Thompson argued that the U.S. “hope for the future” was the evolution of Soviet society into one that was more sophisticated and consumer-driven. “These people are becoming bourgeois very rapidly,” he said. Based on long conversations with Khrushchev, Thompson argued that the Soviet leader was trying to buy time to allow the Soviet economy to progress in that direction. “For this he really wants a generally unexplosive period in foreign affairs.”
For that reason, Thompson said, Khrushchev badly wanted an early meeting with the president. Though he had responded to the U-2 incident as a blow to his pride, prompting him to cut off communication with the White House, Khrushchev now was eager to move forward again. Thompson thought Kennedy should be open to such a meeting, since Khrushchev’s foreign policy relied so much on his personal interaction with counterparts.
Others in the room were more cautious, wondering what value could come from meeting with a Soviet leader who was calling the U.S. “the principal enemy of mankind.” Bohlen opposed Khrushchev’s suggestion that the meeting should take place during a UN session, “because the Soviet leader cannot resist a rostrum.” Harriman reminded Kennedy that protocol required he meet first with his allies.
Whatever the timing, Kennedy made increasingly clear to the men in the room that he wanted the meeting with Khrushchev. He felt he could unlock the potential of his presidency only once he had met with the Soviet leader. As he had told his aide and longtime friend Kenneth O’Donnell, “I have to show him that we can be just as tough as he is. I can’t do that sending messages to him through other people. I’ll have to sit down with him, and let him see who he’s dealing with.” Beyond that, other countries—including close U.S. allies—were acting cautiously on crucial issues until they saw how Kennedy and Khrushchev came to terms.
Kennedy told the group he wanted to avoid a full-fledged “summit,” which he interpreted as something that was necessary only when the world was threatened by war or when leaders were ready to sign off on major agreements that lower-level officials had precooked. What he wanted was a personal, informal meeting to get a firsthand impression of Khrushchev and thus better make judgments about how to deal with him. Kennedy wanted to open up wide channels of communication with the Soviets to prevent the sort of miscalculation that had led to three wars in his lifetime. Nothing worried him more in the nuclear age than this threat of miscalculation.
“It is my duty to make decisions that no adviser and no ally can make for me,” he said. To ensure that those decisions were well-informed, said Kennedy, he needed the sort of in-depth, personal knowledge he could get only from Khrushchev. At the same time, he also wanted to present U.S. views to the Soviet leader “precisely, realistically, and with an opportunity for discussion and clarification.”
Ten days later, on February 21, the same group of experts and senior officials assembled again, and by that time all had agreed that Kennedy should put pen to paper and invite Khrushchev to meet. Khrushchev had floated the possibility of a March get-together in New York around a special UN disarmament session. To head off that option, Kennedy would suggest a spring meeting in a neutral European city, either Stockholm or Vienna. When he hand-delivered Kennedy’s letter in Moscow, Thompson would explain to Khrushchev that the president needed the time before then to consult with allies.
On February 27, Bundy instructed the State Department in the president’s name to prepare a report studying the Berlin problem. The report should deal with the “political and military aspects of the Berlin crisis, including a negotiating position on Germany for possible four-power talks.”
That same evening, Thompson arrived in Moscow with President Kennedy’s letter. It had taken the ten weeks of transition after Kennedy’s election and first month of his presidency before Kennedy had been ready to respond to Khrushchev’s multiple attempts to gain an audience and his several gestures aimed at improving relations.
But by the time Thompson phoned Foreign Minister Gromyko to arrange a time to deliver the long-sought Kennedy response, Khrushchev was no longer interested. The Soviet leader had to resume his agricultural tour of the Soviet Union, Gromyko said, and thus could not receive Thompson either that evening or the next morning before his departure. Gromyko’s frosty tone could not have transmitted Khrushchev’s snub more clearly.
Thompson protested to Gromyko about the importance of the letter he carried. He said he would “go anywhere at any time” to see Khrushchev. Gromyko replied that he could guarantee neither the place nor the time. Thompson’s extension as ambassador had been based in no small part on his vaunted access to Khrushchev, so he was sheepish as he reported the situation back to Washington.
