviet Union, which had been broken off twelve years before, were soon concluded. Alarmed at the Sino-American alliance, the Kremlin also noted that Vietnam, economic competition, and social unrest had shaken America’s standing, and the Soviets considered that the United States would be a realistic negotiating partner in trade and arms control. Among reformers, there were even hopes that in finding themselves both outsiders in large parts of the world, the two superpowers might find themselves allies.

  For this first visit
of a U.S. president to the Soviet Union since Roosevelt’s wartime trip to Yalta—the first ever to Russia—Sol Hurok planned a near repeat of the Eisenhower program. The impresario booked Van to appear in eight cities and Roberta Peters to perform in four operas, and then waited for a presidential blessing. For Van it was an opportunity to renew his ties and reassert his influence after seven long years. He arrived in Moscow early and found himself quartered in the monstrous Hotel Rossiya, an unloved Khrushchev legacy built to house deputies to his Palace of Congresses. Also staying in what was then the world’s biggest hotel was Nixon’s aide Ron Walker, a Texan code-named Roadrunner who coordinated the president’s trips. “Staying” was putting it nicely: KGB agents guarded the hallways and elevator, guns in hand, keeping Walker and his party under house arrest in retaliation for Nixon’s mining of Vietnam’s Haiphong Harbor. The hotel set up a small top-floor dining room for the captives, and Van joined them for meals. When he complained to his fellow Texan about that perennial bugbear of Westerners in Moscow, the telephone system—he didn’t like to let a day go without talking to his mother, he said, and couldn’t get through to her—Walker had a word with the White House Communications Agency, and Van soon had a White House Signal phone that he could use day and night. Walker also passed on Nixon’s personal request that Van perform at a Spaso House banquet for the leaders, and he happily accepted.