An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

by Robert Dallek

  Kennedy responded to the border closing with studied caution. He stayed at the Cape until his scheduled return Monday morning and confined the administration’s initial response to a State Department statement declaring the action without impact on the “Allied position in West Berlin or access thereto.” Nevertheless, the department noted “violations of existing agreements” that would be “the subject of vigorous protests through appropriate channels.”

  The restrained response reflected Kennedy’s realization that the Berlin Wall, as the thirteen-foot-high barrier came to be known, was something of a godsend. “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” Kennedy asked O’Donnell. “There wouldn’t be any need of a wall if he occupied the whole city. This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

  With the wall, Kennedy’s problem was in fact more with his allies—the West Germans in particular—than with the Soviets. On August 16, Edward R. Murrow, USIA director, who had been visiting Berlin when the wall went up, cabled Washington that conversations with West Berlin’s mayor, Willy Brandt, and newspaper, radio, and TV journalists had indicated a degree of demoralization that “can and should be corrected.” The absence of any “sharp and definite follow up” to Washington’s response had produced a “letdown” that amounted to “a crisis of confidence.” At a public rally, Brandt asked Kennedy to demonstrate his commitment to Berlin by reinforcing the U.S. garrison stationed in the city. Embarrassed by the appeal, which Kennedy believed a campaign tactic to help Brandt win election to the chancellorship, JFK bristled: “Look at this! Who does he think he is?” But the pressure to do something was irresistible. At a meeting on August 17 with national security officials, Kennedy cautioned them against considering the issue of the wall itself—“our writ does not run in East Berlin”—and asked them to address instead the question of West Berlin morale. The discussion persuaded him to send additional troops to Berlin along with a letter delivered publicly to Brandt by Johnson, who had played almost no part to that point in the Berlin crisis, and General Lucius D. Clay, the architect of the 1948 Berlin airlift that had saved the Western sector from a Soviet blockade. As Kennedy told Brandt in the letter, he appreciated that these actions were more symbolic than substantive, but not entirely. (The troop reinforcement underlined the U.S. rejection of Soviet demands for “the removal of Allied protection from West Berlin.”) More important, Kennedy promised to continue the buildup of military forces in Europe to counter the Soviet threat to Berlin.

  Johnson thought the trip a poor idea, less because he feared for his safety—as Kenny O’Donnell later suggested—than because he believed it would intensify the crisis. When Johnson heard that he would be expected to greet the American troops traveling through the Eastern Zone to West Berlin, he predicted, “There’ll be a lot of shooting, and I’ll be in the middle of it. Why me?” General Norstad also believed it a mistake to send the vice president: It “would run the risk of exciting great expectations in West Berlin and possibly also among the unhappy East Germans,” he cabled the Joint Chiefs from Paris.

  Kennedy, however, believing that Johnson’s mission would send just the right message to Khrushchev, the West Germans, and the allies, ordered LBJ and Clay to fly to Bonn on August 18. Johnson threw himself into the assignment with characteristic energy, staying awake on the overnight transatlantic flight to work on his speeches. At the Bonn airport, he told a waiting crowd that America was “determined to fulfill all our obligations and to honor all our commitments.” Chancellor Konrad Adenauer assured LBJ that his presence was a refutation to an old woman in the crowd waving a sign that said “Action, Not Words.” Flying on to West Berlin, Johnson rode to the city center in an open car cheered by 100,000 spectators lining the roads. Stopping the car repeatedly, he plunged into the appreciative crowds, shaking hands, distributing ballpoint pens, and responding with visible emotion to the displays of enthusiasm. At city hall, he told 300,000 cheering Berliners to maintain faith in themselves and “in your allies, everywhere throughout the world. This island does not stand alone.”

