The next annoyance came when the Khrushchev party was informed that they would not be visiting Disneyland. They had set aside time in the late afternoon for the visit, but just as the family started lunch, the Soviet leader learned that the Los Angeles police believed the visit would be too risky. Khrushchev’s children were naturally disappointed, and he himself reacted badly to the news, less because of a desire to see Mickey Mouse, about whom it is safe to say he knew nothing, than the feeling that he was again being hemmed in by his hosts.
On September 19 at Twentieth Century-Fox, where the family was being treated to a sumptuous lunch, Khrushchev complained loudly that he and his family had not been allowed to see Disneyland. “Is there some kind of cholera or launching pad out there?” he asked. “You have policemen so tough they can lift a bull by the horns, yet they say it [Disneyland] cannot be securely guarded.”55 Khrushchev’s disappointment marred what was an unusual gathering of Hollywood royalty.56 “This is the nearest thing to a major Hollywood funeral I’ve attended in years,” quipped one guest. Among the 350 people packed into the Café de Paris, Twentieth Century-Fox’s studio dining room, were Judy Garland, Edward G. Robinson, Sammy Davis, Jr., Gregory Peck, Gene Kelly, and Rita Hayworth. At the head table Khrushchev’s wife, Nina Petrovna, sat between Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope with the always debonair David Niven just opposite.57 “She’s absolutely lovely,” Niven purred to the press about the first lady of the Soviet Union. Sinatra’s comment was equally characteristic: “She swings pretty good English, too…and I’m not using my jazz talk, either.”58
After the luncheon Khrushchev and his party were escorted to the Stage 8 area, where a special balcony had been built to allow the group to observe the filming of a dance number from Fox’s Can-Can, a star vehicle for Sinatra, Louis Jourdan, and the young Shirley MacLaine. Rather than be amused by the display of bloomers and energetic behinds, Khrushchev decided that the whole spectacle was intentionally humiliating. He became annoyed when a studio publicity photographer tried to get two of the women to lift their skirts on either side of him. A diplomatic incident was averted when the women themselves refused to play along.
Khrushchev’s State Department escorts were not happy with the entire Can-Can episode, but the greater challenge to the success of his visit came later in the day. The mayor of Los Angeles, Norris Poulson, was a conservative lightweight who seemed intent on having a highly public debate with Khrushchev. Poulson was due to speak at a dinner meeting of the Los Angeles world events forum. At the cocktail party beforehand, Ambassador Lodge was able to get a hold of an advance draft of the speech. In the opening lines there was a mocking reference to Khrushchev’s by now famous “We will bury you” assertion.
Lodge believed Khrushchev had calmly answered the question in Washington but felt sure if the mayor of Los Angeles raised this issue again over dinner, Khrushchev might very well blow up. When Lodge asked Poulson to drop the reference, the mayor refused. “The speech has already been written and distributed,” said a determined Poulson. “It is too late to change it.”59
The result would have been comedy had it not involved the world’s second most powerful man. After the Los Angeles mayor said, “We won’t bury you; you won’t bury us; we will live together in friendship,” Khrushchev retaliated. He interrupted the mayor and announced to the startled audience that it had taken him only twelve hours to fly to the United States, and it would take him ten hours to return, flying directly to Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East from California. Calling out to Tupolev’s son who was sitting in the audience, Khrushchev asked, “Isn’t that so?” Khrushchev felt he was on display, like the big bear at a Russian circus, and as such was being taken advantage of by Americans.
