Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (37 page)

Khrushchev was on the ropes, and he knew it. In the Soviet Union, he weakly parried, women worked in every field, shoulder to shoulder with men.

“I think that this attitude toward women is universal,” Nixon hit home. “What we want is to make easier the life of our housewives.” The vice president was not at all sure he had won.
“I felt like a fighter wearing sixteen-ounce gloves and bound by Marquis [sic] of Queensbury rules, up against a bare-knuckled slugger who had gouged, kneed and kicked,” he later admitted. But in 1950s America, his blow for housewives’ convenience was decisive, and he was hailed for standing up to the Soviet bully. The bruising encounter burnished Nixon’s credentials as a statesman, and to Khrushchev’s dismay, it helped him win the Republican presidential nomination the following year.

Ignoring the embarrassment as usual, Khrushchev bullishly maintained that it had been worth exposing his people to shiny appliances if it prodded the economy into producing desirable consumer goods. It was no use leaving faceless bureaucrats to decide what style of shoes people needed, he lectured perplexed party cadres; workers would only be more productive if they could vote with their wallets for things they actually wanted to buy. The exact mechanism by which that would happen was unclear, but when his experts calculated that the Soviet Union’s command economy could overtake the United States’ free-market economy in twenty years, he put his full faith in the figures. Khrushchev feverishly began to reorganize the Soviet bureaucracy and economy from top to bottom, impatiently demanding drastic improvements in impossibly short time frames. Soon a new national slogan was plastered on walls everywhere:
CATCH UP WITH AND OVERTAKE AMERICA
.

Ever the believer, Khrushchev was convinced that communism could win on the terms set by Nixon, and he was ready to take his message to America itself.

•
15
•

Khrushchev in the Capitalist Den

EISENHOWER HAD
forbidden Nixon from mentioning the biggest news of all while in Moscow: just before he set off, Khrushchev had accepted the president’s invitation to visit the United States. The Soviet leader had been angling for an invitation for some time, and although his highly publicized embrace of Van the previous year certainly did not bring it about directly, it undoubtedly contributed to the modest warming of relations that made it possible.

Khrushchev was secretly amazed and proud that he, a mere worker, should be embarking on a state visit to the capitalist superpower. Pride also made him prickle at the mere semblance of a slight, fret about behaving correctly, and resolve to be thoroughly unimpressed by what he saw. Yet in the few weeks between Nixon’s departure and his own, he was boosted by new triumphs of Soviet technology: that September,
Luna 2
became the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the moon, while the icebreaker
Lenin
, the world’s first nuclear-powered ship, sailed on her maiden voyage to clear sea routes in the Arctic Ocean.
“Only people who refuse to look reality in the face can doubt the boundless possibilities for human progress offered by communism,” he rejoiced in a rallying speech before he left. Americans, meanwhile, contemplated the visit with a little hope and more hostility. To conservatives it was as if the Antichrist were dropping by Rome for eschatological talks with the pope.

On September 15, 1959,
Khrushchev touched down at Andrews Air
Force Base in his brand-new Tu-114, a turboprop beast that was the largest and fastest passenger plane in the skies. He had been bursting to show it off and refused to back down even when engineers found cracks in the fuselage. Standing fifty feet from the ground, it was also the world’s tallest aircraft, a fact that was gratifyingly demonstrated when the airport steps proved too short to reach the forward hatch. Instead, Khrushchev, together with his wife, Nina; his son, Sergei; two of his daughters, a son-in-law, and accompanying officials and bodyguards had to clamber down the emergency escape ladder, thus presenting their rears to America.

Khrushchev beamed at his welcome, which included a one-hundred-twenty-strong military honor guard, a twenty-one-gun salute, and the president waiting with three thousand members of the public and press. Under his gray Stetson, Eisenhower was tight-lipped. He had intended the visit to proceed only if Khrushchev backed off his ultimatum on Berlin, but his diplomats had not made the link clear, and the threat stood. As the president delivered a muted homily about universal peace, Khrushchev’s attention drifted. He held his homburg over his face to ward off the sun, fanned himself with it while mugging to the crowd, and playfully waved it to all and sundry. When the hat ran out of uses, he stage-winked at a young woman and took a dramatic interest in a butterfly that fluttered past. It was all done, noted a reporter, “with the studied nonchalance of an
old vaudeville trouper.” Ike’s demeanor did not soften when Khrushchev took the stand and began crowing about the icebreaker and the unmanned rocket, which he made sure to mention had landed on the moon bearing the emblem of the Soviet Union.

