Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (47 page)

IN COLD
War politics, there were no villains or heroes. Neither side was innocent or entirely to blame. Khrushchev and his opposite numbers in the White House did not have a fetish for needless confrontation: even as they authorized espionage, nuclear blackmail, subversion, and proxy wars, they knew how severely the rivalry drained their domestic programs. They knew the arms race was a nonsensical game of numbers; that regional conflicts could drag them into a tit-for-tat exchange that could escalate into nuclear war. Yet the revolving gears of international allegiances had their own inexorable logic. Every crisis averted created another. Public opinion, entrenched bureaucracies, and powerful interest groups exerted their pull, as did the same shifting forces in their allies and client states.

Of all the dangers, ignorance was the greatest. To cut through the confusion of voices that had bedeviled the Cuban crisis, the White House and the Kremlin established a telephone hotline. The two sides moved to prevent emerging powers from developing atomic technology; a test ban treaty was signed in August 1963, though it failed to stop China from exploding its first nuclear device the following year. The glimmer of hope that Churchill had foreseen in an equality of annihilation, that Eisenhower had understood when he insisted on planning only for total nuclear war, was enshrined in the theory of mutual assured destruction, or MAD, whereby the superpowers targeted each other’s cities with first- and second-strike weapons of such destructive capacity that their survival depended on there being no war at all. The
Dr. Strangelove
–style acronym made the case that when humanity’s propensity for violence had reached the point where annihilation rested on the flick of a switch, the only sane response was one that, to an average person, closely resembled insanity. Khrushchev knew this as well as anyone.

In September 1963, President Kennedy took the rostrum at the United Nations and proposed that the United States and the USSR join forces to reach the moon. Khrushchev categorically dismissed the idea, but over the following weeks he concluded that the Soviets might benefit economically and technologically from a joint venture.
He was on the point of changing his mind when the president was assassinated in Dallas. Khrushchev, on a visit to Ukraine, wired the usual protocol telegram to the White House, but he and his wife also sent personal letters to Jackie. The next day, they cut short their trip to visit Spaso House, passing through Soviet mourners gathered outside the gates, and signed the book of condolences with tears in their eyes. Mikoyan, who had carried Lenin’s coffin, attended the American president’s funeral. Jackie wrote touchingly to Khrushchev, saying that she was very moved by how upset Anastas Ivanovich had looked as he came down the line, and how much her husband had wanted to work with him for peace.

After Kennedy’s vice president, the former majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson, took over the presidency, the leaders exchanged letters. Yet they never got to take each other’s measure in person, which was perhaps a pity, because the ambitious Johnson,
“cunning yet insecure, imposing yet ungraceful . . . the shrewd peasant come to shake up a nation and rule a superpower,” was in some ways the American Khrushchev. After a decade in power the Soviet leader’s overreaching had finally caught up with him. There had been no joyous explosion of energies to fire the USSR’s economy into catching up with that of the West, let alone overtake it. His bureaucratic meddling had brought the economy to a virtual standstill, and after a promising start his grand agricultural schemes had proved an epic disaster. There were riots over food prices, and rebellions over radical reforms of party structures that weakened the powers of functionaries, whom Khrushchev belittled as
“dogs peeing against curbstones.” China finally broke off relations with the Soviets, and Mao took to
insulting Khrushchev at every turn. Ten years of unrelenting activity had made an adversary of nearly every person he counted as a friend.

As so often, the protégé wielded the knife. On October 12, 1964, Leonid Brezhnev called his mentor at his Black Sea villa and notified him that a special Presidium session was to be held the next day to discuss agricultural issues. Khrushchev suspected the worst but flew back. At the meeting, his peers took turns denouncing him for fostering a cult
of personality, flouting collective government, cozying up to the West, creating the Sino-Soviet split, embarrassing the state, behaving waywardly, governing incompetently, permitting nepotism, and nearing his dotage. That night, he called Mikoyan.
“I’m old and tired,” he said. “Let them cope by themselves. I’ve done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn’t suit us anymore and suggesting he retire? Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. Now everything is different. The fear is gone, and we can talk as equals. That’s my contribution. I won’t put up a fight.” He was glad, he later vowed in his habitual barroom language, that the party had advanced to the point where it could fire its first secretary:
“You smeared me all over with shit, and I say, ‘You’re right.’”

