Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume V, Soviet Union

Editors:
  • Charles S. Sampson
  • John Michael Joyce
General Editor:
  • David S. Patterson

Overview

The editors have assembled and present in this volume the complete official record of President Kennedy's meetings with Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev at the Vienna Summit Conference, June 3-4, 1961, together with the related U.S. delegation records of the conference, the essential pre-conference preparatory correspondence and internal discussions, and the post mortems regarding the conference. A guide to the broader universe of State Department documentation at the National Archives and Presidential records at the John F. Kennedy Library is also included.

Also presented in this volume are the records of the major high-level U.S. meetings, policy discussions, working papers, and the principal comprehensive reports from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow regarding ongoing U.S.-Soviet conflicts. These major policy discussions and papers take up or touch upon a broad range of issues comprising U.S.-Soviet relations. This comprehensive accounting is more fully presented in more than 100 chronologically located editorial notes that describe major diplomatic episodes in U.S.-Soviet relations in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia and the ongoing arms control exchanges between the two nations that are fully documented in other volumes of the Foreign Relations series for the Kennedy presidency. This is an unprecedented procedure for the Foreign Relations series. It reflects the editors' conviction that users of the series require in one volume a synthesis of what is spread over nine volumes documenting the 1961–1963 period.