Travel through the lives of History's Legendary Leaders!

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Kabila, Laurent


born 1939, Jadotville, Belgian Congo [now Likasi, Democratic Republic of the Congo]
died January 18?, 2001

in full Laurent Desire Kabila leader of a rebellion that overthrew President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire in May 1997. He subsequently became president and restored the country's former name, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Kabila was born into the Luba tribe in the southern province of Katanga. He studied political philosophy at a French university and attended the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where he met and formed a friendship with Yoweri Museveni, the future president of Uganda. In 1960 Kabila became a youth leader in a political party allied to Congo's first postindependence prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. In 1961 Lumumba was deposed by Mobutu and later killed. Assisted for a time in 1964 by guerrilla leader Che Guevara, Kabila helped Lumumba supporters lead a revolt that was eventually suppressed in 1965 by the Congolese army led by Mobutu, who seized power later that year; in 1971 Mobutu renamed the country Zaire. In 1967 Kabila founded the People's Revolutionary Party, which established a Marxist territory in the Kivu region of eastern Zaire and managed to sustain itself through gold mining and ivory trading. When the enterprise came to an end during the 1980s, he ran a business selling gold in Dar es Salaam.

In the mid-1990s Kabila returned to Zaire and became leader of the newly formed Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire. As opposition to the dictatorial leadership of Mobutu grew, he rallied forces consisting mostly of Tutsi from eastern Zaire and marched west toward the capital city of Kinshasa, forcing Mobutu to flee the country. On May 17, 1997, Kabila installed himself as head of state and reverted the country's name to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

As president, Kabila initially banned political activity but in May 1998 promulgated a decree that established a national constituent and legislative assembly. The subsequent arrest of oppositionists, however, undermined the apparent move toward democracy, and allegations of human-rights abuses against Kabila's forces continued. In August 1998 the Banyamulenge, people of Tutsi origin who had helped bring Kabila to power, launched an open rebellion in the eastern part of the country. Resentful of Kabila's seeming favouritism to members of his own ethnic group and fearful of reprisals from rival factions, they were supported by the governments of Uganda and Rwanda, which had been angered by Kabila's failure to prevent raiders from threatening their borders. Though a cease-fire was reached in July 1999, sporadic fighting continued.

On January 16, 2001, Kabila was shot by a bodyguard at his presidential palace in Kinshasa. Initial accounts stated that he was killed during the attack, but Congolese officials denied the reports. On the 18th, however, it was announced that Kabila had died while on an airplane en route to Harare, Zimbabwe. On January 26 his son, Joseph Kabila, was inaugurated as Congo's president.

Kádár, János


born May 26, 1912, Fiume, Hung. [now Rijeka, Croatia]
died July 6, 1989, Budapest

original name János Czermanik, Czermanik also spelled Csermanek premier of Hungary (1956–58, 1961–65) and first secretary (1956–88) of Hungary's Communist Party who played a key role in Hungary's transition from the 1956 anti-Soviet government of Imre Nagy to the pro-Soviet regime that followed. Kádár managed to convince the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops and allow Hungary a modicum of internal independence after quelling a popular revolt in his country.

Trained as a skilled mechanic, Kádár became a member of the then-illegal Communist Party in 1931 and was arrested several times in the following 12 years. He was admitted to the Central Committee of the party in 1942 and to the Politburo in 1945. After the war he became minister of the interior (1949), but in 1950 he came into conflict with the Stalinists and consequently was expelled from the party, jailed (1951–53), and allegedly tortured.

Rehabilitated in 1954, Kádár joined Imre Nagy's short-lived government. Nagy, who pledged the liberalization of the Communist regime and the evacuation of Soviet troops from Hungary, had been brought to power on the strength of the Hungarian revolt (started Oct. 23, 1956). After Soviet troops took over the country on November 4, Kádár deserted Nagy and formed a new government under Soviet auspices, serving as premier until 1958. Unable to implement Nagy's reforms, Kádár resorted to repressive measures to curb the revolt. He served another term as premier from 1961 to 1965.

In foreign policy Kádár as party leader steered a course close to Moscow's, while trying to raise the Hungarians' standard of living and maintain more liberal internal policies. In contrast to such Stalinist predecessors as Mátyás Rákosi, Kádár minimized political surveillance in Hungary and eventually permitted limited freedoms of expression. Hungary's cultural life benefited from the greater political tolerance experienced under Kádár's pragmatic rule. To achieve faster economic growth, Kádár's government in the late 1960s adopted a new system of decentralized economic management in which plant managers and farmers were given greater freedom to make basic decisions in the operation and development of their enterprises. The profit motive was thus partially introduced into many sectors of the state-run economy, with the result that Hungary became the most prosperous nation in eastern Europe.

Kádár's government slowed and eventually stopped the pace of reform in the mid-1970s, and by the 1980s Hungary's economy had entered a state of stagnation. Consequently, Kádár was removed from his post as general secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party in 1988 and was given the largely ceremonial post of party president until May 1989, when he was removed from the party presidency and from the Central Committee.

Kaifu Toshiki


born Jan. 2, 1931, Ichinomiya, Japan

politician and government offical who served as prime minister of Japan in the period 1989–91.

The son of a photography studio owner, Kaifu graduated from Waseda University, Tokyo, in 1954. Entering politics, he won election to the House of Representatives as a member of the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) in 1960 and was regularly reelected thereafter. He served as deputy chief secretary of Prime Minister Miki Takeo's Cabinet in 1974–76 and then became minister of education (1976–77) under Prime Minister Fukuda Takeo. He held this latter post again in 1985–86 under Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro.

After prime ministers Takeshita Noboru and Uno Sōsuke had successively resigned from office in 1989 owing to financial scandals and public dissatisfaction with the governing Liberal-Democratic Party, Kaifu on August 8 was chosen to fill out Uno's term as president of the party, and the next day he was elected by the House of Representatives to succeed the latter as prime minister. In October Kaifu was elected to a full two-year term as president of the LDP, and in February 1990 the LDP under his leadership won a sweeping victory in national elections to the House of Representatives, thereby retaining a majority in that legislative body. Kaifu declined to seek reelection to the presidency of the LDP in October 1991 after he lost the support of key party leaders, who had been angered by his efforts to reform Japanese electoral politics. His term as prime minister ended the following month.

Karamanlis, Konstantinos


born February 23 [March 8, New Style], 1907, Próti, near Sérrai, Macedonia, Ottoman Empire [now in Greece]
died April 23, 1998, Athens, Greece

also spelled Constantine Caramanlis Greek statesman who was prime minister from 1955 to 1963 and again from 1974 to 1980. He then served as president from 1980 to 1985 and from 1990 to 1995. Karamanlis gave Greece competent government and political stability while his conservative economic policies stimulated economic growth. In 1974–75 he successfully restored democracy and constitutional government in Greece after the rule of a military junta there had collapsed.

The eldest of seven children of a poor schoolteacher, Karamanlis was able, with the help of local benefactors, to attend secondary school and the University of Athens. He received a law degree in 1932 and practiced law in Athens. Launched into politics by the Populist Party, he was elected to Parliament in 1935 for Sérrai, which continued to reelect him. In 1946 he was appointed minister of labour, and over the next nine years he held a string of cabinet posts in successive right-wing governments, earning a reputation for drive and efficiency in his efforts to aid Greek refugees and rebuild the war-torn economy. Karamanlis joined the conservative Greek Rally party in 1950, and, when Prime Minister Alexandros Papagos died in October 1955 and the party was unable to decide on a successor, King Paul chose Karamanlis as prime minister.

Karamanlis formed not only his government but also his own party, the National Radical Union (ERE), which in parliamentary elections in February 1956 obtained 161 seats out of 300. He retained a parliamentary majority in elections held in 1958 and 1961. As prime minister, Karamanlis helped Greece make a dramatic economic recovery from the devastation of World War II and the ensuing civil war (1946–49). With American aid, he achieved rapid economic growth and greatly expanded Greece's fledgling industrial sector.

In foreign affairs, he improved Greece's relations with Yugoslavia, but those with Turkey and Great Britain remained strained because of the issue of tensions between the ethnic Greek majority and the Turkish minority on Cyprus, which was then under British rule. In order to restore friendly relations with the NATO powers, Karamanlis decided to disentangle the awkward Cyprus problem by establishing an independent republic on the island, an action taken, with the agreement of Turkey and Great Britain, in 1960.

In June 1963 Karamanlis resigned after a dispute with King Paul over the respective powers of the monarchy and the government. Shortly afterward he left Greece to live in Paris, where he remained while his country was ruled by the military (1967–74). During these years he repeatedly called for the military junta to resign but did not otherwise actively oppose the regime.

On July 24, 1974, after the fall of the military junta, Karamanlis was recalled to Athens as prime minister of an emergency government. He demanded and obtained the subordination of the armed forces to civilian authority, reinstated the constitution, and averted a catastrophic war with Turkey over Cyprus without loss of prestige. In parliamentary elections held in November that year, his New Democracy Party won 220 of 300 seats. In June 1975 Karamanlis obtained the adoption of a new constitution that strengthened the powers of the presidency, which had largely been a ceremonial office. In December 1975 he held a referendum in which the people voted to abolish the Greek monarchy.

