Eisenhower had taken the Soviet protests very seriously. He believed that an unauthorized Soviet airplane in U.S. airspace would be an act of war and expected Khrushchev to react the same way. Sixteen months had passed since the last U-2 flight, and his intelligence and diplomatic advisers were now telling the president that he needed to revisit the prohibition. Concerns were rising in Congress and throughout the intelligence community about the pace of Soviet strategic missile development. Herter believed that the potential intelligence harvest from a series of U-2 missions that could document Soviet missile launch facilities outweighed the diplomatic costs if one were shot down. The CIA’s desire for the missions was equally clear. Reluctantly Eisenhower concluded that his country’s ignorance of the state of Khrushchev’s strategic arsenal was too high. He approved a single U-2 mission that morning.39
Khrushchev’s surprise proposal of a state visit to the United States was a breath of fresh air for Eisenhower on a day when he was feeling the burdens of leadership in the Cold War. In rescinding the prohibition on U-2 flights, the president had told his inner circle that “we are getting to the point where we must decide if we are trying to prepare to fight a war, or to prevent one.”40 In his conversation with Herter after the press conference, Eisenhower expressed a preference to tie a Khrushchev visit to some kind of summit, probably in Quebec, Canada, where Roosevelt and Churchill had conferred twice during World War II. This newfound interest in summitry was a sign of how seriously the president took that morning’s U-2 decision. He believed that it was not enough to take risks to acquire intelligence but that he needed to take risks to try to improve relations so that these dangerous U-2 flights might become less necessary. He had tried summitry in 1955 and been disappointed. He had avoided meeting Khrushchev over Iraq in the summer of 1958, and once the Kremlin laid down its Berlin ultimatum in November of that year, Eisenhower became firmly opposed to any summit with the Soviet leader. It would be humiliating, he thought, for a president to meet his Soviet counterpart under threat of an ultimatum. But now Eisenhower believed it was time to let Khrushchev have his summit.
Over the next two days Eisenhower worked with Herter on an invitation to Khrushchev. Kozlov, who was due to leave the United States on July 12, could be used to carry a secret message to Khrushchev. A text was drafted that invited Khrushchev to the United States but still bore vestiges of Eisenhower’s long-standing reluctance about a one-on-one meeting with him. The White House believed it was sending a qualified invitation to Khrushchev: If the foreign ministers’ conference produced some kind of positive result and the Berlin ultimatum was removed, then the Khrushchev visit should be scheduled together with a summit in Quebec. However, the State Department doubted that the invitation was qualified in any meaningful way.41 Sure enough, when Khrushchev received the invitation, he concluded that Eisenhower had invited him without any conditions. Finally, one of his initiatives had borne fruit.42 He was going to visit the homeland of his great adversary.
EISENHOWER DID NOT face any public opposition to his decision to be the first American leader to invite a Soviet leader to the United States. A survey sponsored by the State Department found that most newspaper editors and commentators expressed support for the visit.43 The most vocal opposition came from veterans’ groups, the Roman Catholic Church, and hard-core conservative columnists, who believed that the invitation bestowed untoward legitimacy on a Communist dictator. Despite general approval of the visit, few Americans expected any breakthroughs.
For Khrushchev the three-week trip, scheduled to begin September 15, was going to be as much about show as it was about substance. It was a great achievement of Soviet socialism that the United States, its most formidable adversary, would treat a Soviet leader with the full pomp and circumstance accorded any visiting head of state. Khrushchev’s pride was also mixed with some fear. He could not help expecting some kind of effort by the Americans to humiliate him—a “provocation,” as he termed it. Evidence of this fear, and of his own government’s inability to prepare him for the trip, came when the State Department reported to him that the president very much wished him to visit Camp David. What almost every American or Western European who read newspapers knew apparently stumped the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Neither Ambassador Menshikov nor the Americanists in Moscow had any idea what or where Camp David was.
