VATICAN II AND THE COLD WAR 35member of the Soviet delegation then phoned Moscow and re-
ported that Khrushchev would accept the pope’s proposal to with-
draw military shipping if the United States lifted the blockade.17
In the meantime, direct negotiations between Washington
and Moscow took place on several different levels. In addition to
the official contacts between the two powers, Robert F. Kenne-
dy, the attorney general and the president’s brother, had several
meetings with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, with whom
he was on friendly terms.18 At the same time, Aleksandr Fomin,
the KGB’s station chief in Washington, met with John Scali, a
correspondent for ABC News with personal connections with the
State Department who later became the U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations. The choice of such back-door diplomacy showed
that the Soviets were clearly intent on warding off a confronta-
tion. 19
One problem for John XXIII was that the Holy See had no
diplomatic relations with either of the superpowers. Khrushchev
had begun to establish a more cordial relationship with the pon-
tiff—always, of course, with the design of driving a wedge within
the Western alliance. As the first Catholic president, Kennedy had
to tread more cautiously with the Vatican. As a candidate for the
presidency, he had to declare his opposition to diplomatic rela-
tions with the Holy See. In March 1962, however, his wife, Jac-
queline, had an audience with the pope. In September 1962, more-
over, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had visited John XXIII.
But these were overtures that fell far short of initiating a perma-
nent relationship. The pope had to rely on less formal signs that
- Norman Cousins, The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John,
Nikita Khrushchev (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 13–18. Cousins, however, incor-
rectly gives the date of Kennedy’s televised address announcing the blockade as Oc-
tober 21. - Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 65–66, 106–9. - Chang and Kornbluh, eds., Cuban Missile Crisis, 81.