In May 1980 Karamanlis resigned as prime minister and was elected president. Greece's entry into the European Economic Community in 1981 crowned his long efforts to strengthen his country's economic ties with western Europe. When in March 1985 the Socialist prime minister Andreas Papandreou unexpectedly withdrew his party's support for Karamanlis's upcoming reelection, Karamanlis resigned from the presidency. He was elected president again in 1990, when the conservatives returned to power, and served until 1995.

Karamanlis, Kostas


born September 14, 1956, Athens, Greece

byname of Konstantinos Karamanlis Greek politician who became prime minister of Greece in 2004.

Karamanlis was the nephew of Konstantinos Karamanlis, who, as government minister, prime minister, and president, had shaped Greek politics for nearly half a century. The younger Karamanlis started his political activities in the New Democracy Party (ND), which his uncle had founded in 1974. Although Karamanlis held high positions within the party's youth and student organizations between 1974 and 1979 and served in the navy (1977–79), his political career remained unremarkable as he focused on his studies. He earned a law degree at Athens University (1979) and later studied economics at the American College of Greece's Deree College. From 1980 to 1984 he attended Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where he received a master's degree in political science and economics and a Ph.D. in international relations. Karamanlis subsequently returned to Greece to practice law and teach at Deree. He was elected to the parliament in June 1989, and in 1993 he became a member of the ND central committee and political council.

In 1997 Karamanlis was elected party president, and as ND leader he forged relative unity in a party that was traditionally riddled by factionalism between its more traditionalist-conservative and liberal wings. He also persuaded several politicians who had quit the party to return. On March 7, 2004, the ND won the general elections, ending 11 years of centre-left rule under the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, and Karamanlis became the youngest prime minister in recent Greek history.

Karmal, Babrak



born January 6, 1929, near Kabul, Afghanistan
died December 3, 1996, Moscow, Russia

Afghan politician who, backed by the Soviet Union, was president of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1986.

The son of a well-connected army general, Karmal became involved in Marxist political activities while a student at Kabul University in the 1950s and was imprisoned for five years as a result. Upon his release, he served in the army and returned to the university for a law degree. In 1965 he was a founding member of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and from 1965 to 1973 served in the National Assembly. When the PDPA split (1967) into the People's (“Khalq”) and the Banner (“Parcham”) factions, Karmal became the leader of the more moderate, pro-Soviet Banner. The Banner supported the government of Mohammad Daud Khan following Daud's 1973 coup overthrowing the monarchy, but relations between Daud and the political left soon soured. The two PDPA factions reunited in 1977, and in 1978—with Soviet help—seized the government. Karmal became deputy prime minister, but rivalries within the government soon resulted in his being sent to Prague, Czechoslovakia, as an ambassador. The PDPA attempted to reshape the country drastically along Marxist lines, but there were major rebellions in the countryside among an overwhelmingly Muslim population that opposed the government's secular and Marxist agenda. Infighting between members of the dominant People's faction of the PDPA led to the death of President Nur Mohammad Taraki and the rise to power of Hafizullah Amin, whom the Soviets faulted for the growing rebellion. In December 1979 Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Amin regime, and Karmal was called back to serve as president. However, despite Karmal's attempts at conciliation, the Muslim rebels, known collectively as the mujahideen, obtained aid from the West—particularly from the United States—and persisted in attacking the communist regime. The area became a Cold War battleground, and Moscow came to consider Karmal a burden and publicly blamed him for the country's problems. In November 1986 he resigned from office, claiming poor health, and was replaced by Mohammad Najibullah, a former head of the secret police. Shortly thereafter Karmal moved to Moscow, where he lived the remainder of his days.

Kasavubu, Joseph


born 1910?, Tshela, Belgian Congo [now Congo (Kinshasa)]
died March 24, 1969, Boma

statesman and first president of the independent Congo republic from 1960 to 1965, who shortly after independence in 1960 ousted the Congo's first premier, Patrice Lumumba, after the breakdown of order in the country.

Educated by Roman Catholic missionaries, Kasavubu became a lay teacher. In 1942 he entered the civil service; he attained the rank of chief clerk, the highest position open to Congolese under the Belgian colonial administration.

An early leader in the Congo's independence movement, Kasavubu during the late 1940s held important offices in Congolese cultural societies and alumni associations that were actually political organizations operating in defiance of Belgian authorities. As a member of the powerful Bakongo (or Kongo), one of the largest tribal groups in the country, Kasavubu in the 1950s sought an independent Congo with a federal structure that would ensure a certain measure of Bakongo autonomy.

Kasavubu became president (1955) of Abako (Alliance des Ba-Kongo), the powerful cultural-political association of the Bakongo. In 1957 Abako candidates swept the first municipal elections permitted by Belgian authorities in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), and Kasavubu was elected mayor of the Dendale district.

In the Congo's first national elections in 1960, Lumumba's party outpolled Kasavubu's Abako and its allies, but neither side could form a parliamentary coalition. As a compromise measure, Kasavubu and Lumumba formed an uneasy partnership with the former as president and the latter as premier.

Shortly after independence, Congo was racked by an army mutiny, Belgian military intervention to protect the remaining Belgian residents, and the secession of the province of Katanga under Moise Tshombe. United Nations aid proved ineffective in restoring order in the country, and there were reports that Premier Lumumba had accepted offers of Soviet military aid to prop up the faltering central government. With the backing of the army under Colonel Joseph Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko), Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba and appointed a new government. Kasavubu then tacitly supported Mobuto's first coup in late 1960 and later engineered the accession of Tshombe to the premiership in 1964. Kasavubu's role in Congolese politics effectively ended, however, with Mobutu's second, and final overthrow of the government in 1965. Kasavubu then retired to his farm at Boma on the lower Congo River.

Kaunda, Kenneth


born April 28, 1924, Lubwa, near Chinsali, Northern Rhodesia [now Zambia]

in full Kenneth David Kaunda politician who led Zambia to independence in 1964 and served as that nation's president until 1991.

Kaunda's father, who was from Nyasaland (now Malaŵi), was a schoolteacher; his mother, also a teacher, was the first African woman to teach in colonial Zambia. Both taught among the Bemba tribe in northern Zambia, where young Kaunda received his early education, completing secondary school in the early 1940s. Like the majority of Africans in colonial Zambia who achieved some measure of middle-class status, he also began to teach, first in colonial Zambia and in the middle 1940s in Tanganyika (now Tanzania). He returned to Zambia in 1949.

In that year he became interpreter and adviser on African affairs to Sir Stewart Gore-Browne, a liberal white settler and a member of the Northern Rhodesian Legislative Council. Kaunda acquired knowledge of the colonial government as well as political skills, both of which served him well when later that year he joined the African National Congress (ANC), the first major anticolonial organization in Northern Rhodesia. In the early 1950s Kaunda became the ANC's secretary-general, functioning as its chief organizing officer, a role that brought him into close contact with the movement's rank and file. Thus, when the leadership of the ANC clashed over strategy in 1958–59, Kaunda carried a major part of the ANC operating structure into a new organization, the Zambia African National Congress.

Kaunda became president of the new organization and skillfully used it to forge a militant policy against the British plan for a federation of the three central African colonies—Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. African leaders opposed and feared any such federation because it would tend to place ultimate power in the hands of a white minority of settlers. Kaunda employed the Zambia congress as an instrument for executing what he called “positive nonviolent action,” a form of civil disobedience against the federation policy. His campaign had two major results: first, the British government modified the federation policy and eventually agreed to discard it; second, the imprisonment of Kaunda and other militant leaders elevated them to the status of national heroes in the eyes of the people. Thus, from 1960 on, the nationwide support of Zambia's independence movement was secured, as was too the dominant status of Kenneth Kaunda in that movement.

Kaunda was released from prison by the colonial government on Jan. 8, 1960. At the end of that month he was elected president of the United National Independence Party (UNIP), which had been formed in October 1959 by Mainza Chona, a militant nationalist who was disenchanted with the older ANC. The UNIP enjoyed a spectacular growth, claiming 300,000 members by June 1960. In December 1960 the British colonial authorities invited Kaunda and several other UNIP leaders to participate in discussions on the status of the three colonies at a conference in London. Early in the following year the British government announced that formal decolonization of Zambia would commence.

The first major elections leading to final decolonization were held in October 1962. The constitutional proposals upon which the election was based provided the European settlers in Northern Rhodesia with a disproportionate share of the votes. Yet the two major African parties—the UNIP and ANC—gained a majority of the votes. The UNIP was the winner, gaining 15 of the 37 seats in the new Legislative Council.

The UNIP's success was attributed overwhelmingly to the leadership of Kaunda. He had been astute both in allaying the European settlers' fears that an African regime would unfairly disregard their interests and in quelling the factionalism prevalent in large sections of the country's African population. It was this same skill that enabled Kaunda to negotiate further constitutional advances, and in 1964 Zambia was granted independence with Kaunda as its president.

Like other African leaders, Kaunda faced many complex postindependence problems, especially the issue of tribalism. He succeeded in continuing to negotiate on this issue, saving Zambia the trauma of tribal civil war. Nevertheless, interparty political violence occured during the elections of 1968, in which Kaunda and his party were returned to power. In response, Kaunda in 1972 imposed one-party rule on Zambia, and in 1973 he introduced a new constitution that ensured his party's uncontested rule.

