Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (39 page)

Despite all the bumps in the road, a new era in superpower diplomacy had dawned. Many Soviet citizens dared to dream that the Cold War would soon be over; most Americans, too, yearned to cast off their deepest fears. As both Ike and Van prepared to take up Khrushchev’s invitations, hopes built that this was the breakthrough the world had been awaiting.

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Back in the USSR

NEAR THE
Osborne Apartment House on Fifty-Seventh Street, an old lady was neatly arranging the fruit on her stall when a
group of twelve young men and women halted indecisively in front. She glanced at them and rolled up her long jersey sleeves.
“It is clear to me,” she said, “that you are Russians and you’re going to visit my neighbor Van Cliburn. You don’t need to ask how much these apples cost.
I’m not going to bargain with you. I also love Russia and Russian people.”

Rather shaken by her shrewdness, the group carried on. They had been trying to track Van down for three weeks since arriving in December on a student exchange. Among them was Van’s old foe turned friend Lev Vlassenko, and while he was waiting for news of Van’s whereabouts, he had
breakfast with Rosina Lhévinne, who cleaned most of his plate as well as her own. He also watched her teach, noting that she adhered to the Anton Rubinstein school and that a quirk in Van’s playing of the Chopin F Minor Fantaisie derived from Josef Lhévinne, intelligence Vlassenko later passed on to
readers of
Sovetsky Muzykant.

Finally, the appointed day arrived, and the group waited with a gaggle of news agency photographers. Vlassenko looked around nervily and was the first to spot the tall figure in a gray coat, his head hatless and hair resplendent as ever. The cameras clicked as the two medalists excitedly hugged on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh
Street. Upstairs in the Osborne, the visitors crammed round the Steinway, remarking on a stern portrait of Rachmaninoff hanging on the wall next to a picture of the composor’s enormous hands. Van explained that they were two of his most precious objects. Atop the chest of drawers was another prized possession, a model of
Sputnik 1.
One of the Soviet group later reported the scene in loving detail for the party youth paper:

Wonderful sounds fill the small room on the ninth floor of an ordinary building on 57
^th
Street. Van Cliburn played, and probably he saw millions of Soviet people in front of his eyes, people who fell in love with the modest Texan boy with his amazing talent and his pure soul. When the last notes died I asked Van to express in words what he had wanted to tell us with his music, and here is what he wrote for the readers of
Komsomolskaya Pravda:

“I was happy to receive representatives of the Soviet youth. My heart is still full to the brim with memories of the days that I spent with you. They are precious to me. I want to use this opportunity to pass my most ardent feelings and gratitude to the Soviet youth. It won’t be long before I’ll be with you again, before I will play for you again. I will preserve for ever my gratitude and sincerity. Van Cliburn.”

A few weeks later, on February 14, 1960, Van sent a Valentine to his beloved Russia when he joined the Moscow State Symphony to play Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 3 at Madison Square Garden. Kirill Kondrashin was back to conduct, Van’s fellow gold medalist Valery Klimov played the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, and an
audience of 16,100 hung on every note. This reunion was also widely reported in the Soviet media, but nearly two years after the competition, it made Van’s absence from the Soviet Union all the more conspicuous. The problem was not just the heavy concert schedule Bill Judd and CAMI had lined up for Van, but also the politics, which were far
trickier than Van had imagined. He badly needed a wise head and steady hand to guide him, and that November he had finally found one. Seven years after he swooned at the romance of
Tonight We Sing
, Van signed with Sol Hurok.

