For all their confidence that disarmament was the right subject to discuss with the Soviets, the Western leaders could not agree on how to respond to Khrushchev’s interest in eliminating bombers and missiles. As Khrushchev had planned, the French were sympathetic toward the Soviet position. De Gaulle not only saw real possibilities for an arms control agreement that limited nuclear delivery devices but also believed that an arms control agreement would take the stinger out of Khrushchev’s threatening policy toward Berlin. In private talks with the French and the Americans, Macmillan was a little more helpful to Khrushchev. He was worried about a collapse of the summit. Unlike de Gaulle, Macmillan thought the United States should consider apologizing for authorizing the U-2 flight.
MONDAY MORNING, May 16, the long-awaited summit began. The French had picked an elegant venue for these discussions, but the events of the previous day cast a pall over the proceedings. The leaders and their closest advisers were escorted to the second floor of the Élysée Palace. Khrushchev shook hands with Macmillan as he entered but did little more than acknowledge the presence of Eisenhower and the American delegation. For Khrushchev, it was a matter of only signaling, “Okay, we see you.”71
Khrushchev delivered the first address. Uncharacteristically, he stayed on message for forty-five minutes, avoiding the temptation to stray from his text. “In a situation like this I knew I couldn’t speak off the top of my head. Every word had to be exact….”72 He repeated the three demands that he had outlined for the French and the British the night before. If they were not met, Khrushchev vowed, he would leave Paris, and Eisenhower would no longer be invited to visit the Soviet Union in June.
Khrushchev believed that these demands could be acceptable to Eisenhower. He convinced himself that as Eisenhower listened to the translation of his text, he turned to Christian Herter and said, “Well, why not? Why don’t we go ahead and make a statement of apology?”73 Khrushchev believed he heard this and repeated this story to others, before consigning it to his memoirs. Eisenhower and Charles Bohlen, who sat nearby, each denied this.74 It was an interesting sidelight into Khrushchev’s psychology that despite all the evidence he had at his disposal, including Eisenhower’s own statements, he refused to believe that Eisenhower supported the U-2 policy.
Eisenhower was well prepared for Khrushchev’s speech. Although he would not apologize, he pledged that he would satisfy one of Khrushchev’s three demands. There would be no more overflights of Soviet territory. He also had something else to promise. As he had signaled in his presummit press conference he resurrected the 1955 Open Skies proposal. This time he suggested using airplanes under the control of the United Nations, instead of Soviet or U.S. spy planes, to perform the surveillance in the hope this might be more acceptable to Moscow.
Eisenhower did not understand the depth of Khrushchev’s hatred of the idea of opening Soviet airspace to foreign planes. Neither the State Department nor the CIA had been able to tell him that one of the main reasons Marshal Zhukov had been fired in October 1957 was that he insisted on trying to get Khrushchev to agree to the Open Skies proposal.75 Allowing U.S. observation of the Soviet strategic forces would undermine Khrushchev’s risky plan to restructure the Soviet Union and defend the socialist world despite the Soviet Union’s strategic inferiority. How could Khrushchev redeploy assets to the civilian economy if the United States knew how very weak he was? The Americans feared he had 150 intercontinental ballistic missiles, or would have very soon, whereas he had about 4 and expected a mere handful more in 1960. The United States, which already enjoyed a huge lead in strategic bombers, already had 12 ICBMs.
There was an awkward moment after Eisenhower spoke. “Nobody knew what to do,” Khrushchev later recalled. Then the U.S. delegation left, and the day’s meeting ended. Khrushchev’s motives and actions from that point on became increasingly erratic. Having staked so much on Eisenhower, he found that he had no real strategy once it became clear the president would not apologize.
Khrushchev sent a bizarre cable to his Kremlin colleagues to sum up the session. It was defensive and affected a hollow, optimistic tone. “The situation, as it has developed here, demonstrates once more the wisdom of the line we have taken. The NATO allies of the U.S. though they are trying to save American face are striving for our participation in the summit.”76 It was true that the French and the British wanted the Russians to keep negotiating. But there was no evidence that they would work on his behalf to bring about an apology from Eisenhower. Khrushchev’s cable seemed to be saying that success was possible, but it is doubtful that he really believed it.