In the 1970s Kaunda's government acquired a majority interest in the country's copper-mining operations and undertook to manage other industries as well. While investing large sums in the mining sector, the government neglected agriculture while nevertheless having to spend increasing sums on subsidized food for the urban poor. These policies reduced agricultural production and increased Zambia's dependence on exports of copper and on foreign loans and aid. From the 1970s on, the result of these policies was the progressive impoverishment of Zambia; unemployment rose, living standards steadily declined, and the provision of education and other social services decayed. In foreign affairs, Kaunda led other nations of southern Africa in confronting the white-minority governments of Rhodesia and South Africa. He imposed economic sanctions against Rhodesia in the 1970s at great cost to his country's own economy, and in the late 1970s he allowed Zambia to be used as a base by black nationalist guerrillas led by Joshua Nkomo.

In 1976 Kaunda assumed emergency powers, and he was reelected as president in one-candidate elections in 1978 and 1983. Several attempted coups against him in the early 1980s were squelched. The Zambian economy continued to deteriorate owing to a fall in the world price of copper (Zambia's chief export), the rising price of oil (its chief import), the withdrawal of foreign aid and investment by developed nations, and worsening corruption within Kaunda's government. With public dissatisfaction mounting and a credible political opposition in the process of formation, Kaunda in 1990 legalized opposition parties and set the stage for free, multiparty elections in 1991. In the elections, held late that year, Kaunda and the UNIP were defeated by the Movement for Multiparty Democracy in a landslide. Kaunda's successor took office on Nov. 2, 1991.

Keating, Paul


born Jan. 18, 1944, Sydney, N.S.W., Australia

in full Paul John Keating politician who was leader of the Australian Labor Party and prime minister of Australia from December 1991 to March 1996.

Growing up in working-class Bankstown, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, Keating left school at age 14. He became involved in trade union activity, drifted into labour politics, and was elected in 1969 to the House of Representatives at age 25. Acquiring a reputation for both pointed political invective and party loyalty, he was chosen by Prime Minister Robert Hawke to be federal treasurer in 1983. Keating became a stellar performer, making his mark with a blend of earthy attacks on his opponents and high-level explanations and lectures on the more arcane aspects of economics.

In 1991, while Australia struggled through a severe economic recession, Hawke became embroiled in a leadership battle with Keating for control of the Labor Party and the office of the prime minister. On December 19, 1991, Hawke called for a party vote and lost by a small margin to Keating (56–51). As prime minister of Australia, Keating inaugurated financial programs aimed at national recovery. He was reelected prime minister in 1993 as the economy regained strength, but his government was defeated by a coalition of the Liberal Party and the National Party in the elections of March 2, 1996, ending 13 years of rule by the Labor Party. Keating became a successful business consultant after his political career.

Keita, Modibo


born June 4, 1915, Bamako, French Sudan [now in Mali]
died May 16, 1977, Bamako, Mali

socialist politician and first president of Mali (1960–68).

Keita was trained as a teacher in Dakar and entered politics in his native French Sudan (now Mali). In 1945 he cofounded and became secretary-general of the Sudanese Union. In 1946 the Sudanese Union merged with another anticolonial party, the African Democratic Rally, to form the US-RDA. Keita was briefly imprisoned by the French in 1946. Two years later, however, he won a seat in the territorial assembly of French Sudan, and from 1956 to 1958 he served as a deputy in the French National Assembly, becoming its first African vice president.

Meanwhile, Keita had become president of the US-RDA and also mayor of Bamako (the capital). The US-RDA was by then the leading party in French Sudan, and in the elections of 1957 it won an overwhelming victory. In a 1958 referendum in French West Africa, Keita successfully campaigned for Sudan to become an autonomous state within the French Community. This state, the Sudanese Republic, was formed in November 1958. Though eager to create a West African federation of former French territories, Keita finally settled for a Mali Federation made up only of Senegal and his own Sudan. In January 1959 he became president of this short-lived federation, which split apart in August 1960 owing to disagreements between the Sudanese and Senegalese. Keita remained as president of the Sudan, which a congress of the ruling US-RDA proclaimed the independent Republic of Mali in September 1960.

An outspoken Marxist, Keita adopted socialist policies during Mali's first eight years of independence. His government nationalized key sectors of the economy and established close ties with communist countries. His regime, though repressive, seemed firmly established, but by 1967 Mali was experiencing growing economic and financial problems. Keita tried to enlist French support for the Malian currency, a move that aroused discontent within his party and cries of betrayal from his more radical supporters. To appease the latter, Keita in August 1967 launched a Maoist-inspired cultural revolution, but its spiraling purges and authoritarian tactics soon alienated most of the population. On Nov. 19, 1968, Keita was overthrown in a bloodless coup led by junior army officers. He spent the remainder of his life in detention.


Kennedy, John F.


Introduction

born May 29, 1917, Brookline, Massachusetts, U.S.
died November 22, 1963, Dallas, Texas

in full John Fitzgerald Kennedy 35th president of the United States (1961–63), who faced a number of foreign crises, especially in Cuba and Berlin, but managed to secure such achievements as the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty and the Alliance for Progress. He was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. (For a discussion of the history and nature of the presidency, see presidency of the United States of America. See also Cabinet of President John F. Kennedy.)

Early life

The second of nine children, Kennedy was reared in a family that demanded intense physical and intellectual competition among the siblings—the family's touch football games at their Hyannis Port retreat later became legendary—and was schooled in the religious teachings of the Roman Catholic church and the political precepts of the Democratic Party. His father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, had acquired a multimillion-dollar fortune in banking, bootlegging, shipbuilding, and the film industry, and as a skilled player of the stock market. His mother, Rose, was the daughter of John F. (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald, onetime mayor of Boston. They established trust funds for their children that guaranteed lifelong financial independence. After serving as the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Joseph Kennedy became the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, and for six months in 1938 John served as his secretary, drawing on that experience to write his senior thesis at Harvard University (B.S., 1940) on Great Britain's military unpreparedness. He then expanded that thesis into a best-selling book, Why England Slept (1940).

In the fall of 1941 Kennedy joined the U.S. Navy and two years later was sent to the South Pacific. By the time he was discharged in 1945, his older brother, Joe, who their father had expected would be the first Kennedy to run for office, had been killed in the war, and the family's political standard passed to John, who had planned to pursue an academic or journalistic career.

John Kennedy himself had barely escaped death in battle. Commanding a patrol torpedo (PT) boat, he was gravely injured when a Japanese destroyer sank it in the Solomon Islands. Marooned far behind enemy lines, he led his men back to safety and was awarded the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Medal for heroism. He also returned to active command at his own request. (These events were later depicted in a Hollywood film, PT 109 [1963], that contributed to the Kennedy mystique.) However, the further injury to his back, which had bothered him since his teens, never really healed. Despite operations in 1944, 1954, and 1955, he was in pain for much of the rest of his life. He also suffered from Addison's disease, though this affliction was publicly concealed. “At least one-half of the days he spent on this earth,” wrote his brother Robert, “were days of intense physical pain.” (After he became president, Kennedy combated the pain with injections of amphetamines—then thought to be harmless and used by more than a few celebrities for their energizing effect. According to some reports, both Kennedy and the first lady became heavily dependent on these injections through weekly use.) None of this prevented Kennedy from undertaking a strenuous life in politics. His family expected him to run for public office and to win.

Congressman and senator

Kennedy did not disappoint his family; in fact, he never lost an election. His first opportunity came in 1946, when he ran for Congress. Although still physically weak from his war injuries, he campaigned aggressively, bypassing the Democratic organization in the Massachusetts 11th congressional district and depending instead upon his family, college friends, and fellow navy officers. In the Democratic primary he received nearly double the vote of his nearest opponent; in the November election he overwhelmed the Republican candidate. He was only 29.

Kennedy served three terms in the House of Representatives (1947–53) as a bread-and-butter liberal. He advocated better working conditions, more public housing, higher wages, lower prices, cheaper rents, and more Social Security for the aged. In foreign policy he was an early supporter of Cold War policies. He backed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan but was sharply critical of the Truman administration's record in Asia. He accused the State Department of trying to force Chiang Kai-shek into a coalition with Mao Zedong. “What our young men had saved,” he told the House on January 25, 1949, “our diplomats and our President have frittered away.”

His congressional district in Boston was a safe seat, but Kennedy was too ambitious to remain long in the House of Representatives. In 1952 he ran for the U.S. Senate against the popular incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. His mother and sisters Eunice, Patricia, and Jean held “Kennedy teas” across the state. Thousands of volunteers flocked to help, including his 27-year-old brother Robert, who managed the campaign. That fall the Republican presidential candidate, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, carried Massachusetts by 208,000 votes; but Kennedy defeated Lodge by 70,000 votes. Less than a year later, on September 12, 1953, Kennedy enhanced his electoral appeal by marrying Jacqueline Lee Bouvier (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). Twelve years younger than Kennedy and from a socially prominent family, the beautiful “Jackie” was the perfect complement to the handsome politician; they made a glamorous couple.

