Word: khrushchev
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White House officials faced the absolute nadir of the confrontation on October 27, "Black Saturday," as Kennedy's assistant appointments secretary, David Powers, still calls it. The White House had received a combative letter from Khrushchev which seemed to contradict an earlier message indicating a willingness to compromise. That night, the President and Powers, long-time personal friends, shared a late dinner of chicken, in the Oval Office while Kennedy silently weighed his options...
Some Soviets have begun to speculate that Brezhnev may retire rather than die in office, as Joseph Stalin did in 1953, or be ousted, as Nikita Khrushchev was in 1964. One possible setting for a resignation: the plenary meeting of the Communist Party's Central Committee at the end of April or the beginning of May. Says one Western European diplomat in Moscow: "If they do it like this, I would expect them to pull out all the stops and make it a grand, very respectable, occasion...
Brezhnev's offer was not the first of its kind, but it was the most direct to date. Said he: "We have never considered normal the state of hostility and estrangement between our countries." Downplaying the doctrinal conflict that caused his predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev, to withdraw all Soviet advisers from China in 1960, Brezhnev offered to renew negotiations on the border disputes that provoked major skirmishes along the Ussuri River frontier in 1969. The Soviets have important reasons to seek a reduction in tensions with China. Faced with domestic economic strains and a dangerous hemorrhaging of resources in Poland...
Since then, the possibility of nuclear war has asserted itself with renewed urgency. The Soviet Union is in large measure responsible for much of this new alarm. By proliferating missile warheads to hundreds of times what the U.S.S.R. possessed when Kennedy and Khrushchev stood eyeball-to-eyeball at the brink two decades ago, Brezhnev and his comrades have aroused suspicions that they are looking to the day when the Kremlin can avenge that humiliation and pursue political and military advantages at the expense of American and Western interests. In recent months the Soviets have treated the resumption of arms-control...
...week reiterated, and slightly refined, the moratorium proposal, he also issued a vague warning of major new Soviet deployments directly threatening the continental U.S. To Western ears, it sounded as though Brezhnev was hinting that the U.S.S.R. might put Soviet missiles back on Cuba. That would violate the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement that ended the 1962 crisis, and raise the specter of a new, potentially even more serious confrontation in the next couple...