A Cold War Summit Offers Lessons for Trump Before Putin Meeting
While it sounds like the coming encounter between President Trump
and the current Russian leader, Vladimir V. Putin — an encounter scheduled for Friday — this actually was a description of President John F. Kennedy’s first face-to-face session with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev of the Soviet Union in June 1961.
But it is the other lessons of that meeting in Vienna — which stretched over two days, three meals, a clumsy effort by Khrushchev to charm Jackie Kennedy
and a tough one to threaten her husband — that might be useful to the Trump White House.
"He savaged me." (Mr. Reston, perhaps protecting the background nature of the conversation even long after Kennedy’s death, did not quote the conversation directly in his memoir, "Deadline.") Mr. Reston expressed surprise
that the young president came out of the meeting — then, as now, in a time of deteriorating relations with Moscow — determined to show his toughness, someplace.
Still, General McMaster sent a bit of a shiver through Washington last week when he said
that the meeting with Mr. Putin on Friday had "no specific agenda." He added: "It’s whatever the president wants to talk about." Historians who have focused on the Kennedy-Khrushchev interaction say the lesson of the encounter is that having no agenda is a bad idea.