9/29/1961 Khrushchev had sent his first private letter to Kennedy on September 29, 1961, during the Berlin crisis. Wrapped in a newspaper, it was brought to Kennedy's press secretary Pierre Salinger at a New York hotel room by a Soviet "magazine editor " and KGB agent, Georgi Bolshakov, whom Khrushchev trusted to maintain silence. The secrecy was at least as much to avoid Soviet attention as American. As presidential aide Theodore Sorensen said three decades later, Khrushchev was " taking his risks, assuming that these letters were, as we believe, being kept secret from the ( Soviet) military, from the foreign service, from the top people in the Kremlin. He was taking some risk that if discovered, they would be very unhappy with him. " (Paul Wells, " Private Letters Shed Light on Cold War, " Montreal Gazette (July 24, 1993). The private letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev, known as the " Pen Pal Correspondence, " were published with the Cold War leaders' more formal, public letters in the State Department volume Foreign Relations of the United States [FR US], 1961-1963, Volume VI: Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996) .
Khrushchev's first letter was written from a retreat beside the Black Sea. While the Berlin crisis was still not over, the Soviet premier began the correspondence with his enemy by meditating on the beauty of the sea and the threat of war. " Dear Mr. President, " he wrote, "At present I am on the shore of the Black Sea . . . This is indeed a wonderful place. As a former Naval officer you would surely appreciate the merits of these surroundings, the beauty of the sea and the grandeur of the Caucasian mountains. Under this bright southern sun it is even somehow hard to believe that there still exist problems in the world which, due to lack of solutions, cast a sinister shadow on peaceful life, on the future of millions of people. " Now as the threat of war over Berlin continued, Khrushchev expressed a regret about Vienna. He said he had "given much thought of late to the development of international events since our meeting in Vienna, and 1 have decided to approach you with this letter. The whole world hopefully expected that our meeting and a frank exchange of views would have a soothing effect, would turn relations between our countries into the correct channel and promote the adoption of decisions which would give the peoples confidence that at last peace on earth will be secured. To my regret-and, 1 believe, to yours-this did not happen. "
"I listened with great interest to the account which our journalists Adjubei and Kharlamov gave of the meeting they had with you in Washington. They gave me many interesting details and I questioned them most thoroughly. You prepossessed them by your informality, modesty and frankness which are not to be found very often in men who occupy such a high position. " "My thoughts have more than once returned to our meetings in Vienna. I remember you emphasized that you did not want to proceed towards war and favored living in peace with our country while competing in the peaceful domain. And though subsequent events did not proceed in the way that could be desired, I thought it might be useful in a purely informal and personal way to approach you and share some of my ideas. If you do not agree with me you can consider that this letter did not exist while naturally I, for my part, will not use this correspondence in my public statements. After all only in confidential correspondence can you say what you think without a backward glance at the press, at the journalists. " "As you see," he added apologetically, " I started out by describing the delights of the Black Sea coast, but then I nevertheless turned to politics. But that cannot be helped. They say that you sometimes cast politics out through the door but it climbs back through the window, particularly when the windows are open.... I note with gratification that you and I are of the same opinion as to the need for the withdrawal of foreign troops from the territory of Laos . "
9/18/1961 UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was killed when his DC-6B airline crashed in a jungle near Ndola in present-day Zambia (the Congo), shortly after midnight. He had been en route to Northern Rhodesia. The others on the plane were killed instantly, but Hammarskjold and an aide were thrown clear. Though the plane was several hours overdue and a police inspector phoned the airport to describe a mysterious flash, no search party was organized until 10am. The wreckage was sighted at 3:10pm. Hammarskjold had died during the night, but his aide, Sgt. Harold Julien, a security officer, survived for five days and raved about explosions and sparks in the sky. A postmortem established that two of the victims were riddled by bullets, officially from a box of ammo that had exploded on impact. The official verdict was "pilot error." Harry Truman commented, "Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, 'when they killed him.'" (The Peoples’ Almanac #3 p58)
The NYT this morning (9/17 in the US) featured an AP dispatch headlined "Tshombe Confers with UN's Chief on Katanga Truce." The story said, "Hammarskjold and President Moise Tshombe of Katanga Province met for more than an hour...Separate planes brought Mr. Tshombe and Mr. Hammarskjold to Ndola, 130 miles southeast of the Katanga capital of Elisabethville...Mr. Hammarskjold's chartered DC-4 from Leopoldville landed about four hours after Mr. Tshombe arrived." None of this was true; Hammarskjold's plane never arrived from Leopoldville; the meeting described in the AP story never happened. The entire story was faked by someone at AP, and it got out on the wires before Hammarskjold's death was announced. (Unreliable Sources p33)
9/21/1961 An inter-agency report on Soviet nuclear capabilities, National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 11-8/1-61, is disseminated within the government. The NIE and later intelligence reports show for the first time that the Soviet ICBM program is far behind previous U.S. estimates. Only some ten to twenty-five Soviet ICBMs on launchers are believed to exist, with no major increase in Soviet ICBM strength expected in the near future.