  The next day, Sunday, at 9:00 A.M., Johnson and Clay awaited the arrival at the Helmstedt entrance to West Berlin of sixteen hundred U.S. Army troops crossing the 110-mile stretch of autobahn separating the city from West Germany. Kennedy, who normally spent summer weekends in Hyannis Port, stayed in Washington to monitor the progress of the convoy; he intended to control the response to any possible confrontation with Soviet troops at East German military checkpoints along the road. For more than twelve hours from Saturday night to Sunday afternoon in Washington, Kennedy’s military aide reported to the president every fifteen minutes on the progress of the column. Berliners greeted the arrival at 10:00 A.M. of the first elements of the convoy with shouts, tears, and flowers. The U.S. commander described the event as “the most exciting and impressive thing I’ve ever seen in my life, with the possible exception of the liberation of Paris.”

  No one in the Western camp saw Johnson’s trip as more than a temporary morale booster; it offered no formula for ending the confrontation. Kennedy wanted to issue an invitation before September 1 to Moscow to begin talks and to make “plain to our three Allies that this is what we mean to do and that they must come along or stay behind.” But he also wanted fresh proposals to work with. He suggested that the allies “examine all of Khrushchev’s statements for pegs on which to hang our position. He has thrown out quite a few assurances and hints . . . and I believe they should be exploited.” When no one came up with anything that seemed likely to advance negotiations, hopes for meaningful talks remained no more than that. In these circumstances, de Gaulle warned the president, negotiations “would be considered immediately as a prelude to the abandonment, at least gradually, of Berlin and as a sort of notice of our surrender.” Discussions now “would be a very grave blow to our Atlantic Alliance.” Reported “trends towards neutralism” in Europe, new Soviet threats to civil air and road access to West Berlin, and Moscow’s resumption of nuclear testing on August 30 led Max Taylor to tell Kennedy that “Khrushchev intends using military force, or the threat thereof, to gain his ends in Berlin.” It all further diminished Kennedy’s hopes of early productive talks.

  Nevertheless, since the alternative to diplomacy might be a nuclear war, Kennedy saw the continuing search for a negotiating formula as imperative. So did Khrushchev, who invited columnist Drew Pearson during a visit to Russia to come to his summer retreat on the Black Sea for an interview. During their talk, he emphasized that “there isn’t going to be a war.” Consequently, when George Kennan reported from Belgrade, where he was serving as ambassador, that his Soviet counterpart, under instructions from Khrushchev, wanted to discuss Germany and Berlin, Washington agreed.

  Throughout, Kennedy tried to placate Adenauer, who, like Acheson, believed that only military steps would restrain the Soviets. Kennedy endorsed the chancellor’s “estimate of the severity of the crisis . . . and of the likelihood that worse is yet to come.” Yet Kennedy disputed Adenauer’s contention that negotiations “might be misinterpreted as a sign of weakness on our part.” Khrushchev had no reason for illusions about Western firmness. And Kennedy believed that the sheer “logic of a thermonuclear war demands that we exhaust every effort to find a peaceful solution consistent with the preservation of our vital interests.” Little Soviet interest in negotiations did not discourage Kennedy. “It isn’t time yet,” he told Rusk. “It’s too early. They are bent on scaring the world to death before they begin negotiating, and they haven’t quite brought the pot to boil. Not enough people are frightened.”

  Publicly, Kennedy demonstrated only determination to face down Khrushchev. On August 30, he announced the appointment of General Clay as his personal representative in Berlin and described renewed Soviet nuclear testing as a demonstration of “utter disregard of the desire of mankind for a decrease in the arms race . . . [and] a threat to th
e entire world by increasing the dangers of a thermo-nuclear holocaust.” (Privately, he had been furious with the report that the Soviets had resumed testing: “Fucked again,” he told the national security official who brought him the news. “The bastards. That fucking liar,” he said of Khrushchev.) Declaring the Soviet announcement “a form of atomic blackmail, designed to substitute terror for reason in the present international scene,” Kennedy invited the USSR to join the U.S. and Britain in banning atmospheric nuclear tests producing radioactive fallout. In addition, he ordered the resumption of underground explosions as a response to ten Soviet tests but said the United States remained eager for “a controlled test ban agreement of the widest possible scope.”

