Word: summit
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John Kennedy probably best described the realizations that come from such a moment. He was back home in Palm Beach, Fla., resting after the 1961 summit in Vienna, a daiquiri in hand, Frank Sinatra records filling the night air. He remembered Nikita Khrushchev as seeming, well, so different when the two first sat down alone. "I looked him over pretty good," Kennedy chortled. He became fascinated with his adversary's hands. They were always thumping, fiddling. They were blunt, ungraceful hands, Kennedy recalled, but strong, so quick. "You're an old country, we're a young country," blurted Khrushchev. "Look...
Echoes from that hastily conceived summit have resounded down the years. The complaints of the various Soviet bosses have been similar, their pride so predictably fragile. Kennedy thrust at the core of the problem between the leaders when on an impulse he asked Khrushchev, "Do you ever admit you're wrong?" Surprised, Khrushchev clouded up, then angrily pointed out that in the 20th Party Congress he had made his famous speech attacking the Stalin regime. "Those weren't your mistakes," said Kennedy. For the first time Khrushchev had no rejoinder, but his eyes smoldered...
After Vienna, Kennedy did win a little help from the Soviets in dampening the fight in Laos, but there were no agreements on nuclear-weapons testing or on Berlin. The summit, it soon developed, was a prelude to crisis. Khrushchev sized up the young President and decided Kennedy could be challenged. The Berlin Wall followed. The Cuban missile crisis followed. Kennedy, the romantic, came away from the meeting with the conviction that the two most important ingredients in these confrontations were strength--and strength...
...bubbling over with a secret. He had the stewards bring in a little "sherry wine" and pour each of his aides a glass. Then he announced that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would soon begin nuclear arms talks, and he and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin would hold a summit to seal the deal. That afternoon Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia on their brutal mission of suppression. End of dreams...
...there is in this world a craving for peace that will not die. Almost against their wills, Gorbachev and Reagan have been pulled and poked toward the summit. "I don't underestimate the difficulty of the task ahead," the President said in a televised address last week, recounting the problems his predecessors faced. "But these sad chapters do not relieve me of the obligation to try to make this a safer, better world." He proposed an expanded program of "people-to-people exchanges," spoke of "a historic opportunity" to change the course of Soviet-American relations, and dubbed his trip...