When Khrushchev got back to his hotel, he gathered the entire delegation in one of the suites and started ranting. “How dare this man [Poulson] attack the guest of the president of the United States?” Khrushchev yelled. He made it known to his family, his advisers, and their wives that he was seriously considering canceling the remainder of the trip. He did not want to go to San Francisco, the next stop on their itinerary, or anywhere else without an apology from the U.S. government. His tirade was so intense that Gromyko’s wife thought to run to the bathroom to find him a sedative, but Khrushchev shot her a knowing glance. “I was giving vent to my indignation for the ears of the American accompanying us,” Khrushchev later recalled. “I was sure that there were listening devices in our room and that Mr. Lodge, who was staying in the same hotel, was sitting in front of a speaker with an interpreter and listening to our whole conversation.”60
At 2:00 A.M. Gromyko went to Lodge’s bedroom to deliver a formal complaint, just in case the FBI’s listening devices weren’t working. The Soviets could have picked a number of things to complain about but decided to highlight a woman who had stood on a street corner with a black flag and a sign saying DEATH TO KHRUSHCHEV, THE BUTCHER OF HUNGARY. The Soviet leader believed that she had to have been there because Eisenhower wanted her there. Lodge tried his best to explain that because the United States was a free country, this woman had a right to her views, however inconvenient they might be to the White House or State Department. He also passed on his regrets for the misbehavior of some of the Americans Khrushchev had met. Gromyko took the explanation and went back to his room. The trip had hit rock bottom. Lodge went to bed thinking that the Khrushchev visit “was becoming a horrible failure.” He believed major changes had to be made to rescue it.61
THE NEXT MORNING Lodge moved to change the character of the Khrushchev See America tour. If Khrushchev agreed, Lodge would alter the Soviet leader’s security so that he could interact with more ordinary citizens. In a moment of inspiration, Lodge came upon the idea of treating Khrushchev as if he were a political candidate. The Soviet delegation was scheduled to take a train to its next destination, San Francisco, and Lodge thought that there should be some whistle stops along the way. He also decided to let Khrushchev mingle with the press on the train. To this point reporters had been kept far away from the leader.
Khrushchev had begun the day in a dark mood. He had hoped his nemesis, Mayor Poulson, would take the trouble to see him off with a parting statement at the train station. It was not to be. A lone microphone stood by the platform, but there was no mayor. Once he realized that he had seen the last of Poulson, Khrushchev quipped to Lodge that the mayor of Los Angeles “[had] tried to fart but shit in his pants.”62
Lodge’s new approach worked magic on Khrushchev’s mood. “I felt that you had kept me under house arrest for six days,” Khrushchev told him. He roamed the train to greet members of the press. To entice the Soviet leader to stop in his car, one enterprising journalist had brought on board a large bottle of vodka, which he left open on a table next to him. Khrushchev decided to walk right past the open bottle—after years of complaints from his wife he was trying to be abstemious—but his characteristic gregariousness was on full display.63 At Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo he eagerly left the train and plunged into the crowds on the platform. Khrushchev loved the exposure and these Americans were not afraid to smile at him. One person, in particular, had a deep effect on the first secretary. At one of the two stops Khrushchev pressed so hard into the crowd that he lost his Lenin Peace Prize medal, which he wore proudly on his jacket. A member of the crowd found it and, rather than keep the gold medal as a souvenir, handed it to Ambassador Lodge, who passed it back to Khrushchev before he had even discovered it was missing. “The incident pleased me very much,” Khrushchev later recalled, “…the fact that the person returned it to me made me respect these people.”64 The U.S. trip had taken a new turn. Insofar as Khrushchev was concerned, it was about to get much better.
