The acrid atmosphere last week in the Captain Cook Hotel of Anchorage, Alaska, with its vivid murals of the 18th-century British seafarer’s discoveries throughout the Pacific, sounds very much like the acrid atmosphere almost exactly 60 years ago in the Beaux Arts U.S. and Soviet embassies in Vienna. Grim, at least for the United States.

Vienna was where the 42-year-old President John Kennedy met the 67-year-old Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which, as Kennedy told the New York Times’s James Reston immediately afterward, was the “worst thing in my life. He beat the hell out of me.”