Free Berlin 1961 by Frederick Kempe Page B

Khrushchev during his first U.S. trip, had flown to Moscow in February 1960 to convince the Soviet leader that he could work with Nixon. Lodge, who would become Nixon’s running mate, said, “Once Mr. Nixon is in the White House, I’m sure—I’m absolutely certain—he’ll take a position of preserving and perhaps even improving our relations.” He asked Khrushchev to remain neutral, realizing any endorsement would only cost Nixon votes.
    By autumn, the Eisenhower administration had increased its appeals to Khrushchev to release Gary Powers and the RB-47 airmen who had been shot down over the Arctic. Khrushchev recalled later that he had refused after calculating that the election was so close any such move might have swung the outcome. “As it turned out, we’d done the right thing,” he would say later. Given the margin of victory, he said, “The slightest nudge either way would have been decisive.”
    The Democrats were also at work to influence Khrushchev. W. Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s former ambassador to Moscow, recommended through Ambassador Menshikov that Khrushchev be tough on both candidates. The surest way to elect Nixon was to praise Kennedy in public, he said. The timing of the meeting, less than a month before the election and while Khrushchev was still in the U.S., demonstrated the Democrats’ recognition of Khrushchev’s electoral influence.
    As guarded as he was in public, Khrushchev was explicit with underlings. “We thought we would have more hope of improving Soviet–American relations if John Kennedy were in the White House.” He told colleagues that Nixon’s anticommunism and his connection with “that devil of darkness [Senator Joe] McCarthy, to whom he owed his career,” all meant “we had no reason to welcome the prospect of Nixon as President.”
    Though Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric was hawkish against Moscow, the KGB chalked that up less to conviction than to political expedience and the influence of his anticommunist father, Joe. Khrushchev welcomed Kennedy’s calls for nuclear test ban negotiations and his statement that he would have apologized for the U-2 incursions if he had been president when they occurred. More to the point, Khrushchev believed he could outmaneuver Kennedy, a man whom his foreign ministry had characterized as “unlikely to possess the qualities of an outstanding person.” The consensus in the Kremlin was that the young man was a lightweight, a product of American privilege who lacked the experience required for leadership.
    The candidates continued to shower attention on Khrushchev as he monitored their campaign from his suite at the Soviet Mission at Sixty-eighth Street and Park Avenue, where he would occasionally appear on the balcony of a turn-of-the-century mansion built originally for the banker Percy Pyne. In the initial Kennedy–Nixon debate in a Chicago TV studio on September 26—the first live-broadcast presidential debate ever—Kennedy’s opening statement before sixty million American viewers spoke directly to Khrushchev’s New York stay and “our struggle with Mr. Khrushchev for survival.”
    Though the debate was to have been about domestic issues, Kennedy worried that the Soviet Union was churning out “twice as many scientists and engineers as we are” while the U.S. continued to underpay its teachers and underfund its schools. He declared that he would do better than Nixon in keeping America ahead of the Soviets in education, health care, home construction, and economic strength.
    During their second debate on foreign policy on October 7 in Washington, D.C., the candidates focused squarely on Khrushchev and Berlin. Kennedy predicted that the next president “in his first year is going to be confronted with a very serious question on our defense of Berlin, our commitment to Berlin. It’s going to be a test of our nerve and will.” He said that President Eisenhower had allowed American strength to erode and that