A Khrushchev, a Nixon and an Eisenhower met to tell the next generation about how the last one ran the Cold War.
They didn't agree on everything, but they are closer than their parents were."Step-by-step we learn how to live without this big war with nuclear weapons," said Sergei Khrushchev, 62-year-old son of the former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The tense decades after World War II, he said, amount to a transition that still isn't complete - especially in Russia.
Khrushchev, David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon Eisenhower took armchairs in a conference room Monday, and a dozen University of California political science and history students quizzed the insiders to history.
Eisenhower, 49, is grandson of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower; his wife is daughter of former President Richard M. Nixon.
"I think what's fascinating is how little your generation thinks about the Cold War," Julie Eisenhower said. "They don't have the fears and the remembrances."
The era "continues to alter the way we apply democracy in this country and the way we look at other countries," Eisenhower said.
The superpower rivalry gave us not only atomic missiles, he said, but technological advances like personal computers.
Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 became the first Soviet premier to visit the United States.
His confrontation with President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 is seen in this country as one of the scariest incidents of nuclear brinkmanship.
When Kennedy found out that the Soviets had stationed nuclear missiles in Cuba, within striking range of Florida, he told Khrushchev to remove them or else. Khrushchev did.
In Russia, it wasn't that big a deal, said the premier's son. Since the press was controlled, there was no war scare.
Besides, he said, the Soviets had already lost millions in two world wars and had lived with U.S. nuclear missiles on their borders for years.