'Intimidated and blackmailed' |
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US President John F. Kennedy shakes hands with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit on June 4, 1961. |
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In 1961, America's new president, John F. Kennedy, traveled to Europe and got a lesson in superpower brinkmanship from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Ten minutes after their acrimonious meeting in Vienna wrapped up, an angry and frustrated JFK showed up for a meeting in the US Embassy with James "Scotty" Reston, then-Washington bureau chief for The New York Times. Asked how the summit went, Kennedy replied, "Worst thing in my life ... he savaged me," according to presidential biographer Richard Reeves.
The Soviet leader tried to intimidate JFK over the status of Berlin and threatened to cut off supply lines to allied troops in the city in a clash that eventually led to the construction of the Berlin Wall, sealing the Western-run sector from Communist East Germany.
Kennedy admitted to Reston, who had been smuggled into the embassy so as not to tip off the rest of the White House press corps, that Khrushchev had interpreted his botched attempt to use the CIA to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs fiasco as a sign of weakness. The President realized he could soon be facing a military showdown over Berlin that could escalate into a direct clash with Moscow and would risk a nuclear war.
Reston later wrote that Khrushchev had "decided he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could be intimidated and blackmailed" and that this later led him to put missiles in Cuba — a decision that provoked the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, perhaps the closest the world has come to nuclear Armageddon.
But in that showdown, Kennedy learned the lesson of his meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna and threatened to use military force to end the threat from the missiles. After the world held its breath during a 13-day standoff, Khrushchev backed down, removing the missiles while the US promised not to invade Cuba. It later emerged that Kennedy had also secretly agreed to pull US nuclear missiles out of Turkey.
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"He savaged me," Kennedy said of his meeting with the Soviet leader. |
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So what does this all have to do with the current crisis over Ukraine? Biden is hardly inexperienced, as the oldest ever US president and one of the last global leaders, along with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose worldview was shaped by the Cold War. But after dealing with five US presidents, and getting the better of most of them, Putin knows his history. The Russian President is also showing the classic traits of Soviet leaders, which Khrushchev epitomized. Putin apparently convinced himself the US was weak and prone to bullying, and he misjudged Washington's willingness to stand up to Russia. Seen from inside the Kremlin bunker, the US has been in retreat for 20 years, failing to enforce its red lines in Syria, doing little to counter his incursions into Georgia and Crimea, bowing to insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and picking a president, Donald Trump, who hated NATO and tried to destroy his own country's democracy in a failed bid to become a Putinesque strongman.
Like Khrushchev, Putin is seeking to intimidate the US and the West and has also shown himself willing to raise the specter of a spiral to a nuclear crisis if necessary. Biden, like Kennedy, has recognized the need to stand up to Moscow — even as he seeks to ensure the current crisis never gets as close to the possibility of a nuclear exchange as happened in 1962.
History doesn't always predict what happens next. But it's echoing through the war in Ukraine. |
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Kennedy, third from left, and Khrushchev, second from right, appear alongside first lady Jackie Kennedy, right, at the Vienna Summit. |
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'I decide cases from a neutral posture' |
Biden's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, told senators on the first day of her confirmation hearing that she takes her "duty to be independent very seriously." For most of Monday, Jackson had to sit and watch senators claim all the attention as they set up the rhetorical clashes ahead. Democrats played up her historic stature as, if confirmed, the first Black female justice. Republicans questioned her judicial philosophy and made clear they will argue that she's soft on crime, which is part of a wider attack on Biden ahead of November's midterm elections. But Jackson said: "I decide cases from a neutral posture," before adding: "I evaluate the facts, and I interpret and apply the law to the facts of the case before me, without fear or favor, consistent with my judicial oath." |
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Thanks for reading. On Tuesday, Jackson will face senators' questions at the second day of Supreme Court confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Ukrainian Ambassador to the US Oksana Markarova, former US Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor and Curtis Ried, senior director of multilateral affairs at the National Security Council, address a US Institute of Peace online event about responding to Russian atrocities in Ukraine. |
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