In his 1962 book, Six Crises, Nixon sought to heighten the significance of the trip. He depicted his long one-on-one sessions with Khrushchev as monumental clashes of will between two tough and unforgiving combatants. Khrushchev, he wrote, was always “on the offensive,” always “aggressive, rude, and forceful,” always probing for weaknesses. Nixon described himself as “on edge,” “keyed up,” and “ready for battle.” But since he was the guest, he had to avoid making any rude remarks in reply to Khrushchev’s provocations. “I had to counter him like a fighter with one hand tied behind his back.” Nixon fought by “Marquis of Queensberry rules,” while Khrushchev punched like a “bare-knuckle slugger.” The two men went “toe-to-toe”; it was “cold steel between us”; it was “hand-to-hand combat.” And so on. Khrushchev would later refer to Nixon as a “son-of-a-bitch,” a “puppet of McCarthy,” and “an unprincipled puppet—which is the most dangerous kind.” So perhaps Nixon did manage to rattle the Soviet leader.28
Nixon’s trip served him well. He received praise from the press for his handling of Khrushchev. According to James Reston, the trip “enhanced Mr. Nixon’s chances of nomination” for president by the Republican Party in 1960. In Russia, Nixon had found a more complex and dynamic society than he had expected. He had effectively spoken out about American freedom of religion and the press, and done so in a manner that was firm but respectful. Reston concluded that Nixon had “handled a delicate political assignment . . . with considerable skill.” Even Walter Lippmann praised him for demonstrating that personal diplomacy could be far more effective in lowering world tensions than meetings of professional diplomats. Voters too took notice: in August and September the Gallup poll showed Nixon leading both Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy in a presidential contest by 2 points.29
Eisenhower approved of Nixon’s performance, but he did not wish to let the spotlight linger on his junior partner. On August 3, while Nixon was concluding his tour with a brief stop in Poland (and basking in the adulation of large crowds in Warsaw), Eisenhower made even bigger news. In a hastily prepared press conference, Eisenhower announced that he would welcome Khrushchev to the United States within a matter of weeks and would travel to the USSR by the end of the year. Giant headlines filled the world’s newspapers. The exchange of visits was the biggest news story since Sputnik. The Soviet Union remained for many Americans a frightening and menacing country. Stalin had been dead for only six years, and memories of Soviet tanks in Budapest and Khrushchev’s nuclear saber-rattling over Suez still burned. Yet Ike put out a hand of peace and invited the Soviets to grasp it.
The announcement marked a turning point for Eisenhower. The doldrums of the postelection defeat lifted; new air filled the sails of the ship of state. His approval rating, which had slumped to 52 percent in November 1958, now hit 64 percent, according to the Gallup poll. The Wall Street Journal hailed Ike’s new “personal diplomacy” as a “sharp turn in the conduct of foreign affairs.” Reston wrote that Eisenhower seemed reborn, “a man of action again, moving and planning and speaking out with a new serenity. . . . He has moved out of the shadows and into the center of the stage.” With the restraining figures of Sherman Adams and John Foster Dulles gone, Eisenhower seemed more flexible, dynamic, determined to secure his legacy. “He sees the light at the end of the tunnel,” Reston observed, “and some of the old sparkle has returned.”
Ann Whitman, who saw the president every day and knew his moods well, described him as “happy as a lad” about the news that he and Khrushchev would exchange visits. Instead of frosty, tense arguments over Berlin and nuclear weapons, carried out by tired, faceless bureaucrats in Geneva, Eisenhower proposed “to melt a little bit of the ice that seems to freeze our relationship,” as he said in his news conference. Americans overwhelmingly approved. If anyone had the prestige and stature to thaw the cold war, it was Eisenhower.30
V
Planning for Khrushchev’s visit began immediately. On August 5 Eisenhower debriefed Nixon, who provided some churlish comments. Khrushchev, he said, had a “closed mind” and was “primitive” and “polemical.” Nixon suggested that the State Department arrange long meetings with Khrushchev to tire him out and “ferret out his main points” before he met with Eisenhower, so as to put him at a disadvantage—precisely the tactic to which Nixon had been subjected. From the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Ambassador Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, who had replaced Chip Bohlen in 1957, cabled Eisenhower with more thoughtful advice. Khrushchev, he reminded Ike, was a true believer in communism and in the inevitable collapse of capitalism. If organized correctly, the trip might “shake his convictions” that America was a feeble, rotten society. The trip should demonstrate the “long-term prospects for growth” of the vast American economy. If Khrushchev was forced to confront the reality of American power and industry, he might prove more amenable at the conference table.31
Eisenhower reiterated to his advisers that while he did not anticipate any major breakthrough with Khrushchev, he wanted “to bring about some lessening of tension” and “some measure of confidence and relief to the minds of our people.” In a revealing phrase, he told Staff Secretary Andrew Goodpaster that he thought “he personally might make an appeal to Khrushchev in terms of his place in history” by taking steps to ease the cold war. He planned to warm him up by hosting him both at Gettysburg and at Camp David in an informal setting where the two could try to move beyond stale ideological arguments.32
One crucial preliminary task awaited before Ike met with the Soviet leader. He had to reassure his NATO allies that the United States did not intend to negotiate any grand bargain in the cold war or sell out West Germany by agreeing to Khrushchev’s demands. To make his point, in late summer Eisenhower conducted a hasty tour of three key capital cities: Bonn, London, and Paris. On August 26 he set off for West Germany and was met by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and by an enormous crowd lining the streets of the capital city—a heartwarming welcome for the man who, only 14 years earlier, had arrived in Germany as a conqueror. Now Eisenhower came as a symbol of America’s commitment to defend Germany from Soviet pressure. A day of discussion with Adenauer left the Germans reassured: the allies would stay in Berlin and never cede their rights there under duress.33
A short hop to London followed. In the late afternoon of August 27 Eisenhower and Prime Minister Macmillan rode together from the airport to the American Embassy in an open car past great crowds of well-wishers, gathered in the lingering sunshine to get a peek at the man so beloved in Britain. The car moved, Macmillan recalled, “at a snail’s pace,” with no security or police protection. This was a reunion of friends. Eisenhower was the guest of Queen Elizabeth II for the weekend at Balmoral, the Scottish home of the royal family. The 33-year-old queen drove Eisenhower around the vast parklands in her station wagon, across moors and rutted roads, and served him tea and scones in a remote stone cottage looking out over the Caledonian heather.
