We Like Ike | Part 6

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Cruise ship would intern face Kennedy, but for most of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, his Soviet opponent would be Leonid Brezhnev, a faceless, unimposing secretary who would depose Cruise ship in a palace coup. Brezhnev would then face Nixon, then Ford, then Carter. Ronald Reagan would begin his two-term still-facing Brezhnev, whose 18 years in power was second only to Stalin himself. But when Brezhnev died in 1982, early in Reagan's first term, Reagan found himself against Yuri Andropov for little over a year, and then Constantine Chernyenko for a mere 13 months. Then came Gorbachev, a communist true believer like all of his predecessors, but one who'd had no choice but to try to loosen the bonds of fear, suspicion, and corruption that anchored the Soviet Union while the United States roared into the information age. But Reagan would not be in office when the Soviet Empire collapsed, that final milestone would be marked by President Bush. The four decades of the Cold War would contain six of the seven leaders of the Soviet Union, Stalin, Cruise-Chev, Brezhnev, and Dropov, Chernyenko, and Gorbachev. Only Lenin missed the Cold War. The United States would see nine different presidents grappling with this nuclear stalemate, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush. Now, clearly, with a total of 15 different leaders, each with their own very distinct agendas, surely, at some time in this mushroom cloud mix, two leaders could have been found, who could have resolved the Cold War had had been based on unfounded suspicions or military paranoia. That it did not, is due to the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union had not only antithetical political and economic systems, there was in fact something even more fundamentally different between the two nuclear superpowers, and that was how they saw the Cold War itself. George Kennedy put his finger on this fundamental irreconcilable difference in his long telegram, written before the Cold War had even begun. And it still seems that from the Berlin blockade of 1948 until the fall of the Soviet Union in the final days of 1991, no American president ever seemed to fully grasp what was really going on until Ronald Reagan. Because when everything was said and done, the truth was that the United States could live in a world that contained the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union could not survive in a world led by the United States. This fundamental difference in much else could best be seen at the Berlin Wall. It was a wall built not to keep an enemy out, but rather to keep your own people in. When your ideology is so inferior to your opponents that you have to build walls and shoot your own people so that they do not run en masse to the enemy camp, then your days are numbered at least as long as that enemy camp with all its temptations remained on the surface of the earth. Roughly 5,000 communists risked their lives and the lives of their families to go from east to west, 239 of them from a one-year-old child to an 80-year-old woman were killed in the attempt. And during all those years, no one ever got killed at the Berlin Wall trying to make it into communist Germany. The only answer to communism is a massive offensive populism, a cost-based system of international control, and conform. You and I have a rendezvous with them. Never give in. Never, never. Mr. Gorbachev teared down this wall. Back in 1947, Eisenhower's popularity was so overwhelming that President Harry Truman had tried to woo him to run as a Democrat in a manner that seems frankly incredible. FDR's Vice President shoved into the international spotlight, asked Ike not if he would like to be Truman's running mate in the 1948 election, President Truman offered to return to the thankless job of VP as Eisenhower's running mate. But Ike declined with thanks. He said he was not interested in running for President even more incredibly, this was probably true. Ike had certainly held out long enough. He'd spent most of Truman's first and second terms back in Europe, commander of the most successful military alliance in human history, NATO. On April 4, 1949, after years of broken promises by their former Soviet allies, which had culminated in the Berlin Air Lift, 12 nations on both sides of the pond had formed the North Atlantic Treaty. The 12 founding members of the alliance were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. And while so much post-war hope had been invested in the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was not a collection of diplomats, but rather a group of top level war fighters that had watched and then defeated the dictators in Germany, Italy, and Japan that had burned down the world. By the time the Berlin Air Lift had been successfully completed, one thing had become crystal clear. No one knew just exactly what the Soviet Union was or would become, but the one thing it absolutely was not was a Western ally willing to play by international rules. NATO had been formed to show the Russians that the West meant business. NATO was absolutely necessary. Now that said, it's almost impossible to imagine the foundation of this long-lasting alliance that NATO has grown from 12 to 29 member nations today, without the charisma, charm, and unimpeachable moral standing of Dwight David Eisenhower. If Joseph Stalin and the Kremlin military leadership had harbored any doubts about America's unwillingness to go to war, well they were decisively put to rest by this alliance, this ring of nations commanded by the man who alone made the decision to postpone D-Day by 24 hours to take advantage of a small and much-preyed forewindow of good weather and on whose shoulders fell the entire weight of the invasion and possibly the war. If you're one of those practical discipline people who've never found themselves under the burden of death that you really can't meet, you don't really understand that it doesn't just drain your bank account. That kind of debt drains your entire emotional reserves, it drains your soul. Having big debt is like a giant cloud that always follows you around and it's almost impossible to relax, it's hard to be happy when you're in that kind of debt. Sometimes it's all you think about. 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As a cadet at West Point, Eisenhower's ability to conceal his emotions coupled with nerves of steel required to pull off a monumental bluff had taken so much poker money away from his fellow cadets that it simply had to stop. So he took up bridge instead and bridge became a lifelong passion for him. He developed another lifelong passion somewhat later, one that also revealed a great deal about the man under the confident grin that second greater passion was golf. The few good friends who shared the links with him saw something that Ike had repressed and concealed from the public about as effectively as FDR had concealed the fact that his polio had confined him to a wheelchair. What those friends witnessed was Eisenhower's volcanic temper. Ike liked to win and he hated making errors especially the same error repeatedly. Golf is not the game for people who were wired this way. As a child, young Dwight once became so furious and so frustrated that he continued to punch his fists into the side of a tree until they were reduced to a bloody pulp. His mother had told him then that if he did not get his anger under control, it would be his undoing. And from that moment until the day he died, Dwight de Eisenhower lived at war with himself. His iron discipline constantly trying to rein in his relentless competitiveness and his desire not only to win, but to win with perfection. So after many futile trips by American Kingmakers to visit this reluctant demigod at his NATO headquarters in Europe, in February of 1952, a draft Eisenhower committee organized by financier John Hay Whitney