Kanata (50 page)

“Russian.”

“Why Russian?”

“Because they were both naked, had only an apple to eat, and thought they were in paradise.”

They were slaughtering milk cows to solve the meat shortage. This was the kind of thinking out there. A party secretary came in to see Khrushchev and pulled down his pants, screaming his own failures, demanding to be whipped.

There was a housing shortage as well. Khrushchev wanted to build high-rises but was told there wasn't enough steel for the elevators. He knew whatever official was given the housing problem would produce not houses but numbers, numbers that were borrowed or conjured, snatched out of the ether and pasted reassuringly onto the Seven-Year Plan.

And he had promised the people that Russia would surpass America by 1970. So he was thankful for Gagarin. On April 12, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. They had beaten the Americans! The celebration was on the grandest scale, Gagarin escorted to Red Square by the ubiquitous tanks. Khrushchev observed the people crowded onto balconies above the parade of Soviet might. He had read the reports of substandard construction and was thankful the balconies didn't collapse.

Five days later, the Bay of Pigs. A Soviet success and, even better, an American failure. Kennedy was his antithesis (he had heard the jokes about Kennedy being prettier than Khrushchev's wife), yet he wanted to believe that it was the malevolent Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, who was behind the Bay of Pigs, hoping to poison the scheduled summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev just as he had poisoned the last summit by sending Gary Powers's U-2 into Soviet airspace. Powers, of course, was a gift: His spy plane had failed to self-destruct as programmed and Powers had
failed to take his prescribed poison. Life was filled with failure, that's what made it interesting. Discovered inside Soviet airspace and shot down with an S-75 Dvina missile. They interrogated Powers for months, and examined the plane at their leisure, the so-called weather plane. A rare insight into the vacant, appliance-mad American soul.

Dulles was like his Russian counterpart, Lavrentiy Beria, former head of the KGB, a man so treacherous Khrushchev had to kill him. Perhaps Kennedy could do the same to Dulles.

Khrushchev stood on the steps of the American embassy in Vienna amid the photographers, the diplomats, advisers, fixers, the worst-case-scenarists. Kennedy approached with his hand out and they smiled for the cameras. When Khrushchev smiled it was like opening a fissure in the earth, and the glimpse into that black maw showed the happy farm boy walking in pig shit.

The first day was, to be honest, a bore. Kennedy wanted to chat; Khrushchev wanted to negotiate. There was a weakness in Kennedy, he felt, a softness in the West. Between them, dangerously, the issue of Berlin.

“How is it that you can find the time to give long interviews to Walter Lippmann?” Kennedy asked. It was intended as a compliment.

“The system permits it.”

“I spend all my time persuading and consulting,” Kennedy said.

“Why don't you switch to our system.”

Kennedy wanted to talk about test bans. Why discuss test bans, Khrushchev asked, why not disarmament? There was a missile gap and Russia couldn't catch up. The Soviet economy was a failure, the missiles a burden. To get rid of
them would be a relief. “You should have the courage to embrace disarmament,” he told Kennedy. Without warning, Khrushchev's face would detonate into that smile while Kennedy waited for the translator to catch up. There was a disconnect; the smile arriving with a new demand, or a veiled threat.

For a day and a half, it was cordial. Kennedy was the suitor, but Berlin was the sticking point. Kennedy seemed anxious, upset even, over Khrushchev's bluntness. He was carrying the disaster of the Bay of Pigs with him, lucky for Khrushchev. “We cannot abandon our occupation rights in Berlin,” Kennedy finally said. “If the U.S. does not draw this line, it will lose its allies, its promises will be mere scraps of paper. I didn't become president to preside over the isolation of my country.”

“If the U.S. tries to exercise its right of access to West Berlin after a treaty is signed,” Khrushchev coolly said after weighing the translator's words, “there will be a military response. It is up to the United States to decide whether there will be war or peace.”

“Then it will be a cold winter,” Kennedy said.

