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“From the particular vantage point of Belgrade, it is evident that [the] noncommitted world now stands at [a] very crucial parting of the ways,” wrote Ambassador George Kennan. “If some relaxation of over-all world tensions is not achieved, it seems to me very likely that there will be a serious split between that group of unaligned nations which is violently anti-Western and anti-American and that which would like to preserve decent relations with the West.”

The president was coming off the disaster of the Bay of Pigs. If he had not been the one to propose this summit originally, he would probably have postponed the event. The stakes for Kennedy were even higher: unlike most summit meetings, where some agreements have been worked out beforehand, the two leaders were arriving with nothing but a vague agenda, and it was possible that Kennedy would walk away with nothing but the echoes of rhetoric. He clearly could have used something more than generalizations about what to expect, but as the State Department rightly told him: “In an exchange of this type, particularly with so outspoken a leader as Khrushchev, it is not practicable to expect that the course of the talks can be charted in advance.”

Such analyses, as realistic and thoughtful as they were, were not constructed to fill the young president with immense confidence. Of course, Kennedy’s advisers were not supposed to be trainers, massaging him and whispering encouragement to him. Yet many of the documents prepared for Kennedy were marked by a startling defensiveness and a fear of the future. These experts seemed not to understand that the Soviet Union had much more to fear in the future than did the Western democracies.

In February the president had met with his top advisers on the Soviet Union. He asked Llewellyn Thompson, the astute ambassador to the Soviet Union, what had to be done to win the war against Soviet communism. The ambassador had not replied with an arcane discussion of weapon systems, covert actions, and propaganda campaigns. He had talked about the human spirit. “First, and most important, we must make our own system work,” Thompson said. “Second, we must maintain the unity of the West. Third, we must find ways of placing ourselves in new and effective relations to the great forces of nationalism and anti-colonialism. Fourth, we must, in these ways and others, change our image before the world so that it becomes plain that we and not the Soviet Union stand for the future.”

An immense question was just what approach the young president would take with the Soviet Union. There was fear in some quarters that he might overreact to the Soviet challenge, a fear expressed most articulately and passionately by the most unexpected of spokesmen. In his farewell address President Eisenhower had said, “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Critics would attempt to turn Eisenhower into a critic of this military-industrial alliance, but he was warning against only what he considered its potential excesses. “We recognize the imperative need for this development,” he said. “Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.” Eisenhower had overseen an immense military buildup, yet he saw that the cold war was an endurance contest in which economic strength was as creditable a weapon as mass deterrence. He believed Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric and feared that the new president would listen to the blandishments of the defense contractors encouraging him to build military systems of unprecedented expense and complexity while attempting to cut taxes. Eisenhower had warned in a campaign speech that “when the push of a button may mean obliteration of countless humans, the president of the United States must be forever on guard against any inclination on his part to impetuosity; to arrogance; to headlong action; to expediency; to facile maneuvers; even to the popularity of an action as opposed to the rightness of