Back in London, Macmillan again tried to press Eisenhower to agree to a summit of the Big Four powers. Ike remained noncommittal, stressing that he did not want to look as if he had been bullied by Khrushchev into a negotiation. He would wait and see how the Khrushchev visit unfolded. This stubbornness frustrated Macmillan, but he bit his tongue because the joint appearance with the American president on a live television broadcast, direct from 10 Downing Street on the evening of August 31, did wonders for the prime minister’s political popularity. Just a few days after Eisenhower’s departure, Macmillan seized the opportunity to announce the dissolution of Parliament and called a general election. The Eisenhower magic, it seemed, even rubbed off on Macmillan.34
On September 1, his last night in London, the president hosted an extraordinary dinner at Winfield House, the American ambassador’s residence. It was a gathering of wartime compatriots that served to remind the world, if anyone had forgotten, that Eisenhower stood at the center of a transatlantic fellowship of great warriors and leaders. To dine with the president came former pri
me minister Winston Churchill, now almost 85, as well as the great British generals whom Ike had fought alongside, including Field Marshals Alanbrooke and Montgomery. A passage from Shakespeare’s Henry V sprang to Eisenhower’s mind:
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names . . .
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.35
From London, Eisenhower headed to Paris for what John Eisenhower called “the stickiest part of the trip”: a meeting with President Charles de Gaulle. Eisenhower had not seen de Gaulle since the war. A tall, humorless nationalist, a man acutely sensitive to any slight or condescension from the Anglo-Americans, de Gaulle had been a difficult, inflexible ally during the war. In office since 1958, he still crossed swords with the Americans on a variety of matters. But on one important issue Eisenhower and de Gaulle strongly agreed: Berlin. The Allied powers were there by right and would not be pushed out by Soviet threats. The USSR, de Gaulle insisted, must never conclude that it could intimidate the West. Eisenhower came away from the Paris trip heartened by the stalwart support of France. As an old soldier, Eisenhower admired de Gaulle’s “mystical self-confidence and his unswerving dedication to the restoration of French prestige.” The two great war leaders stood shoulder to shoulder before enormous crowds on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville and in a somber ceremony placed a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe.36
VI
With his allies squarely behind him, Eisenhower braced for the arrival of the Soviet leader. On the eve of the big event, Ike received an irksome piece of news. On September 12 the Soviets had fired a new rocket, Lunik II, into space, and the next day the spacecraft plunked down on the moon, becoming the first man-made object to land there. Eisenhower called the moonshot “poor behavior” by the USSR. He snappishly said he was trying to “make one big effort to see if the Soviets will loosen up and adopt a cooperative approach to world problems.” Why would they now launch another rocket to tweak the Americans? He had perhaps forgotten the impact on the Soviets of the congressional “Captive Nations” declaration on the eve of Nixon’s trip. The Americans too were capable of poor behavior: the day before Khrushchev’s arrival, Nixon delivered a dinner speech to 2,500 dentists at the New York Waldorf Astoria in which he called the Soviet leader “cold, calculating, and tough-minded” and said that showing any signs of compromise toward the USSR “would be a grave mistake.” Keen to protect his anticommunist credentials, Nixon seemed to be distancing himself from Eisenhower’s charm offensive.37
Khrushchev, the chairman of the Council of Ministers and first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, arrived in Washington on September 15, 1959, accompanied by an entourage of over 100 officials. In his memoirs he admitted he was “worried” about the trip. “This was America!” he recalled. “It was necessary to represent the USSR in a worthy manner.” He felt pressure to “argue for our position and defend it in a worthy way so as not to humiliate ourselves.” As his son later recounted, Khrushchev fretted over “every trivial detail,” feeling certain that the “capitalists and aristocrats” would look on him as an inferior. For example, he thought holding meetings at Camp David might be some kind of slight, as if he was not important enough to be welcomed to the White House. He had insisted on traveling to Washington in the world’s largest passenger plane, the huge new Tupolev 114, despite the engineering flaws and cracks that its designers had recently discovered. Khrushchev was delighted that the plane was too big to land at National Airport and had to be rerouted to Andrews Air Force Base, with its longer runways.38
