T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Because of the sensitive — indeed sensational — nature of what follows, I have endeavored to tell my story as dispassionately as possible, and must say in my own defense that my sole interest in coming forward at this late date is to provide succeeding generations with a keener insight into the events of those tumultuous times. Some of you will be shocked by what I report here, others moved. Still others — the inevitable naysayers and skeptics — may find it difficult to believe. But before you turn a deaf ear, let me remind you how unthinkable it once seemed to credit reports of Errol Flynn’s flirtation with Nazis and homosexuals, FDR’s thirty-year obsession with Lucy Mercer, or Ted Kennedy’s overmastering desire for an ingenuous campaign worker eleven years his junior. The truth is often hard to swallow. But no historian worth his salt, no self-respecting journalist, no faithful eyewitness to the earthshaking and epoch-making events of human history has ever blanched at it.

Here then, is the story of Ike and Nina.

In September of 1959, I was assistant to one of Ike’s junior staffers, thirty-one years old, schooled in international law, and a consultant to the Slavic-languages program at one of our major universities.* I’d had very little contact with the president, had in fact laid eyes on him but twice in the eighteen months I’d worked for the White House (the first time, I was looking for a drinking fountain when I caught a glimpse of him — a single flash of his radiant brow — huddled in a back room with Foster Dulles and Andy Goodpaster; a week later, as I was hurrying down a corridor with a stack of reports for shredding, I spotted him slipping out a service entrance with his golf clubs). Like dozens of bright, ambitious young men apprenticed to the mighty, I was at this stage of my career a mere functionary, a paper shuffler, so deeply buried in the power structure I must actually have ranked below the pastry chef’s croissant twister. I was good — I had no doubt of it — but I was as yet untried, and for all I knew unnoticed. You can imagine my surprise when early one morning I was summoned to the Oval Office.

It was muggy, and though the corridors hummed with the gentle ministrations of the air conditioners, my shirt was soaked through by the time I reached the door of the president’s inner sanctum. A crewcut ramrod in uniform swung open the door, barked out my name, and ushered me into the room. I was puzzled, apprehensive, awed; the door closed behind me with a soft click and I found myself in the Oval Office, alone with the president of the United States. Ike was standing at the window, gazing out at the trees, whistling “The Flirtation Waltz,” and turning a book of crossword puzzles over in his hands. “Well,” he said, turning to me and extending his hand, “Mr. Paderewski, is that right?”

“Yes sir,” I said. He pronounced it “Paderooski.”†

“Well,” he repeated, taking me in with those steely blue eyes of his as he sauntered across the room and tossed the book on his desk like a slugger casually dropping his bat after knocking the ball out of the park. He looked like a golf pro, a gymnast, a competitor, a man who could come at you with both hands and a nine iron to boot. Don’t be taken in by all those accounts of his declining health — I saw him there that September morning in the Oval Office, broad-shouldered and trim-waisted, lithe and commanding. Successive heart attacks and a bout with ileitis hadn’t slowed the old warrior a bit. A couple of weeks short of his sixty-ninth birthday, and he was jaunty as a high-schooler on prom night. Which brings me back to the reason for my summons.

“You’re a good egg, aren’t you, Paderewski?” Ike asked.

I replied in the affirmative.

“And you speak Russian, is that right?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President — and Polish, Sorbian, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovene as well.”

He grunted, and eased his haunch down on the corner of the desk. The light from the window played off his head till it glowed like a second sun. “You’re aware of the upcoming visit of the Soviet premier and his, uh, wife?”

I nodded.

“Good, that’s very good, Paderewski, because as of this moment I’m appointing you my special aide for the duration of that visit.” He looked at me as if I were some odd and insignificant form of life that might bear further study under the microscope, looked at me like the man who had driven armies across Europe and laid Hitler in his grave. “Everything that happens, every order I give you, is to be held strictly confidential — top secret — is that understood?”

I was filled with a sense of mission, importance, dignity. Here I was, elevated from the ranks to lend my modest talents to the service of the first citizen of the nation, the commander-in-chief himself. “Understood, Mr. President,” I said, fighting the impulse to salute.

This seemed to relax him, and he leaned back on the desk and told me a long, involved story about an article he’d come across in the National Geographic , something about Egyptian pyramids and how the members of a pharaoh’s funeral procession were either blinded on the spot or entombed with their leaders — something along those lines. I didn’t know what to make of it. So I put on my meditative look, and when he finished I flashed him a smile that would have melted ice.

Ike smiled back.

By now, of course, I’m sure you’ve guessed just what my special duties were to consist of — I was to be the president’s liaison with Mrs. Khrushchev, a go-between, a pillow smoother and excuse maker: I was to be Ike’s panderer. Looking back on it, I can say in all honesty that I did not then, nor do I now, feel any qualms whatever regarding my role in the affair. No, I feel privileged to have witnessed one of the grand passions of our time, a love both tender and profane, a love that smoldered beneath the watchful eyes of two embattled nations and erupted in an explosion of passionate embraces and hungry kisses.

Ike, as I was later to learn, had first fallen under the spell of Madame K. in 1945, during his triumphal visit to Moscow after the fall of the Third Reich. It was the final day of his visit, a momentous day, the day Japan had thrown in the towel and the great war was at long last ended. Ambassador Harriman arranged a reception and buffet supper at the U.S. embassy by way of celebration, and to honor Ike and his comrade-in-arms, Marshal Zhukov. In addition to Ike’s small party, a number of high-ranking Russian military men and politicos turned out for what evolved into an uproarious evening of singing, dancing, and congratulatory back-slapping. Corks popped, vodka flowed, the exuberant clamor of voices filled the room. And then Nina Khrushcheva stepped through the door.

Ike was stunned. Suddenly nothing existed for him — not Zhukov, not Moscow, not Harriman, the armistice, or “The Song of the Volga Boatmen,” which an instant before had been ringing in his ears — there was only this vision in the doorway, simple, unadorned, elegant, this true princess of the earth. He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know who she was; the only words of Russian he could command— zdrav’st and spasibo *—flew to his lips like an unanswered prayer. He begged Harriman for an introduction, and then spent the rest of the evening at her side, the affable Ike, gazing into the quiet depths of her rich mud-brown eyes, entranced. He didn’t need an interpreter.

It would be ten long years before their next meeting, years that would see the death of Stalin, the ascendancy of Khrushchev, and Ike’s own meteoric rise to political prominence as the thirty-fourth president of the United States. Through all that time, through all the growing enmity between their countries, Ike and Nina cherished that briefest memory of one another. For his part, Ike felt he had seen a vision, sipped from the cup of perfection, and that no other woman could hope to match it — not Mamie, not Ann Whitman, nor even his old flame, the lovely and adept Kay Summersby. He plowed through CIA dossiers on this captivating spirit, Nina Petrovna, wife of the Soviet premier, maintained a scrapbook crammed with photos of her and news clippings detailing her husband’s movements; twice, at the risk of everything, he was able to communicate with her through the offices of a discreet and devoted agent of the CIA. In July of 1955, he flew to Geneva, hungering for peaceful coexistence.