Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (46 page)

ON OCTOBER
14, 1962, a U-2 flying over Cuba snapped several pictures that revealed clumsy attempts to camouflage launch sites for ballistic nuclear missiles. After processing, the photos were shown to the president the next morning. JFK assembled a circle of his closest advisers, including Tommy Thompson, newly returned from Moscow as Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s adviser on Soviet affairs. The Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously called for air strikes to wipe out the missile sites, followed by a full-scale invasion. Thompson argued for a strong warning. After fierce debate, Kennedy instead ordered a naval “quarantine” of Cuba; the term was deliberately chosen instead of “blockade,” which under international law connoted an act of war. At the same time, he wrote to Khrushchev demanding the removal
of the missile bases and all offensive weapons. On October 22 the president addressed the American public on television to explain his action, warning that a global crisis beckoned if the Soviets refused to heed his call.
“It shall be the policy of this nation,” he unequivocally stated, “to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” The readiness level of U.S. forces rose to DEFCON 3, and a naval force headed for the Caribbean.

Khrushchev ordered some vessels carrying weapons to turn back and the rest to sail on, including four diesel submarines armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes and one ship carrying nuclear warheads that was close enough to reach port before the exclusion zone went into effect. Two days later he cabled the White House insisting that the nonblockade clearly amounted to an act of aggression and the Soviet ships would ignore the attempted “piracy.” As the ships reached the five-hundred-mile line, U.S. naval forces intercepted them, searched them, and allowed them to continue when only food, fuel, and non-offensive equipment were found on board.

Spy planes returned with new images showing the missile sites nearing operational readiness, with fuel tankers and command trailers standing by. For the first time ever the Strategic Air Command’s state of alert rose to DEFCON 2, one step below maximum readiness for nuclear war. B-52s carrying thermonuclear weapons took to the skies on continuous airborne alert, some patrolling near the borders of the USSR. Smaller B-47s were dispersed around civilian and military airfields, ready to take off on fifteen minutes’ notice. More than one hundred ICBMs were readied for launch. In prospect was the first direct military confrontation between the two superpowers since the start of the Cold War.

Kennedy replied to Khrushchev that his hand was being forced after repeated assurances that no offensive weapons were being deployed in Cuba had turned out to be lies. Huddled in gruelingly
long sessions with his advisers, Kennedy listened closely to Tommy Thompson, the only one with deep personal knowledge of the Soviet leader. Thompson was convinced that Khrushchev could be persuaded to remove the missiles, and stood firm against proposals for air strikes and amphibious invasions, warning that they could push the impulsive premier into making a move against West Berlin or Turkish bases that could lead ineluctably to nuclear war. Kennedy had begun to believe that an invasion was unavoidable, but he agreed to give diplomacy more time. As if to amplify the possibility, the previous night Van had
played Rachmaninoff with the National Symphony at Washington’s Constitution Hall, while that night, the twenty-fifth, the Leningrad Philharmonic began its first American tour at New York’s newly opened Lincoln Center, the first foreign orchestra to play there.

The next afternoon, ABC News correspondent John Scali contacted the White House with startling information. A Soviet agent had tipped him off that the Kremlin would remove its missiles under UN supervision in return for an American commitment never to invade Cuba. The agent was the same
Alexander Feklisov who had once listened to Rachmaninoff’s choir at the New York baths, now promoted to KGB station chief in Washington. White House staffers were scrambling to verify the back-channel offer when a letter from Khrushchev clattered over the Teletype from the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Sent at 2:00 a.m. Moscow time, it was rambling and emotional but contained the seed of a solution that mirrored Feklisov’s information.
“If there is no intention . . . to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war,” wrote Khrushchev, “then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.”

Intelligence experts pronounced the letter genuine, and Thompson’s long game seemed vindicated. Yet the morning brought news that Radio Moscow was broadcasting a harsher message, demanding that the United States remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey in return for the Soviet missiles leaving Cuba. The different style led
analysts to question whether Khrushchev was still fully in command; at the least there was clearly dissent in the Presidium, if not outright chaos. The new proposal put Kennedy in an awkward position: it was hard to dismiss it as unreasonable when the United States was anyway planning to remove the missiles from Turkey, but to accept would make it look as if he had capitulated to blackmail. Soon a new letter from Khrushchev came through, essentially repeating the morning’s offer, which now appeared to be the agreed-upon Kremlin position.

An hour later a Soviet surface-to-air missile launched from Cuba shot down a U-2, killing its pilot. Kennedy told the chiefs of staff to be ready to attack within days, but he also plied Thompson with questions about Khrushchev’s likely intentions and state of mind and how far the premier might have to go to appease hard-liners in the Soviet government. Thompson suggested responding to Khrushchev’s first letter and ignoring the second, and he sat down to help draft the reply. The letter, which was sent later that night, included a series of suggested measures for the removal of the Soviet missiles under UN auspices and a pledge that the United States would not invade Cuba. Thompson also suggested sending Robert Kennedy to meet secretly with the Soviet ambassador; given the Soviets’ conspiratorial concept of American power, he argued, they would have more faith in the president’s brother than in anyone except JFK himself. Coached by Thompson, Bobby passed on the message that the Soviets could either remove the missiles or watch the Americans do it, but that the president was keen to avoid war. As for the missiles in Turkey, he added, they were already obsolete and vulnerable to Soviet attack and would soon be gone anyway, but this could not publicly form part of a settlement.

