The Telegram

Nikita Sergeivitch Khrushchev. Peasant. Tyrant. Everything in between. But when some future historian looks back at the 20th century, unburdened by the reflexive JFK-worship that plagues our contemporary scholarship, the two men who saved the 20th century from itself will be understood to be Khrushchev and Gorbachev.

Mikhail Gorbachev will go down as one of the great men of all time. Perched atop a decrepit and tyrannical empire, Gorbachev did what no other leader has ever done; he acknowledged that history was against him, that his empire was held together will duct tape and terror, and he allowed it a peaceful death.

The Soviet Union could just as easily have ended in nuclear Holocaust as an anti-climactic whimper, and I credit Gorbachev with something in between profound and historical humility and saving mankind from itself.

But if Khrushchev had not done what he did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Gorbachev would be irrelevant. And I would never have been born. And if you were born after 1962, you would never have been born, either.

In 1962, the United States had surrounded the Soviet Union with land-based nuclear missiles throughout Europe and Turkey. It had also repeatedly tried to oust Cuban leader Fidel Castro, with tactics ranging from sabotage to terrorism to proxy invasion to several failed assassination attempts.

To deal with these twin realities, Khrushchev surreptitiously placed land-based nuclear missiles in Cuba, hoping to make the America feel the same threat the Soviets felt while at the same time protecting his ally Castro. Whether this was justifiable or not depends on your objectivity and your politics. But suffice it to say, Khrushchev was hardly unprovoked.

Once the crisis came, both Kennedy and Khrushchev were advised to go to war by most men who surrounded them. The two leaders resisted these pressures. It is of course wholly absurd and unacceptable that any two mortal men had as much power over the life and death of billions of human beings as did Kennedy and Khrushchev, but at least we can be thankful that they stopped short of obliterating the world.

Kennedy is credited with single-handedly saving the word, especially in this country, and especially since his "martyrdom", which was really more of a cheap and vulgar spasmodic murder than an actual martyrdom. By this, I mean that Oswald wasn't trying to prove anything other than the fact that he existed. Kennedy wasn't really killed for any cause at all.

At any rate, we should consider Khrushchev, surrounded by men even more hardened, more paranoid, and less democratically-minded than those surrounding Kennedy. Khrushchev withstood immense pressure, and knowingly sacrificed his power and position in the world by backing down. It was much harder for Khrushchev not to fight than it was for Kennedy.

I recently taught my students about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and an excerpt from Khrushchev's telegram to Kennedy struck me as one of the most sublimely profound paragraphs ever uttered, a paragraph which may have literally saved the world.

"Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot. And what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly well what terrible forces our countries possess."

An amazing sentiment. And one which reminds me of another quote, this one from Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara: "The indefinite co-existence of thermonuclear weapons and fallible human beings is a recipe for guaranteed suicide."