Your textbooks/ revision websites package content to make it easily accessible – they use short, often single-sentence paragraphs, topic subjects are highlighted by headings, sentences are kept short, and information is presented in bulleted lists.

Real history books, however, use longer, more complex paragraphs.  If you find the following hard-going, do not be over-faced; it will get easier. 

Tensions from the incident were still high when Eisenhower and Khrushchev arrived in Paris to begin a summit meeting on May 16.  Khrushchev wasted no time in tearing into the United States, declaring that Eisenhower would not be welcome in Russia during his scheduled visit to the Soviet Union in June.  He condemned the “inadmissible, provocative actions” of the United States in sending the spy plane over the Soviet Union, and demanded that Eisenhower ban future flights and punish those responsible for this “deliberate violation of the Soviet Union.” When Eisenhower agreed only to a “suspension” of the spy plane flights, Khrushchev left the meeting in a huff.  According to U.S. officials, the president was “furious” at Khrushchev for his public dressing-down of the United States.  The summit meeting officially adjourned the next day with no further meetings between Khrushchev and Eisenhower.  Eisenhower’s planned trip to Moscow in June was scrapped. 

The collapse of the May 1960 summit meeting was a crushing blow to those in the Soviet Union and the United States who believed that a period of “peaceful coexistence” between the two superpowers was on the horizon. 

Consider:

Source 1 is critical of the USSR. How do you know?
Explain your answer using Source A and your contextual knowledge.

By lying, when it could have remained silent, by admitting it had lied, by disclaiming presidential responsibility, then admitting presidential responsibility, and finally by implying the flights would continue, The United States all but made it impossible for the summit meeting to take place. 

It is difficult to see how any head of government could have been expected to sit down at a peace conference under the veiled public threat of further violations of his airspace. 

Consider:

How useful are Sources 1 and 2 to an historian studying the U-2 Crisis?
Explain your answer using Sources 1 and 2 and your contextual knowledge

In the late 1950s, the United States, under President Dwight D Eisenhower, and the USSR, under Premier Nikita S Khrushchev, had been moving towards closer relations.  Following a successful summit meeting of the two superpower leaders in Geneva in July 1955, there was some thawing of the Cold War.  Khrushchev visited the United States in September 1959, seeing Congress and Iowa cornfields and meeting stars on a Hollywood movie set.  He invited Eisenhower, his children and grandchildren to visit the Soviet Union. 

The superpower warming ended abruptly with the Powers shootdown.  American cover stories about a weather reconnaissance plane straying off course were soon revealed to be bold faced lies.  Khrushchev himself went to New York to denounce the overflights at the United Nations.  Powers was put on trial and found guilty of spying.  Eisenhower, poorly served by the Central Intelligence Agency in the affair, personally took responsibility.  The long-planned summit meeting in Paris in mid-May was a disaster as Khruschev demanded an apology from the president. 

The revelations that followed about the overflights were both a triumph and an embarrassment for the Soviet Union: one of the acclaimed American spy planes had been shot down, but for almost four years – since July 4 1956 – the U-2s had overflown Soviet territory with impunity. 

The 23 successful overflights had been vital to US National Security.  Penetrating the ‘Iron Curtain’ that had descended over the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states, the U-2 provided explicit intelligence of the Soviet manned bomber programme and then of its intercontinental ballistic missile program. 

Consider:

"Source 3 is an excellent example of an impartial, balanced assessment."
Do you agree wth this statement?  Why?

For much of the world.  the spring of 1960 seemed to hold bright promise for improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.  Then on May Day, like a clap of thunder, a CIA U-2 spy plane fell from the skies at Sverdlovsk, followed by some of the most perilous years of the Cold War.  This book is an effort to explain what happened. 