After dinner, Macmillan, the leader who most wished to avoid having the summit collapse, called on Khrushchev at the Soviet Embassy and asked him to stay. “I cannot say that there is not a cloud in the sky, but if we stayed here another 2-3 days, establishing the bases for extended discussions of the issues, then the meeting could be adjourned and we would leave with the feeling that continuity had been preserved,” Macmillan argued.77 He also tried to downplay the importance of the U-2 for Soviet prestige. Like de Gaulle, he reminded Khrushchev that all countries spied on one another. “There are microphones hidden in every embassy,” said Macmillan. “We discover them every day and by evening new ones have taken their place. They are everywhere, even in ink wells…. I could show you these devices.” Referring to the Soviet Embassy reception hall where he was meeting Khrushchev, Macmillan added for effect, “Certainly such devices are even in this room. So let’s not be hypocrites.”
Macmillan pleaded with Khrushchev to find a way to stay in Paris, to continue his participation in these important discussions. “I ask you as a friend to pay heed to what I am saying to you…. I repeat, I ask you as a friend not to push the matter to a head today or tomorrow, go forward, to cross into the next stage.”
Khrushchev indicated that he saw a way out of this mess. He repeated to Macmillan his strong belief that Eisenhower was not really responsible for the U-2 flight, that it was Allen Dulles’s idea. The CIA chief had pressured the U.S. president to go ahead with the flight, and now Eisenhower was protecting Dulles. All Khrushchev wanted was for Washington to admit it had been wrong to act so insolently. “The Soviet Union is not Cuba, not Guatemala, not Panama, not Iceland.” At the end of the meeting Khrushchev seemed moderately optimistic about the next day. He thanked Macmillan for the opportunity to discuss the summit and then turned plaintive. “I ask you, though, go work on President Eisenhower.” Embedded within all this talk, however, was a single line that revealed how very difficult this summit had become for Khrushchev: “I don’t believe Eisenhower now.”78 Khrushchev, the man who was so often the captive of strong assumptions, had seen an influential one shattered.
FROM THE START of May 17, Khrushchev acted as if he had already decided that the Soviet delegation and he would have to leave Paris. Before Macmillan had even had a chance to see Eisenhower, Khrushchev arranged an impromptu press conference on the sidewalk in front of the Soviet Embassy. He said he thought that he would be leaving France very soon. Just the day before, he had assured de Gaulle that he would be making no public statements. Then Khrushchev and Malinovsky headed off in a motorcade of press and embassy personnel toward the battlefield of the Marne. In World War I, Malinovsky had been stationed with imperial Russian troops outside Paris. He wanted to show Khrushchev the little village of Pleurs-sur-Marne where he had once been billeted.
As the Soviets left for the Marne, the Western leaders gathered to discuss their next move. Eisenhower again told Macmillan and de Gaulle that he could not accept the Soviet ultimatum. De Gaulle, in a last gesture to save the summit, suggested that Khrushchev be invited to meet with them at 3:00 P.M. A message was sent to the Soviet Embassy requesting Khrushchev’s attendance.
Khrushchev spent the entire morning enjoying his bucolic visit to the village of Pleurs-sur-Marne. The son of Malinovsky’s former landlord entertained the party with some bottles of wine and some cheese. Malinovsky and Khrushchev star
ted drinking, and the Soviet defense minister told stories of his time there. “I got the impression,” Khrushchev later said, “that the old woman [the wife of the deceased landlord] didn’t want to indulge in those memories: she kept an expression of indifference on her face.”79 The drinking continued long enough that Malinovsky also started talking about women he had known. “Malinovsky was a man who loved women, especially beautiful women,” observed Khrushchev. As the tales got more colorful, the crowd of French townspeople joining in grew larger. Despite the passage of four decades, Malinovsky could still speak a little French. It was quite a spectacle.
