Six Crises by Richard Nixon

Author:Richard Nixon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

SECTION FIVE

Khrushchev

Communism creates and uses crisis as a weapon. Khrushchev, Communist man at his most dangerous best, has developed this technique to a highly sophisticated science. Plans designed to meet his moves may prove useless because of the unpredictability of his conduct. But intensive planning is absolutely essential, to avoid being knocked off balance by what he does.

“IN preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

There could not have been a more dramatic demonstration of the truth of this maxim—one of President Eisenhower’s favorites—than my meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow in July 1959.

I had never been better prepared for a meeting in which I was to participate. During my previous thirteen years in government I had had the opportunity to acquire more than a passing knowledge of Communist strategy and tactics.

At home, as a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities I had met the Communist conspiracy face to face in the Alger Hiss case.

Abroad, I had met and talked at length with Communist leaders in Italy, England, Greece, and other countries, and in South America I had seen Communism in action in all its violence and viciousness.

While I could not qualify as a so-called “expert” on Communism in the popular sense of that term, I had studied the works of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, the Old Testament prophets of modern-day Communism, as well as the statements of Khrushchev and the contemporary observers of Communist policies.

For months before the trip I spent every spare moment studying reports and recommendations from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the White House staff.

I talked for hours with every person I could find in Washington who had met and knew Khrushchev. I was briefed on more than a hundred different issues which might arise in my conversations with him.

I gathered up and tried to absorb every bit of personal information about him which was available.

I even had the benefit of a preview of what I might expect from Khrushchev when Mikoyan and Kozlov, who occupy the next to the top rung on the ladder of the Soviet hierarchy, visited Washington in the period just before I left for Moscow. They threw some pretty fair fast balls and a few curves in the long conversations I had with each of them. But meeting Khrushchev, after talking with them, was like going from minor to major league pitching. He throws a bewildering assortment of stuff—blinding speed, a wicked curve, plus knucklers, spitters, sliders, fork balls—all delivered with a deceptive change of pace.

I had made hundreds of protocol calls on high government officials in nations around the world, but never before had a head of government met me with a tirade of four-letter words which made his interpreter blush as he translated them into English.

Khrushchev had insulted his visitors before, but this time he did it on TV. And not just ordinary TV but on a new, revolutionary type of color-television tape being shown for the first time in the Soviet Union.

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