THE IOWAN ROSWELL “BOB” GARST had promised “to leave no stone unturned” to make Khrushchev’s visit to his farm the highlight of the Soviet leader’s trip.65 As a group the farmers of Iowa had been among the first Americans to seek better relations with Khrushchev’s Russia. America’s gra
nary was overflowing with surpluses, and Iowans were eager to find a market for their wheat and to test the one-world idealism of their native son, and former vice president, Henry Wallace. Four years earlier, after Khrushchev had been quoted as exhorting Soviets to create an “Iowan corn belt” of their own, an influential journalist in Des Moines editorialized that any agricultural experts Khrushchev sent to the American Midwest would be welcome. Moscow agreed and established an agricultural exchange.66
Although the Garst farm was not on the official list of farms that the Soviet delegation was to visit on that first agricultural exchange, Bob Garst ultimately made the greatest impression on the Soviets of any American farmer. Garst had first come to the attention of the American public in 1948, when his friend the celebrated writer John Dos Passos wrote a Life magazine profile of Garst entitled “Revolution on the Farm.”67 Dos Passos described the persuasive farmer as a man who spoke in a manner “between that of a lecturer explaining the solution of a problem at a blackboard, and a lawyer pleading with a jury.”68 During the Great Depression Garst had been in the forefront of the movement to increase the use of nitrogen as a fertilizer, especially in the production of corn. As a result, by the mid-1950s U.S. farmers were facing the problem of massive surpluses in the American breadbasket.69
Garst was more than just a salesman for Iowan wheat and corn. He sensed that East-West relations could be improved if Americans helped the Soviets solve some of their problems. In 1955 he made his first trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to see Soviet agriculture firsthand. Having already heard of Garst through his reading of the reports sent back from Iowa, Khrushchev arranged to meet this energetic missionary for the American way of farming. Khrushchev no doubt had seen a little of himself in Garst’s gruff confidence and boundless interest in producing corn. A number of return visits by Garst followed, and the men struck up a lively correspondence about agriculture. In the 1950s Khrushchev wrote to Garst more often than he wrote to Eisenhower.
Khrushchev came to trust Garst and invoked the American farmer to his Kremlin colleagues in support of this or that agricultural method.70 In June 1958 Khrushchev had sent a Soviet delegation to spend three months at the Garst farm planting crops, chopping hay, and feeding cattle.71 When these men returned home, they became stars of Soviet agriculture. “They [have] studied under Garst,” Khrushchev later boasted before his Presidium buddies, “they didn’t go in vain, they really studied well.”72
In recent years Khrushchev had come to understand nuclear weapons and submarines, but agriculture remained one of his central concerns. When his relations with Cabot Lodge improved on the train in California, Khrushchev opened up about the importance of agriculture to him. Perhaps the most significant intelligence the Soviet leader imparted to his American hosts came in a confession to Lodge of the weakness of the Soviet standard of living and Moscow’s need to find a way to provide its citizens with the very necessities of life. The Soviet Union, Khrushchev explained, was like “a hungry person who had just awakened and wanted to eat. Such a person would not wash his hands before eating…. Therefore, the Soviet Union was not trying now to develop the production of any sophisticated consumer goods; it was simply trying to satisfy the basic needs.”73
Now it was Khrushchev’s turn to visit Garst, and the farm provided the catalytic moment for his U.S. trip. What Khrushchev saw in Coon Rapids, Iowa, on September 23 raised his own expectations for what he should be able to do in the Soviet Union. In just one example, the farm had a very efficient open pen system for feeding the livestock, whereas in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev later noted acidly, “we provide each cow with a stall, each one is allotted with a fork and a knife…. What kind of idiocy is this!”74
Khrushchev’s pride seemed a little bruised after the visit to the farm. As he so often did when he felt bested by someone else, he responded by bragging.75 In the car on the way back to Des Moines, he began talking about a new Soviet airplane, a turbojet with a maximum speed of 640 kilometers and a payload of 14 metric tons. “It can land on dirt fields,” Khrushchev said, in reference to the Iowan fields he saw passing on either side of him on the highway. Afterward on the flight from Des Moines to Pittsburgh, he invited his American hosts and their wives to his compartment in the plane for some drinks. He couldn’t stop talking about Garst. He had loved how the farmer had tried to kick the New York Times’s Harrison Salisbury after losing patience with the journalists hounding the two men but had lost his footing, nearly impaling himself on a stalk of corn.76
The trip to the farm put Khrushchev in a different frame of mind for his next round of discussions with Eisenhower. These meetings, which were to dominate the last few days of Khrushchev’s trip, took place at comfortable Camp David. The tone was civil, at times friendly. From Eisenhower, Khrushchev heard nothing that he hadn’t before. The U.S. president did hint in one of their conversations on Berlin that he thought that Roosevelt and Truman had erred in placing the West in so exposed a position in the middle of East Germany; but he left no doubt that despite this difficult situation, he would do nothing that conflicted with existing U.S. policy in the region.