As a senator, Kennedy quickly won a reputation for responsiveness to requests from constituents, except on certain occasions when the national interest was at stake. In 1954 he was the only New England senator to approve an extension of President Eisenhower's reciprocal-trade powers, and he vigorously backed the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, despite the fact that over a period of 20 years no Massachusetts senator or congressman had ever voted for it.

To the disappointment of liberal Democrats, Kennedy soft-pedaled the demagogic excesses of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, who in the early 1950s conducted witch-hunting campaigns against government workers accused of being communists. Kennedy's father liked McCarthy, contributed to his campaign, and even entertained him in the family's compound at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Kennedy himself disapproved of McCarthy, but, as he once observed, “Half my people in Massachusetts look on McCarthy as a hero.” Yet, on the Senate vote over condemnation of McCarthy's conduct (1954), Kennedy expected to vote against him. He prepared a speech explaining why, but he was absent on the day of the vote. Later, at a National Press Club Gridiron dinner, costumed reporters sang, “Where were you, John, where were you, John, when the Senate censured Joe?” Actually, John had been in a hospital, in critical condition after back surgery. For six months afterward he lay strapped to a board in his father's house in Palm Beach, Florida. It was during this period that he worked on Profiles in Courage (1956), an account of eight great American political leaders who had defied popular opinion in matters of conscience, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Although Kennedy was credited as the book's author, it was later revealed that his assistant Theodore Sorensen had done much of the research and writing.

Back in the Senate, Kennedy led a fight against a proposal to abolish the electoral college, crusaded for labour reform, and became increasingly committed to civil rights legislation. As a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the late 1950s, he advocated extensive foreign aid to the emerging nations in Africa and Asia, and he surprised his colleagues by calling upon France to grant Algerian independence.

During these years his political outlook was moving leftward. Possibly because of their father's dynamic personality, the sons of Joseph Kennedy matured slowly. Gradually John's stature among Democrats grew, until he had inherited the legions that had once followed Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois, the two-time presidential candidate who by appealing to idealism had transformed the Democratic Party and made Kennedy's rise possible.

Presidential candidate and president

Kennedy had nearly become Stevenson's vice presidential running mate in 1956. The charismatic young New Englander's near victory and his televised speech of concession (Estes Kefauver won the vice presidential nomination) brought him into some 40 million American homes. Overnight he had become one of the best-known political figures in the country. Already his campaign for the 1960 nomination had begun. One newspaperman called him a “young man in a hurry.” Kennedy felt that he had to redouble his efforts because of the widespread conviction that no Roman Catholic candidate could be elected president. He made his 1958 race for reelection to the Senate a test of his popularity in Massachusetts. His margin of victory was 874,608 votes—the largest ever in Massachusetts politics and the greatest of any senatorial candidate that year.

A steady stream of speeches and periodical profiles followed, with photographs of him and his wife appearing on many a magazine cover. Kennedy's carefully calculated pursuit of the presidency years before the first primary established a practice that became the norm for candidates seeking the nation's highest office. To transport him and his staff around the country, his father bought a 40-passenger Convair aircraft. His brothers Robert (“Bobby,” or “Bob”) and Edward (“Teddy,” or “Ted”) pitched in. After having graduated from Harvard University (1948) and from the University of Virginia Law School (1951), Bobby had embarked on a career as a Justice Department attorney and counsellor for congressional committees. Ted likewise had graduated from Harvard (1956) and from Virginia Law School (1959). Both men were astute campaigners.

In January 1960 John F. Kennedy formally announced his presidential candidacy. His chief rivals were the senators Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota and Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Kennedy knocked Humphrey out of the campaign and dealt the religious taboo against Roman Catholics a blow by winning the primary in Protestant West Virginia. He tackled the Catholic issue again, by avowing his belief in the separation of church and state in a televised speech before a group of Protestant ministers in Houston, Texas. Nominated on the first ballot, he balanced the Democratic ticket by choosing Johnson as his running mate. In his acceptance speech Kennedy declared, “We stand on the edge of a New Frontier.” Thereafter the phrase “New Frontier” was associated with his presidential programs.
Another phrase—“the Kennedy style”—encapsulated the candidate's emerging identity. It was glamorous and elitist, an amalgam of his father's wealth, John Kennedy's charisma and easy wit, Jacqueline Kennedy's beauty and fashion sense (the suits and pillbox hats she wore became widely popular), the charm of their children and relatives, and the erudition of the Harvard advisers who surrounded him (called the “best and brightest” by author David Halberstam).
Kennedy won the general election, narrowly defeating the Republican candidate, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, by a margin of less than 120,000 out of some 70,000,000 votes cast. Many observers, then and since, believed vote fraud contributed to Kennedy's victory, especially in the critical state of Illinois, where Joe Kennedy enlisted the help of the ever-powerful Richard J. Daley, mayor of Chicago. Nixon had defended the Eisenhower record; Kennedy, whose slogan had been “Let's get this country moving again,” had deplored unemployment, the sluggish economy, the so-called missile gap (a presumed Soviet superiority over the United States in the number of nuclear-armed missiles), and the new communist government in Havana. A major factor in the campaign was a unique series of four televised debates between the two men; an estimated 85–120 million Americans watched one or more of the debates. Both men showed a firm grasp of the issues, but Kennedy's poise in front of the camera, his tony Harvard accent, and his good looks (in contrast to Nixon's “five o'clock shadow”) convinced many viewers that he had won the debate. As president, Kennedy continued to exploit the new medium, sparkling in precedent-setting televised weekly press conferences.
He was the youngest man and the first Roman Catholic ever elected to the presidency of the United States. His administration lasted 1,037 days. From the onset he was concerned with foreign affairs. In his memorable inaugural address, he called upon Americans “to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle…against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.” He declared:
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.…The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.

The administration's first brush with foreign affairs was a disaster. In the last year of the Eisenhower presidency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had equipped and trained a brigade of anticommunist Cuban exiles for an invasion of their homeland. The Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously advised the new president that this force, once ashore, would spark a general uprising against the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. But the Bay of Pigs invasion was a fiasco; every man on the beachhead was either killed or captured. Kennedy assumed “sole responsibility” for the setback. Privately he told his father that he would never again accept a Joint Chiefs recommendation without first challenging it.

The Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, thought he had taken the young president's measure when the two leaders met in Vienna in June 1961. Khrushchev ordered a wall built between East and West Berlin and threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany. The president activated National Guard and reserve units, and Khrushchev backed down on his separate peace threat. Kennedy then made a dramatic visit to West Berlin, where he told a cheering crowd, “Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein [I am a] Berliner.' ” In October 1962 a buildup of Soviet short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles was discovered in Cuba. Kennedy demanded that the missiles be dismantled; he ordered a “quarantine” of Cuba—in effect, a blockade that would stop Soviet ships from reaching that island. For 13 days nuclear war seemed near; then the Soviet premier announced that the offensive weapons would be withdrawn. Ten months later Kennedy scored his greatest foreign triumph when Khrushchev and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Great Britain joined him in signing the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. Yet Kennedy's commitment to combat the spread of communism led him to escalate American involvement in the conflict in Vietnam, where he sent not just supplies and financial assistance, as President Eisenhower had, but 15,000 military advisers as well.
Because of his slender victory in 1960, Kennedy approached Congress warily, and with good reason; Congress was largely indifferent to his legislative program. It approved his Alliance for Progress (Alianza) in Latin America and his Peace Corps, which won the enthusiastic endorsement of thousands of college students. But his two most cherished projects, massive income tax cuts and a sweeping civil rights measure, were not passed until after his death. In May 1961 Kennedy committed the United States to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, and, while he would not live to see this achievement either, his advocacy of the space program contributed to the successful launch of the first American manned spaceflights.

He was an immensely popular president, at home and abroad. At times he seemed to be everywhere at once, encouraging better physical fitness, improving the morale of government workers, bringing brilliant advisers to the White House, and beautifying Washington, D.C. His wife joined him as an advocate for American culture. Their two young children, Caroline Bouvier and John F., Jr., were familiar throughout the country. The charm and optimism of the Kennedy family seemed contagious, sparking the idealism of a generation for whom the Kennedy White House became, in journalist Theodore White's famous analogy, Camelot—the magical court of Arthurian legend, which was celebrated in a popular Broadway musical of the early 1960s.

Joseph Kennedy, meanwhile, had been incapacitated in Hyannis Port by a stroke, but the other Kennedys were in and out of Washington. Robert Kennedy, as John's attorney general, was the second most powerful man in the country. He advised the president on all matters of foreign and domestic policy, national security, and political affairs.

In 1962 Edward Kennedy was elected to the president's former Senate seat in Massachusetts. Their sister Eunice's husband, Sargent Shriver, became director of the Peace Corps. Their sister Jean's husband, Stephen Smith, was preparing to manage the Democratic Party's 1964 presidential campaign. Another sister, Patricia, had married Peter Lawford, an English-born actor who served the family as an unofficial envoy to the entertainment world. All Americans knew who Rose, Jackie, Bobby, and Teddy were, and most could identify Bobby's wife as Ethel and Teddy's wife as Joan. But if the first family had become American royalty, its image of perfection would be tainted years later by allegations of marital infidelity by the president (most notably, an affair with motion-picture icon Marilyn Monroe) and of his association with members of organized crime.

