Free Berlin 1961 by Frederick Kempe

to abandon the summit than to go ahead with a meeting that was destined to fail, and by then it also was clear the U.S. would offer none of the concessions he was seeking on Berlin.
    Though Eisenhower refused to apologize in Paris for the U-2 mission, he tried to avoid a summit collapse by agreeing to stop the flights. He went an important step further and proposed an “open skies” approach that would allow United Nations planes to monitor both countries with over-flights. Khrushchev, however, could never accept such a proposal because it was only secrecy that protected his exaggerations about Soviet capabilities.
    In what would be the one and only session of the summit, Khrushchev uncharacteristically stuck to the language of a prepared forty-five-minute harangue that proposed a six- to eight-month postponement of the conference so that it would resume only after Eisenhower had left power. He also withdrew his invitation for Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union. Without forewarning the other leaders at the summit, Khrushchev then petulantly refused to attend the second session the following day. He instead retreated with Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky to the French village of Pleurs-sur-Marne—where Malinovsky had stayed during World War II—to drink wine, eat cheese, and talk about women. Well lubricated, the Soviet leader returned to Paris that afternoon to declare the summit’s collapse.
    His crowning public act came during a nearly three-hour farewell press conference at which he slammed his fist so hard on a table that it toppled a bottle of mineral water. Assuming the catcalls that followed came from West German reporters, he called them “fascist bastards we didn’t finish off at Stalingrad.” He said if they continued to heckle him, he would hit them so hard “there won’t be a squeal out of you.”
    Khrushchev was so unhinged by the time he debriefed Warsaw Pact envoys in Paris that he employed a crude joke in relating to them the outcome of the summit. It concerned the sad story of a Tsarist soldier who could fart the melody to “God Save Russia” but experienced an unfortunate accident when forced to perform the tune under duress. Khrushchev’s punch line was that the ambassadors could report to their governments that his own pressures applied in Paris had similarly made Eisenhower shit in his pants.
    Poland’s ambassador to France, Stanislaw Gaevski, concluded from the session that the Soviet leader “was just a bit unbalanced emotionally.” For the sake of East–West relations, Gaevski wished Khrushchev had never come to Paris.
    For all his theatrics, however, Khrushchev had too much at stake to abandon his course of “peaceful coexistence” with the U.S. He had given up on Eisenhower but not yet on America. Though the U-2 had undermined his summit, he could not let it undercut his rule.
    On his way back to Moscow, Khrushchev stopped in East Berlin, where he replaced his Paris scowl with a peacemaker’s smile. Though originally scheduled to speak to a crowd of 100,000 in Marx-Engels Square, after the Paris debacle East German leaders had moved the event to the safer confines of the indoor Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle, where Khrushchev spoke to a select group of 6,000 communist faithful.
    To the surprise of U.S. diplomats who had expected Khrushchev to escalate the crisis, Khrushchev sounded an unexpected note of patience until the Americans could elect a new president. “In this situation, time is required,” he said, adding that the prospects for a Berlin solution would then “ripen better.”
    Khrushchev then began preparations for his return trip to the U.S. under dramatically changed circumstances.
    ABOARD THE BALTIKA
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1960
    Khrushchev’s damp welcome on a rickety New York dock demonstrated just how much had changed since his grand reception by President Eisenhower at Andrews Air Force Base just a year earlier. Instead of flying to America aboard the Soviets’