In September 1959, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the U.S. on a whirlwind tour. In this excerpt from Peter Carlson’s new book on the trip, K Blows Top, we catch up with “K” soon after his arrival in the U.S.
khrushchev’s first meal in America was a sumptuous lunch at Blair House, the official presidential guest residence—filet of beef with truffles, potatoes, string beans, and a Charlotte Russe praline with raspberry sauce. He was just finishing when he received his first visitor—Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador to the United Nations and the man Ike had selected to be Khrushchev’s tour guide on his odyssey across America.
Few men on earth had less in common: Khrushchev was a short, pudgy, uneducated Russian peasant who’d climbed to power by tenacity and brutality; Lodge was a tall, thin, Harvard-educated Boston Brahmin who’d been born into America’s aristocracy, scion of one of the families immortalized in an old New England toast:
Here’s to good old Boston,
Home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells speak only to the Cabots
And the Cabots speak only to God.
Lodge’s ancestors included six U.S. senators, a secretary of state, a Civil War general, and a governor of Massachusetts. His grandfather and namesake, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, was the dour Republican famous for leading the forces that crushed Woodrow Wilson’s hopes that the United States would join the newly formed League of Nations after World War I.
Growing up, Lodge picked mulberries in Henry James’s garden, rode horses with George Patton, and visited Edith Wharton’s house in France, where he lived with his family for two years, studying French. In the 1920s, he worked as a newsman, writing for the Boston Transcript and the New York Herald-Tribune. In 1936, after a brief stint in the Massachusetts legislature, he was elected to his grandfather’s old seat in the U.S. Senate. Witty, friendly, and popular, Lodge was a liberal Republican who supported many of FDR’s New Deal programs. During the war, he resigned from the Senate, to serve in the Army in Europe. After the war, he won reelection to the Senate, but he was defeated in 1952 by a rich, handsome young war hero named John F. Kennedy. In 1953, Eisenhower appointed Lodge ambassador to the United Nations, which was, ironically, the successor to the League of Nations that his grandfather had fought so fiercely.
When Ike picked Lodge instead of Nixon to serve as Khrushchev’s guide, pundits speculated that the president was indicating his choice of a successor. Actually, Ike’s reasoning was far less Machiavellian. He simply figured that the diplomatic Lodge was less likely than Nixon to get into any eye-gouging, ear-biting brawls with Khrushchev.
When Lodge arrived at Blair House, he introduced himself to his future traveling companion and asked if there was anything he could do. Khrushchev looked up at Lodge—who at six feet four inches stood a foot higher than the Russian—and smiled. “Before coming over here, I read your speeches,” Khrushchev said. “And after I read them, I thought I would be scared of you, but now that I have been with you, talked with you, and seen what a nice man you are, I don’t feel scared any more.”
That was baloney, of course—any man who’d endured Stalin’s murderous whims would hardly be frightened by Lodge’s U.N. oratory—but at least it was good-natured, friendly baloney.
“Mr. Lodge, I want you to understand one thing,” Khrushchev continued, still smiling playfully. “I have not come to the United States to learn anything about America. We know all we need to know about America and we learn it through our Marxist instruction.”
Now it was Lodge’s turn to smile “Thank you for telling me, Mr. Chairman,” he said. “We will do our utmost to comply with your wishes.”
Having spent his entire life around politicians, Lodge quickly sized up Khrushchev as a master of the breed. “His personal magnetism was immediately felt,” he later recalled. “Here was a natural politician—a man who, on entering a room full of strangers, would, after a few hours, have persuaded some, charmed and amused others, and frightened still more, so that by the end of the day, he would have over 50 percent of their votes.”
The premier informed the ambassador that they had both been generals during the war but Khrushchev had been a higher-ranking general. “Therefore you’re my subordinate,” he said, smiling, “and I’ll expect you to behave as befits a junior officer.”
Lodge laughed. “Yes, sir,” he said. He stood at attention and saluted crisply. “General Lodge, reporting for duty, sir!”
They’d been bantering for only a few minutes but already the short, fat Russian dictator and the tall, skinny Boston Brahmin had created a comedy team—a cold war version of Laurel & Hardy or Abbott & Costello.
Lodge escorted Khrushchev outside, where they climbed into the waiting limousine, accompanied by Mikhail Menshikov, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, and Khrushchev’s translator, Oleg Troyanovsky. After a journey of a few hundred yards, the limo stopped. They’d reached their destination—the White House.
Inside, Eisenhower and Nixon were waiting for them. Grinning, Khrushchev presented the president with a gift. He’d wanted to give it to Ike back at the airport in front of the TV cameras, but his aides talked him out of it. Eisenhower opened the elegant wooden box and found a model of the Lunik II space capsule that had recently hit the moon. The president was astounded. Was this man really rubbing his nose in the moon shot twice on the same afternoon?* “This seemed, at first, a strange gift,” he later wrote, “but then it occurred to me that quite possibly the man was completely sincere.”
Eisenhower led his guests into a room where they could sit comfortably on armchairs and couches. There wasn’t enough time for substantive discussions, he said, but at least they could talk about what issues they would discuss at Camp David when Khrushchev returned from his road trip. Obviously, Ike said, Berlin would be one topic.