The switch had been coming ever since the stout impresario
swept the young pianist into his offices at 730 Fifth Avenue straight after the ticker tape parade and announced he was taking him under his wing. For more than a year Van dithered while Hurok pursued him with champagne and caviar and grew increasingly irate:
“Get rid of the bum,” the manager growled when Van turned up unannounced at one of his parties. When Van did eventually sign, the news came as a terrible blow to Judd, and engagements had to be worked through. Yet Van had always dreamed of seeing the words “S. Hurok Presents” above his name, and now the legendary impresario was both a sentimental ideal and a practical necessity. Hurok was Russian and the biggest name in the business, the manager of Isaac Stern and Marian Anderson, Feodor Chaliapin and Anna Pavlova, as well as the celebrated pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who was
heard complaining that he had worked all his life to earn top dollar only to be overhauled by a pipsqueak.
“What’s the matter?” Rubinstein groused when an orchestra pursued him for an engagement. “Can’t they afford Cliburn?”

Throughout the Stalin years, Hurok had fought a losing battle to bring Russian artists to the West, and his deep connections made him uniquely qualified to preside over the new cultural exchanges. With his fedora rakishly pulled down over the fur collar of his topcoat and his silver-topped cane in hand, he was a regular sight at Bloomingdale’s while splurging on the latest Soviet ballerina. Now he saw an unmissable opportunity in the first state visit of an American president to the Soviet Union. The plan was for three of his stars, the soprano
Roberta Peters, the violinist Isaac Stern, and Van, to play an intimate recital for the top leaders at the Kremlin before performing across the country. Peters was under the impression that
Ike himself had personally requested all three, but given official attitudes toward
Van, the initiative may have been Hurok’s alone. His new recruit was the key to the plan: after all, Van had received Khrushchev’s personal invitation. He was to go for three months, leaving enough time to take the Black Sea vacation he had promised himself two years earlier. Finally, it seemed, he would be back at the heart of the affair.

So he would—but in a very different way than he envisaged.

AT
6:25 a.m. local time on May 1, 1960, a
spindly black plane took off from the U.S. base in Peshawar, Pakistan.

For four years the CIA’s top-secret U-2s had crisscrossed the skies far above the Soviet Union. Soviet radar detected many of the twenty-four deep-penetration overflights, but their missiles and planes were not able to reach them. Project Dragon Lady reaped America an information bonanza, including confirmation of the Soviets’ meager ICBM capacity. By 1959 the arsenal that Khrushchev had brandished at the West turned out to consist of
six R-7s, mostly sited in a swamp south of Arkhangelsk. The huge rockets needed twenty hours’ preparation for firing, and because the liquid oxygen had to be supercold, they could be kept fueled for only a short time. Since the Americans now knew the locations of the launch pads, their B-52 bombers could take them out before the tanks had even been filled.

The Soviets did, however, have an improved antiaircraft missile.
“The way to teach these smart-alecks a lesson is with a fist,” Khrushchev vowed. “Just let them poke their noses in here again.”

In the cockpit of the plane leaving Peshawar, Gary Powers, a former U.S. Air Force captain, pulled back hard on the controls and soared up into the sky. The single-seat, single-engine aircraft was notoriously difficult to fly: wearing a spacesuit and breathing oxygen, the pilot had a margin of just ten knots, or twelve miles per hour, between the stall speed and the critical Mach number, a gap known as the coffin corner. Worse, in Powers’s case, his regular plane was grounded and its replacement had a history of malfunctioning. Yet Powers had notched up twenty-seven missions across the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, making him the most experienced of all U-2 pilots. The plane leveled off at seventy thousand feet, and the huge camera in its slender belly clicked and whirred into action.

Since it was a holiday on the ground, the skies were unusually clear of traffic, and the Soviets began tracking the intruder before it entered their airspace. It continued on a northwesterly heading until it was over the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the launch site of
Sputnik
and home to the two latest R-7s, and then turned north toward
Sverdlovsk, more than thirteen hundred miles inside the border.

