He went about trying to correct the impression as best he could. Kennedy may have been young and inexperienced enough to have given the wily old Soviet leader an impression of weakness, but Kennedy was not so young and inexperienced that he didn’t understand how dangerous that was. Kennedy was reeling from his meetings with Khrushchev, famously describing the meetings as the “roughest thing in my life.” Reston reported that Kennedy said just enough for Reston to conclude that Khrushchev “had studied the events of the Bay of Pigs” and that he had “decided that he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could be intimidated and blackmailed.” Kennedy said to Reston that Khrushchev had “just beat hell out of me” and that he had presented Kennedy with a terrible problem: “If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him. Immediately following the final session on June 4 Kennedy sat for a previously scheduled interview with New York Times columnist James Reston at the American embassy. “ talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill 70 million people in ten minutes, and he just looked at me as if to say ‘So what?'” In The Fifty-Year Wound, Cold War historian Derek Leebaert drily observes of Khrushchev in Vienna, “Having worked for Stalin had its uses.”… “I never met a man like this,” Kennedy subsequently commented to Time’s Hugh Sidey. He threw down the gauntlet on Berlin in particular, all but threatening war. Khrushchev berated, belittled, and bullied Kennedy on subjects ranging from Communist ideology to the balance of power between the Soviet and Western blocs, to Laos, to “wars of national liberation,” to nuclear testing. Khrushchev had taken Kennedy’s measure at a previous summit, and found him wanting in cojones:īy all accounts, including Kennedy’s own, the meetings were a disaster. It came about in part because Khrushchev was emboldened by what he perceived as JFK’s youth and naivete in other words, Kennedy’s weakness. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, which happened when I was young. But Obama’s warnings on this-or anything except his phone and his pen-have an especially hollow ring. It’s not as though previous presidents would have gone to war over Putin’s actions. Putin sent a team of officials to Washington this week for just that purpose.Īnd Russia will face other possible costs, such as a worsening of its already shaky international reputation, and a drop in the value of its currency, the ruble, making imports more expensive and reducing the relative value of its exports. Another option: Reject Russian efforts to promote trade with the United States. One option: Boycott the Group of Eight summit due to be held in June in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. The United States is consulting with its European allies on next steps, a senior administration official told Yahoo News. It was unclear what sort of action Obama might take or what limited approach would deter the Russians.
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