Six Crises

by Richard Nixon

  I left Moscow early that morning with a sense of relief, thinking that I would now have a respite from the tension and crisis-laden atmosphere of dealing with Khrushchev. This was wishful thinking. The “spirit of Khrushchev,” or the line he laid down for my visit, followed me constantly, without letup, on my four-day tour of Leningrad and the Siberian cities of Novosibirsk and Sverdlovsk.

  The American party and the press traveled in a convoy of three twin-engined Soviet jet planes, TU-104s, because Soviet officials had initially refused to allow us to use our own planes for travel within the Soviet Union. Presumably they feared we might photograph their country from our own planes.

  I had looked forward to spreading the good word, mir i druzhba, peace and friendship, to the people of Russia, and I believe I was partially successful in this for it seemed that the farther away from Moscow I got, the friendlier the people were. Large crowds in Leningrad, in the Ural manufacturing city of Sverdlovsk, and in the Siberian frontier city of Novosibirsk, came out to greet us. Thousands upon thousands answered my words of greeting with the cry, druzhba— friendship. The masses of the Russian people, as distinguished from the elite few who make up the Communist hierarchy, are truly friendly toward the United States. They remember our help in World War II, they know at firsthand the terrible destruction of war and desperately want peace.

  Nevertheless, everywhere I went there were planted hecklers who asked obvious, rehearsed political questions. As I toured hydroelectric projects, factories, schoolrooms, or mines, a familiar routine developed. Someone would step out of the crowd, describe himself as a worker or “just a plain Soviet citizen,” and request permission to ask me a question. I would always reply in the affirmative. Then he would recite a question almost by rote. Why is the United States blocking agreement on stopping atomic testing? Why does America want war? Why does America threaten us with military bases on foreign soil? Why won’t America agree to a solution of the Berlin question? The questions were obviously designed to embarrass me, and through me the foreign policy of the United States. With the swarm of newsmen around, I would answer each question rationally, explaining with pointed patience the position of the Western Allies on each question and the opposing Soviet position.

  The routine became so repetitious that the traveling press corps began to make bets among themselves about the time and place of the next “little kitchen debate.” These “debates” occurred in all kinds of places, every day—on a factory assembly line, at an electric plant, at the ballet, in a hotel lobby. The most amusing encounter occurred deep within a copper mine in Petrolyarsk, near Sverdlovsk in the Urals. Dressed in long johns, a wool shirt and breeches, knee-length rubber boots, a miner’s coat, and a miner’s hat with a lamp on it, I was slogging my way through the muck and slime, accompanied by four newspapermen and several Soviet officials, when two miners shut off their clattering air drills and presented themselves to me.

  “Mr. Vice President,” said one, “may I ask a question? The Soviet Union has proposed suspension of atomic tests but the United States refuses. Why?” The setting for such a question was so incongruous that everyone, including the Russians, burst out laughing. Even the two miners recognized the ridiculous circumstances of their assignment and joined in the laughter. But I did not miss an opportunity to answer the question. “You couldn’t have asked such a question in a better place,” I said. “An agreement must have inspection provisions which will assure the detection of underground tests.”

  Harrison E. Salisbury, dean of the American correspondents in Russia, summarized the heckling situation for the New York Times this way:

  Vice President Richard M. Nixon preached the virtues of free speech to several hecklers . . . today. It was one of the rarest of experiences in Soviet life—a free and easy interchange between a leading personality and challengers who appeared from the crowd. The similarity of the questions directed at Mr. Nixon and the tactics of the questioners suggested a central source of inspiration. That the agitation and propaganda department of the Communist Party Central Committee is increasingly nervous over the impact of Mr. Nixon’s man-to-man approach was indicated by several pin pricking reports in the press. . . .

  It must be understood that this heckling campaign provided the only unpleasant incidents in four full days of touring in which I observed a great deal of the Soviet Union and its people and spoke out repeatedly for friendship and peace. These were sixteen-hour, tiring days, beginning early in the morning and often stretching to midnight. I recognized the obvious strategy of the Soviets to probe for any weakness that might be within me, not unlike their international strategy of probing for soft spots around the world. But I was determined to maintain my equilibrium and composure. My objective was to turn the hecklers’ questions into an opportunity for presenting United States policy to the Russian people. Only once did I lose my temper. That occurred near the end of the tour and with considerable provocation.

  It came after a grueling four-hour tour of the huge Uralmash machine plant near Sverdlovsk. The factory was still using some of the huge lathes and drill presses which the United States had sent to Russia under the Lend-Lease program during World War II. It was now manufacturing textile machinery for Red China. At least twenty times, as I started down each new assembly line, a heckler would stop me and put me through the now familiar inquisition. At the end of the tour of the plant, the factory manager insisted that we come to his office, and there, sitting around a table, he and his associates hammered away at me on U. S. policy toward Red China. Finally, realizing that I was two hours behind schedule, I rose and cut short the conversation. The press corps by this time had gone ahead to the next scheduled stop.

