Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (42 page)

Van’s triumphant return to Moscow had hurtled along at an even greater disconnect from political realities than his first breakthrough. At this point it was impossible to say whether he had aided America, the Soviets, the cause of peace, or himself. He headed for the airport accompanied by heaps of gifts, including a three-week-old puppy, who he later told the Soviet news service TASS was a relative
“of the heroes of the cosmos: Belka and Strelka,” and had been presented by their trainers. Amid teary farewells he boarded the plane for home.
On board was Barbara Powers, the wife of the downed U-2 pilot. On August 17 her husband had been convicted of espionage and sentenced to three years in prison and seven years’ hard labor. As to whether the most popular American in Russia and the wife of the least popular American in Russia spoke—and if so, what they said to each other—the record is silent.

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Sole Diplomacy

TWO WEEKS
after Van left Moscow, Nikita
Khrushchev set out for New York. In a typically unorthodox move, he had appointed himself head of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations, which allowed him to stroll into the enemy lair without an invitation. His plan was to advance the case for his nation’s policies in plainspoken terms and expose the perfidy of America and the president whom he had called his friend. The intended audience was not just his own people or Americans but also the leaders of the nonaligned and Third World countries who were gathering for the opening of the fifteenth annual session of the General Assembly.

The Soviet leader’s staff schemed to make him unwind and prepare himself by persuading him to sail on the SS
Baltika
, a midsize twin-screw steamship that had been known as the
Vyacheslav Molotov
before the former foreign minister’s disgrace. The party leaders of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Belarus, and Ukraine went with him, and after ten days of playing Warsaw Pact shuffleboard in choppy conditions, they watched the Manhattan skyline rear on September 19. As they approached, motorboats revved toward them, their decks packed with anti-Soviet protestors holding placards, chanting through megaphones, and hanging an outsize Khrushchev in effigy from a gallows. NYPD speedboats circled the liner and accompanied it to East River Pier 73, which was near the United Nations building but turned out to be an ancient structure half-rotting into the water.
Smiling Mike Menshikov had warned that it was expensive to rent a good pier, and Khrushchev had ordered him to find something cheap.

The ship came to a halt near the pier and waited. After much delay, news arrived that the longshoremen’s union was refusing to service the enemy vessel, and the crew winched down a lifeboat and set off trailing a towing rope. When the leaders finally picked their way along the rickety jetty in pouring rain, there was no American welcoming party and no press pack baying questions to Khrushchev, who sulkily assumed that Ike had leaned on his media mogul pals to starve the premier of publicity.

Khrushchev took up residence at the headquarters of the Soviet mission, a large
Federal-style town house on the corner of Park Avenue and Sixty-Eighth Street. Security considerations precluded him from going for a walk, and he bounced round the elegant rooms like a ball in an arcade game. One by one, reporters collected behind police barriers outside, and a small throng had gathered by the time he spied the cameras and notebooks through the glazed balcony door of the ballroom. Instantly he sprang to life, calling his trusty interpreter, Victor Sukhodrev, and ordering the reluctant guards to open the door. A chorus of questions met them, and he answered each one with gusto and at great length, gesticulating excitedly and hollering above the street noise, completely unfazed that no one understood his Russian. The dapper Sukhodrev was forced to shout as well, which tickled his boss. Pedestrians on Park Avenue approached and stopped to watch the Soviet leader hold forth. Passing drivers wound down their windows and booed. Khrushchev grinned, shook his fist at them, and booed back.

The next day, the press corps came prepared with microphones on long poles. Khrushchev looked slyly at his interpreter:
“Okay, let’s go get some fresh air,” he said, “if we can call this New York air fresh. And we’ll chat to the guys at the same time.” The balcony became a vent where he blew off built-up steam until the United Nations gave him a better outlet.

The Soviet premier had decided to attend every morning and
afternoon session of the General Assembly, and the other Eastern Bloc leaders dutifully followed suit. Seasoned diplomats stared as they trooped in each day on the dot of eleven and took their places in the empty chamber, where sessions always started late. When they finally began, Khrushchev watched curiously, trying to understand why delegates were variously applauding, ignoring the proceedings, and wandering about with a freedom that no one would have dared adopt in the Supreme Soviet. During lulls in the proceedings, he stared balefully down the neck of the foreign minister of Fascist Spain, who was seated directly in front of him.

When it was his turn to speak, he ground on for two hours about the U-2 and imperialists. Soviet allies applauded loudly, and Khrushchev returned contentedly to his desk, but as soon as he realized that not all his suggestions were going to be adopted, he began shouting out objections. An official explained that the delegates could not hear him through their headphones. When the Philippines envoy took the lectern and made reference to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Soviet annexation of the Baltic republics during World War II, Khrushchev banged his fists on the table and stamped his feet. The carpet deadened their impact, so he picked up his country’s nameplate and swung it round. By coincidence, this was the correct etiquette when asking a speaker to give way, and the slight but phlegmatic Filipino stood aside. Khrushchev charged up, waving him away like a fly, and began a disquisition on a subject unrelated to the matter at hand. The president of the Assembly, an Irish diplomat named Frederick Boland, interrupted and explained the rules. Khrushchev threw off a few insults about American marionettes in the Philippines and then went back to his desk, which he continued to thump whenever a delegate said something that sounded like an insult to communism. When the Spanish foreign minister left his seat and took the podium, Khrushchev thumped so hard that his wristwatch stopped.
“Dammit, I’ve even broken my watch because of this capitalist cad!” he growled, and he leaned over, pulled off his shoe, and thwacked it repeatedly on the table. The hall stopped, transfixed by the sight
of a superpower leader behaving like a truculent child. Bounding to the front, Khrushchev grabbed the microphone and shouted that the Spanish people would soon rise up and overthrow Franco’s bloody regime. The chairman interrupted to explain that the rules forbade insulting heads of state. Without his headphones, Khrushchev had no idea what the chair was saying, and he turned on Boland.
“So you, chairman, you too support this dirty imperialist and fascist cad!” he roared. “Well this is what I have to say to you. The time will come when the Irish people will rise against their oppressors. The Irish people will overthrow imperialist lackeys like you!”

