Word: khrushchevism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more sophisticated about the outside world in recent years, they still show a distrust of foreigners that borders on paranoia and a defensiveness that can make them downright offensive. In one of his David Frost interviews, for example, Richard Nixon recalled a conversation President Eisenhower once had with Nikita Khrushchev. Eisenhower lamented that he could never seem to get away from the intrusions of the telephone. Khrushchev responded-irrelevantly and incorrectly-with a tirade about how the Soviets have far more telephones than the Americans...
Nixon's memories of Nikita Khrushchev were vivid. He was "boorish, crude, brilliant, ruthless, potentially rash, with a terrible inferiority complex." He would put on a "big macho act to prove that he was ahead of everybody and everything." Part of the act was his "air of being just a common, peasantlike person... with a sloppy hat and a collar that wouldn't be too clean...
Delicate Hands. Nixon found Leonid Brezhnev to be much more poised and cautious than his predecessor: "Intellectually you had a man not as quick as Khrushchev, but he is a much safer man to have sitting there with his finger on the button than Khrushchev." Brezhnev is also evidence that "the new class is doin' pretty good" in the Soviet Union. He is "something of a fashion plate. He liked beautiful cars. He liked beautiful women...
...sent a man into space before we did and began to test the monster nuclear weapons that nobody thought they had. Our planes in the Berlin air corridor were buzzed; the autobahns were blocked. Insurgents consumed large chunks of Laos. The Bay of Pigs adventure was a disaster. Nikita Khrushchev pounded the table at the Vienna summit. The East Germans put up the Berlin Wall...
...Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed so bitterly at the time of the Bay of Pigs, evolved into the realization that sometimes they knew better than he did. "I did not know enough to ask the right questions," he admitted. One night at dinner Kennedy confessed to friends that Khrushchev turned out to be different from any person he had ever met or imagined. J.F.K.'s experience up to then had suggested that Khrushchev would share his fear of a nuclear exchange and pledge himself to do almost anything to avoid it. When he tried the idea on the Soviet...