SUMMIT MEETINGS, PAST AND PRESENT, ARE GRIST TO AN AMERICAN HISTORIAN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100200005-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 10, 2012
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: July 25, 1991
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

S1 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/10: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100200005-5
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AlNOfli
Summit Meetings, Past
and Present, Are Grist to
an American Historian
By ADAM CLYMER
Special to The New York Times
WASHINGTON, July 24 - The
practice of diplomatic history re-
quires reading and rereading all
previous books on an era, examining
thousands of pages of documents, and
relentlessly requesting authorities to
release more.
Then, says Michael R. Beschloss,
"you think very hard about whether
you would reach different conclusions
from what the people who came be-
fore you thought."
Mr. Beschloss often thinks hard
that way. He is not only one of the
leading practitioners of the diminish-
ing art of diplomatic history. He
makes a living at it, writing about
past summit meetings and comment-
ing for the Cable News Network on
current ones, like the meeting with
President Mikhail S. Gorbachev that
President Bush heads for on Monday.
The research of the diplomatic his-
torian consists of intense slogging.
There is almost never a single dra-
matic find, one document, that leads
to a cry of 'Eureka!'
"Usually if a historic current is im-
portant, you'll find evidence of it else-
where," Mr. Beschloss said. But in
the case of his new book, The Crisis
Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev
1960-1963," there was the equivalent
of what he calls a Eureka archive.
A Soviet Trove Opens
The coming of glasnost, and Mr.
Gorbachev's concerns about acciden-
tal war, led to Soviet re-examination
of the period when the superpowers
came closest to nuclear war, first
over Berlin and then over Cuba.
Beginning in 1987, Soviet participants
in the events of the early 1960's, or
their children, were suddenly al-
lowed, even directed, to tell their sto-
ries. And those sources led Mr. Bess
chloss, 35 years old, to a revisionist
interpretation of the early 1960's.
Contrary to the view he and most
Americans shared for so long, of a
reckless Nikita S. Khrushchev threat-
ening nuclear war for no apparent
reason and a composed, steel-nerved
John F. Kennedy firmly guiding this
country and the world away from the
abyss, "Kennedy and the United
States had at least as great a respon-
sibility," Mr. Beschloss writes. The
signals they gave were uncertain, he
found, and their secret campaign
against Cuba, including assassination
plans aimed at Fidel Castro, alarmed
the Kremlin.
Although the Soviet sources were
an unexpected bonus, giving him
more than the expected "logic and
speculation" to explain Mr. Khru-
lichev, Mr. Beschloss began the book
.,hen he did, in 1985, in the great hope,
he says, "that I would be able to bene.
fit from the tact that declassified
American documents tend to come
tumbling out about 25 to 30 years
after an event occurs."
Many did. One key that did not
come loose without a struggle, how-
ever, was the translator's notes from
the 1961 Kennedy-Khrushchev sum-
mit meeting in Vienna.
Mr. Beschloss made five requests
for the notes, from mid-1986 until they
were released in September of last
year. What did they add?
"There was nothing earth-shatter-
ing," he said, but the "virtually a
word for word" account of two days
of talks gave a feel for the meeting,
and in particular a sense that "Ken-
nedy's Cuba language was vague
enough to have contributed" to Mr.
Khrushchev's belief that he could get
away with putting missiles on the is-
land.
The Mystery Is Less
Summit meetings like that one, and
next week's too, become public in
three stages, Mr. Beschloss said.
First, Mr. Kennedy and his people
leaked versions of conversations to
favored reporters. The Kennedy
quote, "It's going to be a cold winter,"
was peddled to give the impression
that the President was tough all the
way through - tougher than the full
transcript revealed. Later heavily
paraphrased, more thoughtful, but
basically friendly versions came out
in the books by Administration insid-
ers like Theodore Sorenson and Ar-
thur Schlesinger Jr. Then come the
uninvolved, professional historians'
accounts.
There may be less incentive for a
diplomatic historian to explore next
week's Bush-Gorbachev summit
meeting. There is less mystery to ex-
plore. "In the early 1960's, there
really was such a thing as secret di-
plomacy," Mr. Beschloss said. "For
instance, John Kennedy could make a
deal with Nikita Khrushchev on the
basis of a promise to remove Western
missiles from Turkey and expect it to
remain secret."
CONTINUED
The Washington Post
The New York Times _
The Washington Times
The Wall Street Journal
The Christian Science Monitor
New York Daily News
USA Today
The Chicago Tribune
Date T lv /99T
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But if a Western leader had seri-
ously considered letting President
Saddam Hussein of Iraq have the
Persian Gulf islands in exchange for
leaving Kuwait, he would have to ex-
pect the agreement to become public,
Mr. Beschloss said. "Much more di-
plomacy takes place in public," he
said, adding, "When the history of the
gulf war is written in 30 years from
now, there probably will be fewer sur-
prises."