Boland turned crimson. “You have violated all the rules!” he shouted back. “I ban you from speaking and I am closing the session.” He banged his gavel with such force that it cracked and the head went flying. The representatives of the world’s nations looked on. Khrushchev was still bellowing, but his microphone had been switched off and few people could hear him. When Boland got up and stalked out, the premier reluctantly left the stage, but he and the Spanish delegate continued to exchange insulting gestures until the UN police intervened.

On October 11, two days before Khrushchev was due to fly home, banner headlines announced that an Estonian sailor on the
Baltika
had defected and was seeking political asylum. When reporters ambushed the Soviet leader, he declared that he would have helped the poor soul with his application if he had asked.
“God bless him!” he said, ducking into his car. The defector disclosed that the ship was carrying a model of some kind of
advanced spacecraft, and since Khrushchev had timed a lunar landing to coincide with his previous visit to America, rumors spread that a probe was about to reach Mars. Soviet officials denied the story, but it was not far off the mark. On October 14 a Soviet Mars vehicle blasted off with an expected arrival date of May 1961, but it failed during the booster’s third burn stage and scattered debris across a wide swath of Soviet territory. The model went back on board the
Baltika.

Had the details of the Mars shot been known, it would have lent an
irresistible analogy for Khrushchev’s explosive year of personal diplomacy. The rambunctious premier went home characteristically unbowed, convinced that his robust defense of communism had taught the imperialists a thing or two. The Soviet press praised his outburst as heroic, and his popularity with ordinary citizens was undimmed. Yet to many in the political class, including his own UN delegation, it was the new peak in a string of mountainous debacles.

On October 15, Sviatoslav
Richter arrived in Chicago at the start of a ten-week tour of America. After being kept under wraps for years, Richter was now being displayed everywhere as a flagship Soviet product, though instead of the usual single KGB minder masquerading as a chauffeur or secretary—musicians called them gorillas—the unruly pianist had two. His debut was a sensation, but it could not erase the impression left by a shoe on a UN desk.

Incredibly, the worst was still to come.

THE
1960 presidential election was dominated by Democratic accusations that the Eisenhower administration had sat on its hands while the Soviet Union built a commanding lead in stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Nixon, the Republican nominee, was among the few with access to the hard data from the U-2 missions, but to his intense frustration he was unable to reveal it for fear of compromising intelligence sources, and in a tight election the spurious “missile gap” helped John F. Kennedy win the presidency. Khrushchev, whose barnstorming in New York did nothing to help Nixon’s cause, was delighted to see the back of the combative debater he referred to as
“the shopkeeper.”

The new president was soon put to rights. The strategic balance of power still favored the West, as it always had. The Soviet leader’s impression of a nuclear-armed madman was all too effective at suggesting otherwise, but in his quiet way Eisenhower had been playing the same game. Privately he had been certain that America’s triple defense of nuclear bombers, submarines, and short-range missiles was superior to any Soviet ICBM. He had been equally confident that
the Soviets would never risk a first strike unless their very existence were threatened. But he had made the case mainly to himself, and he ended his presidency warning of the dangers of a
“military-industrial-congressional complex” in which politicians in the pockets of corporations funneled vast funds into unnecessary weapons programs.

Kennedy took his chips and bided his time. To change tune too soon after taking office would have been an embarrassment, and there was no shortage of those in his first year. In April 1961, Fidel Castro took three days to defeat fourteen hundred CIA-trained Cuban exiles who disembarked to overthrow him at the Bay of Pigs; Khrushchev had been informed about the invasion well in advance. The same month, the deep voice that had announced Stalin’s death crackled from Soviet radios with news of another scientific triumph: Yuri Gagarin had become the first human to journey into outer space and orbit the Earth. As a propaganda coup, it outshone even
Sputnik
; it was also the clearest possible demonstration of the Soviets’ confidence in the reliability of their ICBMs. And then there was Kennedy’s first summit with Khrushchev.

On June 4 the graceful president and the portly premier sat down in Vienna to discuss Berlin and other pressing issues.
“How old are you, Mr. President?” Khrushchev asked, throwing Kennedy off balance from the start; he was forty-four, younger than his opposite number by a quarter century. “My son would have been this age by now, or even older,” Khrushchev added sadly; Leonid, a bomber pilot, had died during the war. Khrushchev then proceeded to give the novice his usual lecture on how socialism would replace capitalism just as capitalism had replaced feudalism. After several hours of statistics, historical parallels, and references to the classics of Marxism-Leninism, Kennedy shifted uneasily and borrowed a cigarette off his interpreter. When he got a word in, he ventured to dispute some points of ideology, which his advisers had specifically warned him against, and was felled by a thousand cuts.
“He beat the hell out of me,” the president later said. “He savaged me.” On that, Khrushchev agreed. Kennedy, he wickedly suggested, was still in short pants.
“Yeah, well since the Americans have such a president now, I’m very sorry for the American people,” Khrushchev said to Viktor Sukhodrev as they took their evening constitutional round the Soviet ambassador’s residence. He hadn’t meant to upset the sallow young man, he added later, but there was
no mercy in politics. The West had a measure of revenge when Rudolf Nureyev, the young star of Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet, defected in Paris—despite the KGB’s efforts to entice him onto a homebound plane with the unlikely incentive that Comrade Khrushchev had requested a personal performance.