If he was nervous, Khrushchev hid it well. Wiley Buchanan, the White House chief of protocol, remembered the scene: “He came down the stairs [of the plane] with a springy stride, a chunky little bald-headed man who looked more like a teddy-bear than a monster.” He carried a black homburg hat and sported two Hero of Socialist Labor medals on his left lapel and a Lenin Peace Prize on his right. “He was smiling broadly, but his sharp little eyes were shrewd and appraising.” Before him spooled out an immense red carpet along which stood a glittering honor guard. Eisenhower “looked grim,” perhaps because as he stood at attention for the national anthems, he faced directly into the sun and had to squint. But he also took umbrage at Khrushchev’s short speech, in which he bragged about the Soviet space program. The president and his guest strode past the handsomely arrayed soldiers of the 3rd Infantry and got into an open limousine for the 15-mile drive into Washington. Along the route they sped past hundreds of Secret Service officers and police and thousands of curious but silent onlookers.39
Khrushchev, his wife, Nina Petrovna, their two grown daughters, Rada and Julia, and a small party of top officials were driven to Blair House, the guest residence for official visitors. Shortly after his arrival, Khrushchev met with Eisenhower in the Oval Office for 90 minutes, during which the two men reiterated their shared desire for peace and a new beginning in their relations. But they did not limit themselves to pleasantries. Khrushchev presented Eisenhower with a copy of the small hammer-and-sickle pennant that the Lunik rocket had just speared into the moon—an ill-mannered reminder of Soviet scientific prowess. He also presented him with a shotgun, a highly polished box containing special wines and vodkas, 12 jars of caviar, and a collection of records of Russian folk songs. Ike moved directly to the main subject of contention, Berlin, stressing that while the whole situation was “abnormal” and “irritating,” America would never surrender its rights there nor respond to ultimatums. Khrushchev insisted that he wanted peaceful ties and pointed to Nixon’s provocative speech of the day before, suggesting that the Americans had shown a lack of respect to their guest. All in all, it was an awkward beginning.40
Eisenhower, not wishing to start the visit on the wrong foot, dismissed all the senior staff and advisers from the Oval Office, keeping only two translators. In a 10-minute tête-à-tête Ike delivered his planned personal appeal to the Soviet leader, saying that Khrushchev “had an opportunity to become the greatest political figure in history” by taking up the cause of peace and changing the direction of Soviet policy. But the gesture fell flat. Khrushchev firmly replied that both sides must compromise. And with that, the president walked his guest onto the South Lawn for an impromptu helicopter tour of Washington. They slowly lifted off, then veered out across the city at rush hour, gazing down at the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Potomac River, its waters rippling in the fading sunlight.41
The visit never settled into a comfortable rhythm. Khrushchev managed to find small ways to upset his hosts, whether refusing to dress appropriately for the large formal state dinner at the White House that night, or raising his glass with a toast to a future in which the USSR would soon outproduce America, or sitting grimly through an evening performance by Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians as they played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and other patriotic tunes. American journalists at the National Press Club angered Khrushchev the next day by asking him embarrassing questions such as “What were you doing while Stalin was committing his crimes?” and “[How do you] justify armed intervention in Hungary?” According to Wiley Buchanan, as Khrushchev listened to these questions, “a tide of red crept up his bull neck; his little eyes glared with a ferocity that reminded me of a wild boar.” But that night he hosted Eisenhower at the grand Soviet Embassy (a Beaux-Arts mansion built by the sleeping-car tycoon George Pullman) for a lavish dinner of caviar, black bread, vodka, borscht, stuffed partridges, and shashlik. Khrushchev even echoed Eisenhower’s words when he said in his toast, “The ice of the cold war . . . has started to crumble.”42
After a train ride to New York on September 17, the Soviet delegation was installed at the Commodore Hotel and given lunch by the mayor, Robert Wagner. More awkwardness ensued. Khrushchev addressed a dinner that night at the Economic Club of New York and was openly heckled by
drunken members of the audience, eliciting an apology from the club’s president. The next day he made a hasty trip to Hyde Park to pay his respects to Eleanor Roosevelt and lay a wreath at the grave of the former president. He toured the Roosevelt home but seemed uninterested and disengaged. “I’m not getting through to him!” Mrs. Roosevelt sighed. He skipped a lavish buffet lunch that she had arranged and sped back to New York. At the United Nations that afternoon he delivered an address calling for total world disarmament and the banning of atomic weapons—a disheartening speech that contained shopworn phrases and empty rhetoric. By the end of his East Coast trip, Americans had begun to grow disappointed with the “tough, high-tempered, chip-on-the-shoulder Khrushchev,” as Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post described him.43
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