One evening in October 1962, Nikita Khrushchev attended a performance of Boris Godunov starring the American opera star Jerome Hines. Khrushchev led a standing ovation and congratulated Hines backstage. This might not sound like much, but it was in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The idea of normal, even friendly contact between Americans and the Russian premier during the single most perilous moment of the Cold War is just one of the many up-close surprises in Marvin Kalb’s new book, A Different Russia.
In this closely observed memoir—the third in a series of Moscow recollections—94-year-old Kalb, clear as a bell in his 17th book, shows why he was in the top rank of 20th-century diplomatic correspondents, first for CBS News and later for NBC News, where he hosted Meet the Press before becoming the founding director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics.
Kalb began with The Year I Was Peter the Great—1956: Khrushchev, Stalin’s Ghost and a Young American in Russia, a delightful depiction of meeting not just Khrushchev (who, noticing Kalb’s six-foot-three frame, gave him that nickname; the tsar was six eight) but also Marshall Zhukov, who led the Soviet Union to victory over the Nazis in World War II. (My late father, a decorated combat aviator in the war, told me Zhukov, who met few Westerners, was much more central to the victory of the Allies than Dwight Eisenhower). Kalb followed up with Assignment Russia: Becoming a Foreign Correspondent in the Crucible of the Cold War, about his early years as CBS’s very young man in Moscow. A Different Russia is the product of Kalb’s astonishing memory and the foresight of his impressive wife, Mady, in saving his old TV and radio scripts and freelance Sunday New York Times pieces. It chronicles a good chunk of what are called “the crisis years” of the Cold War.
This is the period—1961–62—when the Soviet Union sent the first man (the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin) into orbit; Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy quarreled in Vienna; and Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall, then dispatched nuclear missiles to Cuba before “caving” (that was the word Kalb used on CBS, which Kennedy tried to squelch) by withdrawing them.
In between, Kalb covered Moscow visits from Benny Goodman and a boring Elizabeth Taylor, found himself detained (sort of) in Mongolia, and arranged for the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. By this time, Edward R. Murrow, who had first hired Kalb, was working for JFK and tried to hire his protégé to come work for the government, as Kalb’s distinguished brother, Bernard, would later do under Ronald Reagan. Marvin declined. Instead, he prospered in the company, on air and off, of Walter Cronkite, Charles Collingwood, Daniel Schorr, John Chancellor, James Reston, A. M. Rosenthal, and other giants of journalism now remembered only by the long-in-the-tooth.
The view from Moscow was quite different than the one from Washington. Khrushchev comes across as a flawed but surprisingly sympathetic figure—a Russian leader who anticipated Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and who weeps upon learning of JFK’s assassination. But first, at the Vienna summit in June 1961, he took the measure of the new young president—less than six months in office—and found him wanting.
Kalb’s sources told him that Khrushchev in Vienna said Kennedy was “pleasant”—an insult—“very immature, not well-prepared and not that smart.” One of Khrushchev’s interpreters revealed to Kalb shortly afterward that when Kennedy got up from his chair as the premier reentered the room, in what he viewed as a sign of respect, Khrushchev saw it differently: “Imagine a millionaire, a friend of Wall Street, leaps to his feet when Nikita Sergeyevich walks into a room … He’s weak.”
JFK, for good reason, wanted to discuss the risks of accidental nuclear war. Many years later, scholars learned that Khrushchev, losing his temper, yelled, “Miscalculation! Miscalculation! Miscalculation! All I ever hear … is that damned word, miscalculation! You ought to take that word and bury it in cold storage and never use it again.
I’m sick of it.” He continued, “If the U.S. wants war, so be it.” This from a leader best known for his belief in “peaceful coexistence.” Kennedy let a minute pass and replied, “Then it’s going to be a cold winter.”
Kalb presents Khrushchev as a warm and often accessible presence for the foreign press—even as the premier raged about the massive migration flow from East Germany to West Berlin. Kennedy had never warned Khrushchev against doing something about it, so when the Berlin Wall went up in 1962, the Americans could only issue a loud protest. This led to what Dan Schorr memorably called a “stable crisis.” Kalb argues that after Khrushchev’s gambit paid off, he was “infused with a new cockiness, acting as if he owned the world.” By that time, Kalb (at only 31) had already written a book about the Sino-Soviet split, a conflict the Soviet leader now exacerbated as he took steps to replicate Mao’s cult of personality within his own sphere of influence.
Kalb’s descriptions of his schedule and the internal politics of CBS News are excessively detailed, but I liked learning about the logistical difficulty of going live and how—thanks to Soviet restrictions—he often had to operate his own camera.
Starting in the late 1940s, the assumption within the governments and on the streets of both countries was that a new world war would center on Berlin. In the Soviet press—which Kalb, fluent in Russian, always read carefully—there was more talk in the fall of 1962 of Yemen than Cuba, which was seen in Moscow as too far away to care much about. Misjudging Kennedy as weak, Khrushchev placed missiles there; when JFK responded strongly, the Russian leader was taken by surprise. He tried to turn down the temperature by greeting American visitors effusively in the early days of the crisis and by responding positively to the philosopher Bertrand Russell’s proposal for a summit, which Kennedy ignored.
Kalb was a CBS News colleague and close friend of Blair Clark, who had roomed with JFK at Harvard. Wary of surveillance, the CBS code words on the phone for fleeing Moscow for Finland were “shopping spree.” When Clark told him during a radio hookup in the middle of the missile crisis that this would be “a perfect time for a shopping spree,” it chilled Kalb, who interpreted the line as Kennedy saying that war was a real possibility. But he and Mady chose to stay put. Days later, Khrushchev turned his ships around when faced with a naval blockade, and the crisis ended.
If JFK had instead followed the advice of the Joint Chiefs and senior senators and attacked Cuba with air strikes, Khrushchev might have made a dangerous countermove in Berlin. Only later did we learn that Fidel Castro, whom Khrushchev viewed as a hothead, wanted the Soviets to launch a tactical nuke at the United States. In the late 1990s, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara put his thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart and told me: “We came thisclose to nuclear war.”
Kalb believes that Khrushchev and Kennedy both wanted peace when they signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and looked forward to nearly six more years of working together if Kennedy won a second term. Instead, JFK was assassinated that fall, and within a year, the Politburo and Khrushchev’s “friend” and deputy, Leonid Brezhnev, forced him out, largely over the poor Soviet economy.
At the end of this intimate book, I felt as if I was on a first-name basis with these figures of history. I even felt a tad sorry for Nikita, which is just what Marvin intended.