Read Online One minute to midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war by Michael Dobbs - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Michael Dobbs
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are you going?" and gets the reply, "To Zhitomir." "What a sly fox," thinks the first Jew. "I know he's really going to Zhitomir, but he told me Zhitomir so I'll think he is going to Zhmerinka." Taken together, the two stories captured Khrushchev's view of politics as a game of bluff and daring.
Dealing with Kennedy was child's play compared with dealing with monsters like Stalin and Beria. "Not strong enough," Khrushchev remarked after meeting JFK in Vienna. "Too intelligent and too weak." The difference in their ages--Khrushchev was twenty-three years older than Kennedy--was also apparent. The U.S. president was "young enough to be my son," the first secretary noted. Although Khrushchev later confessed to "feeling a bit sorry" for Kennedy in Vienna, he did not let that stand in the way of giving his rival a brutal dressing-down. He understood that politics was "a merciless business."
Khrushchev's approach to international relations was shaped by his awareness of Soviet weakness. While his public persona was that of the blustering bully, he felt far from confident in the summer of 1962. The Soviet Union was surrounded by American military bases, from Turkey in the West to Japan in the East. America had many more nuclear missiles targeted on the USSR than vice versa. An ideological schism with China threatened Soviet preeminence in the worldwide Communist movement. For all the boasts about the coming utopia, the country was still struggling to recover from World War II.
Khrushchev had done his best to disguise the fact that the Soviet Union was the weaker superpower with spectacular public relations feats. He had launched the first man into space and tested the world's largest nuclear bomb. "America recognizes only strength," he told associates. His son Sergei was taken aback when Khrushchev boasted that the Soviet Union was churning out intercontinental rockets "like sausages." A missile engineer himself, he knew this was not true.
"How can you say that when we only have two or three?" Sergei protested.
"The important thing is to make the Americans believe that," his father replied. "That way, we prevent an attack." Sergei concluded that Soviet policy was based on threatening the United States with "weapons we didn't have."
As the number two superpower, the Soviet Union had to constantly threaten and bluster in order to be heard. "Your voice must impress people with its certainty," Khrushchev told his Presidium colleagues in January 1962. "Don't be afraid to bring it to a white heat, otherwise we won't get anything."
There was a big difference, however, between deliberately bringing international tensions to a boiling point and permitting the pot to boil over. The purpose of the missile deployment, Khrushchev kept emphasizing, was not "to start a war" but to give the Americans a taste of "their own medicine."
Although Khrushchev initially preferred the Democrat Kennedy to the Republican Eisenhower, he had come to regard the two presidents as made from "the same shit." Spending the summer at his villa in Sochi, on the shores of the Black Sea, he seethed with resentment over the presence of American nuclear warheads just across the water in Turkey, five minutes' flying time away. He would hand visitors a pair of binoculars and ask them what they could see. When the mystified guests described an endless vista of water, Khrushchev would grab the binoculars and announce angrily: "I see U.S. missiles, aimed at my dacha. " But he was cheered by the thought of the surprise he was about to spring.
"It's been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy," Khrushchev told a mystified U.S. secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, in Sochi back in September. "Now we can swat your ass."
4:00 P.M. MONDAY, OCTOBER 22
It was, thought Kennedy, the "best kept secret" of his administration. A group known as the ExComm, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, made up of the president and twelve of his most
Dealing with Kennedy was child's play compared with dealing with monsters like Stalin and Beria. "Not strong enough," Khrushchev remarked after meeting JFK in Vienna. "Too intelligent and too weak." The difference in their ages--Khrushchev was twenty-three years older than Kennedy--was also apparent. The U.S. president was "young enough to be my son," the first secretary noted. Although Khrushchev later confessed to "feeling a bit sorry" for Kennedy in Vienna, he did not let that stand in the way of giving his rival a brutal dressing-down. He understood that politics was "a merciless business."
Khrushchev's approach to international relations was shaped by his awareness of Soviet weakness. While his public persona was that of the blustering bully, he felt far from confident in the summer of 1962. The Soviet Union was surrounded by American military bases, from Turkey in the West to Japan in the East. America had many more nuclear missiles targeted on the USSR than vice versa. An ideological schism with China threatened Soviet preeminence in the worldwide Communist movement. For all the boasts about the coming utopia, the country was still struggling to recover from World War II.
Khrushchev had done his best to disguise the fact that the Soviet Union was the weaker superpower with spectacular public relations feats. He had launched the first man into space and tested the world's largest nuclear bomb. "America recognizes only strength," he told associates. His son Sergei was taken aback when Khrushchev boasted that the Soviet Union was churning out intercontinental rockets "like sausages." A missile engineer himself, he knew this was not true.
"How can you say that when we only have two or three?" Sergei protested.
"The important thing is to make the Americans believe that," his father replied. "That way, we prevent an attack." Sergei concluded that Soviet policy was based on threatening the United States with "weapons we didn't have."
As the number two superpower, the Soviet Union had to constantly threaten and bluster in order to be heard. "Your voice must impress people with its certainty," Khrushchev told his Presidium colleagues in January 1962. "Don't be afraid to bring it to a white heat, otherwise we won't get anything."
There was a big difference, however, between deliberately bringing international tensions to a boiling point and permitting the pot to boil over. The purpose of the missile deployment, Khrushchev kept emphasizing, was not "to start a war" but to give the Americans a taste of "their own medicine."
Although Khrushchev initially preferred the Democrat Kennedy to the Republican Eisenhower, he had come to regard the two presidents as made from "the same shit." Spending the summer at his villa in Sochi, on the shores of the Black Sea, he seethed with resentment over the presence of American nuclear warheads just across the water in Turkey, five minutes' flying time away. He would hand visitors a pair of binoculars and ask them what they could see. When the mystified guests described an endless vista of water, Khrushchev would grab the binoculars and announce angrily: "I see U.S. missiles, aimed at my dacha. " But he was cheered by the thought of the surprise he was about to spring.
"It's been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy," Khrushchev told a mystified U.S. secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, in Sochi back in September. "Now we can swat your ass."
4:00 P.M. MONDAY, OCTOBER 22
It was, thought Kennedy, the "best kept secret" of his administration. A group known as the ExComm, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, made up of the president and twelve of his most
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