Dr. Sergei Khrushchev Discusses Cold War and Kennedy

Dr. Sergei Khrushchev, son of the late Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, addressed a packed audience Feb. 19 in the Boyd Recital Hall as part of the 40th Anniversary of the Hollybush Summit lecture series.

Though he didn't spend the entire hour-long speech addressing Hollybush, Khrushchev described the 1967 summit between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Kosygin as momentous.

"One of the big events of the Cold War happened here," he said.

Now an American citizen, Khrushchev said that while no actual accords grew out of the summit it provided an early step in face-to-face dialogue between leaders of the nuclear powers and helped lay groundwork for diffusing distrust.

Recalling the most dramatic single event of the Cold War -- the 1962 standoff between his father and President John F. Kennedy known as the Cuban Missile Crisis - Khrushchev said it might have been allayed, and possibly avoided, through such simple dialogue as occurred during the Hollybush Summit.

He said the impasse, in which Kennedy advised the Soviet leader in the strongest possible language to cease construction of nuclear weapon sites in Cuba, boiled up out of distrust between the emerging superpowers and not from a clash of ideologies.

"The Soviet Union wanted to be recognized as an equal but the U.S. did not want to recognize them as equals," he said.

Khrushchev said the Missile Crisis grew out of the botched Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961 and a belief among many Soviets that the U.S. would again attempt to foster an overthrow of the Cuban government.

The missile crisis was resolved, he said, with a relatively simple but weighty agreement: "We will take the missiles out, you will not invade Cuba."

A senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, Khrushchev charmed the audience in a still-thick Russian accent with stories about his father and Kennedy and even recalled meeting Joseph Stalin once in Red Square.

Recalling his father's removal from government less than one year after Kennedy's assassination, Khrushchev noted: "It was the first time a leader of the Soviet Union was ousted without being executed, along with his family, so I was lucky too."