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

It was only the halftime break at the Kennedy-Kruchev Vienna summit in June of 1961, but it was already clear the Team USA was losing.

Kennedy, in his fumbling responses to the Soviet premiere, had appeared weak to his opponent,

who noted that Kennedy was young enough to be his son. Indeed, the 44-year-old president

had been born in the same year as Khrushchev's eldest son. This man is very inexperienced,

even immature, Khrushchev told his interpreter. Compared to him, Eisenhower is a man of intelligence

and vision. This is from Fred Kemp's indispensable Berlin, 61. You'll remember, of course,

that Khrushchev had a very low opinion of Eisenhower going into the meeting, and so in comparison

to Kennedy. So for him, after the first day, to put Eisenhower back on the top of the heap is quite a downgrade for Kennedy.

Anyway, welcome to the third and final whistle stop on President Kennedy's meeting with the Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev.

It is a rule of the whistlestop priory that a string of episodes cannot last longer than the thing that they are describing.

So we are desperately going to try to stop things here at just three episodes on Kennedy and Khrushchev.

Why have we subjected you to three episodes anyway?

Well, because there's so much to discover.

And our researchers, Brian Rosenwald and Elizabeth Hinson, have put so much before me, I feel a personal debt to them for doing all of the excavating.

When you have diamonds brought before you, it's really not polite in the least to cast them aside or use them to hold up the wobbly table at bar 91, which is where I typed that sentence.

You must put them in their best use, and so here is an attempt to do that.

And even so, not all the gems can fit into the story.

I had to tell the story of Soviet spy Georgi Obolshakov as my cocktail chatter in our live Philadelphia Gab Fest a couple of weeks ago, because my cup so runneth over.

Anyway, why are we here? What's this all about? What's cooking? Well, the story of Kennedy

in Vienna is the story of how summits can change the course of U.S. and world history. We think of

them as discreet moments, but even summits where very little happen in the narrow boundaries

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