Watch a conversation with award winning writer, journalist, and founding director of the Shorenstein Center, Marvin Kalb, about his new book, “A Different Russia: Khrushchev and Kennedy on a Collision Course” (forthcoming December 2024). This is the third volume of Marvin Kalb’s memoirs, and draws on the record Marvin kept of his daily CBS broadcasts as a young American journalist stationed in Moscow during the Cold War. The conversation was moderated by Fredrik Logevall, the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of History and International Affairs at Harvard University.
In the early 1960’s, the most dangerous years of the Cold War, Marvin Kalb brought the excitement and curiosity of a young American journalist to Moscow, where he kept a record of his daily CBS broadcasts on the building confrontation between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and American President John F. Kennedy. He spoke Russian, traveled everywhere and covered both leaders during such important stories as the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the June 1961 Vienna summit, the building of the Berlin Wall, the fracturing of the Sino-Soviet alliance, his door opening journey to Mongolia and the Cuban missile crisis, when the threat of nuclear war hovered over the globe.
This unusual memoir, the third and final one in a series of three, is both personal and professional, recapturing close-up impressions of Khrushchev, who often referred to Kalb as Peter the Great (a story unto itself), of diplomatic negotiations in Geneva, of the life of frightened Russians living in a tight communist dictatorship, and of what it was like to work as a Western journalist in Moscow when East-West relations were tense, desperate and dangerous.
What Kalb found especially eye-catching was the surprising comparison between Khrushchev’s Russia and Putin’s Russia. Khrushchev, while pursuing his goals, was still open to the West, eager for agreements, ready to welcome Americans. Putin, posing as “a different Russia,” has turned his back on the West, framing Russia’s relations with China, North Korea and Iran as an anti-Western package of hostility and confrontation. Khrushchev sought accommodation, when possible; Putin seems often to seek collision. The difference between the two may end up being the difference between war and peace.
Marvin Kalb is an award winning writer, journalist and Harvard professor emeritus, who has covered and studied Soviet politics from Khrushchev to Putin and numerous wars from Vietnam to Ukraine. He has also covered American election campaigns from Ike to Trump. He has won, in addition to many other prizes, a Golden Emmy for “excellence in journalism.” Kalb is the author of 17 books, most recently “A DIFFERENT RUSSIA: Khrushchev and Kennedy on a Collision Course.” He was founding director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a Moscow and Diplomatic correspondent at CBS and NBC, a visiting professor at George Washington and Georgetown Universities and a proud member of Nixon’s enemies list.
Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of History and International Affairs at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of eleven books, including most recently JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (Random House, 2020), which won the Elizabeth Longford Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House, 2012), won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Parkman Prize, the Arthur Ross Book Award, and the American Library in Paris Book Award.