  When I walked out of the factory, with only Georgi Zhukov, the Soviet Minister of Information, and Akalovsky, my interpreter, with me, it was almost dark. But there outside the gate, patiently waiting for me since the change of work shifts, were more than 2000 factory employees. They had been standing there for over an hour. When I waved to them, they sent up a rousing cheer with intermittent shouts of “Welcome!” The Soviet authorities had become increasingly irritated by the warmth of my reception. I had noticed that on several previous stops the police had been trying to discourage the crowds from expressing their enthusiasm. On this occasion, I just happened to see one burly character roughly seize a woman by the shoulder to stop her from applauding. Leaving Zhukov behind without any explanation, I turned and walked quickly over to the police officer, grabbed him by the shoulders, and shook him as hard as I could. “Don’t ever do that again,” I said sharply. “When the people are happy and want to express themselves, you leave them alone.” Akalovsky, standing beside me, caught the spirit, and translated what I had said as angrily in Russian as I had in English.

  “I didn’t do anything,” the policeman protested.

  “Yes, you did,” I said. “I saw you push this woman. Don’t ever do that again.”

  The crowd swarmed around, apparently delighted that someone dared take on the Soviet police. Akalovsky told me later that he heard several workers say to the officer, “Now you’ve caught it. You’d better leave us alone.”

  By this time, Zhukov walked up and asked what was the matter. “Let’s get in the car and we’ll discuss this later,” I told him. Zhukov, who was my official escort on the entire tour, was a confidant of Khrushchev and chief propagandist for the government. He was a suave, well-educated man of about fifty who had traveled extensively in Europe and the United States as a correspondent and editor of Pravda. As we drove away from the factory, I was in no mood for polite explanations and I laid it on the line to Zhukov, whose official title, ironically, was Chairman of the State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.

  “Mr. Zhukov,” I said, “this little game you’ve been playing with me through your planted hecklers for the past few days has not been going well with the press, and in my opinion it is backfiring even among your own people. You underestimate their intelligence. They a
ren’t dumb. They know when somebody is acting and when it is the real thing—particularly when the acts have been so amateurish. Now, I just want to put you on notice that I will continue to answer your hecklers without protest. But the next time I see one of your policemen trying to keep a crowd from indicating its friendship for the United States, I am going to blast the whole bunch of you publicly in a way you’ll never forget. We have our differences, and I believe in discussing them honestly and candidly. But we don’t have to make a joke out of the whole business.”

  Zhukov tried to deny that he or Khrushchev was responsible for the hecklers or the police control of the crowds. “The police were just trying to protect you,” he said.

  “The police don’t have to protect me from friendly people,” I answered, and then sat in silence for the balance of our drive to the next stop on the schedule. I do not know if my talk with Zhukov did any good, but it helped me personally: I had let off some of the steam which had been building up to the exploding point.

  I wound up my ten-day tour of the Soviet Union back in Moscow with an unprecedented thirty-minute speech to the Russian people on a nationwide radio-TV hookup.

  The preparation of this broadcast was a crisis in itself. Thompson kept emphasizing to me how important it was. This would be the first time in history that a Russian television audience would hear a top American official defend United States foreign policy.

  I knew the broadcast was important, but my schedule was so full that I had no time whatever during the day to prepare my remarks. For four days before the broadcast I used every free moment to jot down notes. For the two nights before the broadcast, I did not go to bed at all, using the time to write my final draft. I tried to get what sleep I needed by dozing on long automobile or plane rides.

  As I worked on the broadcast, I thought back on a week of crisis, of unrelenting pressure created and controlled by the Communist authorities. The discipline and the cohesive line of attack of the Communist functionaries, big and small, which had extended from Moscow to Leningrad and into Siberia, had been both impressive to me and discouraging. Yet, there was one encouraging factor that I had noted in every city I visited: the unrestrained expressions of friendship on the part of the Russian people. This was evident particularly in those areas where the people were less under the eye of Communist authorities. Shipyard workers in Leningrad had cheered references to Eisenhower in my speech. In the heart of Siberia, people had leaned out of windows and from jam-packed streetcars to cheer and to applaud our party of Americans. Thousands had gathered on the streets outside of each building we entered and they had cheered when we came out. School children in the Urals threw bouquets of flowers into our cars and had shouted in English, “Friendship . . . friendship,” for that was one of the first words they had been taught in their English classes. A workman in a construction project in the Urals had thrown his arms around me and had said, “I met many Americans during the war and I never want to fight against them.”

  Working on my speech at a desk in Spaso House, I thought of the contrast between the warm, friendly, gracious, and good people I had met—and the tough, cold, ruthless Communist leaders. It was the same here in the heartland of the Communist empire as in all the countries I had visited. The Communists are a class apart. They are a minority with enormous power. This did not mean, of course, that the Russian people are ready to rebel against their government. But it did point up the fact, which any observant visitor can see, that the Communists gain and retain their power through an iron discipline in an elite class of leaders and organizers, not through any development of true mass support. While this is the strength behind Communist tactics, it also is potentially a fatal weakness in the international Communist movement.