Khrushchev delivered a speech the following day in Sverdlovsk that reflected his surly mood: “The Soviet Union has the most powerful rocket weapons in the world and as many atomic and hydrogen bombs as are needed to wipe aggressors from the face of the Earth,” he said.
It was a long way from his New Year’s toast about Kennedy’s presidency as “a fresh wind” in relations. Kennedy’s misreading of Khrushchev’s intentions and the Soviet leader’s angry response to perceived slights had undermined a brief opportunity to improve relations.
Thompson would have to fly to Siberia to try to prevent matters from turning even worse.
And in Germany itself, things were not going any better.
5
ULBRICHT AND ADENAUER: UNRULY ALLIANCES
Whatever elections show, the age of Adenauer is over…. The United States is ill-advised to chase the shadows of the past and ignore the political leadership and thinking of the generation which is now coming of age.
John F. Kennedy on West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, in Foreign Affairs, October 1957
West Berlin is experiencing a growth boom. They have increased wages for workers and employees more than we have. They have created more favorable living conditions…. I am only saying this because we need to deal with the real situation and draw its consequences.
Walter Ulbricht, General Secretary of the East German Socialist Unity Party, in a meeting with the Politburo, January 4, 1961
History would record that Walter Ulbricht and Konrad Adenauer were the founding fathers of two opposing Germanys, men whose striking differences, both personal and political, would come to define their era.
In the first weeks of 1961, however, one important similarity drove their actions: Both leaders fundamentally distrusted the men upon whom their fates depended—Nikita Khrushchev in the case of Ulbricht and John F. Kennedy for Adenauer. In the year ahead, nothing mattered more to the German leaders than managing these powerful individuals and ensuring that their actions did not undermine what each German considered his legacy.
At age sixty-seven, Ulbricht was a cold, introverted workaholic who avoided friendships, distanced himself from family members, and pursued his strict, Stalinist version of socialism with a relentless focus and an unwavering distrust of others. “He was not much liked in his youth and that didn’t improve as he grew older,” said Kurt Hager, a lifelong fellow communist campaigner who would become the party’s chief ideologist. “He had not the slightest understanding of jokes.”
Small in stature and cramped in demeanor, Ulbricht regarded Khrushchev as ideologically inconsistent, intellectually inferior, and personally weak. Though the West posed many threats, nothing endangered his East Germany more immediately than what he considered Khrushchev’s wavering commitment to protecting its existence.
For Ulbricht, the lesson of World War II—which he had spent primarily in Moscow exile—was that, when given a choice, Germans had become fascists. Determined never to allow his countrymen that sort of free will again, he placed them within the unyielding guardrails of his repressive system, enforced by a secret police system that was both more sophisticated and more extensive than Hitler’s Gestapo. His life’s purpose was the creation and now the salvation of his communist state of 17 million souls.
At age eighty-five, Adenauer wa
s an eccentric, shrewd, dryly humorous, and orderly man who had survived all the chaotic stages of Germany’s previous century: the Imperial Reich, Germany’s first unification, the Weimar Republic’s chaos, the Third Reich, and now Germany’s postwar division. He had seen most of his political allies die or fade from the scene, and he worried that Kennedy lacked the historical context, policy experience, and personal character to stand up to the Soviets in the style of his predecessors, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower.
Adenauer shared with Ulbricht a distrust of German nature, but his remedy was to lash his country irretrievably to the U.S. and the West through NATO and the European Common Market. As he would explain later, “Our task was to dispel the mistrust harbored against us everywhere in the West. We had to try, step-by-step, to reawaken confidence in Germans. The precondition for this…was a clear, steady, unwavering affirmation of identity with the West” and its economic and political practices.
As the first and still the only freely elected West German chancellor, Adenauer had helped construct from Nazi ruins a vibrant, democratic, free-market state of sixty million people. His objective was to sustain that construct until the West was strong enough to gain unification on its own terms. More immediately, he was seeking a fourth term in September with the rejuvenated purpose of a politician who felt vindicated by history.
Both Ulbricht and Adenauer were simultaneously central actors and needy dependents—both driving and being driven by events—as the ways they spent the first days of 1961 illustrate.