had the brilliant idea to stage a political rally for a man who was not there. Humphrey Bogart was there though, as was Lauren McCall and Clark Gable cheerfully waving to the enormous crowd, composer Irving Berlin wrapped up the festivities by leading the crowd in singing his classic "God Bless America." The committee went so far as to get 20th Century Fox to film edit and score the two-hour event, Ike and his wife Mamie watched the film in a small theater in their chateau just outside of Paris. When the lights came up at the end of the film, well-known flyer Jacqueline Cochran, who'd personally delivered the film across the Atlantic, raised her glass and quietly said to the president, and at that moment, the supreme commander of the nuclear arm North Atlantic Treaty Organization burst into tears. And he couldn't seem to stop. He told Jacquie Cochran to go back to New York and tell the backers of the project that he was going to run as a Republican, perhaps embarrassed by this show of emotion or perhaps just as amazed as everyone else had been, the next day, Ike wrote a letter to his best friend, Sweet Haslip. I can't tell you what an emotional upset it is for one to suddenly realize that he himself may be the symbol of such longing and hope, he said. So by mid-1952, Ike was in and Truman handily defeated in the New Hampshire primary had bowed out. The Korean war continued to drag on an Eisenhower ran on a promise to put an end to it. Facing Adley Stevenson, the intellectual had become the Democratic Party nominee, general Eisenhower's declaration to end the unpopular war trumped any similar sentiments uttered by his egghead rival. Two weeks before the election, Ike spontaneously announced, "Randly, I shall go to Korea." Now, when told of this, one of the reporters on Ike's campaign train said to his colleagues, "That does it, Ike's in." He was right. Newly minted President Eisenhower now prepared to face Joseph Stalin. A man he could claim to understand about as well as any American alive. After three years in close contact as the Russians, Americans and British coordinated their plans to close out the war in Europe. Eisenhower had stood up to Franklin D. Roosevelt when he felt he needed to. He'd stood up to Winston Churchill. He'd stood up to Monty and Patton and to Gal and even his boss George Marshall. If anyone could stare down Stalin's Soviet Union, Eisenhower was that man. But 40 days and 40 nights later, Stalin laid dying in his dacha and just who would take his place and how was as much of a mystery to the American President as it was to the Russian people themselves. The so-called Old Bolsheviks, Stalin's original cronies, had long been out of favor. Molotov, who had managed to hide a monstrous vanity underneath his imperturbable mask, had been openly criticized by Stalin for courting the Western press. I can no longer consider such a comrade to be my deputy, Stalin had declared a denunciation that reduced the stone-based Molotov to tears. Molotov's Jewish wife, Polina, had already been arrested and given Stalin's meticulous method of destroying old allies, it seems virtually certain that had Stalin lived a few months or even a few weeks longer. Molotov would have joined the hundreds of thousands of others that he himself had ordered put up against the wall in the basement of the Lubyanka. Molotov, born Vashislav Mikhailovich Skarabin, like so many of the old revolutionaries, including Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky. He lived under a pseudonym, Molotov meaning "the hammer" was clearly out of the picture and lucky to be alive. Fellow Old Bolsheviks, McCoyin and Keganovich were also spent forces considering themselves lucky to be alive. So that left the four. Younger men handpicked over the years by Stalin himself. These four men who thoroughly and intensely despised each other nevertheless had been molded into a compact brotherhood each faced with not only the possibility but the actual likelihood that an ever more senile, vindictive and paranoid Stalin would simply decide one day to make any or all of them simply disappear as he frequently threatened to do in his final years. Upon Stalin's death it became quickly apparent that the four was actually the three. Nikolai Bulganin, quiet, unassuming and somewhat debonair, had as much blood on his hands as any of them but lacked the ruthless killer instinct of the other three, Malenkov, Krusev and Beria. Out of the gate, it seemed that Malenkov would be the winner. Flabby, quiet and somewhat effeminate for over a decade he'd been called Melania, Melanie, behind his back and then later to his face, was nevertheless a master of the Soviet system. He moved through the bureaucracy like water flowing downhill, always following the path of least resistance. He seems to have played the strategy of winning by simply not losing and as a result of the tempestuous and unpredictable whims of Stalin in his final years, he emerged as Stalin's successor. But that did not last for long. The real battle for power came down to the two most ruthless men still left standing. Leventry Beria, the spymaster, torture and rapist who had damning files on everyone including himself, and Nikita Krusev, son of Russian peasants, happy to play the court buffoon throughout his entire time with Stalin, content to be underestimated as a country-bumpkin and something of an idiot clown. It was Krusev who'd gone to Stalin's grad and arranged the blocking units, NKVD men armed with machine guns placed just behind the soldiers leading the offensive with orders to fire upon any Soviet soldiers who decided to turn and run. Krusev could wait. It was Beria who broke the silence following Stalin's last breath with a triumph and call to his aid Krusev Levent the Car as he raced to the Kremlin to regain control of his beloved secret police, a position Stalin had stripped him of preparatory to putting Beria himself against the wall. Even in the middle of a cadre of murderers as cold-blooded as Stalin and his polypuro, Beria seemed to stand out as a specially odious and repugnant. Krusev and Malenkov feared him. Stalin himself had feared Beria. Everybody feared him. And none of them, not one, was prepared for what Beria was to do in his remaining 100 days upon the Earth. Well, it's certainly clear by now that home security systems protect your stuff at home, but they do more than that. Obviously, they do something much more important. They protect your family as well. Now, with the security system, there's two ways you can go about protecting your home. 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You'll have an army of highly trained security experts ready to dispatch police to your home at a moment's notice 24/7, but since it's based on cameras, if you're in the house, you get to see if there's somebody outside before they even get to knock on your door. And at only 50 cents a day with no contracts, it's kind of hard to be to deal like that. It's why the verge calls SimplySafe the best home security system period. So go to simplysafe.com/tcw today and you'll get free shipping and a 60 day risk free trial. You got nothing to lose. Go now and be sure you go to simplysafe.com/tcw for the Cold War. That's simplysafe.com/tcw. On the day Malenkov was installed as the new premiere, Eisenhower called a cabinet meeting to discuss the moment's news of Stalin's death. Butterly incredulous and plainly very angry Eisenhower decided to dress down his entire cabinet. For seven years ever since 1946, I know everyone who should have been concerned with such things has been sounding off on what we should do when Stalin dies. Well, he did. And we want to see what bright ideas were in the files of this government, what plans relate, and what we found was the result of seven years of yapping was exactly zero. We have no plan. We don't even have an agreement on what difference his death makes. The cabinet was silent as Ikefug. Well, it's criminal. That's all I