Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [73]
“The hell is Khrushchev up to, Jack?”
“I dunno, Bobby. He told me they weren’t interested in Cuba. He said that Castro was a kinda wild card.”
“Yeah. The bastard lied to you.”
Kennedy and Khrushchev had met, for the first and only time, at a summit conference in Vienna in June 1961. No two men could be less alike, yet they had one thing in common: neither was quite what he seemed.
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was pudgy, porky, bald, and sixty-seven years old. He had been born a peasant, had been a shepherd boy. He liked to boast that he hadn’t learned to read until he was twenty-five. He had extra chins where his neck should have been. When he scowled, he looked like an angry butcher. When he smiled, all chins and gappy teeth, he looked clownish, like the kind of bit-part actor who plays the Cheerful Village Idiot in film comedies. His moods were volatile, unpredictable: the chubby, playful uncle one minute; a ranting, bulge-eyed, desk-banging horror the next. In the Western media, he was often a figure of fun and was a joy to cartoonists.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, by almost ridiculous contrast, was the youthful-faced, smoothly barbered, sharply suited son of a self-made millionaire. He’d studied at Harvard and in London, then won medals for his exploits as a torpedo boat commander in World War II. He’d been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a book called Profiles in Courage. He was also the first (and so far the only) Roman Catholic U.S. president. His predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was an aging, uncontroversial, golf-playing ex-general; Kennedy was all about newness and dynamism and bringing America out of the shadows of war into the bright sunlight of . . . well, something different. He was glamorous. His wife, Jacqueline, was also very glamorous. (Jack and Jackie; how could you resist that lovely alliterative coupling, or the golden children it produced?)
From another angle, through a different lens, each of these men becomes something else.
Beneath the fat and the bad suits, behind the histrionics, Khrushchev was as hard as a drill bit and as cunning as a lavatory rat. During World War II, he’d led guerrilla resistance to the German invasion of the Ukraine. He’d clawed his way to the top of the Soviet leadership, a climb with treachery and murder perched on every step. He knew when to lie low, to get forgotten, and when to make his move. He’d survived — and no mean feat, this, because many hadn’t — the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. No one had given him a leg up, a helping hand. In his homely peasant fashion, he’d put his short arm around the shoulders of rivals, who then suddenly disappeared. When Stalin died, there Khrushchev was, somehow first secretary of the Communist Party. The gleeful mourners around Stalin’s coffin looked up and found Nikita in charge. How’d that happen? they asked themselves, in Russian.
Kennedy had the style and bearing of a New England aristocrat, but his father, Joe Kennedy, had amassed the family fortune by ruthless swindling and smuggling whiskey. Underneath the cool and the tailored suits, and beyond the photo shoots, JFK was, physically, a mess. He was — forgive the cliché; I like the word riddled — riddled by disease. He suffered from bone complaints — osteoporosis and osteoarthritis — which forced him to wear a back brace; he could walk only short distances without experiencing pain. He had a sexually transmitted venereal disease. (I’d like to think that he caught it in Cuba, but that’s maybe too neat.) He suffered from Addison’s disease, which is a rare dysfunction of the adrenal glands. It lent his face a permanent yellowish tan. Colitis affected his bowels, noisily. He had high cholesterol and asthma. And several allergies. For these reasons he was pumped full of drugs much of the time. His weight and the shape of his face varied according