and he knew that he had appeared weak to khrushchev and khrushchev thought he was weak and it was a terrible, terrible performance. >> host: and then -- and how did it go on from there? [laughter] >> guest: well, oh, one other thing about the vienna summit. the other thing i focus on is everyone has written about kennedy's womenizing, kennedy's health issues. he had particularly great pain and we know that from his doctor. we know he had an injury earlier from a trip from canada. he was in enormous pain. and on the trip he had someone called dr. feelgood. he was the doctor to celebrities. and he was shooting him up with a mixture of enzymes and steroids and amphetamines to keep him alert, to keep him from depression. but if you look at the side effects of these things, the side effects are mood swings. the side effects are nervousness, anxiety. you know, he did show mood swings at the end of the summit. he did show nervousness and anxiety. these are national security consequences with these sorts of shots. we never know how it affected him but when you think about vienna, the 67-year-old sov

khrushchev refused to go.saw weakness, indecisiveness and saw he could expose himself in the summit. kennedy, at the same time, put the first man in space, so he had momentum. kennedy went there to repair the foreign poly reputation after the bay of pigs. there they are. first day, kennedy gets into an ideological argument about the virtues of communism and virtues of freedom and capitalism, and he gets totally, totally overwhelmed by khrushchev. the advisers said don't go there our talk about it. second thing, discussion of berlin, he's not prepared for it. he thought he'd reached a presummit agreement that nothing would be negotiated, and khrushchev lays down a threat of war and an ultimate may tum saying the status had to be changed or he would change it unilaterally. kennedy was totally unprepared. kennedy knows he's done badly, and at the end he goes to scotty of the "new york times" and says worst day of my life, worst performance of my life. he savaged me. he knew he appeared weak to khrushchev, and khr

he went to a summit in vienna in june with khrushchev, and khrushchev ate his lunch. and kennedy afterwards said, he thinks i'm stupid and weak because of what happened at the bay of pigs. and certainly you can make a connection then the khrushchev making this move to put up the berlin wall. although in some ways the berlin wall is confused but that's another topic it is story. >> but it triggered the wall being built. >> well, that's true. there were certain, kennedy was certainly very aware of that when he went to a summit with khrushchev. look, the repercussions of the bay of pigs just kept going. all through. they really didn't and for kennedy until the cuban missile crisis, but, you know, a lot of things, the vietnam war in many ways started on april 20, the day after the bay of pigs. john kennedy needing a victory against the communists ordered a task force to look for a way to stop communism in south vietnam. and very quickly after that sent more men, 400 more men to vietnam, really the first step into did not begin on the beaches of cuba. this gentleman here a

kennedy meets with khrushchev himself. now, again, this is not an official summit meeting where diplomacy is occurring, but she meets him at the state dinner at the palace in vienna. and look at the facial expressions on chairman khrushchev's face. again, president kennedy's in the background. here's mrs. kennedy in this lovely perioded gown, and apparently she said this to chairman khrushchev when he began to try to dazzle her with statistics about how many missiles they had and how many cannons they were producing and how many tractors. she supposedly in her breathy voice said, oh, mr. chairman, don't bore me with statistics. and he broke into this wide smile. as "the washington post" put it the next day, he looked like a russian schoolboy at the start of spring when the ice is melting on the volga. [laughter] she just melted him with her charm. other images, of course, were of her life as a mother. think how perfect this was at the height of the baby boom. remember, the baby boom goes from babies born from 1946 to 1964.

you can argue johnson would have so intimidated khrushchev he would not have put those missiles in cuba or humphrey would have beaten kennedy any way or nixon would have beat him or ford would have lost. the purpose of this exercise apart from my accumulating enormous wealth is to offer a kind of meditation on history. to suggest our impulse to fits what happened in these grand schemes and patterns can conceal from us the thought that history could have just as easily gone this way or that way. if the book gets you to shake your head or not your head i have done what i set out to do and i hope you will enjoy. [applause] >> here's what we're going to do. there is a microphone there. barbara, she who must be obeyed once questions asked from here. i can take -- if you can't get there i will take it and repeat them. i need to tell you one thing that happened today. i have done a story -- because this is history. i have done a story for sports illustrated that will be in the baseball hit issue about what would have happened in october of 2003 at the top of the eighth inning in relief field i

khrushchev had never consolidated his power.e defeated a party coup in 1957, but then there was a crisis in the may 1960 where the soviets shot down a u.s. spy plane. and kruschev's enemies pointed to this and said you're being very naive that you think we can live in peaceful coexistence with the west, we can't. so he was facing stalinist remnants who never forgave him within his own party. secondly, as you said, the east german leader, walter. and curiously, his leverage grew with the amount of refugees that were flowing out of his country. because the greater the danger of east germany imploding, the greater the domestic pressure on kruschev to do something about it. it wasn't just a danger to the soviet bloc, it was a danger to his own political standing. and then the chinese. the chinese were rising, they were trying to oppose khrushchev at that time. they thought he wasn't the worthy representative of world communism. so these three things were all against kruschev, and then he was looking at a party congress. that's not d