Five hundred miles from Cuba a Soviet submarine skirted the exclusion zone. Only the objection of a single officer prevented the use of a nuclear torpedo when a U.S. Navy vessel
attacked the sub with signaling depth charges. Far away over the east coast of the USSR, a
U-2 pilot accidentally trespassed into Soviet airspace for ninety minutes. The Soviets scrambled a squadron of MiGs, and the Americans
dispatched nuclear-armed F-102 fighters across the Bering Sea. The world was teetering on the brink of a potentially devastating nuclear exchange.

With no reply forthcoming from Moscow, ABC’s John Scali arranged another meeting with Alexander Feklisov. Scali asked the spy why Khrushchev’s two letters were so different; Feklisov unconvincingly blamed poor communication. Scali shouted that it was a
“stinking double cross” and that the United States would invade within hours. Feklisov replied that Khrushchev would soon send a new response and that Scali should assure the administration that no deception was intended. No one would believe him, the journalist retorted, but after they separated, he delivered the message.

The next morning, October 28, Radio Moscow broadcast a statement from Khrushchev declaring that the Soviet missiles would be dismantled and repatriated. If Feklisov was acting on his own initiative, as it appears, his intervention bought desperately needed time.

The worst crisis of the Cold War had lasted thirteen days. Tommy Thompson took off for the funeral of his mother, who had died in its midst. Robert Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later called him the unsung hero of the hour.

One by one the missiles were taken down, packed up, and loaded onto eight ships, which were scrutinized by the U.S. Navy as they crossed the never-declared blockade. The line stayed in place while the Soviets tried to remove their bombers, which required the cooperation of Fidel Castro. The Cuban leader was incensed at the Soviet climbdown. He had been minimally consulted on the weapons’ installation and not consulted at all about their removal. At the height of the crisis, he had goaded Khrushchev to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on the United States, intimating that he was
ready to die in a nuclear inferno. Even the Soviet leader, whose romantic attachment to Castro had blinded him to the folly of his scheme, thought he was crazy.
“Can you imagine!” he marveled to Mikoyan’s sons. “As if he doesn’t understand it would mean a global catastrophe!” On November 3, Khrushchev
dispatched their ever-reliable father to manage the
delicate feat of getting the planes back while keeping Cuba as an ally. After meeting Mikoyan at the airport, Castro refused to see him for three days. A few minutes into their talks, Mikoyan received news that his wife had died. Castro suggested postponing the discussion, but Mikoyan demurred. The situation was too grave, and he asked for the funeral to take place without him. Finally, Castro saw the writing on the wall and agreed to the withdrawal of the forty-one Il-28 bombers; the rest of the armaments stayed in Cuba, though not the large cache of tactical nuclear weapons that the Soviets had secretly planned to leave until Castro provoked them into changing course.

On his way home Mikoyan stopped over in Washington and switched effortlessly from arm-twisting Castro to sweet-talking Kennedy. The Bolshoi Ballet had also arrived in town, after playing to empty houses in San Francisco, and for their first social outing after the crisis, the First Couple attended the opening night, which for lack of a suitable stage took place in an old movie theater. Reporters noted that the president
“applauded louder and longer than anyone in his section.” At intermission he accompanied the Soviet ambassador backstage to greet the dancers, who gave Jackie a portrait miniature of Tchaikovsky. She invited them to the White House and took young Caroline to watch a rehearsal with their star ballerina, Maya Plisetskaya. JFK’s mother and his brother Teddy invited the whole company to Cape Cod for a dinner in honor of Plisetskaya’s birthday, and Bobby Kennedy
commenced an affair with her. The arts were useful for patching up broken friendships as well as making new ones.

Six months later the United States quietly removed its missiles from Turkey. His authority boosted by his handling of the crisis, JFK committed America to landing a man on the moon before the decade was out and traveled to Berlin to crow that the West had not had to build a wall to keep its people in.

THE FIRST
sign that Khrushchev had ushered his nation into the world fold had been his hearty celebration of Van’s victory. The first
sign that his tumultuous cavalcade had hit the skids came that December, at two cultural events. Touring an exhibit of avant-garde art in the Manezh on December 1, 1962, Khrushchev furiously denounced the paintings as
“dog shit” and the artists as “faggots” whose “asshole art” was fit only for urinals. Meanwhile, at his elbow, emboldened hard-liners hooted for the artists to be arrested, or
strangled. What seemed like an intemperate outburst, or a cheap attempt to garner support by playing the simple man taking on the cosmopolitan elite, looked far more ominous when the authorities did everything they could to sabotage the premiere of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 13 on December 18. The choral setting of poems, beginning with a lament for a massacre of Jews by Nazis and collaborators at Babi Yar, near Kiev, purportedly offended by putting Jewish suffering before Russian. Two singers and a conductor backed out before Kirill Kondrashin took up the baton. Like Shostakovich, he had long nursed deep contempt for the Soviet system.

Both events were roaring successes, and no one was arrested or exiled, but the campaign escalated. The Central Committee set up a commission to crack down all over again on “formalist tendencies.” Leading artists were hauled into the Kremlin and given stern lectures that brought back unpleasant memories of the late 1940s. In March 1963 the intelligentsia was summoned to a Kremlin meeting with Khrushchev himself.
“The thaw is over,” he thundered. “This is not even a light morning frost. For you and your likes it will be the arctic frost.” In case anyone doubted his resolve, he reminded them that his regime had “helped smash the Hungarians.” The echoes of Stalinism were unmistakable:
“Society has a right to condemn works which are contrary to the interests of the people,” he warned. As for avant-garde composers, having allowed them access to Western innovations, he turned on them. “We flatly reject this cacophonous music,” he declared of twelve-tone compositions. “Our people can’t use this garbage as a tool for their ideology.” Once again, artists began to live in fear of intimidation, but the about-face was a sign of weakness, not strength.