cold war

{excerpt, Smith / Grace and Power}----------------
After France had been driven out of Southeast Asia, de Gaulle opposed American military intervention there -- a "bottomless military and political quagmire," he called it. He was also working to build a French nuclear capability -- both to achieve superpower status and to ensure an independent defense against the Soviets. In April, France tested its fourth atomic bomb.

JFK had clashed once with the French before his presidency, when he gave his farsighted 1957 speech promoting independence for their colony in Algeria. The French establishment was "wild with fury." Over a quiet lunch, Ambassador Hervé Alphand had admonished Sen. Kennedy for interfering in France's efforts to resolve the situation. "He promised me not to pursue the question," Alphand recalled. "He kept his promise." When Kennedy fretted that he would suffer domestic political consequences for his position, his practical father assured him, "You'll be out of the woods on the Algerian statement long before the people vote."

Kennedy readied himself for de Gaulle by ploughing through history books and contemporary analyses. He studied a translation of the de Gaulle memoirs so he could cite pertinent passages, and he was briefed in the Oval Office by Raymond Aron, the contrarian political philosopher and critic of de Gaulle. Bundy and Sorensen counseled JFK to lead his discussion with de Gaulle by asking questions. In a confidential memo, New York Times columnist Cy Sulzberger urged the president to "prepare a favorable atmosphere" beginning with areas of agreement, then progressing to more thorny issues.

Kennedy relied mostly on advice from Macmillan, who took a philosophical view after a long history with his imposingly tall French counterpart, whom he nicknamed "the little pinhead." On Kennedy's behalf, Macmillan wrote to"my dear friend" de Gaulle, advising him to "talk to [Kennedy] very frankly and set out your views fully." The Englishman well understood de Gaulle's "pride, his inherited hatred of England," and "his intense 'vanity' for France." Macmillan cautioned Kennedy that "conversations with de Gaulle are quite difficult to conduct" because the Frenchman "sometimes puts his thoughts in a rather elliptical way."
[space in text]

Far more challenging to Kennedy was the summit with the sixty-six-year-old Khrushchev, whom the American President had met fleetingly when the Soviet leader visited the Senate in the fall of 1959. At that time, Khrushchev had pegged the Massachusetts senator as a man on the rise. The first overtures for a summit meeting had come just weeks after the January 1961 inauguration, but the Bay of Pigs seemed to scuttle all prospects until Khrushchev surprisingly issued an invitation less than a month later. In one of his first forays into foreign policy as a back-channel operative for his brother, Bobby Kennedy met secretly with a Russian intelligence agent named Georgi Bolshakov, who led him to believe that Khrushchev might be ready to discuss a possible ban on nuclear weapons tests.

The nuclear menace lay at the heart of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949, but the magnitude of that threat took on new meaning in 1957, when they launched the Sputnik rocket into space and served notice that they could deliver nuclear weapons across the oceans in a half hour. JFK fanned American fears by harping on the "missible gap" during the presidential campaign. In fact, each superpower then possessed significant "overkill" -- 18,000 nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal and a smaller but still substantial amount on the Soviet side.

Even as the two superpowers raced to amass nuclear arms, they (along with Britain) had voluntarily suspended atomic weapons tests since 1958 and had also engaged in arms control talks in Geneva. ...
The possibility of engaging Khrushchev on arms control seemed a worthy goal for the Vienna summit.

Kennedy had no shortage of tactical advice on ways of approaching the Soviet leader. From India, Ken Galbraith relayed Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's warning that the Soviet premier was "a man of exceedingly fast responses." Walter Lippmann, who had recently returned from the Soviet Union, observed that Khrushchev used deceptively simple language to connect with the average Russia, sometimes speaking in fables to make his points. CIA analysts warned that Khrushchev (who had shocked the world the previous year by brandishing his shoe during a speech at the United Nations) "is more aggressive when he's tired." Sixty-nine-year-old Averell Harriman, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, cautioned against taking Khrushchev's pugnacity too literally or trying to debate him. Rather, President Kennedy should try to deflect theSoviet leader's bluster with humor.
--------------------- {end Excerpt.
Grace And Power, by Sally Bedell Smith. Copyright 2004. Random House. New York.}

Floating in the background behind these ping-ponging efforts --
BUILD UP ARMS --
(TRY TO BE FRIENDS) --
BUILD UP NUCLEAR CAPABILITY --
(DISCUSS BANNING NUCLEAR WEAPONS TESTS) --

was the de Gaulle-named (then only potential) "quagmire" of Vietnam.
This was spring 1961.
Three years later, August 1964, Gulf of Tonkin Resolution by Congress allowed Pres. Johnson to wage war without war being declared,
and nearly
EIGHT
years after
THAT,
end 1972 --
by-now-President NIXON is sending Henry Kissinger out, as Candidate George McGovern said, "kept him in orbit for weeks ahead of the election," saying that "peace was at hand"...
And -----------------{Excerpt, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, Hunter Thompson}: "President Nixon will be sworn into office for a second term today....Mr. Nixon will once again take the oath on a temporary stand outside the east front of the Capitol....It will be the President's first statement to the American people since his television appearance on November 6, election eve. Since then the peace talks have collapsed, massive bombing of North Vietnam has been instituted and then called off, and the talks have resumed without extended public comment from Mr. Nixon... -- San Francisco Chronicle, January 20, 1973

-30-