Summits. Six meetings that shap Dav

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.Bobby said later of the Bolshakov channel that “unfortunately, stupidly.I didn’t write many of the things down.I just delivered the messages verbally to my brother and he’d act on them, and I think sometimes he’d tell the State Department, and sometimes, perhaps, he didn’t.”72 This was disingenuous: the informality was exactly what the Kennedys needed to operate outside the trammels of official diplomacy.The May 9 conversation made clear how far Kennedy’s hopes for Vienna had diverged from those of the State Department.The February 11 seminar at the White House had endorsed a chance of “becoming personally acquainted” but advo-cated “nothing approaching a summit, in terms of serious negotiations.”73 Bobby Kennedy, however, was now passing the word toKhrushchev that his brother wanted concrete agreements, not a social chat.The president was raising the stakes.From then on preparations for Vienna proceeded along twochannels: the official diplomatic one managed by AmbassadorsThompson and Menshikov, and the back channel operated by Bol-shakov and Bobby.On May 12 Khrushchev sent the president aformal letter, picking up on the Gromyko-Thompson conversation eight days before.Using the same language about the need to build“bridges of mutual understanding,” he confirmed his readiness to meet in Vienna on June 3–4; he also highlighted Laos, disarmament 187reynolds_01.qxd 8/31/07 10:30 AM Page 188sum m i t sand the German question as key issues for discussion.Menshikov delivered this letter to the White House on May 16.Not surprisingly Kennedy redefined the second topic as nuclear testing, saying that this was an easier area on which to make progress.He was also anxious that “the hopes of the peoples not be disappointed by false expectation of concrete results from a meeting” and therefore proposed that it be publicly presented as merely “an opportunity for a general exchange of views.” Quoting from the end of Khrushchev’s letter, Menshikov said this was also the Soviet position.74In this meeting Kennedy admitted he was now “doubtful thatany agreement on Laos or on nuclear testing would be reached by the time of his visit to Europe.”75 There had been no reply along the back channel and when it came, a few days later, the tone was discouraging.Khrushchev was still out of Moscow, touring Central Asia, so the Foreign and Defense Ministries had prepared Bolshakov’s reply.On the idea of a neutral Laos, Bolshakov was told to make encouraging noises about “the coincidence of the viewpoints of our governments.” But on nuclear testing and on Berlin, he was instructed to reiterate traditional Soviet policies, stressing the obstacles to a test ban agreement and threatening a unilateral Soviet treaty with East Germany.Bolshakov delivered these messages to Bobby Kennedy.76Yet the president refused to be deterred.Having campaigned for a test ban treaty long before he entered the White House, hepressed skeptics in the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commis-sion to rethink American positions.He especially wanted them to reconsider the number of inspections and the Soviet demand that they be conducted not by a single international administrator but by a “troika” comprising a representative of the communist world, another from the West and a neutral.Whether or not Vienna would yield a firm agreement, Kennedy still intended to make realprogress.Indeed he probably felt it vital to achieve some kind of success after the fiasco in Cuba and the fudge over Laos.77Khrushchev, though equally set on a summit, approached it quite differently.“I don’t understand Kennedy,” he told his son after the Bay of Pigs.“What’s wrong with him? Can he really be that indeci-188reynolds_01.qxd 8/31/07 10:30 AM Page 189v i e nna 19 61sive?” The president’s failure to unleash American power against Castro reinforced the Soviet leader’s belief that now was the time for a meeting; the surprising willingness of the weakened president to go ahead with a summit made him even more confident.78 Like Kennedy, Khrushchev wanted more than a chat at Vienna, but his agenda was quite different [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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