What Was Installed to Make Sure That the Khrushchev Pleadge Would Never Happen Again

President Kennedy meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit in June, 1961.

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Just half dozen weeks afterward John F. Kennedy's botched Bay of Pigs invasion, the U.S. president hurtled head-start into some other disaster: his first and but elevation with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

"Worst matter in my life," Kennedy told a New York Times reporter. "He savaged me."

Co-ordinate to Richard Reeves, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California and author of President Kennedy: Profile of Power, the main problem was that Kennedy wasn't properly prepared to accept on the more experienced Khrushchev at the June 1961 summit in Vienna.

"He was the immature guy and he wanted Khrushchev to believe that he was serious," Reeves says of the 44-year old, who had been president for fewer than five months. Kennedy knew that Khrushchev likely saw him as a weak armed services leader for not seeing the Bay of Pigs invasion through, and he wanted to utilize his signature charisma to change his mind.

All the same despite Kennedy's desire to be taken seriously, "he really didn't heed closely to his ain advisors," Reeves says. "He had no real idea how tough it was going to exist… He went in in that location unprepared and Khrushchev walked all over him."

"This man is very inexperienced, even young," Khrushchev told his interpreter. "Compared to him, Eisenhower is a man of intelligence and vision."

Kennedy ignored warnings from his advisors non to do things similar, say, debate communist ideology with a 61-year-onetime Soviet. This got him stuck in fourth dimension-wasting discussions about Marxism, where he was totally out of his league. Kennedy spent a lot of time defending aspects of the pre-World War II condition quo, like British imperialism, that he didn't actually want to defend.

The president likewise made admissions that played right into the premier's easily. "Similar Putin now, Khrushchev...wanted to be seen as equals with the Usa," Reeves says. To the horror of U.Southward. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kennedy told the premier he considered Sino-Soviet forces and U.S.-Western European forces to be fairly as balanced.

This disclosure "sent Khrushchev into nearly ecstasy," writes Michael Beschloss in The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev. "For the rest of his life he boasted that at this summit the leader of the Usa had finally acknowledged that there was crude parity between the two peachy powers."

Khrushchev'south aggression during the talks surprised Kennedy as well as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who was shocked Khrushchev raised the possibility of state of war—something neither leader wanted.

Ringlet to Continue

Khrushchev with President Kennedy at the U.S. Diplomatic mission during their summit meeting in Vienna, 1961.

Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

According to a Land Department memo, Khrushchev said that if the U.Due south. challenged the Soviet position in divided Berlin, the U.South.South.R. "must respond and it will respond," eerily threatening that "It is up to the U.Due south. to decide whether in that location will be war or peace." Kennedy reacted with a statement even more chilling: "And then, Mr. Chairman, there will be war. Information technology volition exist a common cold winter." (Yikes.)

The summit didn't produce any concrete policy decisions, partly because the summit hadn't had any gear up agenda or goals in the first place. Kennedy had gotten a pre-elevation delivery from Khrushchev that they would discuss a nuclear examination ban, but they weren't actually able to agree on 1.

Later on the talks, Kennedy told James "Scotty" Reston, a New York Times columnist, well-nigh how disappointed he was with how things had gone.

Khrushchev "idea that anyone who was so immature and inexperienced as to become into that mess [i.e., the Bay of Pigs] could be taken," the president said. "And anyone who got into it and didn't see it through had no guts. Then he just beat the hell out of me." (Reston used Kennedy as an anonymous source in his commodity; he recorded these quotes in his notes.)

"I never met a human like this," Kennedy remarked to another reporter, Hugh Sidey of Time magazine. "[I] talked almost how a nuclear substitution would kill 70 million people in 10 minutes, and he just looked at me every bit if to say, 'So what?'"

Obviously Kennedy'due south ego took a hit with this acme. Merely did it actually have a negative bear upon on U.South.-Soviet relations? Depends who you ask.

Two months after the peak, the Soviets erected the Berlin Wall. Frederick Kempe, president and CEO of the Atlantic Council, argues in his volume Berlin 1961 that Kennedy could have prevented this if he were tougher on Khrushchev in Vienna.

However Reeves argues that the wall provided a compromise in Berlin for both the U.Due south. and the Soviet Spousal relationship, and helped avoid a nuclear war over this issue. Therefore, the wall wasn't something that Kennedy was interested in preventing. Additionally, he thinks that the meeting, yet rocky, helped establish a adept human relationship between the leaders. For Kennedy especially, it gave him a crash class on understanding Khrushchev.

"The meeting proved in the long run to be enormously valuable," he says. "It was that human relationship which led to things which, I would argue, kept the peace." Though they never met in person again, Kennedy and Khrushchev continued to communicate and develop their human relationship, with both coming to understand that neither wanted nuclear war.

That's not to say Reeves thinks Kennedy would've repeated his Vienna mistakes if he'd had a 2d meridian with Khrushchev. "John Kennedy read and studied history," he says, and would accept learned from the commencement experience that he needed to gear up.

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/kennedy-krushchev-vienna-summit-meeting-1961

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