Assassination

President Kennedy believed that his Republican opponent in 1964 would be Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. He was convinced that he could bury Goldwater under an avalanche of votes, thus receiving a mandate for major legislative reforms. One obstacle to his plan was a feud in Vice President Johnson's home state of Texas between Governor John B. Connally, Jr., and Senator Ralph Yarborough, both Democrats. To present a show of unity, the president decided to tour the state with both men. On Friday, November 22, 1963, he and Jacqueline Kennedy were in an open limousine riding slowly in a motorcade through downtown Dallas. At 12:30 PM the president was struck by two rifle bullets, one at the base of his neck and one in the head. He was pronounced dead shortly after arrival at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Governor Connally, though also gravely wounded, recovered. Vice President Johnson took the oath as president at 2:38 PM. Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old Dallas citizen, was accused of the slaying. Two days later Oswald was shot to death by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner with connections to the criminal underworld, in the basement of a Dallas police station. A presidential commission headed by the chief justice of the United States, Earl Warren, later found that neither the sniper nor his killer “was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy,” but that Oswald had acted alone. The Warren Commission, however, was not able to convincingly explain all the particular circumstances of Kennedy's murder. In 1979 a special committee of the U.S. House of Representatives declared that although the president had undoubtedly been slain by Oswald, acoustic analysis suggested the presence of a second gunman who had missed. But this declaration did little to squelch the theories that Oswald was part of a conspiracy involving either CIA agents angered over Kennedy's handling of the Bay of Pigs fiasco or members of organized crime seeking revenge for Attorney General Bobby Kennedy's relentless criminal investigations. Kennedy's assassination, the most notorious political murder of the 20th century, remains a source of bafflement, controversy, and speculation.

John Kennedy was dead, but the Kennedy mystique was still alive. Both Robert and Ted ran for president (in 1968 and 1980, respectively). Yet tragedy would become nearly synonymous with the Kennedys when Bobby, too, was assassinated on the campaign trail in 1968.

Jacqueline Kennedy and her two children moved from the White House to a home in the Georgetown section of Washington. Continuing crowds of the worshipful and curious made peace there impossible, however, and in the summer of 1964 she moved to New York City. Pursuit continued until October 20, 1968, when she married Aristotle Onassis, a wealthy Greek shipping magnate. The Associated Press said that the marriage “broke the spell of almost complete adulation of a woman who had become virtually a legend in her own time.” Widowed by Onassis, the former first lady returned to the public eye in the mid-1970s as a high-profile book editor, and she remained among the most admired women in the United States until her death in 1994. As an adult, daughter Caroline was jealous of her own privacy, but John Jr.—a lawyer like his sister and debonair and handsome like his father—was much more of a public figure. Long remembered as “John-John,” the three-year-old who stoically saluted his father's casket during live television coverage of the funeral procession, John Jr. became the founder and editor-in-chief of the political magazine George in the mid-1990s. In 1999, when John Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law died in the crash of the private plane he was piloting, the event was the focus of an international media watch that further proved the immortality of the Kennedy mystique. It was yet another chapter in the family's “curse” of tragedy.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Kenyatta, Jomo


Introduction

born c. 1894, Ichaweri, British East Africa [now in Kenya]
died August 22, 1978, Mombasa, Kenya


original name Kamau Ngengi African statesman and nationalist, the first prime minister (1963–64) and then the first president (1964–78) of independent Kenya.

Early life

Kenyatta was born as Kamau, son of Ngengi, at Ichaweri, southwest of Mount Kenya in the East African highlands. His father was a leader of a small Kikuyu agricultural settlement. About age 10 Kamau became seriously ill with jigger infections in his feet and one leg, and he underwent successful surgery at a newly established Church of Scotland mission. This was his initial contact with Europeans. Fascinated with what he had seen during his recuperation, Kamau ran away from home to become a resident pupil at the mission. He studied the Bible, English, mathematics, and carpentry and paid his fees by working as a houseboy and cook for a European settler. In August 1914 he was baptized with the name Johnstone Kamau. He was one of the earliest of the Kikuyu to leave the confines of his own culture. And, like many others, Kamau soon left the mission life for the urban attractions of Nairobi.

There he secured a job as a clerk in the Public Works Department, and he also adopted the name Kenyatta, the Kikuyu term for a fancy belt that he wore. After serving briefly as an interpreter in the High Court, Kenyatta transferred to a post with the Nairobi Town Council. About this time he married and began to raise a family.

The first African political protest movement in Kenya against a white-settler-dominated government began in 1921—the East Africa Association (EAA), led by an educated young Kikuyu named Harry Thuku. Kenyatta joined the following year. One of the EAA's main purposes was to recover Kikuyu lands lost when Kenya became a British crown colony (1920). The Africans were dispossessed, leaseholds of land were restricted to white settlers, and native reservations were established. In 1925 the EAA disbanded as a result of government pressures, and its members re-formed as the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA). Three years later Kenyatta became this organization's general secretary, though he had to give up his municipal job as a consequence.

Entrance into full-time politics

In May 1928 Kenyatta launched a monthly Kikuyu-language newspaper called Mwigithania (“He Who Brings Together”), aimed at gaining support from all sections of the Kikuyu. The paper was mild in tone, preaching self-improvement, and was tolerated by the government. But soon a new challenge appeared. A British commission recommended a closer union of the three East African territories (Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika). British settler leaders supported the proposal, expecting that internal self-government might follow. To the KCA such a prospect looked disastrous for Kikuyu interests; in February 1929 Kenyatta went to London to testify against the scheme, but in London the secretary of state for colonies refused to meet with him. In March 1930 Kenyatta wrote an eloquent letter in The Times of London setting out five issues championed by the KCA: (1) security of land tenure and the return of lands allotted to European settlers, (2) increased educational facilities, (3) repeal of hut taxes on women, which forced some to earn money by prostitution, (4) African representation in the Legislative Council, and (5) noninterference with traditional customs. He concluded by saying that the lack of these measures “must inevitably result in a dangerous explosion—the one thing all sane men wish to avoid.”

Again in 1931 Kenyatta's testimony on the issue of closer union of the three colonies was refused, despite the help of liberals in the House of Commons. In the end, however, the government temporarily abandoned its plan for union. Kenyatta did manage to testify on behalf of Kikuyu land claims in 1932 at hearings of the Carter Land Commission. The commission decided to offer compensation for some appropriated territories but maintained the “white highlands” policy, which restricted the Kikuyu to overcrowded reserves. Kenyatta subsequently visited the Soviet Union (he spent two years at Moscow State University) and traveled extensively through Europe; on his return to England he studied anthropology under Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of Economics. His thesis was revised and published in 1938 as Facing Mount Kenya, a study of the traditional life of the Kikuyu characterized by both insight and a tinge of romanticism. This book signaled another name change, to Jomo (“Burning Spear”) Kenyatta.

During the 1930s Kenyatta briefly joined the Communist Party, met other black nationalists and writers, and organized protests against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. The onset of World War II temporarily cut him off from the KCA, which was banned by the Kenya authorities as potentially subversive. Kenyatta maintained himself in England by lecturing and working as a farm labourer, and he continued to produce political pamphlets publicizing the Kikuyu cause.

Kenyatta helped organize the fifth Pan-African Congress, which met in Manchester, England, on October 15–18, 1945, with W.E.B. Du Bois of the United States in the chair; Kwame Nkrumah, the future leader of Ghana, was also present. Resolutions were passed and plans discussed for mass nationalist movements to demand independence from colonial rule.

Return to Kenya

Kenyatta returned to Kenya in September 1946 to take up leadership of the newly formed Kenya African Union, of which he was elected president in June 1947. From the Kenya African Teachers College, which he directed as an alternative to government educational institutions, Kenyatta organized a mass nationalist party. But he had to produce tangible results in return for the allegiance of his followers, and the colonial government in Kenya was still dominated by unyielding settler interests. The “dangerous explosion” among the Kikuyu that he had predicted in 1930 erupted as the Mau Mau rebellion of 1952, which was directed against the presence of European settlers in Kenya and their ownership of land. On October 21, 1952, Kenyatta was arrested on charges of having directed the Mau Mau movement. Despite government efforts to portray Kenyatta's trial as a criminal case, it received worldwide publicity as a political proceeding. In April 1953 Kenyatta was sentenced to a seven-year imprisonment for “managing the Mau Mau terrorist organization.” He denied the charge then and afterward, maintaining that the Kenya African Union's political activities were not directly associated with Mau Mau violence.

The British government responded to African demands by gradually steering the country toward African majority rule. In 1960 the principle of one man, one vote was conceded. Kenyan nationalist leaders such as Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga organized the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and elected Kenyatta (still in detention despite having completed his sentence) president in absentia; they refused to cooperate with the British while Kenyatta was detained. In a press conference Kenyatta promised that “Europeans would find a place in the future Kenya provided they took their place as ordinary citizens.”