The raw material of diplomatic his-
tory is also changing. "The moment
you really see it happening is 1960,"
Mr. Beschloss said. "Eisenhower
wrote letters. You could write vol.
umes from his letters."
The Effect of Computers
Things changed in 1961. "Kennedy
did business by the telephone," he
said. Moreover, some written records
of important meetings, like those of
the National Security Council, were
kept badly in the Kennedy Adminis-
tration. Other records, including
those of oral messages for Khru-
shchev that Attorney General Robert
F. Kennedy gave Georgi N. Bolsha-
kov, a Soviet intelligence agent at the
embassy here, were hardly kept at
all.
And then there are computers. Not.
only are messages that might figure
in diplomatic history sent on them.
They have changed the process of as-
sembling that history. Using a sort
function, for example, Mr. Beschloss
can have the computer bring together
everything in his notes that refers to
events on a given date, or everything
involving a particular person. Before
they had computers, historians often
spent months sorting and resorting
file cards.
For "The Crisis Years," which
HarperCollins put out in June, Mr.
Beschloss dealt with perhaps 1,500
books and 100,000 pages of docu-
ments. "I try to rely very much on
documents as opposed to interviews,"
he said. "Otherwise it would be more
journalism and less history."
to interviews mattered and
the two he re ards as most va e
were w c eor a Bund Mr. Ken-
ne s nations securit a viser and
tc ar m a former Dire for
~f Central Intellteence "They were
central players who knew much of
what was going on," he said. "At this
late date they felt more free to speak
candidly and voluminously."
Why the Two Talked Tough
The rough symmetry in under-
standing both sides that the Soviet
sources provide is the strength of the
work. Mr. Beschloss claims little for
himself, saying he had "the luck of
writing this book" when they were
newly available. But he took great ad-
vantage of that profound change.
Another symmetry that emerges is
a view of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Khru-
shchev as two leaders who talked,
and sometimes acted, tough to over-
come domestic political weakness,
expecting the other to understand but
showing no such understanding of his
own.
Take early January 1961, when Mr.
Khrushchev gave a speech on wars of
national liberation, using harsh cold
war words but not deeds to throw a
bone to hard-liners. Mr. Kennedy per-
ceived a deliberate effort to test a
new, young President, and responded
in kind in his State of the Union ad-
dress.
Then there was the speech, in Octo-
ber, by Roswell Gilpatric, Deputy
Secretary of Defense, on American
nuclear superiority. Mr. Kennedy's
motive in authorizing it, Mr. Bes-
chloss says, was to seem strong at
home on the eve of negotiations on
Berlin. But Mr. Khrushchev thought
Mr. Kennedy was advertising
strength to set the stage for a possible
nuclear first strike that would over-
come his domestic politicat Weak-
ness. Missiles in Cuba were the re-
sponse.
Most of the writing was done at
home, in a Cleveland Park house once
owned by Loy Henderson, a diplomat
of the era he writes about. His-office
has a 1987 model Campaq cementer
on an otherwise sparsely Jittered
desk. There are bookcases and boxes
of computer disks, and on the ivaJl a
portrait of Abraham Lincoln. He
honors Lincoln, certainly no main fig-
ure of diplomatic history, because
"he is the greatest of our Presidents
in my view."
"When you grow up in Illinois, he
said, "the memory and legacy of Lin-
coln is particularly holy."
His Career Course
A protege of James McGre&or
Burns, Mr. Beschloss wrote his sensor
college thesis on Joseph P. Kennedy
and Franklin D. Roosevelt; it was
published three years later as he was
completing an M.B.A. at Harvard.
With no interest in teaching, the
standard course for historians, he
had gone for that degree with the idea
of earning a living as a foundation ex-
ecutive and writing history on tee
side. But royalties on his next book,
"Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev
and the U-2 Affair," published in 19$6,
appearances as a summit analyst on
CNN and lecturing have enabled him
to make a living as a historian, with-
out any other formal job.
He chose diplomatic history as a
particular field because he wants in
his work "to try to find in history, les-
sons that can help to guide leaders of
our own times."
So what is the main lesson to be
found in "The Crisis Years?"
Here is how Mr. Beschloss reads it:
CONTINUED
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"On paper you have Kennedy and
Khrushchev in power. And both
wanted to relieve the harshness of the
cold war, and both wanted to lteepthe
nuclear arms race at as low a T ve}as
possible. e,. 4 ,
"But events and the worst 401,of
both of their natures caused ttt~
ten Nnn
t
b
e_n_~ . _
s
o
e
K
ing too much politically by * Fe g
anything other than an orth
war stand on Berlin and Ctib"r'n
Khrushchev's case: indulging his
tendency to solve his problems.With
quick schemes that were never
thought out, like missiles in Cuba."
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