The World

‘Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race,’ promised LBJ, ‘until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.’ Yet his decency was always infected with oafish pragmatism: ‘I’ll have those n*****s voting Democrat for the next 200 years.’ On 2 July 1964, the Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination and segregation. In March 1965, Martin Luther King launched a campaign for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, where police brutality on Bloody Sunday exposed how much Jim Crow, like slavery, was based on violence. Two days after King had led a prayer session on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, LBJ, the most successful legislator in presidential history, backed the Voting Rights Bill, signed into law on 6 August 1965. King wept: after 300 years of slavery and apartheid, the liberation of African-Americans had started. But it would take more than two statutes to overturn the prejudices of centuries.

The shah did not mourn JFK, even drafting a critical letter to LBJ that Alam refused to send, but he too lived under the gun. He had already been shot once by an assassin. Soon after JFK’s murder, an Islamicized bodyguard tried to shoot the shah in his office: after dodging machine-gun fire, he carried on coolly with his day, commenting, ‘Thieves never hit the same house twice.’

In the Kremlin, Johnson faced a new team. Castro, safe but humiliated, had no choice but to forgive Khrushchev, whose own comrades could not. At 4 p.m. on 13 October 1964, the seventy-year-old Khrushchev walked into the Presidium in the Kremlin. He had been on holiday in Abkhazia on the Black Sea when Brezhnev had suddenly called him back: ‘We can’t decide without you!’ Khrushchev flew back. At the meeting Brezhnev suddenly denounced him for dictatorship, blundering, boozing, ‘contradicting Lenin’, ‘making decisions over lunch’ and calling the Presidium a pack of ‘male dogs peeing on kerbstones’. Now the pee was aimed at him.

The fifty-seven-year-old Leonid ‘Lyonia’ Brezhnev, ursine and bushy-browed, unpretentious and jovial, had been Khrushchev’s protégé since the 1930s, a Russian lathe worker’s son from east Ukraine who had served on the Ukrainian front with his patron, then been selected by Stalin for promotion. He was one of the team that arrested Beria, backing Khrushchev against the Stalinist grandees (and fainting in the middle of the drama), and was promoted to deputy Party leader. But he disapproved of the denunciations of Stalin, was embarrassed by Khrushchev’s tantrums and was most appalled by the disaster of Cuba. ‘Before the war,’ Khrushchev said mockingly of Brezhnev, ‘the boys nicknamed him the Ballerina’ because ‘anyone who wants can turn him around’. In June 1964, Brezhnev started to plot but was so nervous that he almost wept – ‘Khrushchev knows everything. All is lost. He’ll shoot us’ – and even wrote fake diary entries: ‘Met Nikita Sergeievich. Joyous pleasant meeting.’ Brezhnev recruited the KGB and suggested they murder Khrushchev or arrange an accident for his plane. But in October 1964, when Khrushchev was enjoying his holiday at Pitsunda, Brezhnev set the trap, calling to order his return to Moscow.

‘You’re suffering from megalomania,’ a grandee shouted at Khrushchev, ‘and the illness is incurable.’ But Cuba was his ultimate sin. ‘Juggling the fate of the world,’ said another. ‘Neither the Russian nor the Soviet army,’ said a third, ‘had ever suffered such a humiliation.’

‘I can’t make bargains with my conscience,’ concluded Brezhnev. ‘Dismiss Comrade Khrushchev from the posts he holds and divide them up.’

‘You gathered together and splattered shit on me,’ said Khrushchev, ‘and I can’t object … I’m old and tired.’ But his real achievement? ‘The fear is gone and we can talk as equals. That’s my contribution.’ Khrushchev was not shot. While Mikoyan became head of state, the veteran Alexei Kosygin became premier and Brezhnev became Party leader, soon taking Stalin’s old title of general secretary. But he was no Stalin – and no Khrushchev either.