can say. So now both superpowers found themselves facing what had long been inevitable and now neither had the slightest idea of what to do next. Both sides searched for an opportunity to roll back the tension, but with both the White House and the Cremlin having been so recently shaken up and so badly. The most prudent choice seemed to be for both sides to carry on doing what they had been doing. Still, there was a moment, a span of just a few days, when things might have gone very differently. Speaking of Stalin's funeral, Malenkoff had called for a period of what he called "peaceful coexistence." Ike, meanwhile, had already scheduled a major speech and this seemed to be the perfect opportunity to reframe the entire East-West relationship. He turned to his speechwriter, Emmett Hughes, and said, "Here is what I would like to say. The jet plane that roars over your head costs three-quarters of a million dollars. That's more money than a man earning ten thousand dollars every year is going to make in his lifetime. What world can afford this sort of thing for long? We are in an armament's race. Or will it lead us? at worst, to atomic warfare at best, to robbing every people and nation on earth of the fruits of their own toil." Now Hughes and the rest of Ike's staff stared at the president in Slack jawed amazement. This was what the warrior hero wanted to say to our nuclear armed enemies. But Ike wasn't finished. Now, there could be another road before us. The road of disarmament. What does this mean? It means for everybody in the world, bread, butter, clothes, homes, hospitals, schools, all the good and necessary things for decent living. Now, later, as he began to block out the speech he would have to write, Hughes found himself not only stumped but actually shocked. Such anti-military rhetoric from the nation's greatest living military officer was not just a change in policy. It deeply affected the way Hughes saw Eisenhower himself. This confusion deepened since Secretary of State John Foster Delas had only just told reporters that we were not likely to get a good deal out of the North Koreans until we had "shown" before all of Asia are clear superiority by given the Chinese a hell of a licking. So how to square such belicos language in Ike's warrior image with the sentiments that Eisenhower had laid out for what was to be the first major speech of his presidency. Yet the ability to square that kind of circle was why he had been hired in the first place and so he got to work. Eisenhower himself was intricately involved with the wording of the speech, working with Hughes a full dozen individual drafts were written. Ike ended up calling the speech a chance for peace. John Foster Delas not only hated it, he told the president that he, Delas, considered such an initial show of weakness as downright dangerous. Winston Churchill unwormed personal terms with Eisenhower since America's entry into the war, also thought that an open peace offering was a serious mistake. But Eisenhower was determined to give the speech he wanted to give and give it he did. "The hunger for peace is too great. The hour in history too late, or any government to mock men's hopes of mere words and promises and gestures. We are prepared to reaffirm with the most concrete evidence. Our readiness to help build a world in which all peoples can be productive and prosperous. This government is ready to ask its people to join with all nations in devoting its substantial percentage of any savings achieved by real dishonement to a fund for world aid and reconstruction. We are ready in short to dedicate our strength to serving the needs rather than the fears of the world." It was a catastrophe. The night before the speech Eisenhower had fallen deathly ill, he was so physically sick that as soon as he'd finished his speech he stumbled and had to lie down. His delivery had been sweaty and uneven. He came across to many Americans as confused or uncommitted or even worse, scared. Now the Soviets were delighted, given the disparity in nuclear arsenals, Ike's call for unilateral disarmament sounded very appealing at first. In fact, they printed the entire transcript of the speech in Prophetia, but then as suddenly as it had developed, the moment had passed. Chris Chevin others angrily pointed out that the disarmament would mean inspections and that the entire ploy was in attempt by the United States to pinpoint the location of Soviet military assets. In the US, none of Ike's cabinet came out strongly in favor of this astonishing proposal, whether or not two nations with such opposing ideologies could have in fact reached a long-term peace agreement seems problematic, but the moment had been there and it had been real. But now it had gone. But the speech did clarify Ike's thinking about war in the thermonuclear age. He'd meant what he said about every missile purchase was done so at the cost of a hospital. He'd just watched Harry Truman conduct the largest ge militarization in human history and had no desire to pay for new conventional weapons to replace the ones that had just been scrapped. Through a combination of his time as the Allied commander in World War II, through the years at NATO and now as president, Eisenhower had already settled on what he thought the best course of action would be. The cost to develop the A-BOM had been exorbitant, but that investment had already been made. Ike realized that the only way for America to have its cake and eat it to was to continue to scale back large and expensive conventional forces. No it would be the relatively inexpensive A-BOM and now the H-BOM that would protect the America of the future, determined to avoid the cost of conventional rearmament, Eisenhower had in fact crippled his own options. There would be no more police actions or limited war as far as he was concerned. The consmit poker player had made it clear. Should America have to fight another war? She was going to go all in the entire nuclear arsenal, all of it, or nothing at all. The US in poker terms was now pot committed. For three months after the death of Stalin, a liberal crusader embarked on a mission to defang the terror and return the Soviet Union to the community of nations. Executions were halted. Many prisoners were released. Stalin's final purge, that of the Jews, simply failed to materialize. This humanitarian had kept Molotov's beloved wife alive during her imprisonment. This in itself was a feat of some measure and he was practically beaming as he called Molotov to his Kremlin office and presented him with a haggard, terribly aged but still living Paulina. He made statements that shook the very foundations of the Soviet system. He called for the reestablishment of private property to the end of collective farms, reforms of the corrupt and inefficient bureaucracies. He was so heady with power and freedom that he even advocated the reunification of Germany under whatever system of government it chose. It was widely known that this brilliant liberal reformer was not only the smartest of the post-Solun set, Molotov gauged his attitudes and ideas and called him "the man of the future." He was the only Soviet leader with the organizational skills, drive, ambition and phenomenal memory needed to have run a major US corporation. But the most amazing thing about this post-Solun champion of domestic human rights and international cooperation was the fact that the person in question was Leventree Beria. The man who murdered millions, who'd cruised the streets of Moscow late at night looking for pretty girls to be taken back to his private compound and raped, the man who had delivered Joseph Stalin his own atomic bomb five or even ten years before Western analysts thought such a thing was possible. possible. This man, this monster among mass murderers knew that he was more than just Stalin's policeman. Watching him coordinating security behind the scenes during the big three summits during World War II, Stalin had truly