3

J
OHN
D
IEFENBAKER,
O
TTAWA,
1962

The nuclear age was a plague. It was unnatural for all of God's creation to be held hostage, all of human history leading to one stark mistake. Diefenbaker was handed a petition weighing twenty-one pounds, 147,000 signatures demanding disarmament. Meanwhile, Royal Canadian Air Force Wing Commander Bill Lee was running around the U.S. trying to discredit Diefenbaker, planting stories with journalists and politicians and the American military that Dief was soft, a waffling dotard on the central issue of the age, leaning with each new breeze. “He's a fucking weather vane,” Lee told an American colonel. “He's a liability.”

But Diefenbaker finally found the compromise he sought
in everything. “We will keep the Bomarcs here,” he told Kennedy, “but the nuclear warheads must remain in the U.S. Right near the border. In the event of emergency, they could be transported into Canada.” A political solution. “They could be here in half an hour.”

Kennedy was exasperated. “It isn't possible. It would take fifteen hours minimum to transport and launch them.” A millennium in nuclear time. Twenty million dead. “Our cities would be in ashes.”

And now the nuclear question had passed out of the theoretical, where Diefenbaker was happiest. Soviet ships were heading to Cuba, hours away from the American naval blockade. The CIA had verified that the Russians were putting nuclear warheads on the island—ninety miles from U.S. territory. Forty-two Soviet missiles, each designed to carry a nuclear warhead with more than twenty times the capacity of Hiroshima. Kennedy had telephoned Britain's Harold Macmillan to seek his advice. He hadn't sought Diefenbaker's advice, hadn't even called him personally, simply couldn't bear to talk to him even at the brink of apocalypse. Instead, he called Pierre Sevigny, the associate defence minister.

Dief looked at the blow-ups of the photographs of the missile sites. At first he wasn't sure what he was looking at, the grainy shots. “I'd like to see more photographs,” he told the Americans who had been dispatched to Ottawa to present the crisis. The photographs didn't seem as conclusive as he'd been led to believe. What if Kennedy was grandstanding, still smarting from the Bay of Pigs? What if this was simply wounded manhood? Khrushchev had treated him like a child in Vienna, had referred to him as “the boy.” (And for that, Diefenbaker felt a kinship with the Russian.) Kennedy was
capable of taking the world to the brink of thermonuclear war. He wanted to prove himself the man for our times, a courageous champion of Western democracy. Diefenbaker believed that Kennedy was irresponsible, that the natural parameters that harnessed our lives were absent in him.

“What?”
The Americans couldn't believe what they was hearing. Every other Western leader was behind Kennedy. Even the irascible French were behind them; de Gaulle said he didn't need to see the photographs, Kennedy's word was enough. But Diefenbaker wanted to see more evidence. This, he sensed, was a moment of national import.

“I need to be sure.”

“Everyone is sure. There is no margin for error.”

“I'm not sure.”

But Canada wasn't being consulted, merely notified. In two hours Kennedy was going public. Diefenbaker read through Kennedy's speech and suggested taking out a paragraph about the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko that was needlessly inflammatory. It was taken out, a surprise.

Canada could be at war within hours. There was another problem. The old Canadian War Book, which set out the procedures for war, had been cancelled, and the new one had yet to be approved by cabinet. They were, temporarily, without rules of procedure. Diefenbaker recalled that the old Defence Scheme No. 1—which outlined how Canada would defend itself in the event of an attack from the U.S.—was only cancelled in the late thirties, little more than twenty years ago. Our strongest ally and greatest threat.

America went to Defcon 3, and the rest of the Western nations followed suit. Except Canada. Diefenbaker called an emergency meeting of his cabinet. The minister of defence,
Douglas Harkness, said he had to follow the Americans immediately. “It is irresponsible not to,” he said.

“
Irresponsible! I'm
not the one who is irresponsible,” Dief shouted. “I am the voice of reason. Kennedy has taken us to the edge. Maybe Khrushchev is happy to push us off. We need to think this through.” Diefenbaker thought about John A. Macdonald, his political hero, a man who thrived on persecution. Macdonald had created the country and now Diefenbaker embodied it. Dief kept a portrait and statue of Macdonald in his office, and sat in the man's old chair. He could feel Macdonald, his shimmering historical light, a companion.

