representation of a good part of american society and that would change his thinking about the soviet ability to compete and he comes home and we know this from released records. he comes home and he says we have to cut our defense budget in order to compete and that is why, george, he first a million men from the army. >> that is why exhibitions are good. >> he wants to move to minimal nuclear defense because it's cheaper, but the problem is for him is that the soviet union will be weaker than, will continue to be weaker than the united states and that creates an insecurity in him which would

later lead to the famous crisis of the kennedy period, but there is no doubt that seeing the representation of american wealth had an effect on khrushchev and he's an optimist by nature but changed his thinking about what his society could afford and what he had to do to make communism work. >> very interesting having seen khrushchev an talked to him through interpreters, that instance at the foreign ministry made me feel that they really wanted to push ahead, okay, with better relations. eisenhower invited khrushchev, khrushchev invited eisenhower, they both accepted, if it had not been for the shooting down of gary powers in the spy plane which pushed khrushchev back against the wall, he had to rescind the invitation, eisenhower knew the general, my

feeling is we could have come along a lot falsfaster getting out of the cold war if eisenhower had gone there. that picture that you saw in the beginning was actually my last meeting with him and he told me one of his dreams had been to go to the soviet union, that was dashed with that. and i think things would have been better, i don't know what your opinion is. >> eisenhower maintained a close correspondent with prime minister mcmillan of great britain. he, the single ally general, invited to moscow in 1945, he wrote to mcmillan the greatest disappointment of my political life, my entire political life

was the collapse of the -- eisenhower was one of those generals who had seen war and hated it. eisenhower hated war. khrushchev, i lived in russia, among russians for years, so i have this. in my bones i feel about khrushchev for all his bluster about communism was some butter on the bread. he's shown here as a guy pounding at the un and he wasn't a very diplomatic guy and certainly did some nasty things and we did some nasty things. but essentially khrushchev wanted peace. eisenhower wanted peace. could we have cooled it? yes, we could have cooled it. do you realize during the cold

war we produced 72,000 atomic weapons? am i exaggerating? does this have relevance to today? i leave that to you to judgment. we produced 72,000 atomic weapons. how do we, as a country, respond to challenge? are we paranoic? did a single politician say cool it, wouldn't he be accused of being soft on communism and lose elections? you can -- nobody knows more than i the faults of the soviet union and the responsibility for starting the cold war. but i want to say we often leapt down there in the pit with them and behaved just as badly as they did. >> i'm not sure i believe that. >> they were scared and we scared them.

>> i can't quite buy, sure we were scared but there were reasons we were scared. khrushchev wasn't exactly a typical politician, he had blood on his hands. he did a lot of horrible things in his own country. >> what was he doing in '59? yes or no? >> i think he was trying to do things. >> he had his right wing on his side. our job was to try to help him and -- >> i think we tried. >> isn't it true it's hard to get in the mind of a foreign mind, it's our job to resolve uncertainies in a way of fear? when we couldn't know for sure how many missiles they had, we exaggerated because there was always somebody here would say are you certain? and nobody in our society wanted to be wrong. nobody wanted a second pearl harbor, nobody wanted to under estimate the threat and we

couldn't be sure of what the threat was and sadly, khrushchev, for all the intentions we now know very well because of the materials that the russians finally opened, he often spoke as if his society was producing more missiles than they were. he was feeding some of of our paranoia and doing it deliberately because he was afraid of us. it was a vicious circle. >> one thing you can know and feel good about in the new treaty where we are today and in 2011, 1500, down to 1500 missiles each. so we're making a lot of progress and i think the american exhibition was a part of that. you and tanya you look at the picture there of the guides, it was a fantastic thing. 52 years later i still remember things as vividly as if it was

yesterday. >> that is only the girls. we had guys, too. we had a lot of fellas. >> how do you create trust? there is an issue of trust between leaders and that is harder, isn't it because of their background and training >> the way that you have trust is by getting to know the other even if it's the enemy, so the exchanges, i was talking to the head of the visitors exchange, we had that at usia, what happened is i remember a list of 50 leaders that the american embassy and usia they really carefully looked at who would be up and coming and so they would send them to the united states for three weeks. those 50 leaders were like margaret thatcher, you name it, all the leaders, a list of 50 of them. when i was at usia. i asked today, a list of 350.

