Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of the presidency. I'm John Dickerson, co-host of CBS this morning.

When last we left, President Kennedy was June of 1961. He was fresh off a successful visit to France, but when he landed in Vienna, Austria, carrying his gray hat in one hand, he was tense.

For reasons that went beyond his stiff back, Kennedy faced a high-stakes parlay with Soviet premier

Nikit Khrushchev, the son of a multimillionaire businessman and graduate of the Toniest U.S.

college meeting with Khrushchev, the son of a Ukrainian coal miner who had three years

of grammar school. It was the first time the two would meet, leader to leader. Give them hell, Jack,

read a placard at the airport when Kennedy arrived. You'll remember, of course, our backdrop,

Vienna, the capital of Austria, its streets refreshed after the shelling and marching of World War II, welcomed the two main adversaries of the Cold War.

The meeting's purported purpose, which is not to say a purported porpoise, which is really just a fake dolphin,

the purpose was to lessen Cold War tensions. The two countries had not met since the Soviets downed an American U-2 spy plane in May of 1960.

The spy plane incident showed American vulnerability.

The failed Bay of Pigs invasion, which had happened even more recently,

also demonstrated that America could not work its will everywhere that it wanted.

This created a destabilizing fizzle in the atmosphere in Vienna.

The stakes were high.

Khrushchev spied an opening.

His age urged him to gambits, particularly on the question of Germany and Berlin.

Moscow wanted Germany under its sway. The U.S. was

adamantly opposed. Looming over the whole business was the prospect that the meeting could fail

and cauliflower into a crisis like the Berlin blockade of 1948. Okay, we're caught up. On the cusp of

President Donald Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, we offer

part two of our perhaps three-part coverage of Kennedy's famously muddy interaction with the

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