“What would Sir John A. do?” Diefenbaker asked rhetorically. You have to take risks to create a country. Macdonald took them, and paid dearly, but look at the result. He willed this endless geography into existence, he collected these colonies into a single force, a nation. He would defy these aggressive neighbours. He had done it before; he would do it again.

Harkness stared at Diefenbaker. It occurred to him that Dief was a nineteenth-century man himself. Invoking Macdonald over the nuclear issue. Was he mad?

“If we go along now,” Diefenbaker warned, “we'll be their vassals forever. We have to go slow.” And remember Nagasaki. The recklessness that sits in the Americans.

“We can't go slow.
There is no slow
. We could be at war.”

“There is nothing this man can teach me.
Nothing at all
.”

It was Kennedy, Harkness thought. Diefenbaker was obsessed with him. This was about him.

Harkness secretly issued the order to go to Defcon 3 himself, without Diefenbaker's or cabinet's authorization, and told the military to do it quietly.

The world held its breath. In schools there were bomb drills. Each day an insistent alarm, louder and shriller than the recess bell, the sound of adult urgency, and the children all solemnly filed into the hallway. They lined the walls and shut the doors so that the glass from the windows wouldn't fly inward and scour their flesh in that camera-flash instant. In the hallways they sat cross-legged and were told to bend their heads down into laps as far as they would go (kiss your ass goodbye, school wits announced). They waited like that for two minutes, the time not spent thinking that this time it was real, the Russians had finally lobbed one over the pole and they would all vanish: their pets, their baseball mitts and babysitters, the pink plastic hairclips in the shape of Scottie dogs, the lunches of tuna salad and two percent milk, all vaporized. Instead, those minutes in that awkward but oddly lulling position were spent dreaming of a perfect future: heroic victories, impossible romance.

In the end, the Russians blinked. Their boats stopped at the naval blockade; the missiles were disassembled and shipped back to Russia.

Diefenbaker issued a statement to the press. “We supported the stand of the United States clearly and unequivocally.” The country wasn't so sure. The press castigated him, the opposition party vilified him as a quisling.

Perhaps it
was
only Kennedy, Dief thought. Certainly it had become personal. They had been opposed on almost every issue. Kennedy wanted Britain to join the European Common Market, while Diefenbaker wanted them to stay out, as it would mean less British influence on Canada and in the growing void, more American influence. When Dief went to London to state his position, he was ridiculed in the papers (the world's cruellest, surely), denounced as Colonel
Blimp, a man poorly briefed and out of touch. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan disliked him, and could no longer disguise it. Canada had once been the go-between for Britain and America, the interpreter, a logical mediator holding a piece of each culture. Now Kennedy and Macmillan were friends, united in their disregard for Diefenbaker. He was isolated abroad and increasingly at home. He couldn't vent his feelings about Kennedy because Canadians liked him too much.

It was on January 25, 1963, that Diefenbaker finally unveiled his nuclear position, unspooled in the House of Commons, two hours of baffling rhetoric, words that circled and curved in on themselves, each new thought eating the one that came before it. “We know that the way to prevent nuclear war is to prevent it,” he said righteously, comforted by this tautology. His tone was emphatic, his words minced into opposing positions and mingled with theocracy. “My prayer is that we will be directed in this matter. Some may ridicule that belief on my part but I believe that the Western world has been directed by God in the last few years, or there would have been no survival. I believe that will continue.” God would be the arbiter; He would make the decision. Dief told the House that both Kennedy and Macmillan had agreed at the Nassau meeting to move away from nuclear warheads, to return to conventional weapons (though they hadn't said that, and Dief hadn't been at the meeting). “If nuclear arms are necessary for defence, we will take them,” he thundered. If not, we would not abide them, for they were unabidable.