Khrushchev took the initiative anyway. He wanted Eisenhower to know that he had decided to discard his strategy of diplomacy by ultimatum. The November 1958 ultimatum on Berlin had been a dead letter since Mikoyan’s return from the United States earlier in the year, and even though Khrushchev indicated in their earlier conversation that the ultimatum was not absolute, the threat of a renewed ultimatum had remained. With a gesture that showed Khrushchev could be a diplomat when he wanted to be, he took Eisenhower into his confidence. He admitted that he had tried to force a settlement in 1958 out of a sense of exasperation at the “high-handed” behavior of the United States. At the time he had judged the situation as steadily deteriorating, and there seemed to be no avenue available to settle the matter through diplomacy. Khrushchev proposed that if Eisenhower admitted that the United States opposed a permanent continuation of the present state of occupation, then the Soviets would not insist on any deadline in the negotiations over Berlin. Given that it was established U.S. policy to pursue the eventual reunification of the two Germanys, Eisenhower could easily agree to that.77
The leaders also reached another point of understanding. Khrushchev revealed to Eisenhower his ever-present concern about the cost of arming his country. He asserted that for the Soviet government, disarmament was a more important matter than Berlin. Eisenhower, who had hoped this was the Soviet position, agreed readily. After the rescinding of the Soviet ultimatum on Berlin and Khrushchev’s acknowledgment that disarmament was a more important matter for discussion between the two leaders, Eisenhower agreed to a summit of the four occupying powers sometime before the end of the year.
Despite this apparent meeting of the minds, Khrushchev felt somewhat disappointed in Eisenhower. The Soviet chief had come to Camp David empowered by the Presidium to negotiate an agreement if he could, but it appeared that the U.S. president was either unwilling to talk or incapable of talking about specifics. When asked for the U.S. position on disarmament, Eisenhower would say only that his experts were studying Khrushchev’s UN speech on “general and complete” disarmament. Efforts to draw the president out on his own preferences came to naught. In the end Khrushchev concluded that the sixty-nine-year-old Eisenhower was tired, like “someone who had just fallen through a hole in the ice and been dragged from the river with freezing water still dripping from him.”78 Nevertheless, he had learned what he needed, and he had been treated better by the U.S. government than he had expected to be treated.
Having spent nearly five years in the Soviet Union, Ambassador Thompson understood the effect of this American adventure on Khrushchev. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that Khrushchev was deeply impressed with the richness and strength of the United States, both in material and human terms.” In particular, Thompson singled out the visit with the Garsts. “The comparison between a small Iowa farm community and a similar
community in the Soviet Union,” he wrote, “must have been very striking indeed.”79 Thompson was right about the effect of the trip. It emboldened Khrushchev to take ever-greater risks to achieve the Soviet society and international order that he dreamed about.
WITHIN THIRTY-SIX HOURS of returning to Moscow, Khrushchev flew to Beijing, where he intended to do some missionary work on behalf of a new American policy. Relations between India and China were reaching a boiling point over a border dispute, and Khrushchev wished to discuss the possibility of war in South Asia in the context of what he had achieved in the United States. Mao was to be the first of Khrushchev’s socialist allies to see the effect that the U.S. visit had on him.80
The Soviet leader carried a message from Eisenhower to the Chinese leadership. Recently two CIA pilots had been downed over China. Although the first to admit that the fate of these men was a matter of Chinese domestic policy, Khrushchev believed that the Americans should be released. He stressed the importance for China of contributing to Soviet efforts to reduce tensions and improve international relations. Mao was dumbfounded by the spectacle of his socialist ally pleading on behalf of capitalist spies.
But Khrushchev wanted to make a point. He sensed that a relaxation of international tension, a condition vitally important to his plans for Soviet domestic regeneration, was near at hand. He did not want his Chinese ally to do anything that might undermine this relaxation. In this vein he mentioned his concerns about events in Southeast Asia. He had heard that the North Vietnamese military wished to increase its military support of the Communist Pathet Lao faction in the civil war in neighboring Laos. He and Mao agreed that this was not the time to widen any war in that landlocked country.
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