Nikita Khrushchev Quotes
The thought sometimes - the unpleasant thought sometimes creeps up on me here as to whether perhaps Khrushchev was not invited here to enable you to sort of rub him in your sauce and to show the might and the strength of the United States so as to make him sort of... so as to make him shaky at the knees. If that is so, then if I came - if it took me about 12 hours to get here, I guess it'll just - it'll take no more than about 10½ hours to fly back.
Khrushchev, Nikita. Speech at a civic dinner. 19 Sept. 1959, Los Angeles. Published in Khrushchev in America, Crosscurrents Press, 1960.
At the end of WWII there was much tension between Russia and the Anglo-American alliance. This plan was developed but never implemented. See {613195} for Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s description of the invasion idea.
Kennedy was a relatively new president and the Bay of Pigs Operation was prepared and planned by the CIA under the Eisenhower Administration. The president assumed that the intelligence was correct and there would be an uprising of the Cuban people when as soon as the landing took place. That was all wrong and the Cubans actually supported Castro and the operation was a disaster. Kennedy never trusted the CIA after that.
It was interesting that Reagan as a political presidential Republican candidate would criticize the foreign policy of the previous Republican Party. However the policy was created by President Richard Nixon who had but a small reservoir of support after Watergate.
During the Cold War and afterwards many Americans attributed the problems we were having with the Soviet Union emenated from the fact that they were Communists, and our focus was anti-communism. Kennen, however argued that it was not Communism that was the cause of the Aggression of the Soviet Union. It was an extension of the Russian Culture. After the Soviet Union collapsed, and Communism was rejected by the Russians, we still had a great deal of Russian aggression and Foreign Policy problems with Russia. Kennan was right. It was the Russian culture, history, values and traditions that were the primary cause of most of the problems with Russia.
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and as chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev stunned the communist world with his denunciation of Stalin's crimes and began De-Stalinization. He sponsored the early Soviet space program, and enactment of relatively liberal reforms in domestic policy. After some false starts, and a near-nuclear war over Cuba, he conducted successful negotiations with the United States to reduce Cold War tensions. His proclivity toward recklessness led the Kremlin leadership to strip him from power, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier.