defined that the one thing Beria wanted above all else was for himself to be considered a statesman. Beria's whirlwind of proposed reforms, the loosening of the terror that he had for so long orchestrated. It was not a sudden conversion on his partner near death experience, causing him to rethink the evils he'd brought upon so many for so long. Beria did all of these things not out of mercy or compassion because Leventry Beria, like his fellow Georgian master, Joseph Stalin, was incapable of such emotions. Beria, giddy with power and filled with the sheer exuberance of having survived decades with Stalin proposed all of these reforms and more because he was determined to step into the sunlight of world opinion and personally dispel what was left of the thunderstorm that he and the world had lived through and which he himself had done so much to create. He had been content to let spineless malencofs sit on the throne for a while and the short fat bald clown Stalin's pet Nikita Krushchev would get what was coming to him once the dust had settled. And so this most hated man of them all, this utter genius of plotting, manufacturing evidence and assassination made the one mistake that would for one last time still prove fatal. On June 25th 1953, Beria was relaxing at his dacha, swaying in his hammock and humming old Georgian songs as he dreamed about his upcoming role as savior of all mankind. When he received a call to return to the Kremlin to attend a special meeting of the polypuro now renamed the presidium. His wife Nino was concerned but Beria hadn't the slightest care in the world. He assured that malencofs, Stalin's successor, was firmly on his side. At around 1 p.m., Beria entered the meeting as he had entered so many times before, surveying the familiar faces of malencofs, Molotov, Bulgarian, McCoyan, and Krushchev, who stood and opened the meeting. "The Lever entry Beria," said Krushchev, "was a traitor, a foreign agent, a sexual predator, and an enemy of the people." What's going on Nikita? Ask Beria still in shock. Why are you searching for fleas in my trousers? Krushchev turned to Malencof whom he had secretly recruited after Beria's flamboyant and shocking statements that would completely undermine the entire Soviet system. But Malencof, true to form, had no stomach for a coup. He did, however, manage to summon the courage to press a small buzzer recently installed underneath his table. And a few moments later, former Defense Minister Giorge Zhukov, conqueror of Berlin and second only to Stalin in the hearts of the Russian people, burst into the room in his uniform as "martial of the Soviet Union" his chest emblazoned with metals. Zhukov, who'd been demoted, disgraced, and humiliated by Stalin, who had broken arrivals, arrested Beria on the spot. Beria screamed for his private army of the NKVD secret police by Zhukov, as thorough here as he had been with the Nazis, had seen to it that they had been disarmed and replaced by red army regulars loyal to himself. Beria was escorted to a prison cell, alternately threatening and pleading, "Alteno Avail." From jail, he flooded his former ally Malencof with "please for his release" and then simply for his life. He pointed out that his organizational skills could still be useful to the party, as his months in his own dungeons stretched into half a year. He eventually slashed his price and offered to work on a collective farm, anything other than execution. Beria wrote the same groveling letters, the same professions of love and loyalty to Malencof, Krusechev and the Communist Party, and a based himself with the same desperate confessions that he himself had read without pity or remorse thousands of times. On December 22nd, six months after his arrest, Beria was tried by a secret political court and charged with treason and terrorism. He was found guilty and sentenced to immediate execution. He was taken to a holding cell, stripped to his underwear and manacled to the wall. His screams for mercy became so loud and so intolerable that someone shoved the towel into his mouth. Half naked, chained to a wall, his eyes bulging in terror. Beria watched as a Soviet general walk directly in front of him, raised his pistol, and shot Beria through the forehead. Krusechev the clown. Krusechev the idiot. Krusechev, the man who had had to smile as Stalin emptied his pipe onto his head to great hilarity among his hated rivals, had taken action. Russia was his. And terror, too, died with Beria. Yes, the gulag would continue, and an ever-present low-grade fear would permeate the Soviet Union until its final day, but the terror politics by murder had ended. Malenkov and Belganin would be forced out of office, but Malenkov would be given the job of running a hydroelectric plant in a remote province, a job that he seemed to enjoy enormously after all of his years in Stalin's nest of vipers. By January of 1954, a pattern had been established that would last for the next ten years, culminating in an event that came so near to Armageddon as to scare both sides into redefining their policies towards the other. Look, everyone's had the experience of spending a night away from home. 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The way to deter aggression is for the free community to be willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with the means of its own choosing." Now to this he added somewhat more opaquely, quote, "Now the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff can shape our military establishment to fit what is our policy instead of having to try to be ready to meet the enemy's many choices. That permits of a selection of military means instead of a multiplication of means. As a result, it is now possible to get and share more basic security at less cost." And that at its heart was what this new look was all about, saving money by drawing down large and expensive conventional forces in exchange for expanding the relatively cheap nuclear arsenal. Now his purely defensive posture, meaning as a means of preventing the invasion of the United States, this was sound enough policy attack us and we will immediately reply with every weapon in the nuclear inventory, an inventory growing dramatically in numbers and destructive power every single year. But like it or not, the U.S. was by now the great single defender of freedom around the world, a world under continuous assault by a Soviet system whose philosophy proves scientifically that capitalism was doomed and communism inevitable. The stakes were raised again when the Soviets detonated their first H-bomb, a 400-kiloton device code name Joe Four on August 12, 1953. Now as hydrogen bombs, when it was actually quite a fizzle, 25 times more powerful than Little Boy the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The first American H-bomb test, Ivy Mike, was by coincidence about 25 times more powerful than Joe Four. Now it would take more than two additional years for the Russians to successfully test RDS-37 on November 22, 1955, the first Soviet thermonuclear device to yield more than a megaton, but this was still only 10% of the 10.4 megatons that Ivy Mike delivered three years earlier. Now that same year, 1955, the Soviet Union and their newly conquered satellite states met in Warsaw, Poland to ratify the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, an alliance between Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and the Soviet Union. This Warsaw Pact, as it became known, was a direct response to NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and it resulted in a series of Atlantic nations, including Canada and the United States, forming a ring around the inland core of the socialist Eastern European mostly landlocked countries. This geographical situation would be reflected throughout the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact nations would focus on large numbers of tanks and armored personnel carriers with tactical air support. NATO's