Above the city the autopilot broke down, but since he was halfway to his destination, Powers decided to fly the plane manually and complete his mission. Two hundred seventy minutes into the flight, he heard a dull thump and saw a bright orange flash as an antiaircraft missile exploded nearby. The U-2 lurched forward and began whirling toward the distant ground. A Soviet MiG-19 appeared on its tail and then blew up, hit by friendly fire. Powers was forced into the U-2’s nose and prevented from ejecting, which may have saved his life if, as was later claimed, the
seat was rigged to explode when the Eject lever was pressed. Instead, with the plane spinning halfway to the ground, he dragged the canopy open and unbuckled his seat belt. The plane fell beneath him, but his oxygen mask was still attached and yanked him down after it. His visor frosted over in the ice-cold air, and he was struggling blindly to get free when suddenly the hose broke, the chute opened, and he floated down next to a chunk of the plane gliding to earth on its long wings.

In Moscow, Khrushchev was watching the May Day celebrations from the balcony of the Lenin-Stalin mausoleum. This year he had ordered that the usual military display be replaced with athletes, children, and white doves. There were two weeks left before the Paris summit, and he wanted to send a signal that the cooperative spirit was alive and well. When he received news of the U-2, he was in equal measure horrified at the international consequences if he reacted publicly, worried about appearing weak in his generals’ eyes if
he did nothing, and electrified at the prospect of exacting revenge for the years of infuriating intrusions.

By the time he was captured, Powers had not used the needle tipped with a lethal shellfish toxin that he carried concealed in a silver dollar. The map showing his course survived the crash, along with large parts of the plane, including the camera and its contents, and blew away his prepared cover story. From his interrogation, the KGB learned that the CIA believed it was impossible for a pilot to survive an accident at seventy thousand feet, exploding seats and poison pins aside. Khrushchev kept quiet, waiting to see what the Americans would say.

After four days, NASA issued an elaborate cover story explaining that a plane had been lost during a high-altitude weather research mission above Turkey and might have drifted off course. Setting a trap, Khrushchev ordered the release of information that a spy plane had been shot down—without any mention of a pilot. As he expected, the Americans assumed that Powers was dead and fatally embroidered their story.

On May 7, old Voroshilov retired as the ceremonial head of state and was replaced with Khrushchev’s protégé Leonid Brezhnev. Khrushchev and the eternal Mikoyan were the last of Stalin’s henchmen to survive in power, and Nikita Sergeyevich held a card that, if played well, could further strengthen his hand, and if not, irreparably weaken it. That day, he appeared before a session of the Supreme Soviet and sprang his trap.
“Comrades, I must tell you a secret,” he announced, his
veins bulging with a heady cocktail of rage and self-righteousness. “When I was making my report I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and in good health . . . And now, just look how many silly things they [the Americans] have said.”

Khrushchev had the Eisenhower administration on a hook, but in public he was careful to blame the U-2 program on CIA director Allen Dulles. Probably he believed it: privately he told Tommy Thompson that he
“could not help but suspect that someone had launched
this operation with [the] deliberate intent of spoiling [the] summit meeting,” again suggesting that that someone was Dulles. Then he sat back and waited for Eisenhower to apologize for his out-of-control subordinates.

In Washington, Ike quietly read Thompson’s cable. He had always been nervous that the U-2 overflights could be represented as acts of aggression justifying war. He understood that Khrushchev was giving him a way out that could salvage the summit, perhaps was even asking for his help. Yet he faced an impossible choice: blame Dulles and hand his political opponents false evidence that he had lost control of crucial decisions in the federal government, or take responsibility and risk blowing up the summit.

There was a third choice.
“I would like to resign,” he told his secretary. But abandoning his post was unacceptable to an old soldier. On May 11 he personally revealed the scope of the U-2 program and his direct authorization of each flight. He declared the program on hold but reserved the right to restart it in future, if it were deemed necessary to prevent a surprise attack. In response to questions, he said he was
still going to the Paris peace conference, which was now just three days away. Privately he did not have great hopes but was clear that he had to give it his best shot.
“My feeling is that the world is headed toward an arms race of such magnitude as can culminate only in unbearable burdens on our peoples at best, or general war at worst,” he wrote to a critic of the talks. “No efforts should be spared to find some way out of this grim prospect.” But by placing his political capital above his relationship with the Soviet premier, he had booby-trapped an already tortuous path.