Faced with an invitation to this unknown place, Khrushchev immediately conjured up the specter of a visit to an American internment facility. “One reason I was suspicious,” he later recalled, “was that I remembered in the early years after the Revolution, when contacts were first being established with the bourgeois world, a Soviet delegation was invited to a meeting held someplace called the Prince’s Islands. It came out in the newspapers that it was to these islands that stray dogs were sent to die…. I was afraid maybe this Camp David was the same sort of place, where people who were mistrusted could be kept in quarantine.”44 Once his advisers described where he was actually being invited, the presidential retreat in the Cacoctin Mountains of Maryland, Khrushchev was delighted and, he later recalled, a little ashamed: “It shows how ignorant we were in some respects.”45
Khrushchev wanted to arrive in style. Nonstop transatlantic travel was still in its infancy, and the Soviet turboprop Tu-114, which Khrushchev had ordered in 1955 after the embarrassment of arriving in Geneva in the smallest plane of any of the participants in the great power summit, was one of the few airplanes that could do it. The problem for Khrushchev’s bodyguards in the KGB was that the plane was only in its experimental phase, and there was evidence of flaws in the design. Microscopic cracks had been discovered in the fuselage of the single operational plane during its first long-distance flight in May 1959. Nevertheless, Khrushchev insisted on using that aircraft. He wanted the world to see that Soviet technology could be world class. In June he had forced his dauphin, Frol Kozlov, to use the TU-114 to fly to the United States for his visit. Now Khrushchev would do the same.
Sergei Khrushchev, who accompanied his father on the U.S. tour, recalled later that the plane should never have been certified to fly. The designer, Andrei Tupolev, made a show of his confidence in the plane by suggesting that his own son, Nikolai, accompany the Khrushchevs. Despite the grandstanding by Khrushchev and his aircraft designer, there was enormous concern that something might happen during the flight, and the reason would not be CIA mischief but Soviet incompetence. The Soviet merchant marine sent instructions to Soviet trawlers and cargo ships in the Atlantic to stand guard to rescue the Khrushchev delegation in the event the plane went down.46
Precautions were also taken onboard the aircraft. The Soviets built a special compartment where the wings met the fuselage to accommodate a team of Tupolev engineers during the flight. Armed with instruments that looked curiously like stethoscopes, they spent the trip listening for the development of any cracks and watching a bank of red and green sensor lights that might indicate some other system failure.
Although in the end not life-threatening, the trip was a misery for the Khrushchevs. The plane’s turboprops created a huge amount of noise, which prevented all but the hardiest sleeper from getting any rest during the twelve-hour flight. Khrushchev spent the time reading and fussing about. When he wasn’t sending cables to all the foreign leaders whose countries the Tu-114 flew over, he was thinking about the country he was about to encounter.
Before leaving the Soviet Union, Khrushchev had had a final chance to size up his American hosts. Vice President Richard Nixon arrived on July 23 for a ten-day visit. Nixon was ostensibly in the Soviet Union to open an exhibition of U.S. science and technology, but the future Republican nominee for president was also eager for a stage to show that he could stand up to “Mr. K,” as journalists jocularly referred to Khrushchev. The Soviet leader respected Nixon but disliked him enormously. Khrushchev believed that with Foster Dulles gone, Nixon was the new leader of the faction in the Eisenhower administration that had sought to thwart Eisenhower’s efforts to re
ach détente with Moscow. Nixon, for his part, considered Khrushchev “a man of great warmth and totally belligerent.”47
The two men held the famous debate on their respective political systems in the model U.S. kitchen at the U.S. exhibition in Moscow. Nixon spoke of the benefits of living in the United States, while Khrushchev denounced an electric juicer sitting on the counter in the kitchen exhibit to make a general argument about what the wasteful luxury of the model kitchen said about the United States’ ability to meet the needs of its citizens. The two politicians seemed to enjoy the give-and-take thoroughly.48 For the vice president, however, the visit had at least one moment of discomfort and possible danger. Secret Service officers assigned to his detail discovered a high level of radiation in and around the vice president’s bedroom in the U.S. Embassy. Nixon was informed but decided to stay in the room anyway. His Secret Service detail devised a different plan. The officers sat in the bedroom and at the top of their voices started cursing the Soviet Union for attempting to poison the vice president of the United States with radiation. The next day the levels returned to normal. The reason for the radiation and whether it was connected with a malfunctioning Soviet listening device were never explained.49
KHRUSHCHEV’S ARRIVAL in the United States started out as comically as the flight over had been. At fifty feet off the ground, the Tu-114 was at the time the world’s tallest airplane, although the reason was not the Soviet love for the gigantic. To sustain itself over long distances, the plane had enormous propellers that acted like huge vacuum cleaners, sucking in birds and everything else that had the ill fortune to come too close. Because Soviet airfields were notoriously dirty—even those used by the Soviet Air Force could never be swept clean of debris—Tupolev had placed the engines as high off the ground as possible.
