Veteran CBS and NBC News correspondent Marvin Kalb’s latest book, “A Different Russia: Khrushchev and Kennedy on a Collision Course,” explores a perilous chapter of US-Soviet relations, culminating in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

His riveting 500-page memoir — Kalb’s third in a series chronicling his nearly seven-decade journalism career and 17th book overall — serves as both warning and plea. And when America’s most respected foreign and diplomatic correspondent, now 94, speaks, world leaders would do well to listen.

“We are living in an extremely dangerous time made more dangerous by ignorance, by the failure of the Russian government to open itself to the rest of the world, [with] the exception of a number of their satellites,” Kalb told The Times of Israel in a recent interview from Washington, DC. “In the United States, the American people and the American government are making decisions based on instinct, based on history — but not based on current information and insight into what is happening in the Kremlin. And that ignorance could be devastating.”

The “different Russia” to which Kalb arrived as a press attaché at the US embassy in Moscow in 1956 “was just emerging from a long night of Stalinist oppression,” writes Kalb. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev launched his effort to dismantle Stalin’s dictatorship, which removed “the heavy blanket of fear” among Russians. He “scrapped” Stalin’s belief in the “inevitability of war” for his own policy of “peaceful co-existence,” favoring “summitry over confrontation,” while encouraging openness toward the West.

Asked to contrast Khrushchev with Russia today, Kalb pulled no punches.

“The leader of Russia today is someone who has turned his back on the West, who has used every opportunity to discourage contact between the Russian people and the American people,” said Kalb. “During Khrushchev’s time, there was a constant interplay of Russian scientists coming to the United States, American scientists going to Russia, athletes, scholars, and writers going back and forth. None of that exists today.”

Kalb was introduced to Khrushchev at a July 4, 1956, embassy reception. The chemistry of that encounter shaped his reporting from Moscow for CBS News from 1960 until shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“Because of our disproportionate heights — I was six-foot-three to........

© The Times of Israel