The next day, the Presidium and Central Committee voted to accept his retirement. Shortly before his ouster, he had spoken with the Soviet cosmonauts aboard the
Voskhod 1
orbiter, during the seventh manned Soviet space flight, the first to carry an engineer and physician as well as a pilot and to dispense with space suits. At their homecoming ceremony there was no mention of the premier who had overseen the entire Soviet space program. Khrushchev was dispatched on a modest pension to his dacha, where he suffered from depression, cried a lot, and slept badly. The pension was later reduced, the dacha was exchanged for a smaller one, and the leader who for all his faults had saved his nation from the ravages of Stalinism was airbrushed from Soviet history.

Mikoyan, the great survivor, outlasted the latest upheaval and was appointed president of the Soviet Union before retiring the following year. The stolid Brezhnev became first secretary and put up the shutters on reform. His government spent vast sums on music, literature, and art in the same way that it invested lavishly in gymnastics and weight lifting, as ideologically useful tools.
“In order to be victorious,” the reempowered Composers’ Union leader, Tikhon Khrennikov, commanded his troops, “we must strictly obey the party line and guide our youth.” Those few Moscow nights that had transfixed the world in 1958 now belonged to a less predictable, more innocent age.

THIRD MOVEMENT

Pianoforte

•
19
•

America’s Pianist

ON DECEMBER
20, 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson put in a telephone call to J. Edgar Hoover to ask if Van Cliburn was politically sound.

The nation was still officially in mourning for JFK, but President Johnson was preparing to receive his first head of government. The summit was to take place at LBJ’s ranch, near the tiny farmhouse where he was born in the Texas Hill Country west of Austin, and its centerpiece was to be a luncheon in a converted school gymnasium in nearby Stonewall. “Cactus” Pryor, a Texas entertainer and Johnson family friend, had been tapped as master of ceremonies, and he had called Liz Carpenter, the First Lady’s press secretary, to suggest an alternative to the usual country music outfit.

“Liz, wouldn’t this be a good opportunity to display to the world that Johnson isn’t a hick, a hillbilly, that Texans are something besides cowboys and fiddle bands?” he had asked. “Why don’t we get Van Cliburn down?”

“But this is a barbeque,” Carpenter had objected. “We can’t present Cliburn at a
barbeque
.” Still, Cactus persuaded her, Lady Bird Johnson approved, and LBJ picked up the phone. Hoover, at sixty-eight still vehemently in charge of the FBI, summarized the conversation in a memorandum that was distributed to senior staffers:

President Johnson called and asked what I know about Van Cliburn, the musician. I advised him that Van Cliburn is a homosexual.

The President then asked if there is any reason why Van Cliburn should not play for the White House, and I replied that there is no reason why he shouldn’t. The President remarked that most musicians probably are homosexuals and I told him a great many are.

Johnson secretly recorded the rest of the exchange on his Dictaphone Dictabelt. Hoover added that Khrushchev had given Van a great deal of publicity while he was in Russia, but that Van’s eager response was not politically motivated.
“It’s more, as I think, exhibitionism,” he explained. “But he’s a great pee-yanist, and I would see no reason why he couldn’t be used for entertainment purposes.” With the FBI director’s political and critical blessing, the president called Carpenter.
“Edgar Hoover says Van Cliburn’s all right so I guess you can go ahead and invite him,” he said in his husky drawl.

After supervising a candle-lighting ceremony at Lincoln Memorial that marked the end of thirty days’ mourning, Johnson flew home for Christmas. On the twenty-eighth, Chancellor
Ludwig Erhard of the Federal Republic of Germany landed with a large entourage. The next day, Van arrived at the Johnson ranch, also known as the Texas White House, and was handed a red-checked shirt and jeans. When he gathered that he was supposed to get into them before he played, he demurred and insisted on wearing white tie and tails.

