nikita khrushchev becomes premier of the soviet party in 53, so this book is about khrushchev and kennedy. that plenty of years under a different president, under dwight eisenhower. what was that relationship like. khrushchev and eisenhower. and the changof presidencies, what was his view coming in of john kennedy. guest: great questions, a historical questions. in 1956, i arrived there in january. khrushchev had been essentially the boss only for about a year or 18 months. it took a year or so before he could establish his position following stalin's death in march of 1953. so khrushchev wanted very much by 1956 to say to the russian people and to the world that russia is now changed, it is no longer stalin's russia, it is now khrushchev's russia. and delivered a very famous secret speech, i believe it was february 24, 1956. and he summoned all of the leaders of various communist parties which had been meeting in moscow at the time to come back to the kremlin in the middle of the night because he wanted to tell them his view of stalin. and his view of stalin was very negative. but becaus

right when nikita khrushchev learned john f. kennedy had been assassinated he cried. why? guest: it was one of the marvelous interesting in my judgment fascinating aspects of nikita khrushchev that he had a dream and the dream was that if he could sit down with an american president, he figured that he and the president could solve all the problems of the world. all he needed was that opportunity. and he got that opportunity only once in june of 1961 in vienna when they met at the summit, the summit that was greeted with enormous expectation and ended in the deepest disappointment. and khrushchev took it into his mind that he wanted to somehow or another take kennedy to the cleaners, he was going to get his way, he wanted to rewrite the strategic balance of the world which favored the u.s.. he wanted to favor russia, the soviet union and he did have that moment with kennedy which led to the cuban missile crisis, which led the world to the edge of a nuclear war. afterward, they reached an agreement on an atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty.

communist party looking at the de-stalinization crisis of 1956 when the soviet then soviet leader nikita khrushchev denounced his predecessor, josef stalin, who had ruled over the soviet union from 1924 until his death. and. 1953 denounced him as a bloody, paranoid murderer. everything that his opponents and his critics abroad had had always he was a moment of great disillusion, but briefly, a moment of it seemed to open up a road to create the communist movement along new lines as an independent movement, as a movement that wasn't tied to soviet foreign objectives. and that too badly. and thirdly, the book about dorothy healy. dorothy was the leader of the los angeles communist party district, which after new york was second strongest in, the party from the 1930s on in well into the fifties. and she was a maverick so much so that other people, other more orthodox people in the communist party began to refer to los angeles as the the yugoslavia of american communism, as this sort of deviant direction. and she to from within the movement to to reinvent it and ultimately had leave it decided that was