![]() The summit didn’t produce any concrete policy decisions, partly because the summit hadn’t had any set agenda or goals in the first place. to decide whether there will be war or peace.” Kennedy reacted with a statement even more chilling: “Then, Mr. “must respond and it will respond,” eerily threatening that “It is up to the U.S. challenged the Soviet position in divided Berlin, the U.S.S.R. Embassy during their summit meeting in Vienna, 1961.Ĭentral Press/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesĪccording to a State Department memo, Khrushchev said that if the U.S. Khrushchev with President Kennedy at the U.S. Khrushchev’s aggression during the talks surprised Kennedy as well as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who was shocked Khrushchev raised the possibility of war-something neither leader wanted. “For the rest of his life he boasted that at this summit the leader of the United States had finally acknowledged that there was rough parity between the two great powers.” ![]() This disclosure “sent Khrushchev into near ecstasy,” writes Michael Beschloss in The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kennedy told the premier he considered Sino-Soviet forces and U.S.-Western European forces to be fairly equally balanced. “Like Putin now, Khrushchev.wanted to be seen as equals with the United States,” Reeves says. The president also made admissions that played right into the premier’s hands. Kennedy spent a lot of time defending aspects of the pre-World War II status quo, like British imperialism, that he didn’t actually want to defend. This got him stuck in time-wasting discussions about Marxism, where he was totally out of his league. Kennedy ignored warnings from his advisors not to do things like, say, debate communist ideology with a 61-year-old Soviet. “Compared to him, Eisenhower is a man of intelligence and vision.” “This man is very inexperienced, even immature,” Khrushchev told his interpreter.
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