  Although Khrushchev privately described the resumption of tests as essential to build Russia’s nuclear strength, Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov believed otherwise. Soviet testing, Sakharov predicted, would simply provoke U.S. testing and a further lead for the United States in the arms race. When Sakharov confronted Khrushchev with this reality, the chairman, playing to hard-line critics in the Kremlin, publicly reprimanded Sakharov for not understanding politics. The Americans, Khrushchev lectured, did not understand any other language than displays of military strength. And Kennedy, Khrushchev felt, was of no help in reaching useful agreements. “We helped elect Kennedy last year,” Khrushchev told a Soviet lunch group. “Then we met with him in Vienna, a meeting that could have been a turning point. But what does he say? ‘Don’t ask for too much. . . . If I make too many concessions, I’ll be turned out of office.’ Quite a guy! He comes to a meeting but can’t perform. What the hell do we need a guy like that for?”

  However poor prospects for productive talks seemed, Kennedy pressed aides, allies, and Moscow to find a negotiated solution to Berlin. In a conversation on September 5 with Rusk, Stevenson, and other White House officials, he described several plausible elements of a negotiating strategy. He also instructed Ambassador Thompson to discuss a possible basis for negotiations with Foreign Minister Gromyko. Meanwhile, Kennedy sent Khrushchev conciliatory messages through the American press: On September 6, James Reston quoted the president as ready for an “honorable accommodation.” Two weeks later, James Wechsler of the New York Post described Kennedy as believing that nothing was nonnegotiable “except the dignity of free men.”

  Never forgetting how devastating a nuclear exchange with the United States would be for the Soviet Union, and relieved of his émigré problem through Berlin, Khrushchev began a slow but unmistakable shift away from threats and toward talks. Worried that a peace treaty with East Germany would “spark a Western economic embargo against the socialist bloc,” which would destabilize Moscow’s Eastern European satellites, he had ample reason to maintain the status quo with Germany. But after repeatedly threatening to sign a treaty, Khrushchev needed a graceful means of retreat.

  Khrushchev sent a message to the president, carried by Cyrus Sulzberger of the New York Times, that he was not “loath to establishing some sort of informal contact with him to find a means of settling the crisis without damaging the prestige of the United States—but on the basis of a German peace treaty and a Free City of West Berlin.” A preliminary discussion between Rusk and Gromyko in September signaled further Soviet interest in an accommodation. Khrushchev then sent Kennedy a message through Soviet press spokesman Mikhail Kharmalov. At a dinner with Salinger at the Carlyle Hotel in New York on September 24, the night before Kennedy was to mark the opening of the U.N.’s annual session with a speech before the General Assembly, Kharmalov said, “The storm in Berlin is over.” Kharmalov also described the chairman as ready for a summit discussion that could head off a Soviet-American conflict, and relayed Khrushchev’s hope that Kennedy’s upcoming U.N. address would “not be another warlike ultimatum like the one on July 25. He didn’t like that at all.” Salinger delivered the message to the president, who was dressed in pajamas and chewing on an unlit cigar, in his hotel suite at one o’clock in the morning. Kennedy commented, “He’s not going to recognize the Ulbricht regime—not this year, at least—and that’s good news.”

  To encourage Khrushchev’s interest in talks, Kennedy’s speech the next day mixed condemnation with conciliation. He denounced renewed Soviet nuclear testing and seeming indifference to the horrors of a conflict—“Mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to mankind,” Kennedy declared in a memorable line. “This is not the time or the place for immoderate tones,” he added. Although he left no doubt that Moscow was responsible for the current confrontation, he declared the crisis unnecessary and himself willing to talk. “We are committed to no rigid formula,” he explained. “We see no perfect solution. . . . But we believe a peaceful agreement is possible. . . . There is no need for a crisis over Berlin, threatening the peace—and if those who created this crisis desire peace, there will be peace and freedom in Berlin.” At the same time, he instructed Bobby to give interviews that emphasized the dangers to peace from Soviet threats. “The United States and the Soviet Union,” Bobby told Knight journalists, “are on a collision course. Unless the situation changes, we will run into one another in a short period of time. I don’t think that there is any problem that even comes close to this. . . . On this question really rests the future not just of the country but of the world.”