The happy group returned to the Soviet Embassy in the early afternoon. It seems that Khrushchev was given the French invitation at least by 2:00 P.M. Without responding to the invitation, let alone going to the meeting, or calling de Gaulle or Macmillan, Khrushchev decided that the summit was over for him. It is fair to wonder how sober he was at that moment.80 The cable he sent to the Kremlin was clear, though: “The change in the situation that would have permitted us to stay has not occurred. Therefore we have decided to leave Paris.”81 It was 2:15 P.M. Khrushchev also recommended to the Presidium that the East Germans be instructed to invite him to speak in East Berlin on his way home. He wished to reaffirm his commitment to solving the German problem. It was revenge served cold for Eisenhower’s humiliating him over the U-2.
As for the three world leaders awaiting his decision that day, Khrushchev wanted nothing to do with them. He instructed a low-level diplomat to convey a message to the French: “If the question was to discuss what had been discussed yesterday, then the meeting would be acceptable, but not before 5 P.M. because Khrushchev had had no lunch. However, if other questions were to be discussed, then Mr. Khrushchev would not attend.”82 The message was a deliberate fiction. “Mr. Khrushchev” had already decided that he would not attend any meeting. Later that evening he sent word to the French that he would be leaving Paris the next day after conducting a press conference.
When Eisenhower heard of the brushoff from Khrushchev, he was so angry he could not bring himself to say the Soviet leader’s name. Khrushchev became “this man.” De Gaulle was also fed up with Khrushchev, whose disappearing act to the Marne was the last bit of boorishness the French leader was prepared to stomach. Macmillan, who knew enough not to try to force the Americans to accept Khrushchev’s conditions, was intensely disappointed. “The Summit—on which I had set high hopes and for which I worked for over 2 years—has blown up, like a volcano! It is ignominious; it is tragic; it is almost incredible….”83 In many ways he blamed his old friend Dwight Eisenhower for not exercising good judgment in the weeks leading up to the meeting.
THE WORLD’S NEWSPAPERS covered the collapse of the summit as a great calamity. Despite the U-2 affair, expectations had grown in the weeks preceding the event. Now that nothing had come of the meeting, the general disappointment was equally exaggerated.
In Moscow the KGB lectured Francis Gary Powers on how his flight had caused the collapse of the summit. Powers replied that it was wrong to assume he was a patsy in some kind of right-wing conspiracy to wreck U.S.-Soviet relations; “Whoever organized my flight, in my opinion, did not want to disrupt the summit. If they had known that this flight would break up the summit, they would not have done it.” When he was asked to condemn the aggressive acts of the American “reactionaries,” he politely declined. “If I consider these flights as necessary to protect the security of the United States, I will not condemn them.”84
In Washington the administration had its own theories about why the summit collapsed. Led by the two longtime Soviet watchers, Tommy Thompson and Charles Bohlen, the U.S. government came to believe that Khrushchev had used the U-2 affair as an excuse to back away from the summit. Many in Washington still could not quite understand the politics of Khrushchev’s January announcement of a unilateral cut in the Soviet armed forces. Their thinking was that Khrushchev faced enormous opposition from the military to his plans for a détente and so needed a real breakthrough on Berlin in Paris to shore up his authority in the Kremlin. When it became clear to him in April that the West would not reconsider its opposition to the free city proposal and that it was firmly committed to stationing NATO forces in West Berlin, Khrushchev scouted around for a pretext to call off the summit. The ill-fated Powers mission gave him that excuse.85
Eisenhower seemed to share this view of what had happened in Paris. The day after the summit collapsed, he offered this explanation in a letter to the president of Colombia, Alberto Lleras Camargo: “As result of a chain of events within the Soviet Union which is not clear to me at this time, Mr. Khrushchev must have concluded before coming to Paris that progress at a Summit Meeting would be either undesirable or impossible. Accordingly, he embarked on a calculated campaign, even before it began, to insure the failure of the conference and to see to it that the onus for such failure would fall on the West, particularly the United States.”86
The U.S. government and Eisenhower had missed the real story. Khrushchev had not wanted Paris to fail. He had shared the president’s hope that the summit would lead to a period of relaxed international tensions. Indeed, like Eisenhower, he had invested some political capital and personal prestige into the prospect of achieving better relations. Until May 15, two weeks after Powers had parachuted into Russia, the Soviet leader was reluctant to sacrifice all that he had done since December 1959 to achieve a détente.