Oct 1961 At the Geneva Conference, Averell Harriman was trying to carry out the president's order to negotiate a settlement for a neutral Laos. JFK had been explicit to him that the alternative was unacceptable: "I don't want to put troops in." Harriman brought to the conference the asset of a mutual respect with the Russians. He had done business in the Soviet Union. The Russians regarded Harriman as a friendly capitalist. He and Nikita Khrushchev had visited each other for informal diplomatic exchanges, first at the Kremlin, then at Harriman's Manhattan home, during the year before Kennedy became president. JFK had recognized Khrushchev's confidence in Harriman and would use that relationship later to great effect when Harriman represented JFK in negotiating the test ban treaty with Khrushchev in Moscow. In Geneva, Harriman and his counterpart, Soviet negotiator Georgi M. Pushkin, were developing a wary friendship as they tried to find a way together through Laotian battlegrounds and Cold War intrigues. While representing opposite, contentious sides of the Cold War, Harriman and Pushkin respected each other and were inclined to conspire together for peace. A turning point at Geneva came in October 1961, when leaders of the three Laotian factions agreed to neutralist Souvanna Phouma 's becoming prime minister of a provisional coalition government. Then, as Rudy Abramson, Harriman's biographer, put it, the Soviets " agreed to take responsibility for all the Communist states' compliance with the neutrality declaration and accepted language declaring that Laotian territory would not be used in the affairs of neighboring states-meaning the North Vietnamese could not use the trails through Laos to support the insurgency in South Vietnam. " This largely unwritten understanding would become known in U.S. circles as the " Pushkin agreement. " A major obstacle arose, however, when the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, and the Pathet Lao insisted on the right of all three Laotian factions to approve any movements of the International Control Commission. The Pathet Lao would thereby be given a veto power over inspections to monitor violations of the accord. The communists wouldn't budge on the issue. With the Pathet Lao controlling the battlefield, Harriman became convinced that the Geneva Conference would collapse unless the United States was willing to compromise. Although the State Department was adamantly opposed, Kennedy reluctantly decided with Harriman that the critical compromise with the Communists was necessary. The negotiations moved on. But from then on, a "neutral Laos " would take the form of a partitioned country under the guise of a coalition government. Georgi Pushkin would soon die. The agreement named after him would never be honored by Soviet leaders, who lacked the power to tell the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese what to do. The corridor running down the eastern border of Laos would become known as the " Ho Chi Minh Trail" for its infiltrating North Vietnamese soldiers on their way to South Vietnam-or as State Department critics would call the same route, the "Averell Harriman Highway. " Kennedy, struggling to avoid both war and Communist domination of Laos in the midst of the larger East-West conflicts over Cuba, Berlin, and the Congo, was happy to get the compromise Harriman had worked out with Pushkin. The president's most bitter opponents to a Laotian settlement, in the Defense Department and the CIA, tried to destroy the agreement. They kept up their support of General Phoumi's provocations and violations of the cease-fire. Rudy Abramson, Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891-1986 (New York: William Morrow, 1992), pp. 586 - 87.
10/16/1961 Kennedy responded privately to Khrushchev on October 16, 1961, from his own place of retreat beside the ocean, Hyannis Port:
"My family has had a home here overlooking the Atlantic for many years. My father and brothers own homes near my own, and my children always have a large group of cousins for company. So this is an ideal place for me to spend my weekends during the summer and fall, to relax, to think, to devote my time to major tasks instead of constant appointments, telephone calls and details. Thus, I know how you must feel about the spot on the Black Sea from which your letter was written, for I value my own opportunities to get a clearer and quieter perspective away from the din of Washington . " He thanked Khrushchev for initiating the correspondence and agreed to keep it quiet: " Certainly you are correct in emphasizing that this correspondence must be kept wholly private, not to be hinted at in public statements, much less disclosed to the press. " Their private letters should supplement public statements " and give us each a chance to address the other in frank, realistic and fundamental terms. Neither of us is going to convert the other to a new social, economic or political point of view. Neither of us will be induced by a letter to desert or subvert his own cause. So these letters can be free from the polemics of the 'cold war' debate. " Kennedy agreed wholeheartedly with Khrushchev's biblical image: " I like very much your analogy of Noah's Ark, with both the 'clean' and the 'unclean' determined that it stay afloat. Whatever our differences, our collaboration to keep the peace is as urgent-if not more urgent-than our collaboration to win the last world war. "
In his October 16, 1961, letter to Khrushchev, Kennedy said, as he had in his verbal message through Salinger and Kharlamov three weeks before, that any second summit meeting should be preceded by a peaceful resolution of Laos: " Indeed I do not see how we can expect to reach a settlement on so bitter and complex an issue as Berlin, where both of us have vital interests at stake, if we cannot come to a final agreement on Laos, which we have previously agreed should be neutral and independent after the fashion of Burma and Cambodia . "
10/28/1961 This morning the Soviet tanks backed away, and the U.S. tanks followed suit in thirty minutes. The Checkpoint Charlie crisis was over. Its resolution prefigured that of the Cuban Missile Crisis one year later. In both cases Kennedy asked Khrushchev to take the first step. The Soviet leader did so, in gracious recognition that Kennedy was under even more intense pressure than he was. In both cases a back-channel communication via Robert Kennedy was critical. And in both cases Khrushchev, in withdrawing his tanks and later his missiles, achieved his own objectives in exchange from Kennedy: the removal of U.S. threats to bulldoze the Wall and to invade Cuba, and the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and Italy.
11/8/1961 JFK told the public, "The Soviet Union prepared to test [nuclear weapons] while we were at the table negotiating with them. If they fooled us once, it is their fault. If they fool us twice, it is our fault."
11/9/1961 Khrushchev, in his second secret letter to the president, on November 9, 1961 , regarding Berlin, had hinted that belligerent pressures in Moscow made compromise difficult from his own side. " You have to understand, " he implored Kennedy, "I have no ground to retreat further, there is a precipice behind. "
11/16/1961 JFK gives a speech at the University of Washington (Seattle): "We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient - that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind - that we cannot right every wrong or reverse every adversity - and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem." "We cannot as a free nation, compete with our adversaries in tactics of terror, assassination, false promises, counterfeit mobs and crises."
11/25/1961 JFK met at Hyannis Port with Georgi Bolshakov, who was identified as "a Soviet editor." Actually, he was a major in Soviet intelligence and Khrushchev's secret envoy to the Kennedys.