Kenyatta was released in August 1961, and, at the London Conference early in 1962, he negotiated the constitutional terms leading to Kenya's independence. KANU won the preindependence election in May 1963, forming a provisional government, and Kenya celebrated its independence on December 12, 1963, with Kenyatta as prime minister. A year later Kenya became a one-party republic when the main opposition party went into voluntary liquidation. At the same time, Kenyatta became the first president of Kenya under a new constitutional amendment. In this office he headed a strong central government, and successive constitutional amendments increased his authority, giving him, for instance, the power to arrest political opponents and detain them without trial if he considered them dangerous to public order—a power he used effectively though infrequently. To forestall any tribally based opposition, Kenyatta consistently appointed members of different ethnic groups to his government, though he relied most heavily on his fellow Kikuyu. In general, Kenya enjoyed remarkable political stability under Kenyatta's rule, though conflicts within KANU's political leadership did occasionally break out because of ideological differences and tribal rivalries.

Kenyatta early on rejected socialist calls for the nationalization of property and instead preached a doctrine of personal and entrepreneurial effort, symbolized by his slogan “Harambee,” or “Pulling together.” Besides relying heavily on a free-market economy, he encouraged foreign investment from Western and other countries. Largely as a result of his policies, Kenya's gross national product grew almost fivefold from 1971 to 1981, and its rate of economic growth was among the highest on the continent in the first two decades after independence. But though economic growth benefited large numbers of people, it also led to tremendous disparities of wealth, much of which was in the hands of Kenyatta's family and close associates. This concentration of wealth, along with an extremely high rate of population growth, meant that most Kenyans did not realize a correspondingly large increase in their living standards under Kenyatta's leadership.

In foreign policy, Kenyatta's government was consistently friendly toward the West. Always—in spite of his imprisonment by the British authorities—one of the more pro-British of African leaders, Kenyatta made Kenya the most stable black African country and one of the most economically dynamic. After his death at Mombasa in 1978, Kenyatta was succeeded by Daniel arap Moi, who continued most of his policies.

Khālid


born 1913, Riyadh, Arabia [now in Saudi Arabia]
died June 13, 1982, Taʾif, Saudi Arabia

in full Khālid Ibn ʿabd Al-ʿazīz As-saʿūd king of Saudi Arabia (1975–82), who succeeded his half brother Fayṣal as king when Fayṣal was assassinated in 1975. A moderate influence in Middle East politics and a relatively retiring man, he left much of the administration of the country to his half brother Prince Fahd, who became his successor.

Born in Riyadh when it was a small desert town, Khālid became the closest supporter of his brothers Saʿūd and Fayṣal. When he was 14, his father Ibn Saʿūd, founder of the Saudi kingdom, sent him as his representative to the desert tribes to hear their grievances. In 1934 he took part in the Saudi expedition against Yemen led by his brother Fayṣal, and afterward he was regarded as a “man of the desert,” more at home with desert pursuits than with politics or diplomacy.

In 1939 he left Arabia for the first time to take part in the abortive London conference on Palestine. He hastened to return and, unlike most of his brothers, he never pursued higher-educational studies abroad. He concerned himself with the problems of the Bedouin and took a special interest in desert-reclamation projects through the use of groundwater. When in Riyadh, he devoted himself to charitable work. His modest and self-effacing personality, coupled with his reputation for calm reason, made him the chief conciliator in the disputes that arose among the large family of royal princes. Such qualities led to his appointment as crown prince, in preference to his more forceful and ambitious brothers Fahd and Sultan, when King Saʿūd was deposed in November 1964 and was succeeded by Fayṣal.

From 1970, illness inhibited his role in public life and cast doubt on his eventual succession to the throne. However, he did take over following Fayṣal's assassination and was welcomed as a figure who enjoyed much popularity, especially with the Bedouin. He reacted moderately to Egyptian President Anwar el-Sādāt's Israeli peace initiative and benefited from the success of the 1979 visit to his country of Queen Elizabeth II and his return visit to the United Kingdom in 1981.

Khamenei, Ali


born July 15, 1939?, Meshed, Iran

Iranian Shīʿite clergyman and politician who served as president of Iran (1981–89) and as that country's rahbar, or leader, from 1989. A religious figure of some significance, Khamenei was generally addressed with the honorific ayatollah.

Khamenei began his advanced religious studies at Qom under the most prominent Shīʿite scholars of the day, including Ruhollah Khomeini. From 1963 he was actively involved in protests against the monarchy, for which he was imprisoned several times by Iran's security services. Khamenei remained closely associated with the exiled Khomeini during this time and immediately after the latter's return to Iran in 1979 was appointed to the Revolutionary Council. After its dissolution he became deputy minister of defense and Khomeini's personal representative on the Supreme Defense Council.

A fiery orator in support of the pro-Khomeini Islamic Republican Party (IRP) and an ardent advocate of the concept of velāyat-e faqīh (governance by the religious jurist), Khamenei was injured in 1981 in one of a series of terrorist bombings that devastated the IRP's upper echelon. Following the death of the secretary-general of the IRP in another such blast later that year, Khamenei was appointed to fill the vacant position and within weeks announced his intention to run for the presidency. He was elected president in October 1981 and reelected in 1985. Although not considered one of Iran's senior clerics—he was then generally accorded the somewhat less lofty title of hojatolislam—Khamenei rose to the position of rahbar following the death of Khomeini in 1989. Khamenei enjoyed a good working relationship with President Hashemi Rafsanjani in the early 1990s, but his relations were strained with reformist President Mohammad Khatami, who was elected in 1997.

Khatami, Mohammad


born September 29, 1943, Ardakān, Iran

also spelled Muḥammad Khātamī Iranian political leader, who was president of Iran (1997–2005).

The son of a well-known religious teacher, Khatami studied at a traditional madrasah (religious school) in the holy city of Qom, where he later taught. However, he also received degrees in philosophy from Eṣfahān University and the University of Tehrān, both secular institutions, a somewhat unusual accomplishment for a member of Iran's Shīʿite clergy. Khatami held the title hojatoleslām, signifying his position as a cleric, and, as a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, he wore a black turban.

During the 1960s and '70s Khatami gained a reputation as an opponent of the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. In 1978 he was appointed head of the Islamic Centre Hamburg in Germany, and after the 1979 Islamic revolution he was elected to the Majles, the Iranian national assembly. Khatami held several positions in the Iranian government during the 1980s, including that of minister of culture and Islamic guidance, which he held again in the early 1990s before being forced to resign in 1992 amid allegations that he permitted too much un-Islamic sentiment. He then became the director of the National Library and served as an adviser to President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

In the 1997 elections Khatami was one of four candidates to run for the presidency and was the most moderate on social issues. With strong support from the country's youth, women, and intellectuals, he was elected by almost 70 percent of the vote. Some of the moderates he appointed to the cabinet were controversial but nonetheless were approved by Iran's conservative Majles. Tension between the president and conservatives grew, however, and, beginning in 1998, a number of key Khatami supporters were prosecuted and harassed as a result. He advocated increased contact with the United States, but his domestic opponents hindered rapprochement between the two countries. Khatami was reelected in 2001 by an overwhelming majority of the vote. Constitutionally barred from a third term as president, he left office in 2005.

Khomeini, Ruhollah


born May 17, 1900?, Khomeyn, Iran
died June 3, 1989, Tehrān


also spelled Rūḥallāh Khomeynī , original name Ruhollah Musawi , Musawi also spelled Musavi Iranian Shīʿite cleric who led the revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979 and who was Iran's ultimate political and religious authority for the next 10 years.

Little is known of Khomeini's early life. There are various dates given for his birth, the most common being May 17, 1900, and September 24, 1902. He was the grandson and son of mullahs, or Shīʿite religious leaders. When he was five months old, his father was killed on the orders of a local landlord. The young Khomeini was raised by his mother and aunt and then by his older brother. He was educated in various Islamic schools, and he settled in the city of Qom about 1922. About 1930 he adopted the name of his home town, Khomayn (also spelled Khomeyn or Khomen), as his surname. As a Shīʿite scholar and teacher, Khomeini produced numerous writings on Islamic philosophy, law, and ethics, but it was his outspoken opposition to Iran's ruler, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, his denunciations of Western influences, and his uncompromising advocacy of Islamic purity that won him his initial following in Iran. In the 1950s he was acclaimed as an ayatollah, or major religious leader, and by the early 1960s he had received the title of grand ayatollah, thereby making him one of the supreme religious leaders of the Shīʿite community in Iran.

In 1962–63 Khomeini spoke out against the shah's reduction of religious estates in a land-reform program and against the emancipation of women. His ensuing arrest sparked antigovernment riots, and, after a year's imprisonment, Khomeini was forcibly exiled from Iran on November 4, 1964. He eventually settled in the Shīʿite holy city of Al-Najaf, Iraq, from where he continued to call for the shah's overthrow and the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran.

From the mid-1970s Khomeini's influence inside Iran grew dramatically owing to mounting public dissatisfaction with the shah's regime. Iraq's ruler, Ṣaddām Ḥussein, forced Khomeini to leave Iraq on October 6, 1978. Khomeini then settled in Neauphle-le-Château, a suburb of Paris. From there his supporters relayed his tape-recorded messages to an increasingly aroused Iranian populace, and massive demonstrations, strikes, and civil unrest in late 1978 forced the departure of the shah from the country on January 16, 1979. Khomeini arrived in Tehrān in triumph on February 1, 1979, and was acclaimed as the religious leader of Iran's revolution. He appointed a government four days later and on March 1 again took up residence in Qom. In December a referendum on a new constitution created an Islamic republic in Iran, with Khomeini named Iran's political and religious leader for life.

