The World

Khrushchev denounced the Cuban: ‘Because he’s young, he couldn’t behave himself.’ But the crisis had shown, he said, ‘we are members of the World Club’ and defended himself: ‘It’s not necessary to act like the tsarist officer who farted at the ball and then shot himself.’ It had been a bit more than a fart at a ball. ‘I cut his balls off,’ exulted JFK, who resumed the affair with Mimi. Kennedy and Khrushchev, who had terrified each other, hinted through aides that it was time to reduce nuclear weapons and agreed to establish a hotline – actually a teleprinter – to avoid future crises. Each side tested the hotline – the US quoting Shakespeare, the Soviets Chekhov: it would be used sooner than anyone guessed.

‘We have a problem making our power credible,’ said JFK, ‘and Vietnam looks like the place.’ Khrushchev regarded Ho Chi Minh as a Red ‘saint’ but gave limited backing to the Vietnamese, monitoring more US personnel arriving in Thailand and South Vietnam. Kennedy, riding high after Cuba, hated – and was hated by – the two Asian leaders who most resembled him.

SIHANOUK AND THE SHAH

Prince Sihanouk, charismatic playboy, now in love with a teenaged Eurasian beauty queen named Monique who became his chief but not only lover, often compared to Jackie Kennedy, was trying to keep Cambodia neutral. Sihanouk joined the non-aligned movement, led by Nasser, Nehru and Sukarno, which leaned strongly towards the Soviets. But in Indo-China, where even the US and USSR agreed to a neutral Laos, there was little space for real neutrality. After a breathing space following the French withdrawal, Ho Chi Minh and his younger more aggressive comrade Le Duan ordered General Giap to infiltrate South Vietnam, now ruled by another set of siblings, President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brothers.^*

Kennedy raised the number of American military advisers from 1,000 to 16,000, and pressured Sihanouk to resist Communist encroachment. The CIA approved Sihanouk’s assassination, organized by the Ngos, but the prince survived the bomb. Kennedy himself was exasperated by the Ngos, who were brutally crushing mounting Buddhist protests. In November 1963, just twenty days before JFK went to Dallas, the Ngos were deposed by their generals and bayoneted, though Madame Nhu survived because she was abroad. Sihanouk, growing close to China, resented JFK’s menaces.

Similarly, JFK had much in common with the shah – the same age, both athletic playboy sons of domineering self-made moguls, both married to cool-blooded fashion icons. But tragically Queen Soraya could not have children; after the shah, now forty, had begged her to allow him to take a second wife, they divorced and in 1959 he married a young, high-spirited architecture student, Farah Diba, wearing a wedding dress by Yves Saint Laurent. Farah was more liberal, more open to change than he was. They had two sons and two daughters, and her elegance too was compared to that of Jackie Kennedy. Both JFK and Mohammad Pahlavi were risk-taking womanizers and clients of the Parisian Madame Claude.^*

Yet president and shah hated each other. In the ten years since the fall of Mosaddegh, the shah had emerged as the rising power of the region. While coping with a welter of conspiracies, he renegotiated the oil deals with the west and in 1960 he was one of the founders of OPEC, the oil producers’ organization, managing to be close to both Saudis and Israelis, whom he respected and liked. Playing the Americans against the Soviets, he chose the former as allies but resented their interference. He created a secret police, SAVAK, to hunt Communists, many of whom he executed, and to confront the constant plots against him.

JFK regarded the shah as an inefficient tyrant, advising that he appoint a Kennedy ally as premier. Bristling with pride and planning revolution and rearmament, the shah was incensed but agreed, convinced JFK was trying to overthrow him. When the shah and Farah visited Kennedy at the White House, the meetings were chilly. On the shah’s return, his firm treatment of the ayatollahs finally convinced JFK that he could be a useful ally.

On 9 January 1963, the shah launched his Shah and People Revolution, to industrialize, distribute land and grant female rights, but it outraged the ulema – Islamic jurists – led by Ruhollah Khomeini. The glowering ayatollah, sixty-three years old, seemed the very model of a medieval mullah, but he was also an innovator. Backed by Fadayan-e Islam, the secret network of terrorist extremists who had assassinated several ministers, Khomeini was developing an extraordinary idea that involved rejection of secular rule altogether: as Shiites awaited the messianic emergence of the occulted Mahdi, they should adopt rule by an Islamic judicial guardian – velayat-e faqih – and probably Khomeini was already thinking of himself. Most of the ulema regarded the idea as eccentric if not bizarre.