"In the West, America’s leaders called the shots. Reflecting their country’s essentially Manichean view of the world—a struggle between good and evil—they were skeptical of any kind of negotiations with the Soviets. And the lessons drawn from Munich and Yalta suggested that parleys at the summit were particularly dangerous. In June 1961 the disastrous meeting at Vienna served to confirm that precept. The bruising encounter between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev constitutes almost a textbook lesson in how not to do summitry. And their meeting helped spark two of the most dangerous confrontations of the Cold War: the Cuban Missile Crisis and America’s quagmire war in Vietnam."