Going jaw to jaw with our enemies

SENATOR JOHN McCain has apparently decided to focus not on the sagging economy under the disastrous Bush economic and fiscal policies, which McCain would continue, but on Senator Barack Obama's willingness to communicate with hostile foreign leaders, such as those in Iran, North Korea, and Syria.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, authors Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkin attempted to support McCain's thesis by defaming a dead president. They stretched a common misperception about the 1961 Kennedy-Khrushchev summit meeting in Vienna to absurd length, claiming that President Kennedy was "weak," "pummeled," and "no match as a sparring partner," which led to US foreign policy setbacks.

Having studied the transcript of those talks, and having been briefed by the president on our return flight from Vienna, I accept Sergei Khrushchev's account that his father was impressed with Kennedy as a worthy and forcefully articulate opponent.

In the months that followed, Khrushchev never sent troops to Laos - having agreed with Kennedy to its neutralization - and never sent troops into West Berlin. Instead he built a wall that confessed to all the Soviet empire's inability to induce its most talented citizens to stay home instead of fleeing to the West.

Partly as the result of back-channel correspondence between Kennedy and Khrushchev that commenced later that year, those crises faded. When Khrushchev tested Kennedy's resolve by secretly rushing nuclear missiles to Cuba the following year, it was the Soviets who retreated in the face of that resolve.

True, Kennedy did tell New York Times correspondent James Reston in Vienna that his final session with Khrushchev on Berlin had been "rough," thereby hoping to prepare the American people for the new troop mobilizations and funding that his policy of vigilant deterrence would require. But the United States sustained no Cold War setbacks during Kennedy's presidency; and his commencement address on peace at American University in June 1963 demonstrated that he had experienced no reason to doubt or withdraw his inaugural admonition that we "should never fear to negotiate."

In fact, Kennedy's messages to Khrushchev and Robert Kennedy's talks with Soviet Ambassador Anatoliy Dobrynin enabled the Kennedys to induce Soviet agreement on the removal of their nuclear missiles from Cuba without the Americans firing a shot, much less precipitating the global nuclear holocaust then widely feared.

Communications between adversaries are a proud American tradition. Ronald Reagan, in meeting with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, paved the way for mutual nuclear arms reductions and limitations. The desirability of meetings between adversaries won President Jimmy Carter a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin together at Camp David; won President Teddy Roosevelt a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing Russia and Japan together over Manchuria and Korea in 1905; won Ralph Bunche, a distinguished American United Nations official, a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing the Arabs and Israelis together for their first armistice in 1949; and almost won President Bill Clinton a Nobel Peace Price for his effort to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together at Camp David in 2000.

True, President Bush, an advocate of seemingly endless war and not likely to win any peace prizes, did recently denounce communications and negotiations between adversaries as "appeasement"; but most Americans agree with Winston Churchill, no appeaser, that "it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war."

Direct meetings and communications enable a US president to utilize his skills, knowledge, charm, determination, empathy, and national values, extending the olive branch as well as the arrows depicted on the presidential seal.

There is a great deal about which the United States and Iran might talk - including trade, investment, tourism, and nuclear weapon nonproliferation. But none of those benefits will be achieved if the Bush policy of noncommunication is continued, and the United States, under McCain, returns to the pre-Kennedy days when the United States lacked the confidence to communicate with Mao Tse-tung or even shake hands with Ho Chi Minh, policies that garnered our country nothing but their hatred.

Ted Sorensen, former special counsel to President John F. Kennedy, is author of "Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History."