ALTERNATE HISTORY: The Second Kennedy-Khrushchev summit that never happened.

In my novel, ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964, I detail the second Kennedy-Khrushchev summit that never happened. As recounted through the eyes of Marine Colonel Martin Maddox, a member of the President’s national security staff, this fateful meeting occurs in the aftermath of multiple international crisis in the spring of ’64, including the American invasion of Cuba, a result of the revelation that the Castro government was involved in the failed attempt on the President’s life in Dallas, Texas, the preceding November. That invasion sets off a series of events that lead the super powers to the brink of World War III, a calamity averted at the last moment by an agreement to have the leader of the United States and the Soviet Union meet face to face in New Delhi, India. Of course, as revealed in the excerpt below, there are complications.

Excerpt:

We arrived in New Delhi early on the day before the summit was scheduled to begin; no sooner had the President was settled in at the American embassy to catch up on some much-needed sleep, a whole new problem arose. It seemed that in their capacity as hosts of the summit, the Indian government had not just invited the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union to attend, but had also extended a blanket invitation to all nations with a grievance to send a representative. In all the rush to get to the meeting with the Soviet leaders, this fact had been overlooked. Now we were greeted with the news that Chinese Premier Chou En Lai had arrived by plane only an hour after Air Force One had touched down to represent the North Koreans and the North Vietnamese.

The presence of the #2 man in Red China at the summit put most of the President’s men in a panic; since 1949, as far as the USA was concerned, the only legitimate leader of China was Chaing Kai-chek, currently enjoying his exile on Taiwan. So adamant were we in this, that in 1954, then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had reportedly refused to shake Chou’s hand during the Geneva conference that settled the partition of Indo-China. Then there were the Chinese troops Mao and Chou had sent to aid their fellow Communists during the Korean War; I’d had the pleasure of meeting a few of them personally in 1951. Any Democratic President who so much as thought about acknowledging the existence of Red China was opening himself to charges of appeasement, especially in an election year.

Behind the scenes, Secretary Rusk was most insistent that the President not be in the same room with Chou, if necessary, he should be prepared to simply get on Air Force One and leave rather than give any recognition to the Communist government in Peking. Some of the others, like my old boss, McGeorge Bundy, advised the President to simply ignore Chou and his presence at the summit. A tired John F. Kennedy listened to all this and then called his brother in Washington, who told him it was too great a risk in an election year to acknowledge Chou, he would be handing the Republicans an issue to run against him; just let it wait until the second term.

As soon as he concluded the call to his brother, the President then called in Secretary Rusk and instructed him to call the Indian Foreign Minister and request that he serve as an intermediary between the American delegation and the Chinese Premier - this was asking something of the Indians because of the short war they’d fought with Red China in the fall of ‘62 over some piece of territory in the Himalayas, but as President Kennedy pointed out, the Indians had taken it upon themselves to host the summit, so it was the least they could do under the circumstances. To their credit, our hosts readily agreed, settling the matter for the moment and allowing the summit to proceed.

While the President was able to sleep off some of his considerable jet lag in a nice bed inside the embassy, I was up all night preparing reports on the situation in Cuba among many other things for the President to take into his first meeting with the Soviets in the morning. As of the first week of June, we had over 125,000 combatants engaged in pacifying the island; organized resistance was supposed to have ended two weeks before, but units of Castro’s forces refused to give up and even though our casualty rate was down dramatically from the first week of the invasion, we were still losing at a minimum a half dozen men a day down there. As of the 10th of June, there was no real governing authority in Cuba other than General Abrams; Castro himself was being held under guard in the Guantanamo Bay hospital, his brother Raul had reportedly sought sanctuary with Andreyev while Che Guevara had escaped back to Argentina.

All of this was in the report I handed the President in the morning as he left the embassy for the site of the summit, an old 300 room British colonial era hotel called The Burnham. It was a massive building, a relic from the days of the Raj and perfect to host a superpower summit. The sessions between the Soviets and us were to be held in the main dining room, an ornate area with a high chandelier dangling from the ceiling over the long tables where the delegations were to sit. John F. Kennedy made sure he was there a good 45 minutes ahead of schedule, and though he had been complaining of back pain earlier, he made it a point to jump from the back seat of limo when the car pulled up in front of the Burnham, vigorously shaking the hand of the Indian Foreign Minister for all the news cameras to record.

The self-assured public image the President was projecting was helped immeasurably when the Soviet delegation turned out to be late; there was much speculation as to the condition of Nikita Khrushchev after seemingly being AWOL throughout most of the crisis. The Soviet leader we observed enter the Burnham was noticeably heavier and moving slower as he ambled through the same doors the President walked through earlier. The biggest contrast between the American President and the Soviet Chairman was the entourage who followed close on Khrushchev’s heels. At this time, we had no knowledge whatsoever of the recent events behind the walls of the Kremlin, but something appeared different here, as Brezhnev, Kosigyn, Mikoyan and Gromyko, among others, shadowed their supreme leader. Our Kremlin experts had pages of notes ready by the end of the day.

Though Khrushchev appeared older and slower at first, his old aggressiveness came back the minute he walked into the hotel, again becoming the man who’d greeted President Kennedy at Vienna in their first summit almost three years to the day in 1961. He marched across the lobby with his hand thrust forward for the President to grasp, and then with his finger jabbing the air, made it clear through an interpreter, that as far as the Soviet Union was concerned the Americans were solely responsible for the tense circumstances which had made the summit necessary. Despite all the nastiness inside the Kremlin, Khrushchev and the rest of the gang put on the tough guy act when confronting their enemies from the West. When the President finally got a word in, he suggested “it took two to tango,” and Khrushchev shot back that they were most certainly not there to dance.

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