primary task would be to slow a Warsaw Pact attack long enough for supplies from the United States to arrive by Atlantic convoy. Now that meant the West would need a strong navy to protect those supply lines, an air force to slow-pack armor columns and achieve air superiority, and a relatively small but lethal NATO ground force, making up in quality what it lacked in quantity and backed by highly advanced attack aircraft. The main purpose of the relatively small Soviet navy would be to interdict NATO shipping lanes. NATO, there it was. A United States with very limited and inexpensive conventional forces backed by the promise of an all-out thermonuclear response. And that posture, for all intents and purposes, made the poker-minded Eisenhower the master of what was in effect history's largest bluff. Soviet aggression would be deterred or not deterred based on whether or not they believed Eich would deliver on his nuclear promise. Eich's strategy was that of a lifelong poker player who genuinely believed that every dollar spent on defense was a dollar of post-war prosperity wasted. So now, what of the Soviets? What would their position be faced with the wealth and power of the West and their overwhelming lead in nuclear weapons? How would they face this new look response? While as with the Americans, the Russian strategy would be determined not only by the relative strengths and weaknesses of the cards in the hand, but also the unique personality of the Soviet leader at that time. And here it seems history forced the Soviets to play the worst possible card. If Eisenhower was bringing bluff to the table, Krushchev would bring bluster. He really had no other choice. His Soviet Union retained their massive conventional forces of troops and armor, but unlike the West, which never had at any time the intent to begin aggression. Krushchev's Soviet system could not survive without it. Not only did the gleaming temptation of the capitalist West pose a perpetual existential threat to world communism. There was also the matter of maintaining control over their newly conquered satellite states. The first test of Kremlin resolved to maintain their socialist empire would not be long incoming. On February 25th, 1956, Nikita Krushchev, now first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, gave a top secret speech to the 20th Congress. He called it "on the cult of personality and its consequences." To say that it had quite an impact is to understate the case somewhat. There are reports that the content of the speech had caused several members of the audience to suffer heart attacks while still in the hall, and several more members of the 20th Congress reportedly committed suicide soon after. Because in an effort to consolidate power, Krushchev took the highly risky gamble of telling the members of the 20th Congress the truth. At least those parts of the truth that reflected well on Congress, Krushchev and the rest of the survivors of Stalin's inner circle. Krushchev launched a devastating attack on the Red Zare, Stalin. The infallible God King of the Workers' Paradise, a figure not only venerated on every street corner and in every textbook for the past 20 years, but one who had patiently and meticulously rewritten himself into Soviet history as Lenin's co-architect. No wonder there were heart attacks and suicides. For the atheistic members of the 20th Congress, as well as the Russian nation and the entire communist world, hearing that the great, wise, and infallible Stalin was in fact a tyrant and a murderer was by any reasonable measure actual blasphemy against the religion of heaven attainable on earth. One of the most shocking passages of Krushchev's speech revealed that of the 1966 delegates attending the 17th Congress in 1934, 1,108 were eventually arrested well more than half, and many of those people disappeared into the gulag or the basement of the Lubyanka and were never seen again. Krushchev won on to reveal that, quote, "of the 139 members and candidates of the Central Committee who were elected at the 17th Congress, 98 persons, i.e. 70 percent, were arrested and shot mostly in 1937 and 1938." And needless to say, this was not something that the Soviet government wanted advertised to the rest of the Russian nation or the socialist world. But a transcript of the speech had been obtained and the Eisenhower administration ordered that it be read "Verbate'em" to the peoples of the Soviet bloc via Radio Free Europe, a Western Radio Service broadcast throughout the Cold War and routinely jammed by communist intelligence services. The impact of Krushchev's secret speech simply cannot be overstated. When it became known in the United States, membership in the Communist Party dropped by 30,000 in a matter of a few weeks. It would eventually be a key element in the Sino-Soviet split, the separation of communist Russia and China into separate warring camps, which was a disaster for world socialism. But more immediately, it was the "goad" that launched the first attempt of a nation to escape from Soviet rule. By the summer of that same year, 1956, the United States was aggressively courting the satellite nations of the Soviet Empire, attempting to strip them away and undermine Soviet authority. At the end of World War II, Stalin had installed puppet governments in all of the Eastern European countries under Soviet control, the countries that would go on to forge the Warsaw Pack. In Hungary, the communist state was established under the leadership of Matthias Rokosi. True to form, Rokosi began a series of arrests and purges, thousands of innocent Hungarians were arrested, tried, and tortured. Major forced relocations also took place, which coupled with waste, corruption, and the inefficiency of communist economic policies, created high unemployment and general despair, a despair made even sharper by those war-torn countries on the western side of the Iron Curtain, who were rebuilding economies and starting to boom as a result of the American Marshall Plan. In June, a violent uprising of Polish workers was ruthlessly put down by the Soviets in July, Rokosi himself resigned after eight years of iron rule. Now combined with the repercussions from Christchurch's secret speech back in February, by July, resistance on the part of Hungarian students became open. On October 23, 20,000 protesters gathered at the statue of Hungarian patriot Joseph Bem. Peter Harris, president of the writers' union, read aloud a manifesto calling for Hungary's freedom from any outside political control. After this was read, the crowd began to sing the words from the band National Song, which includes the lines, "This we swear, this we swear, we will no longer be slaves." Someone then cut the communist insignia out of the center of the Hungarian flag, and this flag, with the center ripped out, became the symbol of the Hungarian uprising. The crowd then crossed the Danube to the parliament building, and by 6 p.m., the 20,000 protesters had swollen to over 200,000. At 8 p.m., the government broadcast a speech condemning the protests, and this hardline response caused some of the demonstrators to carry out one of their more minor demands by 930, a 30-foot high statue of Joseph Stalin built on the site of a bulldoze church was torn to the ground, leaving only his copper boots, which the Hungarians then filled with their torn flags. During this time, a delegation of protesters at the state-run radio station were detained inside the heavily fortified building. Now rumors spread that they'd been killed. When tear gas failed to disperse the ever more angry crowd, the thoroughly hated Hungarian secret police or AVH opened fire on the crowd killing many. Regular Hungarian army soldiers were called in to relieve the besieged building, but the troops. their communist red stars off of their caps incited with the crowd. Now the rulers in Moscow were well aware that trouble had been brewing and by 2am on the 24th, Russian tanks had entered Budapest. By noon, they were facing barricades erected by the Hungarian patriots. Most of their anger had been directed at the AVH secret police that had arrested and tortured so many of them for so long. On the 25th, AVH forces again fired into the crowd in front of the parliament building. The demonstrators, many of whom were now armed, began to shoot back. From the 24th through the 29th, there were 71 armed clashes spread over 50 communities in one of these conflicts, a fighter jet strafed civilians in the street. 