Khomeini himself proved unwavering in his determination to transform Iran into a theocratically ruled Islamic state. Iran's Shīʿite clerics largely took over the formulation of governmental policy, while Khomeini arbitrated between the various revolutionary factions and made final decisions on important matters requiring his personal authority. First his regime took political vengeance, with hundreds of people who had worked for the shah's regime reportedly executed. The remaining domestic opposition was then suppressed, its members being systematically imprisoned or killed. Iranian women were required to wear the veil, Western music and alcohol were banned, and the punishments prescribed by Islamic law were reinstated.

The main thrust of Khomeini's foreign policy was the complete abandonment of the shah's pro-Western orientation and the adoption of an attitude of unrelenting hostility toward both superpowers. In addition, Iran tried to export its brand of Islamic revivalism to neighbouring Muslim countries. Khomeini sanctioned Iranian militants' seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehrān (November 4, 1979) and their holding of American diplomatic personnel as hostages for more than a year. He also refused to countenance a peaceful solution to the Iran-Iraq War, which had begun in 1980 and which he insisted on prolonging in the hope of overthrowing Ṣaddām. Khomeini finally approved a cease-fire in 1988 that effectively ended the war.

Iran's course of economic development foundered under Khomeini's rule, and his pursuit of victory in the Iran-Iraq War ultimately proved futile. Khomeini, however, was able to retain his charismatic hold over Iran's Shī'ite masses, and he remained the supreme political and religious arbiter in the country until his death. His gold-domed tomb in Tehrān's Behesht-e Zahrāʾ cemetery has since become a shrine for his supporters. Ideologically, he is best remembered for having developed the concept of vilāyat-e faqīh (“guardianship of the jurist”) in a series of lectures and tracts first promulgated during exile in Iraq in the late 1960s and '70s. Khomeini argued therein for the establishment of a theocratic government administered by Islamic jurists in place of corrupt secular regimes. The Iranian constitution of 1979 embodies articles upholding this concept of juristic authority.

Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich


Introduction

born April 17 [April 5, Old Style], 1894, Kalinovka, Russia
died September 11, 1971, Moscow, Russia, Soviet Union


first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1953–64) and premier of the Soviet Union (1958–64) whose policy of de-Stalinization had widespread repercussions throughout the communist world. In foreign policy he pursued a policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist West.

Early life

Unlike Lenin and most other Soviet leaders, who generally had middle-class backgrounds, Khrushchev was the son of a coal miner; his grandfather had been a serf who served in the tsarist army. After a village education, Khrushchev went with his family to Yuzovka (later named Stalino, now Donetsk, Ukraine), a mining and industrial centre in the Donets Basin, where he began work as a pipe fitter at age 15. Because of his factory employment, he was not conscripted in the tsarist army during World War I. Even before the Russian Revolution of 1917, he had become active in workers' organizations, and in 1918—during the struggle between Reds, Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists for possession of Ukraine—he became a member of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik).

In January 1919 Khrushchev joined the Red Army and served as a junior political commissar, ultimately in the campaigns against the Whites and invading Polish armies in 1920. Soon after he was demobilized, his wife, Galina, died during a famine. In 1922 Khrushchev secured admission to a new Soviet workers' school in Yuzovka, where he received a secondary education along with additional party instruction. He became a student political leader and was appointed secretary of the Communist Party Committee at the school. There he married his second wife, Nina Petrovna, a schoolteacher, in 1924.

Political career under Stalin

In 1925 Khrushchev went into full-time party work as party secretary of the Petrovsko-Mariinsk district of Yuzovka. He distinguished himself by his hard work and knowledge of mine and factory conditions. He soon came to the notice of Joseph Stalin's close associate, Lazar M. Kaganovich, secretary general of the Ukrainian Party's Central Committee, who asked Khrushchev to accompany him as a nonvoting delegate to the 14th Party Congress in Moscow. For the next four years—in Yuzovka, then in Kharkov (now Kharkiv) and Kiev—Khrushchev was active as a party organizer. In 1929 he received permission to go to Moscow to study metallurgy at the Stalin Industrial Academy. There he was appointed secretary of the academy's Party Committee. In 1931 he went back to full-time party work in Moscow. By 1933 he had become second secretary of the Moscow Regional Committee.

During the early 1930s Khrushchev consolidated his hold on the Moscow party cadres. He supervised the completion of the Moscow subway, for which he received the Order of Lenin in 1935. That year he became first secretary of the Moscow city and regional party organization—in effect, the governor of Moscow. In the preceding year, at the 17th Party Congress, he had been elected a full member of the 70-man Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

Khrushchev was a zealous supporter of Stalin in those years and participated in the purges of party leadership. He was one of only three provincial secretaries who survived the mass executions of the Great Purge of the 1930s. He became a member of the Constitutional Committee in 1936, an alternate member of the Central Committee's ruling Politburo in 1937, and in the same year a member of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Supreme Soviet. A year later Khrushchev was made a candidate member of the Politburo and sent to Kiev as first secretary of the Ukrainian party organization. In 1939 he was made a full member of the Politburo.

In 1940, after Soviet forces had occupied eastern Poland, Khrushchev presided over the “integration” of this area into the Soviet Union. His principal objective was to liquidate both the Polish and Ukrainian nationalist movements, as well as to restore the Communist Party organization in Ukraine, which had been shattered in the Great Purge. This work was disrupted by the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Khrushchev's first wartime assignment was to evacuate as much of Ukraine's industry as possible to the east. Thereafter he was attached to the Soviet army with the rank of lieutenant general; his principal task was to stimulate the resistance of the civilian population and maintain liaison with Stalin and other members of the Politburo. He was political adviser to Marshal Andrey I. Yeremenko during the defense of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and to Lieutenant General Nikolay F. Vatutin during the huge tank battle at Kursk.

After the liberation of Ukraine in 1944, Khrushchev reassumed control of Ukraine as first secretary of the Ukrainian party organization. He worked to restore the civil administration and to bring that devastated country back to a subsistence level. A famine in 1946 was one of the worst in Ukraine's history; Khrushchev fought to restore grain production and to distribute food supplies, against Stalin's insistence on greater production from Ukraine for use in other areas. During this period Khrushchev gained a firsthand acquaintance with the problems of Soviet agricultural scarcity and planning. In 1949 Stalin called him back to Moscow, where he took over his old job as head of the Moscow City Party and concurrently was appointed secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

The period 1949–53 was far from pleasant for Khrushchev and other members of the Soviet leadership, who found themselves pawns in Stalin's palace politics. Khrushchev moved more and more into agriculture, where he began his schemes for the agrogorod (“farming town”) and larger state farms at the expense of the conventional collectives. His innovations were rejected in 1951, however, when responsibility for agriculture was transferred to Georgy M. Malenkov.

Leadership of the Soviet Union

After Stalin's death in March 1953 and the execution of the powerful state security chief, Lavrenty Beria—which Khrushchev engineered—he engaged in a power struggle with Malenkov, who was Stalin's heir apparent. Khrushchev soon gained the decisive margin by his control of the party machinery. In September 1953 he replaced Malenkov as first secretary and in 1955 removed Malenkov from the premiership in favour of his handpicked nominee, Marshal Nikolay A. Bulganin.

Significantly, by 1954 Khrushchev had been able to reform the Stalinist security apparatus by subordinating it to the top party leadership. Stalin's Ministry of Internal Affairs was divided into criminal police and the security services—the Committee on State Security (KGB), which in turn reported to the U.S.S.R.'s Council of Ministers.

In May 1955, when Khrushchev made his first trip outside the Soviet Union—to Yugoslavia with Bulganin—he began to show his flexibility; he apologized to Josip Broz Tito for Stalin's denunciation of Yugoslav communism in 1948. Later, in trips to Geneva, Afghanistan, and India, he began to exhibit a brash, extroverted personal diplomacy that was to become his trademark. Although his attacks on world capitalism were virulent and primitive, his outgoing personality and peasant humour were in sharp contrast to the image earlier Soviet public figures had cultivated.

On February 25, 1956, during the 20th Party Congress in Moscow, Khrushchev delivered his memorable secret speech about the excesses of Stalin's one-man rule, attacking the late Soviet ruler's “intolerance, his brutality, his abuse of power.” The spectacle of the first secretary of the Communist Party exposing the wrongful executions of the Great Purge of the 1930s and the excesses of Soviet police repression, after years of fearful silence, had far-reaching effects that Khrushchev himself could barely have foreseen. The resulting “thaw” in the Soviet Union saw the release of millions of political prisoners and the “rehabilitation” of many thousands more who had perished. (See also Khrushchev's secret speech.)

Khrushchev's rule was not without its dark side—including an intensified persecution of religion. Nonetheless, by smashing the repressive icon of Stalinism and the mentality of terror that had been imposed on the general population, Khrushchev inspired a new intellectual ferment and widespread hopes for greater freedom, particularly among students and intellectuals.

