Free Berlin 1961 by Frederick Kempe Page A

most advanced passenger aircraft, which was in the shop for repairs, he had traveled aboard the Baltika , a vintage 1940 German vessel seized as reparations after the war.
    To compensate and send a message of communist solidarity, Khrushchev had drafted as fellow passengers the leaders of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Byelorussia. His mood swings during the voyage were violent. At one point he fought off depression while preoccupied by fears that NATO might sink his unprotected vessel, yet on another occasion he joyously insisted the Ukrainian party boss Nikolai Podgorny entertain fellow passengers by dancing a gopak , a national dance performed with strenuous leg kicks from the squatting position.
    When one of the Soviet sailors jumped ship while approaching the American shore, then sought asylum, Khrushchev shrugged in response, saying, “He’ll find out soon enough how much it costs and what it tastes like in New York.” Other indignities would follow. Khrushchev was received in the harbor by union demonstrators from the International Longshoremen’s Association, who waved huge protest signs from a chartered boat. The most memorable: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, STALIN DROPPED DEAD, HOW ABOUT YOU?
    Khrushchev was infuriated. He had dreamed of arriving like America’s earliest discoverers, whom he had read about as a boy. Instead, the unionist boycott left the Baltika to be moored by its own crew and a handful of unskilled Soviet diplomats on the East River’s dilapidated Pier 73. “So, another dirty trick the Americans are playing on us,” Khrushchev complained.
    The only saving grace was Khrushchev’s control of his home press. Pravda correspondent Gennady Vasiliev filed a story speaking of a happy crowd (there was none) lining the shore on a bright and sunny morning (it was raining).
    None of that dampened the energy Khrushchev would invest in the trip. Speaking before the UN General Assembly, he would unsucessfully demand the resignation of Secretary General Dag Hammerskjöld (who would die the next year in a plane crash in Africa), and be replaced by a troika of a Westerner, a communist, and a nonaligned leader.” On the last day of his stay, in an iconic act that would be history’s primary recollection of the visit, he removed a shoe in protest of a Philippine delegate’s reference to communist captive nations and banged it on his UN table.
    By September 26, only a week into Khrushchev’s trip, the New York Times reported that a nationwide survey showed the Soviet leader had made himself the focal point of the presidential election campaign and had helped make foreign policy the premier concern of U.S. voters. Americans were measuring which of the candidates, Richard Nixon or Senator John F. Kennedy, could best stand up to Khrushchev.
    Khrushchev was determined to use his considerable leverage more wisely than in 1956, when Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin’s praise of the Soviets’ favored candidate, Adlai Stevenson, had helped the winning Eisenhower–Nixon ticket. In public, Khrushchev hedged his bets, saying that both candidates “represent American big business…as we Russians say, they are two boots of the same pair: which is better, the left or the right boot?” When asked whom he favored, he safely said, “Roosevelt.”
    But behind the scenes, he worked toward Nixon’s defeat. As early as January 1960, over vodka, fruit, and caviar, Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Mikhail Menshikov had asked Adlai Stevenson how Moscow might best help him defeat Nixon. Was it better for the Soviet press to praise him or criticize him—and on which topics? Stevenson responded that he did not expect to be a candidate—and he then prayed that news of the Soviet proposition would never leak.
    Yet both parties so deeply recognized Khrushchev’s potential to swing votes, either by design or by accident, that each reached out to him.
    Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who had grown close to