Word: khrushchev
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...oval presidential office. There secretaries had cleared Jack Kennedy's desk of personal mementos: a coconut shell on which he had carved a message of his survival after his PT boat sank in World War II, a silver calendar noting the dates of his confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev over Soviet missiles in Cuba, photos of Jackie and the children. Johnson lingered only briefly, decided to work out of his three-room vice-presidential suite in the adjacent Executive Office Building...
...style was a tough wit. When he met Nikita Khrushchev for the first time in Vienna in 1961, he noticed a medal on the Russian's chest, asked what it was. When Khrushchev replied that it symbolized the Lenin Peace Prize, Kennedy snapped back: "I hope you keep it." Again, when he spoke at a big-money fund-raising dinner in Denver, he looked over the audience for a moment, then cracked: "I am touched by your attendance-but, of course, not as deeply touched as you were...
Moments. But he also had his fine presidential moments-and to many the finest came in October 1962, when he set up a naval blockade that forced Nikita Khrushchev to remove the missiles that the Soviets had sneaked into Cuba. During that dramatic showdown, which both Kennedy and Khrushchev later said had brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war, Kennedy said: "This secret, swift and extraordinary buildup of Communist missiles-in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the U.S. and the nations of the Western Hemisphere-is a deliberately provocative and unjustified...
That was not the only time that President Kennedy stood firm before Khrushchev. In 1961, when the Communists sealed off the Eastern zone with the evil Wall in Berlin and seemed ready to block the Western allies from their access routes to West Berlin, Kennedy dispatched then-Vice President Johnson to the scene, sent 1,500 armored troops rolling down the autobahn and beefed up U.S. forces in Germany. Again Khrushchev backed down-and not for the last time...
...Iran, including appeals for insurrection against Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. These days Moscow's line is more seductive than destructive. In Teheran on a state visit last week, toasting the health of "Your Imperial Majesty," was the titular Soviet Chief of State, Leonid L. Brezhnev, one of Nikita Khrushchev's most promising prot...