Parting the Curtain by Walter L. Hixson

Author:Walter L. Hixson [Hixson, Walter L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SIX

From the Summit to the Model

Kitchen: The Cultural

Agreement and the Moscow Fair

O

n June 2, 1957, as five million Americans watched on television, Soviet premier Khrushchev declared in a CBS “Face the Nation" interview from Moscow that broadened trade and cultural ties were the keys to improved East-West relations. Blaming Washington for the impasse on cultural exchange, the Soviet leader called on Americans to “do away with your Iron Curtain.” Four days after the CBS interview, the Soviets submitted a formal proposal for broad-scale exchange of technical, industrial, scientific, and artistic groups. Khrushchev continued to emphasize “peaceful coexistence,” partly as a means to access Western science and technology.1

While the Eisenhower administration, apparently caught off guard by Khrushchev’s public statements, said little in response, Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson took the lead in urging a U.S. rejoinder. Calling for an “open curtain” that would allow Western ideas to “cleanse evil" inside the USSR, Johnson proposed specifically that Washington respond to Khrushchev by offering a reciprocal exchange of weekly radio and television broadcasts. The State Department embraced the idea, calling in July 1957 for a Soviet-American agreement “at an early date for regular exchange of uncensored radio and television broadcasts.” Vice President Richard M. Nixon took the American counteroffensive a step further, condemning Khrushchev’s Iron Curtain reference as “hypocritical double-talk” in view of continuing Soviet jamming, censorship, and travel restrictions.2

Responding in late July, the Soviets said they were willing to discuss the broadcast proposal, but only in conjunction with wider-ranging discussions of “contacts and ties in their entirety.” Momentum toward renewed cultural contacts continued to mount on October 5, 1957, when John Foster Dulles and Andrei Gromyko met for four hours in New York, at Dulles’s invitation, following the Soviet foreign minister’s arrival for a meeting of the UN General Assembly. In addition to their discussion of Mideast geopolitics and disarmament issues, the two leaders focused on efforts to establish broadened East-West contacts. The final obstacle to negotiations aimed at achieving a new cultural agreement, the Soviets averred, was the odious fingerprinting provision of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. If Washington intended to increase contacts, this remnant of McCarthyism would have to be removed. U.S. newspaper editorialists and various public figures, including the president and the secretary of state, joined the Soviets in condemning the law. In response, in October 1957, Congress amended the immigration law, removing the fingerprinting provision and with it the last barrier to resumption of full-scale negotiations on an East-West cultural agreement.3

High anxiety in the West over the October 4 Sputnik launch did not impede progress toward an East-West cultural accord. On October 28, only days after the congressional action removing the fingerprinting provision, a Soviet delegation headed by the ambassador to the United States, Georgi Zarubin, began discussions in Washington. Veteran diplomat William S. B. Lacy, head of a new State Department staff on East-West contacts, headed the U.S. delegation. In an opening statement, Lacy blamed Soviet censorship of news dispatches and systematic jamming for the failure at Geneva more than two years earlier.

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