Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) by David Talbot Page B

needed Walton again that week, after he had helped oversee a proper ceremonial departure for his friend. They were to entrust him with a final, highly confidential task. “He was exactly the person that you would pick for a mission like this,” said Vidal.
     
    BILL WALTON HAD BEEN scheduled to fly to the Soviet Union on November 22, at the request of JFK, to help open a dialogue with Russian artists. The artistic exchange mission was part of Kennedy’s peace offensive, which was gathering momentum that year, with his eloquent olive branch speech at American University in June and the nuclear test ban treaty in August. Walton was to visit Leningrad and Moscow, where he was to oversee the opening of an American graphic arts exhibit for the U.S. Information Agency. Walton canceled his flight after hearing the news from Dallas. But Bobby later urged him to go ahead with his travel plans, and to carry a secret message from him and Jackie to a trusted contact in the Soviet government. On November 29, one week after the assassination, Walton took a Pan Am flight to London, and after connecting to Helsinki, arrived in Leningrad on an Aeroflot plane the following day. After touring the Hermitage in Leningrad, Walton flew to Moscow, where he would spend the next two weeks.
    Moscow was in the grip of its usual frigid winter, and Walton was fighting a bad cold, blowing his nose into a red handkerchief as he went unflaggingly about his busy schedule. He chatted with Russian artists at the USIA exhibit and visited their studios, the state-sanctioned variety as well as underground ones, to view their work. He went to a poetry reading in a crowded hall, where passionate young fans ran to the stage to scribble questions on bits of paper for the poets after they finished their recitals. “Poets in Moscow have fans as devoted as American bobbysoxers are to movie stars,” a bemused Walton later observed. “They debate the relative achievements of their heroes and heroines.”
    Walton was also invited to take tea with Mrs. Khrushchev at the House of Friendship, a government-sponsored club where foreign dignitaries were fêted. The wife of the Soviet leader immediately turned the conversation to Jackie Kennedy, whom she had met in Vienna during the 1961 summit. “She is so strong and so brave,” she said, her eyes welling up. “My heart aches for her and for the two children who probably won’t even remember their father.”
    Everywhere Walton went in Leningrad and Moscow, people wanted to talk about his dead friend. “When I arrived, he had been dead a week,” Walton later recalled. “Tough old bureaucrats would brush aside a tear as they spoke of him. In several studios the painters stood in one minute of silent tribute before we began our talk about the arts. In one house the cook, crippled by age, hobbled on crutches from the kitchen and with tears coursing down her cheeks gave me a handful of paper flowers to put on John Kennedy’s grave. The emotion was so genuine, the feeling so deep, that one wondered how this young man, in such a brief presidency, could have gotten through to the people of this distant land.”
    The Russians Walton met credited the young president with trying to ease the doomsday terror of the Cold War. “He was a man of peace.” This, observed Walton, “was the universal epitaph” for his friend as he traveled the land held in mutual nuclear bondage with the United States.
    “I could see that President Kennedy’s death was as disrupting to the USSR as to everyone else. With him the Russian leaders felt they had established personal contact. Over and over they emphasized how much more important personal connections are than cumbersome diplomatic contacts between great powers.”
    Among those Walton spoke with about the violent transformation of the U.S. government was Soviet journalist Aleksei Adzhubei, the son-in-law of Khrushchev. Over three glasses of throat-soothing hot tea and a cognac, Walton