people who became prime ministers or presidents were selected early in their career and sent and paid for to come to the united states and live in american homes. the question -- my answer to your question is absolutely that we have to have an exchange of people from libya, and asia and that and russia and get to know them. eisenhower started the people-to-people program. because as you said, he didn't like war. he knew what it was. he told me we've got to have hundreds of thousands of people coming back and forth and i

think that is the answer. by the way, the internet and facebook and twitter, i don't use that, but i think all of those things will make it a smaller world as we are seeing with the arab spring. >> let's open the floor to questions from the audience. there are mics, let's turn the lights up. there are mics on either side here, thank you. >> after the vice president left office, don kendall gave him a great deal of law business representing pepsi cola. is it clear the vice president was a friend of his at the time? >> i can answer that clearly, kendell now says and i think he said it so long he believes it, that nixon got khrushchev to drink pepsi. we did. it was just the way we structured it, and it was accidental, we hoped it would happen but nixon played no part with -- kendall was only a vice

president then. we had over there the heads of ibm and at&t, it was amazing the amount of chief executives who felt now freedom and power that they could go to the land of enemy, george, and actually see it. i tell you -- may i? anecdote. i told you we had u.s. offices and soviet offices. i walked in the one guy and he asked me to come in and i hadn't had time i came in a couple hours later and i noticed on his desk very neatly piled was the whole pile of papers, all neatly stacked. and i kind of looked at him with my rudimentary knowledge of russian, press releases, ge the kitchen, a press release went out. hundreds of press releases. so he said i need your judgment, i have to figure out how many soviet people from the trade department will be here to

service and help the americans who are coming over to buy. americans coming over to buy no, they were coming over to look. he had seen the lists in the press releases and they had no real good knowledge of it so i wanted to be as kind as i could, so i think he was think tg of 60 or 100, so i said well, you know it's new, brand, maybe 10 or 15. oh, really he said? >> if can say one quick thought that comes to mind. i think khrushchev had a difficult time understanding how we really lived until he came to america that fall. i remember when i came over in '59, 20 years old, a new cultural experience, lots of people lived in come youal amounts. communal. >> majority of. >> it was only under khrushchev they started to build the four or five story apartment buildings. >> instant slums.

>> they were badly built. life was so hard for them at that time, the way they dressed the kind of shoes. you would walk down the street in moscow everybody would look at your shoes and they would know you were a foreigner because you couldn't buy things like that there. their life style was very, very difficult at that time. >> very top of the soviet system the presidium would have discussion about the fact balconies were falling down, collapsing in moscow, the top, this is the soviet system building nuclear weapons, they are worried because the balconies are collapsing. >> remember the nets? that held up the building? >> this is 14 years after the kind of war that we kind even

imagine. >> but the thing about it -- >> world war ii was so destructive. >> george, this is your point. we were afraid of society that couldn't build balconies. that is something to keep in mind. we thought they had 150 intercontinental ballistic missiles when they had two. >> tim, we had every right to be afraid. there were aspects and not all of us knew i say see change after stalin you refer to things that happened under stalin, it was a still full of abhorrent aspects to an american the way the soviet union ran in that '59 and after when i was a student there. but it wasn't stalinist, it had changed remarkably and we kept on thinking it as tanya talks about stalin. and i just want to say one thing

we have every right to be afraid, but not 72,000 atomic weapons afraid worth. we can't change much in our enemies, let's begin by looking at ourselves for a moment. and stop talking about if we're going apportion blame, put more blame on the soviet union if that is what you want but we can't change much there. i'm asking that we look a little bit at ourselves and stop producing 72,000 atomic weapons which is an indication of the kind of people we are and the way we respect to challenge, you can't use -- >> or maybe what the multiple industrial complex. >> i don't understand where you all think that in 1958 that kitchenette that was shown with the wonderful appliances is what the average family in america