17 people were killed and another 100 wounded. By October 30th, rebel units led by Bella Karali stormed the building housing the central committee of the Communist Party and executed dozens of suspected communists, security forces, and military personnel. By this time, Molotov cocktails were being thrown against Russian tanks. Finally on November 4th, the Soviet Red Army launched Operation World Wind, a full invasion that had Budapest completely surrounded by Russian armor before dawn. Fighting continued to gain ferocity as Hungarian army units sided with the uprising and began firing on Soviet troops. But Hungarian resistance to Russian might was clearly doomed when the last of the Freedom Fighter surrendered on November 11th, some 2,500 Hungarians had been killed and another 20,000 wounded. One week after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising, Khrushchev addressed an assembly of Western ambassadors at the Polish Embassy in Moscow. He said, "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side." And then he added, "We will bury you." Now Eisenhower was faced with a real dilemma, an unavoidable one brought on by the new look strategy of massive nuclear retaliation. During the Berlin blockade in Erlif, both sides wondered if America really had the stomach to trade an American city for Berlin. Now the question became, would Eisenhower trade Boston for Budapest or in other words, what option did Eisenhower have with regard to the Hungarian uprising other than all out nuclear assault? Khrushchev continued to bluster and threaten his way through the spring, summer and fall of 1957, constantly remarking on the numbers and power of Soviet thermonuclear missiles and joking to diplomats that he promised to not drop one on their private home if or when nuclear war finally began. So that was the mood of the United States on the night of October 3rd, 1957. A thermonuclear armed Soviet Union ruling its European empire by force and brutally suppressing any attempts at liberalization led by what many considered to be an irrational madman. By the next morning, October 4th, 1957, this mood took on an entirely new fever pitch when the Soviets announced the launch of Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite. Fifteen times a day, a Soviet sphere orbited above American homes announcing its arrival with a simple rhythmic beeping, the ticking of a digital clock whose time was running out before the communists made good on their threat to bury all of American. One month later, the Russians launched Sputnik II, a massive capsule weighing 1121 pounds and carrying a dog named Lyca. Lyca died from heat exhaustion a few hours after launch, but for the next 162 days, a dead dog flew over the heartland of the United States, entombed in a capsule about the size and weight of a 20-megaton thermonuclear weapon. You know, it's difficult for those of us who grew up in the space age to fully appreciate the significance of this. Certainly, Eisenhower openly stated that he never understood the panic that had spread throughout the country, but what Sputnik did in one fell swoop was to eliminate both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, those vast, unbreachable defenses upon which so much American confidence and sense of security was based. I've honestly tried to find a better term for it, but the fact is the best way to describe how Americans felt after Sputnik is to simply say that the entire country just freaked out. The feeling was mutual. For two years before Sputnik, the Soviets had experienced the exact same sensation. Near the beginning of his presidency, Eisenhower had agreed to a remarkable project proposed by Alan Dulles, the younger brother to Ike's Secretary of State, and head of the newly formed CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency. Edwin Land, inventor of the Land Polaroid Camera, had managed to persuade a reluctant Dulles that technology could fill in many of the gaps that human intelligence assets simply could not provide. The agency had contacted America's burgeoning aerospace companies about the feasibility of a radical aircraft for a radical mission. Would it be possible, they asked, to build an airplane that could fly so high that Soviet air defenses simply could not reach it or possibly even detect it? Lockheed's legendary chief designer, Kelly Johnson, said he thought it could be done. In March of '55, the agency wrote Lockheed a check for $22 million, the first million dollars being mailed directly to Kelly Johnson's home, so as not to slow the project down as the paperwork was being ironed out. Unbelievably, Lockheed agreed to build 20 of these aircraft, the first one to be delivered an incredible nine months later and the last 20 by November. Not only did Lockheed and Kelly Johnson pull off this engineering miracle, but they did it three and a half million dollars under budget largely due to the fact that Lockheed fully aware of Kelly Johnson's genius allowed him and his hand-picked staff to work on their own away from the main plant in their own little workshop of nasty smelling dirty tricks that Johnson had named the skunkworks. With the high altitude reconnaissance plane being delivered, project aquatone was a go. The aircraft Lockheed delivered was designated the U2 and its breathtaking high altitude performance caused the CIA to refer to it as the angel. But cruising at an astonishing 73,000 feet or the problems of fuel freezing in the extreme cold or boiling because of the low pressure had been painstakingly hammered out among many others meant that the U2 was a very persnickety and difficult bird to fly. Its pilots looking more like astronauts and their full pressure suits called it the dragon lady. It took form in a remote section of Nevada at a hard scrap of field out in the middle of nowhere, a non-descript desert wasteland known to the agency as Area 51. Now I personally have seen and inspected one of the original U2As and is a thousand hour pilot with a lifelong interest in aviation, two things about the dragon lady stood out immediately. First and most shocking was its size. The U2A is an astonishingly small aircraft. The second striking aspect to the U2 are its wings. In an era where airplane wings were becoming ever smaller and more swept back, the U2 has the very long, very thin high aspect ratio wings of a glider, elegant tapering wings with just the slightest backward sweep. Sweeped wings were what you wanted when you wanted to fly fast but the dragon lady was never a speed demon nor was she meant to be. But at 70,000 feet, she could fly over the Soviet Union with her refrigerator size, top secret camera, and return images of stunning clarity as it slowly and hotly overflowing whatever top secret Russian installation it shows. Eisenhower was well aware of the diplomatic and possible military repercussions of American military aircraft overflying the most sensitive Soviet assets more or less at will. But I desperately needed the U2 in order for him to be able to maintain his bluff. The U2 reconnaissance flights proved conclusively that the U.S. was still far ahead in terms of nuclear weapons but that the Russians were catching up fast and all of this before the double exclamation points caused by the launches of Sputniks 1 and 2. And Soviet air defenses were increasing too. Rapidly. When coming to a decision on whether or not to deploy this revolutionary asset, Ike as usual had