Khrushchev agreed and suggested another issue—disarmament. “We believe that you do not want war,” he said, “and we assume that you also believe this about us.”
“I see no profit in mutual suicide,” Ike replied.
“The main thing is to establish trust,” Khrushchev continued. “Probably we can’t take each other’s word at this time but we must try to bring about trust. There is no other way.”
As the meeting went on, one topic flowed into another. Khrushchev mentioned the speech that he was scheduled to deliver at the United Nations in a few days but refused to reveal any details about it.
“Here is my speech,” he said, tapping his jacket pocket, “and no one is going to see it.”
But there was one speech that the chairman did want to discuss—the speech Nixon had delivered the previous day. Khrushchev had read a translation on the plane.
Sitting across the room, Nixon said he was proud to hear that. The speech was clearly calculated to arouse anti-Soviet animosity, Khrushchev said, angrily. “After having read that speech, I am surprised to find on arriving here that people in the United States welcomed us with such tolerance and obvious friendliness,” he said. “In the Soviet Union, there would have been no welcome whatsoever if I had, in advance, publicly spoken against the visitor.”
“That,” Ike said, “is the basic difference between our two systems.” It was the perfect comeback. But Nixon, being Nixon, couldn’t resist saying more.
You delivered an anti-American speech before my arrival in Moscow, Nixon said.
My speech was not nearly as provocative as yours, Khrushchev replied. It was just like old times: Nixon and Khrushchev squabbling again. Eisenhower must have felt like a kindergarten teacher trapped with a couple of bickering brats.
“You read the speeches,” Khrushchev told Ike. “You be the judge.”
Years later, Eisenhower was still amused at that. “To add to the snowballing comedy of the situation,” he wrote, “Mr. Khrushchev suggested that I be the referee as to which speeches were more provocative.”
Eisenhower led Khrushchev outside to the South Lawn, where two Marine helicopters squatted like big green dragonflies. Ike loved helicopters and he was eager to take Khrushchev on a ride over Washington at rush hour. It was an ideal way to show off America’s economic power by pointing out the long lines of workers driving their private cars to their private homes in the suburbs. Ike had suggested the ride in his press conference a month earlier and Murphy repeated the suggestion to Menshikov countless times. But Smiling Mike always rejected it, claiming that Khrushchev had no desire to waste time on helicopter rides. But the president persisted. On the ride in from the airport, Ike told Khrushchev that he hoped the premier would join him for a helicopter ride over the city.
“Oh,” Khrushchev replied, “if you’re going to be in the same helicopter, of course, I will go.”
Instantly Ike realized what the problem had been. Khrushchev feared that the helicopter ride might be a trick, that the chopper would suffer some sort of nonaccidental “accident.” But of course that wouldn’t happen if Eisenhower was aboard. It reminded Ike of another incident, this one back in 1945, shortly after the end of the war. He’d offered his friend Georgy Zhukov, the Soviet general, the use of an American plane. Zhukov hesitated, then asked, “May your son go as my aide?” Ike agreed and Zhukov smiled. “With your plane and your son going with me, I know I shall be quite safe.”
Such was the paranoia inspired by working for Josef Stalin.
Once inside one of the choppers, Eisenhower offered Khrushchev a window seat and spread a map of Washington across the premier’s lap. The chopper’s rotors whirled and it slowly rose into the sky. Khrushchev grinned and waved his homburg for the photographers. As the helicopter lifted off, Chalmers Roberts, the Washington Post’s White House correspondent, called his wife, Lois, at their home overlooking the Potomac River. Roberts figured the chopper would fly over the river as it headed toward the Maryland suburbs. He knew something that he suspected the Secret Service might not realize. For days, workers building a fish ladder in the Potomac had been blasting rock out of the riverbed with dynamite.
“Go out and have a look,” he told his wife.
She hustled outside and saw the helicopter carrying the two most powerful men on the planet pass over the river, flying north. A few moments later, as she watched in horror, an explosion in the river blasted large chunks of rock into the sky. Fortunately, none of them hit the chopper, which passed overhead and rumbled safely into Maryland. Ike pointed out the cars on the roads below—their red brake lights flashing on and off in the stop-and-go traffic. Soon the helicopter flew over a big green meadow, one of Ike’s favorite places—the golf course at the Burning Tree Country Club.
The president asked the chairman if he played golf. Khrushchev said he knew nothing about it. Eager to show the premier his favorite sport, Ike told the pilot to drop a little lower. The chopper swooped down over the sixteenth green, where the noise and wind of the rotors caused a golfer to muff an easy four-inch putt.
By sheer coincidence, the golfer was Senator J. William Fulbright, who had invited Khrushchev to tea with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the next day.
The premier was not as impressed by America’s traffic jams as Ike had hoped, nor was he thrilled by the sight of grown men whacking a little white ball around a manicured meadow. But he loved the helicopter. If this was the modern statesman’s latest status symbol, Khrushchev wanted one. In fact, he wanted more than one.
When he got home, the premier placed an order for three helicopters, specifying that he wanted them to be just like Ike’s.
* Khrushchev first tweaked Ike about the moon landing, which had occured on the eve of K’s arrival in Washington, during a speech at Andrews Air Force Base.
Excerpted from K Blows Top, by Peter Carlson, available now from PublicAffairs (www.publicaffairsbooks.com), a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2009.
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