The U-2 episode deserves renewed attention because of the light it sheds on American-Soviet diplomacy and other battles being fought in our own day.  The four years of flights into Soviet airspace are an instance of the oft-hidden influence of espionage and covert action on the deeds and emotions that drive nations toward war or peace.  The downing of the U-2 was the CIA's first massive public failure, the first time many Americans discovered that their government practiced espionage.  May 1960 was the first time many learned that their leaders did not always tell them the truth. 

The U-2 provides evidence for the student of historical reputation.  Western historians have lately shown new appreciation of Dwight Eisenhower's shrewdness and commitment to curbing the arms race.  Some who once saw Nikita Khrushchev purely as the Butcher of Budapest and a careless rattler of missiles have come to view him also as a man committed – however ambivalently – to reducing the harshness of the Cold War. 

Consider:

Which is more useful to an historian studying the U-2 Crisis – Source 3 or Source 4?
Explain your answer using Sources 3 and 4 and your contextual knowledge.

The decisions concerning the Soviet downing of the U-2 were dramatic because they represented the first time that the U.S. government publicly admitted to conducting state-sponsored espionage.  More importantly, the U-2 crisis was the first time that an American president was openly caught engaging in deception concerning such policies.  Public exposure of such a governmental cover-up genuinely shocked the American public in 1960. 

The U-2 affair appears as a curious case in Eisenhower's foreign policy decision making.  Why did Eisenhower take an apparently unnecessary risk in this situation? The administration did not need to speak out as early as it did; it could have kept quiet until more information was released by the Soviet Union on the status of the plane and the pilot.  Moreover, once the administration decided to engage in a cover-up of its spying activities, it need not have issued such a specific.  and thus easily refutable, lie; certainly more time and thought could have been devoted to creating a more credible and consistent cover story.  The incongruities demonstrated by the administration's erratic handling of the cover-up make the decisions surrounding the U-2 incident a good case for investigation from the perspective of prospect theory. 

Once the plane was shot down by the Soviet Union on May 1, however, Eisenhower was instantly plunged into a ‘domain of losses’.  The previous status quo of silence concerning surveillance had been ruptured.  The domestic and international criticism of his administration and its policies was intense.  Worst of all, the Soviet response threatened to endanger the success of the long-planned Summit Meeting scheduled to commence in Paris on May 16.  At this point.  Eisenhower appeared to throw caution to the wind, cover one lie with another, and proceed to engage in a badly planned and poorly orchestrated cover-up.  This cover-up was quickly revealed for the transparent web of lies it was and Eisenhower was forced to admit publicly to both spying and lying, thus creating the very outcome he had taken such risks to prevent. 

In terms of prospect theory, Eisenhower became risk seeking once the downing of the U2 placed him in a domain of losses.  He took a risk that he would not have taken if he had perceived himself to be in a domain of gains at the time.  Although Eisenhower was quite popular at the time of the incident, he felt vulnerable to public disclosure of his espionage policies because of the importance of the upcoming Summit Meeting.  At this point Eisenhower did not want to lose what he had worked so hard to attain: the possibility of positive steps towards international peace. 

Consider:

Sometimes a writer comes up with a really interesting theory, which you hadnt heard before. 
What is Rose McDermott's theory about Eisenhower?
Do you agree?  Explain your answer using Source 5 and your contextual knowledge.

“It can be said that a man of more heroic mold would have blown up his plane and committed suicide, but perhaps Powers couldn’t and certainly he didn’t do either.”  The Chicago Tribune’s emasculating disparagement of captured Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) pilot Francis Gary Powers in August of 1960 echoed a conversation that had roiled the United States for months.  On May 1, 1960, a surface-to-air missile fired by Soviet military forces shot down Powers near Sverdlovsk, Russia as he photographed military installations from 60,000 feet.  Powers miraculously survived his airplane’s destruction and a fall from the upper atmosphere.  Yet, living appeared to many Americans an effeminate and unpatriotic act that defied CIA orders.  The CIA had provisioned Powers with a lethal injection.  His U-2 airplane included a self-destruct mechanism.  Officials in U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration and U.S. journalists asked a morbid question: Why was Powers still alive? Popular audiences and intelligence officials feared Powers might break under Soviet “brainwash” and expose national security secrets to his interrogators.  As U.S. journalists and policy makers disparaged “spy pilot” Powers’s performance they constructed the pilot in the cockpit as an unmanly military liability. 