an ace up his sleeve. Just as the U2 was nearing completion, Ike had traveled to Geneva for his first summit meeting with the new Russian leadership. There, he managed to pull off a private pre-Summit conversation with Soviet Marshall Zhukov, Ike's counterpart as military commander of the Red Army. Zhukov, who had been humiliated and nearly executed by Stalin, had provided the muscle for not only Khrushchev's coup against Beria and Malenkov, he would also go on to rescue him a second time in a plot the top of Khrushchev that came very close to succeeding. Ike remembered Zhukov from the war as a cocky little rooster, but that was a decade before. Now, Zhukov. Koff was subdued, almost cowed. Things are not as they seem, he said, confiding in the man who'd fought Germany on the Western front while he had attacked it from the east. As was so often the case with the Soviet Union, real power could be hidden behind innocuous titles, conversely, those visibly holding the top office were often there merely for distraction and decoration. So it was a Geneva, when Eisenhower first met the Russian delegation ostensibly headed by Bulgarian. But it didn't go unnoticed that Khrushchev had literally shoved his supposed superior out of the way as they entered their limousine. And Eisenhower quickly realized that it was, in fact, Khrushchev, who wielded power in the Byzantine world of Soviet politics. When the actual summit opened on Wednesday, July 21st, Ike presented the stunned Russians with a Heads-I-Win tails you lose offer. Starting with the observation that in the terrible new world of thermonuclear weapons, the great threat and the great chance for cataclysmic error centered around the idea of a surprise attack, this usem or lusom equation was one of the pillars of the Cold War stalemate. To eliminate this great risk, President Eisenhower surprised not only the Soviets, but also his British and French allies by proposing a policy he called "open skies." Much side would allow unlimited overflights of the other's territory, the ideological equivalent of Reagan's trust but verify policy still three decades into the future. Ike's ace was that he had the U2 almost ready to fly. If the Soviets agreed to open skies, he wouldn't need it. And if he did not, the Onus on secret overflights would be on the Russians. Now as if to underscore the significance of this peace-overture, the instant Eisenhower finished his speech, the building was hit by what Ike later called the loudest lightning that he had ever heard the strike plunging the hall into darkness. Well, I expected to make a hit, but not that much of one he said through his famous grin as the room erupted in laughter and applause. Bulgarian immediately praised the proposal, saying that it would get a serious and sympathetic review once the delegation returned to Moscow. But Eisenhower's elation did not last more than a few moments when for the first time he found himself alone with Krushchev. "I don't agree with the chairman," he said in reference to Bulgarian. Long accustomed to being the object of scorn and derision among his own colleagues, Krushchev nevertheless had a fierce, overpowering sense of pride especially when dealing with the Americans whose technological and economic successes stroked Krushchev's already massive inferiority complex. "Nyet, nyet," he muttered later, wagging his finger in Eisenhower's direction. Krushchev, who grew up as a peasant working collective farms and then coal mines, deployed a particularly scatological analogy which the Russian interpreter politely rephrased as "you're trying to look into our bedrooms." When Eisenhower responded, this would free Krushchev's own country to detect an imagined NATO attack. Krushchev replied, "Who are you trying to fool?" In our eyes, this is a very transparent espionage device. You could hardly expect us to take this seriously. His momentary hope for a way out of the nuclear impasse completely doused. The president of the United States returned to Washington and ordered the first U2 spy missions to proceed. As the 50s hit their stride, Americans were gleefully making up for the long years of deprivation caused by the Depression and the war. Television sets Hula Hoops, houses in the suburbs, and big, two-tone V8 American land yachts complete with white wall tires, gleaming chrome, and sleek tail fins were selling like hot cakes. Now, all of this would have made for complete euphoria had it not been for that nagging beep, beep, beep, bling overhead, reminding everyone that all of this prosperity, all of this prepaid fun could quite literally be over in a flash. Now back on July 28, 1955, just three days after returning from the Geneva Summit, the president had set aside a half-hour for a briefing on the idea of delivering an H-bomb not by the reliable but vulnerable bomber, but rather by mounting one on top of what would soon be known as one of the most iconic terms from the Cold War, the ICBM or Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. Up until this point, the nuclear Sunday punch had been in the hands of Air Force General Curtis Lemais bomber force. It was Lemais who had ordered the high altitude B-29s to come in low and fire bomb Japan into submission in World War II. His superbly trained and equipped strategic air command had a striking insignia. It was a steel gauntlet, gripping a lightning bolt and an olive branch against a clear blue sky, and the motto "Peace is our profession." Now, in question by a reporter about the apparent incongruity of such a slogan, describing the most awesome instrument of war in the history of mankind, Lemais insisted that peace was indeed the strategic air command's profession, war he continued, it's just something we do for kicks. Air Force official Trevor Gardner, who was presenting the ICBM briefing, told Ike and his cabinet that the Russians were well on their way to developing this technology and when implemented, Soviet H-bombs could hit anywhere in the US with perhaps 15 minutes warning. Now in an earlier test, a mock evacuation of Washington with three hours advanced warning generated nothing but complete gridlock. In fact, the ability to evacuate American cities more quickly was one of the main drivers of Eisenhower's signal domestic achievement, the interstate highway system. The implementation of ICBMs completely recalibrated both sides' calculations. If the Russians can fire a thousand a day and we can fire a thousand a day back at them, then I personally would want to take off for the Argentine, said Ike. That had been 1955. The following year, Eisenhower had written a close confidant that there was terrible danger in "the assumption that we're opposed by a people who think as we do with regard to the value of human life, but they do not, as shown in many incidents from the last war. I could face the vulgar, boastful Soviet leader, Geneva, and he had not liked what he'd seen. We have no basis for thinking that they have hored destruction as we do continued Eisenhower. In the event that they should decide to go to war, the pressure on them to use atomic weapons in a sudden blow would be extremely great. So with the failure of the open skies initiative and the arrival of Sputnik in 1957, it was clear that the Russians were indeed in hot pursuit of just a capability. And so Eisenhower had calculated that despite the possibility of a major diplomatic breach, if not all out war, the information gathered by the YouTube program was worth the risk. Operation AquaTone's first two missions had begun on July 4, 1956, and directly overflue both the Kremlin in Moscow and the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad. Now surprisingly, the aircraft had indeed been detected by Soviet radar and early. Unsurprisingly, MIG fighters sent to intercept it could only watch the Dragon Lady fly serenely away thousands of feet higher than their operational ceiling. Five flights were flown before July 10th when the Soviets filed a formal