Berlin 1961 Read Online Free PDF Page A

arteries to assess rumors of their hardening and his high blood pressure. They concluded in a highly classified report—which later would reach President Kennedy—that despite Khrushchev’s mood swings, depressions, and drinking bouts (which they reported he had recently brought under greater control), the Soviet leader exhibited the consistent behavior of what they called a “chronic optimistic opportunist.” Their conclusion was that he was more of an ebullient activist than, as many had believed until then, a Machiavellian communist in Stalin’s mold.
    Another top-secret personality sketch prepared by the CIA for the incoming administration noted Khrushchev’s “resourcefulness, audacity, a good sense of political timing and showmanship, and a touch of the gambler’s instinct.” It warned the newly elected Kennedy that behind the often buffoonish manner of this short, squat man lay a “shrewd native intelligence, an agile mind, drive, ambition and ruthlessness.”
    What the CIA didn’t report was that Khrushchev took personal responsibility for Kennedy’s election and was now seeking the payoff. He boasted to comrades that he had cast the deciding vote in one of America’s closest presidential elections ever by refusing Republican entreaties that he release three captured American airmen—the downed U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, and two crew members of an RB-47 reconnaissance plane shot down by the Soviets over the Barents Sea two months later—during the height of the election campaign. Now he was working impatiently through multiple channels to land an early summit meeting with Kennedy in hopes it would solve his Berlin problem.
    During the campaign, the Soviet leader’s instructions to his top officials had been clear, regarding both his desire for a Kennedy win and his distaste for Richard Nixon, who as Eisenhower’s anticommunist vice president had humiliated him in Moscow during their so-called Kitchen Debate over the relative advantages of their two systems. “We can also influence the American presidential election!” he had told his comrades then. “We would never give Nixon such a present.”
    After the election, Khrushchev had crowed that by refusing to release the airmen he had personally cost Nixon the few hundred thousand votes he would have required for his victory. Just a ten-minute walk from his Kremlin New Year’s party, the American captives languished as a reminder of Khrushchev’s electoral manipulation inside the KGB’s Lubyanka Prison, where the Soviet leader was keeping them as political pawns to be traded at some future moment for some other gain.
    As the countdown to his New Year’s toast continued, Khrushchev bathed in the crowd more like a populist politician than a communist dictator. Though still vigorously youthful, he had aged with the accelerated speed of so many other Russians, having already turned gray at age twenty-two after a serious illness. As he bantered with comrades, he often threw back his nearly bald head and exploded in mirth at one of his own stories, unself-consciously showing bad teeth with a center gap and two golden bicuspids. Closely cropped gray hair framed a round, animated face with three large warts, a slit scar under his pug nose, red cheeks with deep laughter lines, and dark, piercing eyes. He waved his hands and spoke short, staccato sentences in a loud, high-pitched, nasal voice.
    He recognized many faces and asked after comrades’ children by name: “How is little Tatyana? How is tiny Ivan?”
    Given his purpose that evening, Khrushchev was disappointed not to find among the crowd Moscow’s most important American, Ambassador Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, with whom he had remained close despite the decline of the U.S.–Soviet relationship. Thompson’s wife, Jane, apologized to Khrushchev that her husband was home nursing ulcers. It was also true that the ambassador was still smarting from his encounter with the Soviet leader at