“But Van,” pleaded Carpenter, who came from the sleepy Bible Belt town of Salado, Texas, “they haven’t ever seen a tuxedo in Stonewall.”

“This is a concert for the chancellor of Germany,” Van protested, aghast at the lapse in decorum.

“But you’ve never seen Stonewall!” Carpenter and Bess Abell, Lady Bird’s social secretary, chorused. After a long debate a compromise emerged in the form of Van’s regular business suit.

The clapboard gymnasium had been Western-themed in what Carpenter called “artistic rustic fashion,” with bales of hay, red lanterns, a tack shop’s worth of saddles and lariats, and yards of bunting in the German and American colors. A mariachi band welcomed the dignitaries for a chuck wagon meal of barbecued spare ribs, deer meat sausage, and hominy grits accompanied by Beethoven, Brahms, and Schumann. Afterward the president shooed the party into the pasture, where they stepped gingerly over what Vice President Hubert Humphrey called
“the Republican platform,” so Johnson could show off his prize herd of Texas longhorns.

“He was a man,” Carpenter once said of LBJ, “like the raw land he came from, hard limestone land with twenty-seven inches of rainfall a year. He was as strong and open as the West Texas hill country.” Not all the European visitors relished the drastic change from the elegant formality of JFK’s reign, but the entertainment was unexpectedly well chosen: before he became an economist and then a politician, Chancellor Erhard had wanted to be a concert pianist. The “Spare Rib” summit ended with commitments to closer cooperation and renewed efforts at assuaging East-West tensions.

As he turned thirty, Van had become America’s national pianist, a treasure to be wheeled out on state occasions. In 1965 he played Liszt’s Piano Concerto no. 1 at the president’s inaugural concert after “Landslide Lyndon” received the highest-ever share of the popular vote. He was featured at the White House Festival of the Arts, a presidential pat on the back for America’s artists that turned into a
public relations catastrophe when the poet Robert Lowell declined his invitation on the front page of the
New York Times
in protest at the escalating Vietnam War. That Christmas, Van attended a White House state dinner for the returning German chancellor, and then
accompanied LBJ home to Texas aboard Air Force One, with Rildia Bee at his side. The two families went way back: Johnson was virtually an adopted son of the Cliburns’ old friend Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn.

In 1965, Van returned to the Soviet Union for the first time since his unplanned visit three years earlier. With the world awash in
Beatlemania, he once again passed for a rock star in a country where the Fab Four were outlawed as hedonistic and corrupting and where students still danced at parties to scratched 78s. True, he was a different kind of rock star: instead of destroying hotel rooms, he liked one so much that he
bought its entire contents, including the drapes—or so it was said. With his Romantic devotion, natural aristocracy, and golden boy looks, he was still every bit a
kumir
, an idol. He was mobbed in Kiev and Leningrad and Novosibirsk, the
press coverage was incessant, and in Moscow the Van Club danced in constant attendance. But there was no doubt the times were grayer and cooler and less sincere. The kind of personal relationship he had had with Khrushchev was impossible under the doughty Brezhnev, and official Moscow was closed to him.

It was the first real rebuttal in seven extraordinary years. Van had always been easily discouraged and prone to paranoia, convinced that he
“was not in good favor in certain places,” and despite his strong Christian faith, he had looked to alternative spiritual systems for answers. Now, less sure of himself than ever, he turned to the occult for the comfort he craved. He was hardly alone—American pianist Byron Janis was an ardent believer in the paranormal—but his dabblings went far enough that they attracted the attention of the FBI. While he was in the Soviet Union, the Bureau recorded numerous conversations between Van and a female
“medium or spiritualist” living in the Bronx, who was “maintaining very close control over the subject’s activity.” A report to J. Edgar Hoover noted that Van was “completely dependent” on her and “obeys all her orders” and gave some excerpts from their long exchanges: