K Blows Top

He got the idea from Bob Considine, the famous columnist. Considine and his boss, William Randolph Hearst Jr., had conducted two long, strange interviews with Nikita Khrushchev, and so Nixon, eager for insights, invited them to lunch in Washington. They informed him that the Soviet premier was tough, smart, and surprisingly funny.

“Bone up on some American proverbs,” Considine suggested. “He’ll have a Russian proverb for every possible topic and he believes that these proverbs not only sum up all his arguments, but win them for him. You’d better get some proverbs of your own, preferably from Lincoln or Franklin or people like that.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Nixon, and he jotted down a reminder on the back of an envelope.

Just as the United States could not afford to fall behind the Soviet Union in the arms race, Nixon felt he must maintain parity with the premier in the proverb race. He began stockpiling an arsenal of American aphorisms, proverbs, and bits of folk wisdom. Then, being a savvy politician, he let the story of his proverb collection leak out to the press.

“Reckoning with His Host, Nixon Is Packing Proverbs,” the New York Times headlined its story. Citing an “informed source,” the Times revealed that “the vice president has been recalling old and learning new proverbs” in preparation for his meeting with Khrushchev, who was known to utter such aphorisms as “spit in his eye and he’ll say it’s dew from heaven.”

The Daily News—the Times’s funkier, feistier crosstown rival—spun the story into a full-page feature that ran beneath a headline that read like a tabloid haiku:

The News, which frequently filled its entire back page with a close-up photo of some luckless pugilist getting hit with a haymaker, couldn’t resist an extended boxing metaphor:

The News urged Nixon to pummel the premier with authentic Russian proverbs:

Back in Washington, Nixon was not spending all of his time memorizing proverbs. With characteristically dogged tenacity, he studied everything he could find on the Soviet premier, poring through reports from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, and even visiting the CIA’s secret new office—located above an auto repair shop in a seedy section of town—to inspect photographs taken by the agency’s secret U-2 spy plane.

Nixon figured he needed every edge he could get. Although the official purpose of his mission to Moscow was prosaic—he was to cut the ribbon at the American exhibition in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park—Nixon was already running for president and he knew that voters would judge him on how well he handled Khrushchev.

At sixty-five, the Soviet dictator was a wily and unpredictable opponent. Son of peasants and grandson of serfs, Khrushchev left school after only a few years to work as a shepherd, a coal miner and a factory hand before joining the Red Army after the Bolshevik revolution. Uneducated but intelligent, ambitious and fiercely loyal to Josef Stalin, he quickly rose in the ranks of the Communist Party. In 1938, Stalin sent him to run the Ukraine, where Khrushchev helped to carry out his boss’s paranoid purges. In September 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin pact divided Poland, Khrushchev was dispatched to collectivize the Soviet sector, a brutal process that killed thousands of Poles and sent another half million to labor camps in the Soviet Union. During World War II, General Khrushchev was a commissar in the Red Army, fighting the Nazis in the horrific battles at Stalingrad, Kharkov, and Kiev. After the war, he became part of Stalin’s inner circle, and was compelled to spend long nights with the man Pravda praised as “leader and teacher of the workers of the world” and “the greatest genius of all times and peoples,” while the demented old dictator got drunk, watched cowboy movies, and eyed his underlings for signs of disloyalty.

When Stalin died in 1953, his closest henchmen scrambled for power, and Khrushchev emerged on top, exiling his rivals to obscure posts in far places. At a secret session of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev did the unthinkable. He delivered a speech denouncing Stalin’s brutality, paranoia, and egomania. Slowly, cautiously, Khrushchev began to liberalize and de-Stalinize the Soviet Union, releasing hundreds of thousands of political prisoners from labor camps and relaxing the state’s iron grip on artists and intellectuals. But when Hungarians revolted against their Communist government in 1956, Khrushchev crushed the rebellion with Soviet tanks, killing 20,000 people in the process.

In November 1958, Khrushchev suddenly announced that West Berlin was a “malignant tumor” inside Communist East Germany and demanded that the Western occupying powers—Britain, France, and the United States—leave the city within six months. In May 1959—two months before Nixon’s trip to Moscow—that deadline passed without incident. But the threat remained and Khrushchev seemed to enjoy the crisis he’d provoked. “Berlin is the testicles of the West,” he later said. “Each time I give them a yank, they holler.”

That was typical Khrushchev. During the Suez crisis of 1956, he mocked British prime minister Anthony Eden: “I’ve just heard a good joke. Eden is sick. Do you know what he’s suffering from? Inflammation of the canal!” Three years later, he ridiculed West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer: “If Adenauer pulls down his pants and you look at him from behind, you can see Germany is divided. If you look at him from the front, you can see Germany will not stand.”

In 1958, Senator Hubert Humphrey visited Moscow and was granted an audience with Khrushchev that he expected would last about an hour. But Humphrey and Khrushchev, two of the world’s most notoriously loquacious politicians, ended up yakking for eight solid hours. (It must have been a very tough workday for Khrushchev’s translator, Oleg Troyanovsky.) At one point, after bragging about his missiles and his hydrogen bombs, the premier asked the senator to point out his hometown on a map of the United States. Humphrey identified Minneapolis and Khrushchev circled it with a thick blue pencil. “That’s so I don’t forget to order them to spare the city when the rockets fly,” he explained.