  Three days after Kennedy spoke, Khrushchev sent him a back-channel twenty-six-page letter delivered by Kharmalov to Salinger. The letter flattered the president as someone who “prepossessed” people with his “informality, modesty and frankness, which are not to be found very often in men who occupy such a high position.” It also struck warm, folksy notes, describing the chairman’s retreat into tranquility on the Black Sea, where he enjoyed the sun, bathing, and the “grandeur of the Caucasian Mountains.” In this setting, Khrushchev found it “hard to believe that there still exist problems in the world which . . . cast a sinister shadow on peaceful life, on the future of millions of people.” His letter was meant to be an informal and personal approach to their mutual problems—“Only in confidential correspondence can you say what you think without a backward glance at the press.”

  Most important, Khrushchev mirrored Kennedy’s concern not to bring the world to disaster through rash actions provoking a nuclear war. He sounded positive notes about shared interest in “striving towards that noble goal” of disarmament and in finding a solution to their German problem. With the Berlin Wall easing Soviet embarrassment, Khrushchev focused on his other concern, keeping Germany divided. Khrushchev now proposed private talks about Germany between personal representatives as a prelude to a summit meeting between Kennedy and himself. “We can argue, we can disagree with one another,” Khrushchev concluded, “but weapons must not be brought into play.”

  A week after Kennedy received Khrushchev’s letter, Gromyko asked to see him at the White House. “This is really the first time since Vienna that they’ve wanted to talk,” the president told O’Donnell and Powers. “It looks like a thaw.” Kennedy greeted Gromyko with expressions of satisfaction at the recent exchanges between him and Rusk and suggested that Ambassador Thompson continue the discussions in Moscow. Tediously reading from a prepared text for an hour, Gromyko, whose wooden, formal demeanor irritated the president, said nothing that Kennedy had not heard before, except that Khrushchev no longer saw a “fatal date,” meaning that a year-end treaty signing no longer applied. Kennedy answered Gromyko that current Soviet proposals on Germany and Berlin “meant [their] trading an apple for an orchard. It would result in a decline of our position in West Berlin and would require our acceptance of other changes which are in the interest of the U.S.S.R.” It amounted to “not a compromise but a [U.S.] retreat.” Nevertheless, Kennedy stressed American willingness to continue discussions in Moscow and expressed the determination not to protract them month after month.

  On October 17, before Khrushchev received a firm but cordial written reply to his letter, in which Kennedy agreed to the likely benefit of “wholly priva
te” exchanges, Khrushchev publicly announced his satisfaction with indications of Western interest in a solution to the German and West Berlin problems and the diminished need to sign a peace treaty by the close of the year.

  The “thaw,“ however, did not end American planning for a possible confrontation. After Khrushchev’s false private assurances on renewing nuclear tests, Kennedy remained distrustful of Soviet professions of peace and good intentions on Germany. In addition, Franco-German opposition to negotiations made a Berlin settlement unlikely, and at home Kennedy faced considerable pressure from mindless right-wingers all too ready to fight a nuclear war. During a White House luncheon, E. M. Dealey, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, verbally assaulted the president for heading an administration of “weak sisters.” Dealey believed that the United States needed “a man on horseback” to deal with the Soviet threat. “Many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle,” Dealey commented. Kennedy, with evident but controlled anger, replied, “Wars are easier to talk about than they are to fight. I’m just as tough as you are—and I didn’t get elected President by arriving at soft judgments.”