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When Khrushchev arrived, he dispensed quickly with the inevitable politesse of diplomatic gatherings and began to lecture Kennedy like a professor trying to force some knowledge into a stubborn student. The Soviet leader led the American president on a journey that swept from the feudal past, through the French Revolution, to the Soviet present. “Once an idea is born, it cannot be chained or burned,” Khrushchev said with the conviction of his ideology. “History should be the judge in the argument between ideas.”

However much Kennedy’s health dragged him down, at moments like this he was able to will himself into a sharp focus. He did not challenge Khrushchev’s sweep of history by suggesting that others might view communism as a journey back into history’s dungeons, not the triumphant march of the future. Such a response might have been emotionally satisfying, but this was not a debate in which he would be scored on the points he made, and he had a crucial agenda that he had come to promote.

Instead of confronting Khrushchev, Kennedy suggested that this struggle of ideas had to be conducted “without affecting the vital security interests of the two countries.” The Russian leader took that to mean that “the United States wanted the USSR to sit like a schoolboy with his hands on his desk. The Soviet Union supports its ideas and holds them in high esteem. It cannot guarantee that these ideas will stop at its borders.”

Kennedy was a student of history, but the past had taught him different lessons. When he finally got Khrushchev alone, he tried to impart his own vivid sense of history to the Soviet leader. Khrushchev might believe that feudalism led to capitalism, and capitalism to communism. As Kennedy saw it, history was not made up of abstract movements but of human lives moving through time. The president pointed out that history was not won without immense costs in blood and turmoil. He talked of all the “great disturbances and upheavals throughout Europe” at the time of the French Revolution, and all the “convulsions, even interventions by other countries,” at the time of the Russian Revolution. The president admitted that he had “made a mis-judgment with regard to the Cuban situation,” and that the reason the two of them were sitting here today was “to introduce greater precision in these judgments so that our two countries could survive this period of competition without endangering their national security.” Khrushchev countered that when a subject people rose up to throw off a tyrant, that was not the hand of Moscow at work but the will of a subjugated people. The Russian leader paraded some of the more obvious examples of Western hypocrisy, including the support of the fascist Franco in Spain.

Khrushchev did not seem interested in this “greater precision” if it meant signing new agreements in Vienna. He was full of endless Marxist platitudes and bromides, while Kennedy was an American technician, attempting to strap a few more safeguards onto the machine of death that the two leaders controlled—or perhaps more accurately, that controlled the two leaders.

After lunch on the second and final day, Kennedy asked to talk to Khrushchev again in private. This was his last chance to achieve at least some of that “greater precision.” Berlin was arguably the most dangerous place in the world. There, where the Soviet bloc and the West touched so menacingly, was the tinder to set off World War III. Khrushchev could pretend that history was a dove that rode on the Soviet shoulder, but the people of East Germany were turning away from the Communist future by tens of thousands a year, escaping into the free city of West Berlin. The Russian leader could suggest, as he did to Kennedy, that the famous American kitchen in which he had debated Nixon was unlike any kitchen in America, but the West was a siren song and the walls around the Soviet Union and its satellites were there to keep people in more than to keep spies out. Khrushchev needed to