The motorcade sped into downtown Washington along a route lined with sparse crowds of curious onlookers, flag-waving Soviet embassy staff, and more than four thousand police and armed forces. Back home,
Pravda
reported that three hundred thousand turned out in the American capital, with hands swaying and shouts rolling like waves, adding that
“not even the end of World War II brought such a sea of people onto the streets of Washington.”

After talks at the White House during which Khrushchev presented as his official gift a model of the much-touted Soviet rocket, Ike proposed a helicopter sightseeing trip. The Soviet leader initially declined, fearing an assassination plot, but relented when he realized the president would be in the same copter. They took off at rush hour so Khrushchev could see the bumper-to-bumper cars heading to suburban houses just like the one he had pooh-poohed in Moscow. He remained studiedly silent throughout, though he certainly admired the helicopter: when he got home he ordered three for his own use.

That evening, the Khrushchevs were the guests of honor at a White House state dinner. Ike wore white tie and tails; Nikita Sergeyevich, a dark suit pinned with medals. In his speech, Khrushchev acknowledged that America was wealthy but predicted that tomorrow the Soviet Union would be just as rich.
“The next day? Even richer!” Music was provided by Ike’s favorite band,
“a jazzy pop combo called Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians,” whose biggest hit was “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream,” but the
Washington Post
noted that the president had missed striking a note of harmony by not booking Van Cliburn. Van was disappointed himself, and wondered whether he would be invited to one of the Soviet receptions for Khrushchev. He placed a call to a Russian contact, with the
FBI listening in, and was assured he would be included. Heartened, he announced that he was going to send three dozen roses to Madame Khrushchev at Blair House, the presidential guest residence.

The day following the dinner was taken up with more tours and meetings, including a trip to the Agriculture Department’s experimental farm at Beltsville, Maryland, where Khrushchev declared the pigs too fat and the turkeys too thin. Photographers snapped away; luckily American editors were not as undiplomatic as the one in a well-known Soviet joke who struggled to find a suitable caption for a photograph of the premier with some prize hogs before settling on
“Third from left, Khrushchev.” Still, a National Press Club dinner that evening, broadcast in prime time on the three major networks, threatened to turn into a turkey shoot. The first questioner asked
why Khrushchev had remained silent while Stalin committed atrocities; red-faced and scowling, the Soviet premier refused to answer. Another pressed him on Hungary: the question, he fumed,
“stuck in some people’s throats like a dead rat.” A third raised the topic of his infamous remark to a group of Western diplomats three years earlier: “We will bury you!” he had blustered, which many Westerners took as a threat to launch a nuclear strike. Khrushchev patiently explained for the umpteenth time that he had not alluded to an actual burial but to the inevitable historical triumph of communism predicted by Marxism-Leninism. Another reporter asked if he had plans to launch men at the moon, but unfortunately Khrushchev’s interpreter used a word for
launch
that was closer to
throw.
“What do you mean?” the Soviet leader thundered. “Do you mean abandoning them?” His voice mounted. “We don’t throw anyone anywhere, because we value our people highly. We’re not going to throw anyone to the moon.” Every so often the roller-coaster performance righted itself when Khrushchev’s plain, persuasive language drew applause from the hardened hacks, only to go for a loop into another cultural chasm.

Still smarting, the premier took the train to the capitalist den of iniquity. Out in New York Harbor a Hungarian refugee had blindfolded the Statue of Liberty to spare her eyes the sight of the
“murderer,” but Khrushchev soon had his revenge. On the way up to the presidential suite, on the thirty-fifth floor of the Waldorf-Astoria, the elevator jerked to a halt. The operator, security men, and officials looked at one another in horror, but the Soviet leader beamed.
“So what?” he crowed. “The elevator broke down. Here’s the famous American technology. So it happens to you as well.” He chortled away for ten minutes until the car bumped up halfway to the next floor, and Henry Cabot Lodge, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, helped the Soviet premier out with a shove to his broad backside. Khrushchev referred to the incident throughout his trip, though he left out the last bit.