had. i wasn't poor, and we didn't have anything like that in my kitchen. and i was a 20-year-old mother with and i bought my first house in 1960, and we did not have -- you're right. >> compare it to leavitt town didn't have base mets or attics, they might have had a wonderful kitchen but they had no space. >> there was that aspect to any exhibition, the soviet exhibition in new york in the coliseum was even worse that way. >> to me i never understood why nixon thought that was so great because i didn't have it. i don't know who he knew. >> it depends a lot of us had dishwasher at that point. >> i didn't have a dishwasher until 1990. >> well -- >> what are the women lined up supposed to be? those were the american guides that worked there. >> why would, in this day and age would you show a picture of

women with shot up from the bottom, give me a break. >> no, no, it wasn't shot up from the bottom. i have to explain. we were doing a circular shot, the photographer was on his stomach in the mud, a man i later married, trying to get all the group together in a picture with the dome in the background. it's not -- there is no attempt to be anything else. >> it's my fault. purple is my favorite color. >> by the way i want to say something about the guides. tanya, george, i don't know george, how much you had this, but i know tanya there was another woman charlotte who also was fluent in russian, later became the bureau chief out of her experience there. >> of the christian science monitor. >> i introduced her to a man and he was the editor of the monitor and also when he came over not in that position but he was a chairman of the u.s. chamber of

commerce but what i wanted to say people like charlotte and tanya had incredible access to the children. we had a non-fraternization poll six we were not allowed to date russians and our guides were not supposed to date but you got invited to their homes. >> absolutely. >> they saw what it was. why don't you say something about that, at the time when things were so poor in the soviet union, some of your friends told me that they were in and they had special shops. >> it's a -- it was a society on various levels. the average person had to fend for themselves in the stores, find what they could find and do the best they could do.

for the political people, my god yes, they had special stores, they could buy thing the average soviet citizen could not buy. but the life style was very primitive. you can't imagine what it was like to live in a communal apartment. >> can you imagine to be what it was like to be a middle class american? >> we all were. >> if it make you feel any better when my father purchased a house -- >> ma'am, let the ambassador finish. this has turned in a kitchen debate. >> big signs, $4500 for a home. a lot of us lived in grew up in homes that were $4,000, $5000, and we had everything but a dishwasher. >> i don't know what your personal situation was like but my parents just worked regular jobs, two people in the family worked, so that we could have, we had a modest and a long time my mother had a modest house in the northeast part of washington. it happened to be a newer house

that had the appliances because that is -- >> we can agree there is no exhibit the exhibit put america's best forward and lots of aspects that are not depicted in the exhibition. we can also say there is no doubt the united states produced far more consumer goods than the soviet union. >> the standard of living was a tenth not -- >> that is why this was an important moment in cultural and political history because the soviets began to see the gap and even their leadership realized that this was a gap that could not be filled unless they made changes and that what is leads to some of the things that we discussed. are there any other questions? yes. >> i had a question about how the average american responded

to the exhibit. when i read about in the 1950's, there is a dual image, yes, let's show them american prosperity, that will encourage them to move toward capitalism, others if we show them that, they will get our technology. just curious, articles in "life" magazine about the exhibit, what was the average reaction to it? >> tanya, you know about those articles in "life" magazine. hard to say what the average american reaction was. it was publicized, "life" ran several story, it was a very big story we came through in the soviet union, kind of crossed the barrier, got in. it's hard to say how the average american responded, i don't know, it's a very individual matter. >> when i read articles say around 1955, people were frightened, they didn't want to make the contact, just curious if that was the same sort of thing?