Yet a détente was not realized. The year 1960 did not become a turning point in the Cold War. Was this all the fault of a single failed spy mission, as the KGB asserted to Powers? In a word, no. A review of what the United States and the Soviet Union planned to say to each other in Paris shows that a dramatic breakthrough would have been impossible on Berlin and unlikely on disarmament. The West was unwilling to give up its protection of West Berlin, and Khrushchev’s views on that city had not evolved since November 1958. On the subject of disarmament, where his views were more flexible, the Russian appeared to be too afraid of U.S. power and intentions to concede to Eisenhower’s request for a verification regime, the on-site and overhead inspections, that Washington needed to overcome its deep mistrust of Moscow. Nevertheless, the dynamics of a summit where the Soviet Union would have been treated as an equal might have alleviated the fears of the mercurial Soviet leader. The aftermath of the U-2 incident, however, made this impossible to know.
What the U-2 affair did reveal was the enormous role of reputation in the superpower confrontation. Both leaders allowed matters of personal prestige to dictate their most important decisions in May 1960. At key moments, neither swallowed his pride when doing so would have allowed the embarrassing spectacle of a U.S. pilot in Lubyanka to fade into the background. This was not, however, the fault of grandeur or vanity. In a war fought more on a psychological plane than a conventional battlefield, where a superpower’s most potent defense involved deterring an enemy attack before it ever happened, the credibility of each leader carried enormous significance.
Two months after the failure in Paris, Khrushchev again reminded Washington of the importance of prestige. Although U-2 flights were suspended, the United States continued to send reconnaissance flights along the border with the Soviet Union. On July 1 the Soviet Air Force shot down an RB-47 spy plane that had taken off from a U.S. base in Great Britain on a mission over the Barents Sea. U.S. intelligence concluded that the plane never came closer than thirty miles from Soviet airspace. The Soviets argued otherwise. Four crew members died in the attack. The two surviving pilots were captured, and the Soviets refused to return them without a United Nations investigation. They joined Powers in Soviet custody.87
Powers stood trial in August 1960 and was sentenced to three years in prison and an additional seven years of hard labor. He was exchanged for a Soviet spy, Vilyam Fischer, alias Rudolf Abel, in February 1962 and set free. Although the U.S. government negotiated for Powers’s freedom, he returned home under a cloud. The American people and Dulles�
�s replacement as CIA director, John McCone, believed that he had been disloyal under KGB interrogation. McCone set up a board of inquiry under Federal Judge E. Barrett Prettyman at the CIA to investigate Powers’s actions. The board determined that Powers had not been disloyal. The Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees also investigated his actions. But these investigations like the assessments of the Prettyman board were kept secret, thus denying Powers the opportunity not only to clear his name but to gain public praise.88 The KGB’s records of Powers’s actions under interrogation remained closed until the publication of this book.
DESPITE THE TOLL that the U-2 experience had taken on his respect for Eisenhower, Khrushchev did not intend to give up entirely on seeking détente with the West. A few weeks after the failure of the summit, he instructed Soviet representatives at Geneva to present the disarmament plan that he had intended to unveil in Paris.89 On June 7, 1960, the Soviet Union formally proposed that the destruction of all strategic missiles and bombers be the first step in general and complete disarmament. More important, the Soviets agreed that “all disarmament measures be carried out under strict international control from beginning to end.” Foreign inspectors would be allowed on Soviet soil but only after weapons had been destroyed.
Khrushchev also signaled that he continued to be patient about Berlin. He still assumed that it would take a meeting of the great leaders to reach an agreement. Unwilling to risk another Berlin crisis in the short term, he settled into a policy of marking time until Eisenhower’s replacement came into office in January 1961. There was little he expected to get out of the remaining months of the Eisenhower regime.
What Khrushchev did not anticipate was that events in three developing countries, in three different regions of the world, would make a six-month pause in the Soviet-American competition impossible.
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