Consider:

Here is another interesting idea, which you maybe hadn't heard before. 
Was Powers the victim of homophobia?

Apparently a great many people were under the impression that I had been under orders to kill myself, come what may.  But, as I had attempted to make clear in the trial, I had no such orders.  I was to use the destruct device – which wouldn’t have destroyed the plane, only a portion of the equipment – if possible.  Under the ‘circumstances, it had not been possible.  I could understand why, not having been in the cockpit with me, some people might doubt my story.  But when it came to the poison needle, there should not have been any doubt.  Since carrying it was optional, suicide was obviously optional too. 

Consider:

Read Source 7.  Was criticism of Powers fair?

On 7 May Khrushchev returned to the Supreme Soviet:

'I must let you in on a secret .  .  .  I deliberately refrained from mentioning that we have the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking...  The people behind this pirate flight could not think up anything better than the stupid story that this was a weather plane and that when the pilot lost consciousness, his plane...  dragged him against his will into Soviet territory... 

...I am quite willing to grant that the President knew nothing about the fact that such a plane was sent into the Soviet Union...  But this should put us even more on guard.  When the military starts bossing the show, the results can be disastrous.'…

Eisenhower had two unpleasant options.  He could allow blame for the overflight to be borne by his subordinates or he could accept responsibility himself.  If he chose the first option he would be telling the world that he was not in charge of his own administration.  Subordinates could authorize acts that could lead to war.  If he chose the second option he would admit to the world that the US had been lying, and that the US had been involved in this type of espionage since 1956. 

Khrushchev continued his diatribe.  At an informal news conference at the exhibition of the downed aircraft on 11 May he stated:

'...  We assisted the pilot when he flew into our territory and gave him due welcome.  If there are other such uninvited guests, we shall receive them just as "hospitably" as this one.  We shall try him, try him severely as a spy. 

...  I consider myself to be an incorrigible optimist.  I regard the provocative flight of the American intelligence plane over our country not as a preparation for war, but as a probing.  They have not "probed" us, and we boxed the nose of the "probers". 

Following a conference with congressional leaders on the same day, Eisenhower issued a statement to the press and answered several questions.  He said:

‘...  ever since the beginning of my administration I have issued directives to gather, in every feasible way, the information required to protect the United States and the free world against surprise attack and to enable them to make effective preparations for defence. 

We prefer and work for a different kind of world - and a different way of obtaining the information essential to confidence and effective deterrents.  Open societies, in the day of present weapons, are the only answer.'

Eisenhower decided to go ahead with the summit in Paris.  When the President landed at Orly Airport in Paris on 15 May, he soon learned that Khrushchev had placed preconditions in the paths of the meetings.  Khrushchev demanded that Eisenhower publically apologise, punish those responsible for the overflight, and promise not to violate Soviet airspace again.  Eisenhower suspended the overflights - hardly a concession since the Russians were now able to shoot the U-2 down.  Eisenhower, however, refused to apologise or to punish anyone. 

Eisenhower arranged to answer Khrushchev as the first order of business.  On the morning of 16 May the meeting began with de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and Macmillan.  Before de Gaulle could convene the convention and recognize Eisenhower, Khrushchev launched a tirade 'employing the vulgar, uncouth profanity for which he is well known.' Khrushchev withdrew the invitation to Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union.  The President, however, was finally able to make a brief reply defending United States actions, but at this point the meeting broke up before it ever formally began. 

Consider:

Studying Source 8, you will see that Khrushchev gave Eisenhower a 'way out' – by denying that he knew about the flight.  Why did Eisenhower not take it?