protest. They did this in secret, however, despite the sensational propaganda opportunities that were presented, these were outweighed by the fact that a public announcement of these illegal transgressions would be an admission that America could fly over Soviet territory at will, and there was not a damn thing the Russians could do about. And so the days and months passed. The Hungarian uprising brought brief hope and then when crushed, even deeper gloom, to hike in his advisors. In 1959, Eisenhower tried again to break the East-West impasse by inviting Chris Jeff to visit the United States and after touring the country, meeting him privately at Camp David. Chris Jeff was surprised and delighted by this offer. He went more or less where he pleased for several days in America, having a wonderful time telling his American hosts how quickly his Soviet Union was catching up economically and how it would soon surpass them. The only dark moment of the trip was when Chris Jeff entered an epic sulk after being told security measures would prevent him from visiting Disneyland. Upon his arrival at Camp David, things were noticeably tense until I had the idea to present his grandchildren, which softened Chris Jeff's mood dramatically. The Soviet leader had once again been putting the squeeze on Berlin, which he called the testicles of the West, but with the ice broken at Camp David, a future summit to be held in Paris was promised, and the Russian pressure threatening another blockade of Berlin was eased. With this sudden thaw, Chris Jeff was spent to Washington from Camp David at 80 miles an hour in order to make a television address to the American people. "Goodbye, good luck," he said, and when he reported to the Supreme Soviet about his American adventure, he was interrupted 50 times by thunderous applause. With both sides optimistically awaiting the Paris summit, it began to look like Ike was going to get his peace agreement just as his second term was coming to a close. The U-2 flights, although much scaled back, continued into 1960. On April 9th of that year, a U-2 crossed into Soviet airspace, but the Russians did not utter a word of protest. With the Paris summit just around the corner and the very real possibility of a concrete treaty with real numbers very much in sight, an agonized Eisenhower weighed the CIA's constant requests for one final flight over Soviet ICBM sites. President Eisenhower did not want to risk spoiling his chance with Khrushchev. General Eisenhower badly needed to know just how serious a threat he would be negotiating against, so after much anguish, he authorized a final U-2 mission before closing down the program. Operation Grand Slam would be the 24th and the most ambitious flight of the entire U-2 program. Passing over two Soviet ICBM sites, the flight would cover some 3,800 miles before terminating in Norway. They chose who they thought would be their most reliable and experienced pilot. His name was Francis Gary Powers. Now weather delays caused the flight to be delayed until the morning of May 1st, 1960, that's May Day, a major communist holiday and coincidentally, the radio call for an in-flight emergency. Powers flew the tiny, delicate dragon lady out of Pakistan, climbed a 70,000 feet and turned north for the Ural Mountains. Air-Sverred Lobsk, radar from an improved surface-to-air missile installation, locked onto the American spy plane in a few moments later. A Sam roared out of its launcher, leaving a feathery white smoke-trill high, high into the Russian sky. Powers saw a bright flash followed by a dull thud, as the dragon lady began to come apart and begin her long, slow-fall to Russian soil. Powers blew the canopy, but was sucked out of the aircraft before he was able to trigger the self-destruct mechanism built into everyone of the U-2 airframes. Now needless to say, this public relations catastrophe put both Eisenhower and Krushchev into opposing equally embarrassing positions. Krushchev very badly wanted his Paris summit, but the more he thought about it, the more enraged he became. He took it as a personal insult. What's more, he realized that he had been handed a gift he simply could not refuse. The shooting down of Francis Gary Powers was more than a great propaganda photo op. It had, with a single blow, destroyed Eisenhower's worldwide reputation as a straight shooter, a man as good as his word, and with it, went to America's credibility and previously unimpeachable moral integrity. Mike, as fundamentally honest as any politician in history, wanted to simply come out and admit the truth. Krushchev seemed to be letting him off the hook by wondering aloud if the president had personally been aware of or authorized the flight. Perhaps suggested Krushchev had been renegade American militarists. Against his better judgment, Mike decided on a denial. The White House issued a statement saying that a civilian weather aircraft had accidentally violated Soviet airspace and crashed in Russian territory. Now it was Krushchev's turn to play a hidden ace. When he announced the shooting down of the U-2, he had not made any mention of the fate of the pilot. Now that the United States had not only over flown the Soviet Union but went on to deny it publicly, Krushchev stunned the world and mortified the Americans by producing Francis Gary Powers himself, very much alive and very clearly not a civilian weatherman. Eisenhower then had a State Department spokesman trot out a paper thin lie. Yes, this was an American spy plane and it probably violated Soviet airspace but quote, "There was no authorization for any such flight." Despite his ever-growing fury, Krushchev gave Mike a final chance to come clean and apologize. He didn't do it. Instead, the White House issued the fourth different story in five days. Yes, the flight had been flown under broad presidential authority to gather information but that blanket authority had been issued previously. Eisenhower was still trying to cling to a final thread of plausible deniability. It was, he later said, by far, the worst decision of his life. Although incensed at the overflight, it was Eisenhower's public denials that finally drove Krushchev out of his wits according to his son, Sergey, who went on to say that his father saw this as a betrayal by General Eisenhower, a man who had referred to him as a friend, a man with whom he had only recently sat at the same table, a betrayal that struck him in his very heart. His father said Sergey Krushchev would never forgive Eisenhower for the U-2. And although this was undoubtedly true, there would not be a chance to test Krushchev's word. Although both sides did end up traveling to Paris, an indignant Krushchev sought to it that the summit fell apart before it had even begun. Four months after the U-2 catastrophe, John F. Kennedy beat Eisenhower's vice president Richard Nixon by a razor thin margin. The election of 1960 was so close that it seems virtually certain that Nixon would have won Handley had opted not to fly Operation Grand Slam. But he had opted to fly it. And worse, he went against his own moral compass and lied about it, not once, but four times. His presidency was over. The country would now be in the hands of a young, energetic, but inexperienced president, facing a newly communist Cuba 90 miles to the south, and a mad as a hornet Soviet leader who had sworn to never trust the Americans again. The Cold War, what we saw, is written and presented by Bill Whittle, produced by Robert Sterling, directed by Jonathan Hay. Executive producer is Jeremy Boring. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our associate producer is Katie Swinerton. Post-production producer Alex Singaro, story producer Jared Sashel, edited by Matthew Scheller, audio recorded by Mike Coramina, original music and mixed by Kyle Perron, designed by Cynthia Angulo. The Cold War, what we saw, is an esoteric radio theater production copyright, esoteric radio theater 2020. [BLANK_AUDIO]