The Vienna Summit and Its Importance in International History (The Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series)

At the beginning of June 1961, the tensions of the Cold War were supposed to abate as both sides sought a resolution. The two most important men in the world, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, met for a summit in Vienna. Yet the high hopes were disappointed. Within months the Cold War had become very hot: Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall and a year later he sent missiles to Cuba to threaten the United States directly. Despite the fact that the Vienna Summit yielded barely any tangible results, it did lead to some very important developments. The superpowers came to see for the first time that there was only one way to escape from the atomic hell of their respective arsenals: dialogue. The "peace through fear" and the "hotline" between Washington and Moscow prevented an atomic confrontation. Austria successfully demonstrated its new role as neutral state and host when Vienna became a meeting place in the Cold War. In The Vienna Summit and Its Importance in International History international experts use new Russian and Western sources to analyze what really happened during this critical time and why the parties had a close shave with catastrophe. -- Provided by publisher Introduction: the Vienna Summit and its importance in international history / Günter Bischof, Stefan Karner, Barbara Stelzl-Marx Summitry in the twentieth century: an overview / David Reynolds "The first test of [. . .] détente will be the Berlin negotiation": Berlin, disarmament, and the 1960 Paris Summit / Richard D. Williamson "Vienna, a city that is symbolic of the possibility of finding equitable solutions": John F. Kennedy and his European summitry in early June 1961 / Günter Bischof and Martin Kofler Great Britain and the Vienna Summit of June 1961 / Anne Deighton Paris as beneficiary of the unsuccessful Vienna Summit / Georges-Henri Soutou Soviet-American relations in the early 1960s / Vladimir Pechatnov Between pragmatism and ideology: the U.S.-Soviet negotiating process in the Khrushchev era / Olga Pavlenko Casting a long shadow over Vienna: the Chinese factor in the Vienna Summit / Michail Prozumenshchikov Laos and the Vienna Summit / Lawrence Freedman Two days of drama: preparation and execution of the Vienna Summit / Barbara Stelzl-Marx A difficult education: John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev in Vienna / Timothy Naftali "Summit ladies": gender arrangements, media staging, and symbolic scenes of the 1961 Vienna Summit talks / Ingrid Bauer Moral masculinity: gender, power, and the Kennedy-Khrushchev relationship / Jennifer Lynn Walton On the significance of Austrian neutrality for Soviet foreign policy under Nikita S. Khrushchev / Peter Ruggenthaler The personal recollections of a presidential adviser in Vienna / Ted Sorensen The personal recollections of Khrushchev's interpreter in Vienna / Viktor Sukhodrev Khrushchev, the Berlin Wall, and the demand for a peace treaty, 1961-1963 / Gerhard Wettig The Vienna Summit and the construction of the Berlin Wall / Manfred Wilke. Based on Russian and US archives and the multinational research efforts of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the Study of the Consequences of War in Graz, Austria, in conjunction with the Contemporary History Archives (RGANI) in Moscow and the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich-Berlin, this book represents a definitive study of the bilateral Vienna Summit meeting of Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy. The authors of the various articles are top scholars and, in the case of Ted Sorensen and Viktor Sukhodrev, participants in the summit. This valuable contribution to the