when khrushchev decides to put offensive nuclear missiles in cuba and the instincts and the fear of being labeled soft on communism means the men in the room are much more inclined to believe a surgical strike will work in fact, the majority in 1962 favored the strike it was the 11th 13 data-processing to work their way through the there was no john kennedy and robert kennedy has taken the senate seat in massachusetts teddy was too young and then in that era the kennedy is much more cold war type of guy then he came to be. nobody is pushing for the other way out which means that the results of the cuban missile crisis are really different from the ones that we live through. that is one. the second story for its obvious personal connections is another attempt on another life june 4th 1968 robert kennedy has finished his victory speech and because of a last-minute flight on the wall decision to spare another rally he goes through the kitchen of the ambassador hotel. but unlike reality something changes here is another discovery that knocked me for a loop was reading the histories in the jfk

and given the right are coming out of the criminal, khrushchev was saying all sorts of things, they seem more and more willing to use them. i emphasized this, point out that the kindness country, 90 miles from american shores was simply intolerable. not just conservatives like barry goldwater, richard nixon, but really to everybody. so, fidel castro was interrogated on the subject of communism everywhere he went on his visit. by vice president nixon, by congressional subcommittee, by scores of journalists. everyone asking the same question. are you a communist? and he answered the same every time. no, he was not economies, never have been, never would be. when castro finally left new york on april 25, the please were relieved to see him go. but most of new yorkers were happy to come to visit. and avatar and "the new york times" summed up the general attitude towards castro as he left, quote, he made it quite clear that neither he nor anyone of importance in his government so far as he knew was a communist. by the same token it seemed obvious that americans f

like to be the first man to fly over the soviet union in the youtube and yes he agitated nikita khrushchev greatly and yes, there was a lot of fallout between the eisenhower administration and the soviets over the spying going on. wrap the same time, what hervey brought back in the film canisters of his u-2 plane was over 400,000 square feet of film and spy footage about what was going on in the soviet union. as he said to me, the cia could learn in fact, the soviets were not lining up for world war iii iras many members of the air force wanted to believe. you may call him an antagonistic in my book. if you consider the cia's job is to prevent -- present intelligence based on fact or speculation that is what the two spy plane did for us. that is an important notion that the same time there'll other elements that were pushing science as the right in the book and here is where i get into the more dangerous areas and questions i would like leaders to be able to ask of themselves about whether or not pushing science is necessarily a good thing. right around that time, or if you back up after w

across the world and is only weeks before president kennedy was due to meet with soviet premier khrushchev in vienna. desperate not to see any more photos of firebombs buses and bloody beating riders in the papers and on tv it was attorney general robert kennedy called for a hault to the rights. in an opinion widely echoed in the media and by a variety of the establishment leaders. there riders however had been reenergize by reinforcements from the national student movement and were determined to press on. next stop, jackson mississippi. in response, robert kennedy quietly reached out to mississippi officials who promised to protect the riders from mob attacks. they also promised to arrest them. when the first 27 riders to reach jackson were peacefully arrested, mississippi officials as well as i suspect the can i be administration they give the situation was finally under control. i feel wonderful mississippi governor ross barnett said. i am so happy everything went off so smoothly. but, the riders recognized the rest for what they were, a strategic blunder by mississippi. the one that cr

it wasn't too obvious that unisys was behind, khrushchev would have no choice was all clinical reason but to escalate the problem in west berlin and the john kennedy would have no choice but to escalate somewhere else. so that's how this worked. he'd worked on so many different levels but if there's one thing i have learned writing this book is that you don't want to be a president certainly during the cold war. i mean, you were faced minute by minute with these life-and-death decisions and they are incredibly difficult. i will end by saying the point that the moral for me is that when people write about the bay of pigs, talk about the baby pigs, there's so much anger and fall. there has been over history. and a lot of blame goes around. my impression was that most of the people involved in this on all ends were doing it for what they thought were the right reasons. they were basically good people trying to do the right thing for the country. the problem was that it was a very difficult thing, to. and the way they did it was not the right way. now, you know, what the answer should hav

shortly after khrushchev took off his shoe and said we will bury you. it was a great day we had in 1980. but today the -- finally we got him moment in regard to, yes, i'm talking about osama bin laden. i want to take an opportunity, mr. speaker, to commend the president, commend the c.i.a., commend our military, commend the navy seals, the brave men and women that affected this-affected this. let's not forget the intelligence officers that worked so diligently at guantanamo bay, guilt mow, not torturing but get -- gtmo, not torturing, but getting information. to find the best friend of osama bin laden lived in his neighborhood in pakistan. that's how we got him. intelligence is how we got him. it's a great day. let's all take credit. let's commend the president. we should be tremendously proud today of this accomplishment. this guy, this monster that caused 3,000 people to die on 9/11, and 17 of the u.s.s cole. and men and women since then, god bless them. i yield back the balance of my time. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman's time has expired. pu