Free Real War by Richard Nixon Page B

life; the latter, civilization with all its weapons and its arts: the conquests of the one are therefore gained by the ploughshare; those of the other by the sword. The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided exertions and common-sense of the citizens; the Russian centers all the authority of society in a single arm: the principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter servitude. Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.
    â€”Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
    Communism became the force it is today largely by historical accident—because the first state whose system took its namewas Russia. Soviet Russia is a peculiar, fascinating amalgam of past and present, and an insight into its past is essential to an understanding of its present.
    Fifty years ago I saw Russia for the first time—through the eyes of Leo Tolstoy. At the urging of Dr. Albert Upton of Whittier College, I spent the summer between my junior and senior years reading everything Tolstoy had written. I came away with a feeling of sympathy, respect, and affection for the Russian people and with a profound dislike for tsarist imperialism and despotism.
    During World War II I became strongly pro-Russian as the Soviet Union fought alongside us in the war against Hitler. My attitude began to change in 1946, in part because I was impressed and disturbed by the warning to the West that Winston Churchill delivered that year at Fulton, Missouri—his “Iron Curtain” speech. At first I thought that Churchill might have gone too far, but these doubts were soon removed by Stalin’s actions. When President Harry S. Truman asked for aid to Greece and Turkey and initiated the Marshall Plan, I strongly supported both in Congress.
    In 1948 the Alger Hiss case brought me face to face with the ugly realities of Soviet subversion in the United States.
    In my travels as Vice President, I saw tens of thousands of refugees from communism in all areas of the world. In 1958 Mrs. Nixon and I were almost killed by a communist-led mob in Caracas, Venezuela.
    In July of 1959 I became the first U.S. Vice President to visit the Soviet Union. In what was in effect a two-month cram course, I read books on Russia and thousands of pages of analyses of the Soviet Union prepared by the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Department. Among those from whom I received briefings on Nikita Khrushchev and the other Soviet leaders were British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, two former ambassadors to the Soviet Union, William Bullitt and Charles E. Bohlen, journalist Walter Lippmann, New York Times editor Turner Catledge, and publisher William Randolph Hearst.
    But no amount of briefing could have prepared me for what I encountered when I arrived in Moscow. Khrushchev was tougher and smarter than most of the briefers had indicated.All the Soviet leaders I met were communist to the core, but at times they were more Russian than communist. They pointed with pride to what they claimed communism had achieved in the Soviet Union. But they also showed pride in the glories of Russia’s past as they escorted me through the Kremlin, the Winter Palace in Leningrad, and other points of historic interest.
    Khrushchev was at his vociferous communist best, or worst, in an impromptu no-holds-barred debate between the two of us at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. But at a luncheon in an ornate room in the Kremlin immediately afterward he was all Russian—directing his guests to throw their glasses into the fireplace after we had had our vodka and champagne.
    The Russian people impressed me tremendously with their strength and warmheartedness. In the heart of Siberia, in Novosibirsk, away from the tight control of the central