  These and many other thoughts flowed through my mind as I selected what I wanted to say to the Russian people. One basic decision I had to make was whether to aim my speech primarily at the Russian people or at the American people, for I realized that this speech would be heard by the Russian people but also read in the press by the American people. With the 1960 presidential election not far off, a tough blasting speech would be politically expedient for me and, with some justification, I was tempted to deliver my own thoughts about the obvious evils of a Communist police state which I had seen firsthand.

  However, with all things considered, I chose to speak out solely with the Russian people in mind. The best use I could make of my historic opportunity was to cite some facts for the Russian people which they never got in the Communist press. I tried to present these facts in such a way that the Russian people would recognize that I was not being belligerent or bellicose or discourteous to my hosts. For one thing, I intended to give the Kremlin hierarchy no excuse for preventing other American visitors, particularly President Eisenhower, from also addressing the Russian people. I was the first high American official to have this opportunity. I did not want to be the last.

  Ambassador Thompson, whose intimate knowledge of the Soviet Government and people proved invaluable, advised and guided me through this task. At his suggestion, I included the whole story of the incident at the vegetable market, when the Soviets had accused me of trying to bribe a citizen. While on the surface this seemed a minor incident, it proved to be one of the most effective parts of my speech: it was the first time in recent Soviet history that anyone had publicly challenged the veracity of Pravda. According to reports I received later, it stimulated quite a bit of debate among the Russian people about the accuracy of the news they were receiving. In fact, the speech itself set off a wave of new discussions within the Soviet Union, for never before had the Russian people been given so fully the Western side of the East-West conflict.2

  I spelled out in detail that the United States had fought in two great world wars and had never exacted any territorial gains or reparations and that the United States had no designs on world conquest. Our armaments, our bases were for defense. Following Foster Dulles’ advice, I firmly placed the responsibility for peace upon Khrushchev’s shoulders and told the Russian people:

  I would not be so presumptuous to give [Mr. Khrushchev] advice on how he should fulfill that responsibility. But could I relate something that I noted on the trip I have just completed? In every factory and on hundreds of billboards, I saw this slogan, “Let Us Work for the Victory of Communism.”

  If Mr. Khrushchev means by this slogan working for a better life for the people within the Soviet Union, that is one thing. If, on the other hand, he means the victory of Communism over the United States and other countries, this is a horse of a different color. For we have our own ideas as to what system is best for us.

  If he devotes his immense energies and talents to building a better life for the people of his own country, Mr. Khrushchev can go down in history as one of the greatest leaders the Soviet people have ever produced. But if he diverts the resources and talents of his people to the objective of promoting the Communization of countries outside the Soviet Union, he will only assure that both he and his people will continue to live in an era of fear, suspicion and tension. . . .

  The next day, Sunday, August 2, was my last in the Soviet Union. I attended a pleasant reception for our American personnel at the Embassy. Then I went through a long press conference with the newsmen who had covered my trip. I tried to be scrupulously fair in recognizing alternately Soviet and American reporters. But one of the Pravda reporters proceeded to launch into a long harangue, charging I was discriminating against the Soviet newsmen. James Reston of the New York Times came to my defense and set the record straight, something for which I was most grateful at the end of what had been a long and trying ordeal.

  I had a final talk with Ambassador Thompson and confided to him my sense of frustration over my visit. I felt that my personal contacts with the Russian people on my tour outside of Moscow would have some lasting effect for good and might in turn affect Khrushchev, for no dictator can totally ignore the deep-seated desires of his people. I felt I must have con
vinced some of the Russian people of our desire for peace, which matched theirs. But I knew that I had had no success whatever in getting through to Khrushchev and the Soviet leaders.

  In thinking of the little progress I had made against the enormity of the task, I was left with a sense of depression. Even the way the Soviets had carried my television speech was typical. They complied with their technical agreement to give me similar exposure to that of Mikoyan and Kozlov in the United States, but they did so on the smallest possible network and with no advance notice of my appearance.

  Thompson, however, reassured me. “Five years ago,” he said, “it would have been absolutely unthinkable for anyone to say the things you did to the Russian people. Those of us who have lived with this problem know what a momentous thing this was for them [the Soviet leaders] to do.”

  I was reminded of a similar comment about the course of progress made by Prime Minister Macmillan—to the effect that one hundred years elapsed between the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who beheaded her councilors who fell out of favor, and Queen Anne, who because of the pressure of public opinion, could only send hers into exile. And now, only five years had elapsed between Stalin, who had executed his real or imagined rivals, and Khrushchev, who had demoted Malenkov from Premier to manager of a small power plant, and Molotov from Foreign Minister to an Embassy post in Outer Mongolia. Perhaps even in the Communist empire there is a ray of hope for peaceful change.

  • • •

  On the two-hour flight from Moscow to Warsaw, I looked back on my trip to the Soviet Union with little satisfaction, and on my impending visit to Poland with even less hope. And the reason had nothing whatever to do with material power. After seeing the Soviet Union, I was not concerned about the ability of the United States to stay well ahead of the Communists militarily and economically. But what had most impressed me was the ruthless efficiency of the whole Communist operation.