Inevitably, the de-Stalinization movement had repercussions in the communist countries of eastern Europe. Poland revolted against its government in October 1956. Hungary followed shortly afterward. Faced with open revolution, Khrushchev flew to Warsaw on October 19 with other Soviet leaders and ultimately acquiesced in the Polish leader Władysław Gomułka's national communist solution, which allowed the Poles a great deal of freedom. Khrushchev's shared decision to crush the Hungarian Revolution by force, however, came largely because of the Hungarian premier Imre Nagy's decision to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Aside from this sanguinary exception, Khrushchev allowed a considerable amount of freedom to the European communist parties.

The stresses in eastern Europe helped crystallize opposition to Khrushchev within the Soviet Communist Party. In June 1957 he was almost overthrown from his position, and, although a vote in the Presidium (i.e., the Politburo) actually went against him, he managed to reverse this by appealing to the full membership of the party's Central Committee. In the end, with the help of Marshal Georgy Zhukov, he secured the permanent disgrace of Malenkov, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, and others, who were labeled members of the antiparty group. A few months later, in October, he dismissed Marshal Georgy Zhukov from his post as minister of defense. In March 1958 Khrushchev assumed the premiership of the Soviet Union.

Confirmed in power, Khrushchev set a new policy of “Reform Communism.” In an attempt to humanize the Soviet system—but without sacrificing its ideology—he placed greater emphasis on producing consumer goods, in contrast to the Stalinist emphasis on heavy industry. With several million political prisoners newly released from the infamous labour camps of the Gulag, the domestic political atmosphere became freer. In his rough way, Khrushchev was a populist.

In foreign affairs, he widely asserted his doctrine of peaceful coexistence with the noncommunist world, which he had first enunciated in a public speech at the 20th Party Congress. In opposition to old communist writ, he stated that “war is not fatalistically inevitable.” At the 21st Party Congress in 1959 he said: “We offer the capitalist countries peaceful competition.” His visit to the United States in 1959, where he toured cities and farms with the ebullience of a politician running for office, was a decided success, and the “spirit of Camp David,” in Maryland, where he conferred with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, brought Soviet-American relations to a new high. A long-planned summit conference with Eisenhower in Paris in 1960 broke up, however, with Khrushchev's announcement that a U.S. plane (a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft) had been shot down over the Soviet Union and its pilot captured. In 1961 his blustering Vienna conference with the new U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, led to no agreement on the pressing German question; the Berlin Wall was built shortly thereafter.

Soviet success in lofting the world's first space satellite in 1957 had been followed by increased missile buildups. In 1962 Khrushchev secretly attempted to base Soviet medium-range missiles in Cuba, but these efforts were detected by the United States. During the resulting tense confrontation in October 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union apparently stood on the brink of nuclear war, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles on the promise that the United States would make no further attempt to overthrow Cuba's communist government. (See Cuban missile crisis.) The Soviet Union was criticized by the Chinese communists for this settlement. The Sino-Soviet split, which began in 1959, reached the stage of public denunciations in 1960. China's ideological insistence on all-out “war against the imperialists” and Mao Zedong's annoyance with Khrushchev's coexistence policies were exacerbated by Soviet refusal to assist the Chinese nuclear weapon buildup and to rectify the Russo-Chinese border. The Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty reached between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1963, although generally welcomed throughout the world, intensified Chinese denunciations of Soviet “revisionism.”

During Khrushchev's time in office, he had to steer constantly between, on the one hand, popular pressures toward a consumer-oriented society and agitation by intellectuals for greater freedom of expression and, on the other, the growing fear of the Soviet bureaucracy that reform would get out of hand. Khrushchev himself was uneasy with intellectuals, and he sanctioned the repression of Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) within the Soviet Union, culminating in the refusal to allow Pasternak to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. His crude condemnations of Soviet avant-garde artists recalled Stalin's intolerance in cultural matters. On the other hand, Khrushchev permitted the 1962 publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, with its sweeping denunciation of Stalinist repression. Other similar works of protest followed, creating what the historian Martin Malia calls “a culture of dissidence”—an emerging public opinion in Russia which later repression proved unable to completely control. Meanwhile, for the first time, Soviet tourists were permitted to go overseas, and Khrushchev often seemed amenable to widening exchanges with both socialist and capitalist countries.

Khrushchev's desire to reduce conventional armaments in favour of nuclear missiles was bitterly resisted by the Soviet military. His often high-handed methods of leadership and his attempted decentralization of the party structure antagonized many of those who had supported his rise to power. By this time, four decades after the Revolution, the Communist Party had solidified into the so-called nomenklatura—a 10 million-strong elite of bureaucrats, managers, and technicians intent on guarding their power and prerogatives. In 1962 Khrushchev further weakened the party's hold over the economy by announcing a policy of creating separate party-government networks in the fields of industry and agriculture.

The central crisis of Khrushchev's administration, however, was agriculture. An optimist, he based many plans on the bumper crops in 1956 and 1958, which fueled his repeated promises to overtake the United States in agricultural as well as in industrial production. He opened up more than 70 million acres of virgin land in Siberia and sent thousands of labourers to till them; but his plan was unsuccessful, and the Soviet Union soon again had to import wheat from Canada and the United States.

The failures in agriculture, the quarrel with China, and the humiliating resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, added to growing resentment of his own arbitrary administrative methods, were the major factors in Khrushchev's downfall. On October 14, 1964, after a palace coup orchestrated by his protégé and deputy, Leonid Brezhnev, the Central Committee accepted Khrushchev's request to retire from his position as the party's first secretary and chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union because of “advanced age and poor health.”

Last years

For almost seven years thereafter, Khrushchev lived quietly in Moscow and at his country dacha as a “non-person”—officially a special pensioner of the Soviet government. He was mentioned in the Soviet press occasionally and appeared in public only to vote in Soviet elections. The one break in this ordered obscurity came in 1970 with the publication of his memoirs in the United States and Europe, although not in the Soviet Union. This was the first installment of a large body of personal reminiscence that he dictated in secret during his retirement.

Almost 48 hours elapsed after his death before it was announced to the Soviet public. He was denied a state funeral and interment in the Kremlin wall, although he was allowed a quiet burial at Novodevichy Convent Cemetery in Moscow.

Assessment

For the Soviet Union and indeed for the entire world communist movement, Nikita Khrushchev was the great catalyst of political and social change. In his seven years of power as first secretary and premier, he broke both the fact and the tradition of the Stalin dictatorship and established a basis for liberalizing tendencies within Soviet communism. Khrushchev was a thoroughgoing political pragmatist who had learned his Marxism by rote, but he never hesitated to adapt his beliefs to the political urgencies of the moment. His experience with international realities confirmed him in his doctrine of peaceful coexistence with the noncommunist world—in itself a drastic break with established Soviet communist teaching. He publicly recognized the limitations as well as the power of nuclear weapons, and his decision to negotiate with the United States for some form of nuclear-testing control was of vast importance. At the same time, Khrushchev's rough empathy with the Soviet people resulted in concessions to a consumer economy and in a general relaxation of security controls, which had equally far-reaching effects. Despite his repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, his acceptance of “different roads to socialism” led to growing independence among European communist parties, but his Russian nationalism and his suspicion of Mao Zedong's communism helped create an unexpectedly deep fissure between China and the Soviet Union. By the time he was removed from office, he had set up guidelines for and limitations to Soviet policy that his successors were hard put to alter.

The cautious handling of his death announcement reflected his increasing popularity in his last years, both in the Soviet Union and the outside world, as many contrasted his consistent, if occasionally stormy, peaceful coexistence diplomacy with the more restricted, conservative, and quietly repressive policy of his successor, Leonid Brezhnev. Even at the time of Khrushchev's death, it was widely felt that the basic changes in Soviet life made under his regime would be hard to uproot and might indeed result in ultimate changes in the pattern of Soviet society and world power relationships.

Khrushchev's attempts to reform communism, once begun, powerfully and permanently influenced similar tendencies in the world's other communist states, from Władysław Gomułka's Polish thaw (1957) to Alexander Dubček's “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia (1968) down through the efforts of Deng Xiaoping and his successors to combine a market economy with the dictatorship of the Communist Party in China during the 1980s and '90s. In fact, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's reform policies of perestroika (“restructuring”) and glasnost (“openness”) in the late 1980s owed much to Khrushchev's attempts to liberalize the communist party-state. Gorbachev, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and other leading figures of this twilight period of Soviet communism developed their reformist outlook during the post-Stalin thaw, as did those more-radical reformers, led by Boris Yeltsin, who came to power in Russia after the collapse of communism in 1991. These “children of the 20th Party Congress,” as they were called, were in their 20s and 30s when Khrushchev's impassioned expose of Stalin's dictatorship burst on their consciousness. Their shock at hearing the crimes of the leadership thus publicly exposed engendered a mood of doubt and gathering disbelief that ultimately tore down the whole structure of Lenin's imposed ideology.

Whatever the view of Khrushchev's personal eccentricities, his boisterousness, his vulgarity, and his bewildering shifts, he was accounted a man of stature. Throughout the 1990s, increased access to party and state archives in Russia produced a steady stream of publications relating to Khrushchev's career—and with them an inevitable reassessment of the peasant statesman, flawed though he was, whose courage in revealing the crimes of the past would ultimately work to change his country's and the world's future.