To Americans, Khrushchev’s most famous statement was an off-the-cuff utterance he made at a diplomatic reception in 1956: “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” The diplomats at the reception understood that Khrushchev was merely restating, in his own inimitable style, the Marxist belief in the inevitable triumph of Communism. But most Americans who read the quote in newspapers assumed that Khrushchev was planning to slaughter them.

The more Nixon learned about the premier, the more nervous he became about meeting him. On July 22, 1959—the day he was scheduled to fly to Moscow—he stopped at the White House for last-minute advice from President Eisenhower, who revealed some shocking news: Khrushchev was coming to America!

In an exchange of letters over the previous ten days, Eisenhower told his vice president, he had invited Khrushchev to visit and the premier had accepted, saying that he’d like to tour the country for a couple of weeks. The trip was still top secret—it wouldn’t be announced until the details were arranged—and Ike ordered Nixon not to mention it to anyone, not even Khrushchev himself. Nixon was flabbergasted. While he’d been cramming for his meeting, studying briefing papers and memorizing proverbs, Ike and the striped-pants boys at the State Department had invited Khrushchev to America—and nobody even bothered to tell him about it! It was a karate chop to Nixon’s ego.

Eisenhower told his vice president to play it cool in Moscow and maintain “a cordial, almost light atmosphere.” But Nixon had other ideas. He told Ike that he wanted to debate the dictator, “to probe and cause some blurting out of Khrushchev’s real feelings.” Nixon was trapped in a tough spot. As vice president, he was supposed to follow Ike’s orders and be diplomatic with Khrushchev. But as a presidential candidate, he had to show his toughness, to prove that he could, in the phrase of the day, “stand up to the Russians.”

On the plane to Moscow, Nixon sat up all night worrying. When he arrived at the American embassy, he was still too keyed up to sleep. After churning in his bed for a few hours, he rose before dawn and strolled through Moscow’s open-air market. He returned to the embassy for breakfast, then rode to the Kremlin for his historic meeting.

Escorted into Khrushchev’s office, he got his first glance at the premier. Bald as an egg, Khrushchev stood only a few inches over five feet but weighed nearly two hundred pounds. He had a round face, bright blue eyes, a mole on his cheek, a gap between his teeth, and a huge pot belly that made him look like a man shoplifting a watermelon.

Something in Khrushchev’s chubby hands caught Nixon’s eye. After a moment, he realized it was a model of a Soviet satellite. The crafty Russian was rubbing Nixon’s nose in the memory of Sputnik, the satellite the Soviets had launched into orbit in 1957, scaring the hell out of America. Khrushchev stared at his visitor, eyeing him the way “a tailor might estimate a customer’s size for a suit of clothes,” Nixon later recalled, “or perhaps more as a undertaker might view a prospective corpse with a coffin in mind.”

Khrushchev smiled warmly as the two men posed for pictures. But after he shooed the photographers away, he launched into a tirade about the captive nations resolution. The annual resolution, passed by Congress about a week before, called for Americans to pray for the liberation of the “enslaved peoples” of the “Soviet-dominated nations.” Khrushchev pounded the table and denounced the resolution as a provocation to war.

Like a crafty pol confronted by an angry constituent, Nixon promptly passed the buck. The resolution was the work of the Democratic Congress, he said, not the Eisenhower administration.

Khrushchev wasn’t convinced. “Any action by an authoritative body like Congress must have a purpose,” he insisted, “and I wonder what the purpose of this particular action can be.”

The purpose was, of course, to enable the lawmakers to exhibit their anti-Communist zeal while courting the votes of Polish Americans. But how could Nixon explain that to Khrushchev?

“The Soviet government thought Congress would never adopt a decision to start a war!” Khrushchev bellowed. “But it appears that, although Senator McCarthy is dead, his spirit still lives. For this reason, the Soviet Union has to keep its powder dry.”

Failing to convince Khrushchev that the resolution was meaningless, Nixon dipped into his arsenal of proverbs. “At the White House,” he said, “we have a procedure for breaking off long discussions that seem to go nowhere: President Eisenhower says, ‘We have beaten this horse to death, let’s change to another.’ Perhaps that is what we should do now.”

Khrushchev, the connoisseur of proverbs, enjoyed that one. “I agree with the president’s saying that we should not beat one horse too much,” he replied. But he couldn’t resist the urge to give this old nag one final whack: “I cannot understand why your Congress would adopt such a resolution on the eve of such an important state visit.” He came back with a proverb of his own: “It reminds me of a saying among our Russian peasants that ‘People should not shit where they eat.’”

By now, Khrushchev was red-faced and roaring. “This resolution stinks!” he said. “It stinks like fresh horseshit—and nothing smells worse than that!”

The interpreter blushed as he translated that little bon mot, but Nixon remained poker faced. Having grown up in a small town in southern California, he knew that horse manure was hardly the most pungent of livestock excrement.

“I’m afraid the chairman is mistaken,” he said. “There is something that smells worse than horseshit—and that is pigshit!”

For a moment, Khrushchev looked as if he was about to start bellowing again. But then he cracked a smile. “You are right,” he said. “So perhaps you are right that we should talk about something else.”

The strangest series of diplomatic visits in the twentieth century had begun with two of the most powerful men on Earth arguing about the odor of animal dung.

“Dear Mr. Prime Minister,” Eisenhower’s letter began, “For some time past, it has seemed to me that it would be mutually profitable for us to have an informal exchange of views about problems which interest both of us.”

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Khrushchev said later. “We had no reason to expect such an invitation—not then or ever for that matter.”