Rio. And Che Guevara would be in the thick of it.
Timur Gaidar, the
'Has Moscow called?'
'I'm waiting. They'll call soon.'
'Wonderful. I was afraid I would be late. I have been writing all night.'
Yevtushenko had been in the television studio when Castro delivered his speech and had spent the last few hours recording his impressions. It was easy for him to understand Khrushchev's attraction to Castro because he too was half in love. Listening to Fidel speak, he was prepared to forgive him anything. What did it matter if there was only vinegar and cabbage in the grocery stores if Fidel had closed down the whorehouses and declared an end to illiteracy? In the struggle between tiny Cuba and mighty America, Yevtushenko knew which side he was on.
As he waited for the telephone call from Moscow, the poet paced up and down the room, declaiming his lines. Soon they would be splashed across the front page of
CHAPTER FOUR
'Eyeball to Eyeball'
Nikita Khrushchev saw no need to communicate directly with his own people at a time of grave international crisis. Even though he was the most personable of Soviet leaders ? allowing himself to be photographed strolling through cornfields or waving his fists in the air ? public opinion was a relatively minor concern. Unlike Kennedy, he did not face midterm elections. Unlike Castro, he did not need to rally his people against an invasion.
His main goal was to project a sense of business as usual. He went out of his way to be friendly to visiting Americans. The previous evening, he and other Soviet leaders had gone to the Bolshoi Theater for a performance of
Knox was in Moscow to explore possible manufacturing deals. His knowledge of the Soviet Union was so limited that he had to ask Khrushchev to identify the sage with the large bushy beard whose portrait hung on the wall of his huge Kremlin office. 'Why, that's Karl Marx, the father of Communism,' a surprised first secretary replied. Two nights earlier, the Westinghouse president had been woken from a deep sleep by the roar of military vehicles and brilliant searchlights shining into his hotel room opposite the Kremlin. 'It was hard to believe my eyes,' he wrote later. 'Red Square was full of soldiers, sailors, tanks, armored personnel carriers, missiles of various lengths up to at least 100 feet, jeeps, artillery, etc. I simply could not figure it out!' It was not until the following morning that he found out that the nighttime exercise had been part of preparations for the annual November 7 Revolution Day parade.
The president of an electricity company was a strange choice for the role of superpower emissary. Knox's most important attribute was that he embodied the Soviet preconception of the American ruling class. Steeped in Marxist ideology, Khrushchev really did believe that corporate CEOs ran the U.S. government, like puppetmasters pulling strings behind the scenes. Hearing that a prominent capitalist was in town, he summoned Knox to the Kremlin at less than an hour's notice.
The message Khrushchev wanted to send America via Knox was that he was standing firm. He conceded for the first time that the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles on Cuba, but insisted they were there for 'defensive' purposes only. Everything depended on the motive of the person with the weapon, he explained. 'If I point a pistol at you like this in order to attack you, the pistol is an offensive weapon. But if I aim to keep you from shooting me, it is defensive, no?' He said he understood that Cubans were a 'volatile people,' which was why the missiles would remain under Soviet control.
Having confirmed the presence of the medium-range missiles in Cuba, Khrushchev next alluded to the short- range cruise missiles. If Kennedy really wanted to know what kind of weapons the Soviet Union had deployed to Cuba, all he had to do was order an invasion, and he would find out very quickly. The Guantanamo Naval Base would 'disappear the first day.'
'I'm not interested in the destruction of the world,' Khrushchev told Knox, 'but if you want us to all meet in Hell, it's up to you.'
He then related one of his favorite anecdotes, about a man who had to move in with his goat after falling on hard times. Although he did not like the smell, he eventually became accustomed to it. Russians, Khrushchev said, had been 'living with a goat' in the form of NATO countries like Turkey, Greece, and Spain for a very long time. Now Americans would have to get used to their own goat in Cuba.
'You aren't happy with it and you don't like it, but you'll learn to live with it.'
At the White House, the morning ExComm meeting began as usual with an intelligence briefing from John