A cocktail party for rich financiers brought no meeting of minds, and Khrushchev headed back to the Waldorf-Astoria for an Economic
Club of New York dinner in his honor. Inside the great ballroom, several guests quizzed him about how Marxism, which foresaw total victory for communism, could accommodate peaceful coexistence. When they kept pushing, he lost his temper.
“If you don’t want to listen, all right,” he shouted. “I am an old sparrow and you cannot muddle me with your cries. If there is no desire to listen to me, I can go! I did not come to the USA to beg! I represent the great Soviet State!” The next day, he addressed the United Nations and surprised everyone with a plan to abolish nuclear weapons within five years, but afterward, as he toured Manhattan, he erupted at the sight of placard-brandishing protestors, whom he assumed had been stationed by the authorities just as at home. Taking the elevator (this time without hitches) to the top of the Empire State Building left him unplacated.
“If you’ve seen one skyscraper you’ve seen them all,” he later declared. When he pointed out that the
“conical shape of A-bomb waves made tall buildings situated even at great distances from ground zero more vulnerable to destruction” and observed that the Soviets were building only four or five stories high, an American aide suggested they would all soon be living underground.

Khrushchev left New York complaining that he had not seen a single worker and flew to Los Angeles, where he had specifically asked to visit Disneyland, meet John Wayne, and tour an aerospace plant. He was irritated to discover that he was instead booked for lunch at Twentieth Century-Fox with three hundred movie stars, though several, including Ronald Reagan, had refused to come. Between the Sahara-like heat and the TV floodlights, the long, low studio commissary was unbearably close, but there were compensations. Following orders, Marilyn Monroe was wearing her tightest dress, and Natalie Wood, whose parents were Russian, had been coaching her.
“We the workers of Twentieth Century-Fox rejoice that you have come to visit our studio and country,” she said breathily, in passable Russian. Khrushchev squeezed her hand so hard and long she thought it would break, they chatted about
The Brothers Karamazov
, and the premier invited her for a tête-à-tête at the Kremlin. When he met
Shirley Temple
“his eyes lit up like a pinball machine,” and grabbing her hands, he placed them on his stomach, which she reported was firm, and not soft as she had expected.

The wine flowed, and Elizabeth Taylor stood on a table to get a better view.

During the meal, Khrushchev heard that his visit to Disneyland had been canceled. The given reason was safety concerns, but Walt Disney was famously right-wing, and the visitor detected a snub. He stood up to make a long, rambling speech and, at the end, started shaking his fists.
“Just imagine, I, a premier, a Soviet representative . . . told that I could not go!” he shouted. “Why not? Is there an epidemic of cholera or plague there? Do you have rocket-launching pads there? Or have gangsters taken over the place? If you won’t let me go to Disneyland I’ll send the hydrogen bomb over!” Between the weather and his choler, he almost seemed heated enough to blow Mickey Mouse to smithereens along with the rest of Southern California.

“Screw the cops,” Frank Sinatra said loudly to David Niven, who was sitting next to the matronly Mrs. Khrushchev. “Tell the old broad you and I’ll take ’em down this afternoon.” Unbeknownst to Sinatra, the “old broad” understood English.

Luckily
John Wayne was there to discuss the relative merits of vodka and tequila.

“I’m told,” Khrushchev said through Victor Sukhodrev, the young translator whom Van had met in Moscow, “that you like to drink and that you can hold your liquor.”

“That’s right,” Wayne drawled, and they went to work, the first secretary of the Communist Party matching the Duke shot for shot. Neither mentioned the actor’s well-known anticommunism, or his meetings with army chiefs to discuss how to insert “Militant Liberty” into the movies.

After lunch, Fox president Spyros Skouras took his guest into a separate room with Kim Novak, a famous beauty who had starred in Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
the previous year.
“Kiss him,” Skouras said quietly
to Novak. Sukhodrev translated, whispering into Khrushchev’s ear. The premier’s coarse features melted into a broad grin. “Why is it necessary to ask her?” he said. “I’ll kiss her myself with great pleasure.” He took her tenderly by the shoulders and did the honors on both cheeks. Presumably Novak was more susceptible to power than Marilyn, who told friends she thought Khrushchev was
“fat and ugly and had warts on his face and growled.”