What was convenient for engines was inconvenient for passengers. As the airplane taxied along the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, the grounds crew realized that they did not have a ladder tall enough to accommodate this airship. Khrushchev and his party would have to descend using the emergency escape ladder in the back. “Therefore,” Khrushchev later recalled, “we had to leave the plane not in the formal, dignified way called for by protocol, but practically climbing down using our hands and legs.”50
Khrushchev was a little unsure of himself as he stepped onto U.S. soil for the first time and was greeted by President Eisenhower. He had performed well in India and the United Kingdom, but now he was in the country he had eyed with envy and contempt for so many years. Before the trip Khrushchev’s representatives had insisted that he be treated as a visiting head of state, despite the fact that the president of the Supreme Soviet was still Kliment Voroshilov. One of the usual rituals for a visiting head of state was the reviewing of troops on the tarmac. Khrushchev found it hard to keep up with the long and lanky Dwight Eisenhower. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson’s wife, who had never seen Khrushchev outside the Soviet Union, watched bemused as his quick and short strides intensified the impression that he was finding the whole thing trying and uncomfortable.51
On the advice of Mikoyan, Khrushchev had decided to bring his family with him: his wife, Nina Petrovna; son, Sergei, and daughters, Rada and Julia. Under Stalin, Kremlin families had remained hidden. As a result, there was so little known about them in the West that when Khrushchev became first secretary of the CPSU, there was some speculation that he was married to a relative of Molotov’s. The U.S. press still had no idea of his children’s names, and for several days, because the two daughters were so shy, could not determine which was Rada and which Julia. There were even some untrue reports that all the children were from Khrushchev’s first marriage. The eldest, Julia came from his first marriage to Yefrosina Ivanovna, who had died in 1919, while Rada and Sergei were his children with his second wife.
He had brought more than his family and a very big plane in an effort to impress the Americans. During the first part of the trip he was scheduled to give a major address to the United Nations. The text of the speech included an announcement of a Soviet initiative to achieve “general and complete disarmament.” This was not a new proposal; the Kremlin had announced something similar in 1955. What was important was that Khrushchev announced he was willing to be more patient in the negotiations over the future of Berlin if he could achieve a relaxation of international tension through arms reductions. The man who had been eager to wash his hands of international agreements in November 1958 had come around enough nearly a year later to give them another try. Regarding Berlin, Khrushchev knew he had to lift the ultimatum, which had never really been his preferred strategy. He had wanted to cancel unilaterally the set of informal four-power agreements that allowed the militaries of the United States, France, and Great Britain to be stationed in West Berlin and to have unfettered access to their bases. Mikoyan and others had convinced him that it was better to find a diplomatic solution that involved the Western powers, an argument that had produced an ineffectual attempt to bully the West. Khrushchev intended to explain the thinking behind his urgent attempts to persuade the Americans to recognize the existence of three Germanys: a Communist East, a non-Communist West, and a capitalist but nonaligned West Berlin.