>> i don't know, we all discussed why it was good to make contact and how it opened up avenues for both countries. i don't know who would be that afraid. they didn't copy as much, the chinese are the ones that copied japanese copied, i don't think the russians copied us. >> they tried. >> they had clunky things. >> people were concerned they would copy -- >> their models were older, not that kitchens have to be the basis of the whole discussion, but if you took a appliances you would sell, and we buy these things, let's face it, and their models were clunk, we were more advanced with our consumer economy than they were. they loved things like our cars, they went ape over our cars. >> i think that the key word of how at the american public was, that what is your question is, was cure yous curiosity. i got publicity and all, people my friends would talk to me, and curiosity about the soviet union. there was such a closed society

and that is the main thing and the only thing that will open it up is going back and forth. i continued to go back and forth, i have my own business, i have clients, american clients in russia. and it's amazing -- and from '93 -- have you all been back? >> oh yeah. >> from '93 when it was like the wild west to today, i mean, you got a growing class.

moscow's got a couple hiltons, a couple marriotts. >> remember the hotel where they give a towel and wash cloth? that has been replaced by the ritz carlton. the whole thing -- it's one of the most expensive cities in the world now. the interchange and if you see the amount of travel, it's a very good thing. i don't want to leave that 72,000 -- you're in the old days, my friend. you're back 50 years. you're talking about now. we've got -- >> that's what we paid in the cold war. >> that all leads to wonderful

debates, among panelists. >> we didn't produce 72,000? >> how do i know? am i not citing an exact government. this is from our government. >> you're talking about -- >> the government acknowledges 72,000. 50 years from now we'll probably learn it was 100,000. all i'm saying is, we have a tendency, it was a very serious challenge in the u.s. our reaction has always been a massive over reaction. >> now, we don't have any more times for questions but i'd like to ask the panelists if they have a comment that they'd like

to finish about why anyone over a certain age should care about the exhibition and kitchen debate. why does this matter today? >> well, i think if history matters, you know, to anybody, you need to look back. you had a very vicious system. when you look at stalin, a lot of people were shot and then when you think about what happened in those days, he eliminated his own population. and then you see gorbechov with

a lot of influence to people who come now. look, you got 1,000 years of surf, 70 years of communism and from what i see, it's beginning to work. it's going to be interesting to see what happens. >> we were one of the first to can't. we were huge. in comparison to what they had seen before. and we showed them an awful lot about america. you couldn't get information about america over there. you had this, that. it was just horrible. the kind of news that the soviet public was exposed to. you had to have special permission to get the new york times and special library and washington post and you didn't have that kind of access if you

were russian at that time. and, you know, it wasn't like we were keeping it from them. and all the books went. we brought more books. they all disappeared too. people were starving for information about what we had. they were so delighted to get this kind of access. so i think we did serve a very important service. exposing a lot of russians to something that they had never heard about or seen before. >> george, significance? >> exchange is terribly important when we're faced with a challenge and with conflict. there's no other way other than violence exchanged. i'm going to leave with a puzzle

called what she says about the lack of news information is new. they say there was a great deal but i leave with you a puzzle because i can't figure it out. why was it that in the depths of the cold war we were not in the depths. we were coming out of it by owe ow 1959. and now in this so-called democracy, the average russian, about whom i know a little bit because i'm there a lot, the average russian has a far less sanguine or hospitable or loving feeling towards america. that's puzzling to me. russians really liked miles an hours. a lot of them were afraid to meet us. they were scared. and they had to take cautions. they had to take precautionses.

and now, as i say, we are not at all liked. that's what is puzzling to me. >> familiarity breeds contempt. we were talking about an event almost 52 years ago. you've been privileged to listen to people who were animated. listen to the passion that they bring to remember not just those events but why they matter. that's the passion that informed and shaped our role and participation of the cold war. it continues to be a source of debate and interpretation and continues to matter. you are all very fortunate to have witnessed three people who understood it, cared about it, and wanted to convey that significance to you. thank you, all three of you, for coming. [ applause ] >> you're watching american history tv.