Russian Meddling

We're in the midst of political outrage over Russian meddling in Trump's election. Trump's close monetary ties to Russian oligarchs are politically unique. Russian meddling is not.

In 1960 I was in 8th grade and we all watched in rapt attention as the first ever televised debates occurred between Nixon and Kennedy. Little did we understand or know the influence of the U-2 incident and how the internal machinations of Kremlin politics might affect the outcome in the United States. Khruschev always maintained he helped Kennedy win the election. He was upset with Eisenhower, disliked Nixon, and thought Kennedy would be easier to manipulate because of his inexperience.

By autumn, the Eisenhower administration had increased its appeals to Khrushchev to release Gary Powers and the RB-47 airmen who had been shot down over the Arctic. Khrushchev recalled later that he had refused after calculating that the election was so close any such move might have swung the outcome. “As it turned out, we’d done the right thing,” he would say later. Given the margin of victory, he said, “The slightest nudge either way would have been decisive.”

I'm reading a fascinating book by Frederick Kempe on the 1961 crisis in Berlin and he lays the groundwork by an examination of the election and the characters of the major players. Had Khruschev wanted to help Eisenhower or Nixon, he could have released Gary Powers sooner. His shoe banging at the United Nations in September helped focus the United States  electorate on foreign policy.

Publicly favoring neither candidate ("which is better? the left shoe or the right shoe?") 

But behind the scenes, he worked toward Nixon’s defeat. As early as January 1960, over vodka, fruit, and caviar, Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Mikhail Menshikov had asked Adlai Stevenson how Moscow might best help him defeat Nixon. Was it better for the Soviet press to praise him or criticize him—and on which topics? Stevenson responded that he did not expect to be a candidate—and he then prayed that news of the Soviet proposition would never leak. Yet both parties so deeply recognized Khrushchev’s potential to swing votes, either by design or by accident, that each reached out to him. [my emphasis - shades of 2016] Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who had grown close to Khrushchev during his first U.S. trip, had flown to Moscow in February 1960 to convince the Soviet leader that he could work with Nixon. Lodge, who would become Nixon’s running mate, said, “Once Mr. Nixon is in the White House, I’m sure—I’m absolutely certain—he’ll take a position of preserving and perhaps even improving our relations."
The Democrats sent Averill Harriman to Moscow to argue that any endorsement of Kennedy would redownd to Nixon's benefit.

Khruschev was coming under pressure from within his own party as well as that of Mao in Communist China who wanted a less conciliatory position than the "peaceful coexistence" strategy being promoted by Kruschev. The situation in East Germany was also becoming dire as more and more East Germans fled to the West.

It was clear that Khruschev wanted Kennedy to win.  “We thought we would have more hope of improving Soviet–American relations if John Kennedy were in the White House.” He told colleagues that Nixon’s anticommunism and his connection with “that devil of darkness [Senator Joe] McCarthy, to whom he owed his career,” all meant “we had no reason to welcome the prospect of Nixon as President.”  Khrushchev believed he could outmaneuver Kennedy, a man whom his foreign ministry had characterized as “unlikely to possess the qualities of an outstanding person..... "The consensus in the Kremlin was that the young man was a lightweight, a product of American privilege who lacked the experience required for leadership." They had yet to meet Trump whose extreme narcissism and financial needs will clearly make him a tool of Putin.