Khrushchev worked hard to set the right tone in the opening moments of his trip. He made pilgrimages to honor two American presidents whom he admired. Accompanied by U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge, who would be with him throughout his stay, Khrushchev visited the Lincoln Memorial. He hailed Lincoln’s great achievement in ending slavery and then, in a theatrical gesture, bowed from his waist in the direction of the reflective Lincoln.52 Khrushchev later visited with Eleanor Roosevelt in Hyde Park, New York, and placed flowers at the grave of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the last American leader to have had good relations with Moscow.
For a while it seemed as if Khrushchev were imbued with the spirit of Hyde Park. On September 15 he hinted to his American hosts that the Soviets would be prepared to wait a little longer on Berlin. “Believe me,” he told President Eisenhower at their first meeting, “we would like to come to terms on Germany and thereby on Berlin, too. We do not contemplate taking unilateral action.”53 The ultimatum was not fully lifted, but Khrushchev was signaling that it would be. At the United Nations two days later he announced the Soviet program for complete and general disarmament. With those two items out of the way, Khrushchev was eager to see the rest of the United States. He was to return to Washington on September 25 and expected by then that the administration would have some substantive responses to his initiatives.
Khrushchev had a short meeting with Eisenhower before leaving on his grand tour that produced a small but unexpected victory. The president pleased the Soviet leader by characterizing the Berlin situation as “abnormal.” For months Soviet diplomats had used that word to explain a situation that had to be corrected. Eisenhower’s word choice did not represent any concrete concession by the Americans, but it suggested that Khrushchev’s strategy of going straight to Eisenhower, bypassing all the professional anti-Communists around him, might be working.
Not all went well, however, in those first few days. Khrushchev found it a lot harder to explain himself to the U.S. press. At the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., he was asked to explain what he had meant when he vowed, “We will bury you,” to a group of Western diplomats in Moscow in November 1956. “We will bury you,” was a Russian proverb that meant, in effect, “I shall outlast you” or “I shall live so long that I shall be able to attend your funeral.” It captured Khrushchev’s belief that the Soviet system would outlast capitalism. But many in the West had interpreted the phrase to mean that Khrushchev intended to cause the death of the United States, something altogether different. His effort to clear up this confusion in Washington seemed only to make matters worse.
Khrushchev and his family were having a hard time adjusting to more than just the questioning of a free press. They were baffled by the crowds that lined the streets of Washington an
d New York to look at them. Neither cheering nor screaming, these people were largely just silent, as if in the presence of Martians.
One of Khrushchev’s principal goals in coming to America, perhaps his most important objective, was to meet Americans and to let them meet him. “I do not have horns,” he said to an audience in New York City. He wanted Americans to substitute whatever misconceptions they had about him and the Kremlin with the reality, as he saw it.
Yet he came to believe that a wall had been built between him and the American people to prevent this from happening. Not convinced that he needed so many policemen around him and a closed limousine, he blamed Ambassador Lodge, his personal escort for the tour, and the State Department, which oversaw the logistics of the tour, for acting as if they were intentionally trying to insulate U.S. citizens from an infectious creature.
THE TRIP NEARLY ENDED prematurely in California. Khrushchev, who had been on his guard for any attempts at provocation, experienced a stream of them in Los Angeles. They started with the first local dignitary assigned to meet him. Victor Carter, a movie mogul who headed Republic Studios and the City of Hope, a California hospital, had fled years before from Rostov, a town in southern Russia. When Carter announced that he was Jewish, Khrushchev assumed he was in the presence of a class enemy. By Czarist decree, Jews could not live in Rostov unless they were wealthy merchants. Privately, Khrushchev wondered how to interpret the fact that the U.S. government had selected an emigrant from Russia to be beside him. Throughout the remaining twenty-four hours of his stay in Los Angeles, Khrushchev ascribed every untoward event to the evil genius of the Jewish merchant’s son.54
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