“GROSSES HAUS,” COMMUNIST CENTRAL PARTY HEADQUARTERS,
EAST BERLIN
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 4, 1961
Standing before a secret emergency session of his ruling Politburo, Walter Ulbricht scratched his goatee unhappily and contradicted his optimistic, public New Year’s message of just three days earlier.
Speaking to his subjects, he had spouted socialist triumph, extolled the success of his farm collectivization, and boasted that he had enriched East Germany economically in the previous year while improving its standing around the world. However, the situation was far too serious to risk employing the same lies on his leadership, who knew better, and whom he needed for his struggle against an opponent whose resources seemed to be expanding with every hour.
“West Berlin is experiencing a growth boom,” Ulbricht complained. “They have increased wages for workers and employees more than we have. They have created more favorable living conditions, and they have to a great degree rebuilt the main parts of the city, while construction in our part continues to lag.” The result, he said, was that West Berlin was “sucking out” the East Berlin workforce, and that more of East Germany’s most talented youth were studying in West Berlin schools and watching Hollywood movies in its theaters.
Ulbricht had never been so clear with his comrades about the enemy’s rising fortunes or their own declining position. “I am only saying this, because we need to deal with the real situation and draw its consequences,” he said, laying out his plans for a year during which he wished to shut off the refugee flow, bolster the East Berlin economy, and protect his East Germany from the spies and propagandists operating from West Berlin.
One speaker after the other rose to support Ulbricht and provide additional reasons for concern. A Magdeburg district party secretary said he had only solved a Christmas tree shortage over the holidays through an emergency harvest. His citizens blamed a shoe and textile shortage on the party’s redirection of insufficient supplies to the more politically sensitive major cities of Karl-Marx-Stadt and Dresden. Politburo member Erich Honecker complained that the West’s attractions were draining East Germany’s sports movement, for which he was responsible, of its best athletes, a serious threat to its Olympic ambitions. Bruno Leuschner, the head of state planning and a concentration camp survivor, said East Germany would only avoid collapse if it got an immediate billion-ruble credit from the Soviets. He reported that he had recently returned from Moscow, where just the technical documents to work out the required scale of Soviet help had filled a twin-engine, Ilyushin Il-14 military cargo plane. East Berlin party boss Paul Verner, a former metalworker, said he could do nothing to stop the continued flight of his city’s most skilled workers.
Ulbricht’s party lieutenants drew a picture of a country heading toward inevitable collapse. As long as so much of the country’s productive capacity was walking out the door as refugees, they complained, they could do little to reverse the trend. Their increasing dependence on the West Berlin economy for suppliers had only made them more vulnerable. Karl Heinrich Rau, the minister in charge of East Germany’s trade with the West, argued that Ulbricht could not accept Khrushchev’s position that they wait until the Soviet leader had his summit with Kennedy before he dealt with the growing problems. They had to act now.
With unusual candor before his party comrades, an exasperated Ulbricht condemned Khrushchev for his “unnecessary tolerance” of the Berlin situation. Ulbricht knew the KGB would get a report on what he told his Politburo, but he nevertheless pulled no punches. The dangers of Khrushchev’s displeasure mattered far less to him than those of his continued inaction. Ulbricht reminded his colleagues that he had been the first to declare openly that all of Berlin should be considered part of East German territory, and that Khrushchev had only later come to agree with him.
Again, Ulbricht said, he would have to take the lead.
The West would not know until years thereafter—through the release of secret East German and Soviet documents—how crucial Ulbricht’s actions during the first days of 1961 would be in shaping everything that followed. That said, his decision to escalate his pressure on Khrushchev, despite the potential political perils for himself, was consistent with a career during which he had repeatedly overcome Soviet and internal opposition to create a state that was more Stalinist than even Stalin had envisioned.
Like his mentor Stalin, Ulbricht was unusually short, standing at just five feet, four inches, and like Stalin he had a physical peculiarity that helped define his misshapen personality. For Stalin, the scars were pockmarks, a limp, and a crippled left arm from childhood disease. Ulbricht’s enduring defect was his distinctive squeaky falsetto voice, born of a diphtheria infection when he was just eighteen. He hammered home his harshest points in a high-pitched, often indecipherable Saxon dialect, leaving listeners waiting for him to calm down and drop an octave or two. His anti-imperialist rants—most often delivered while he wore crumpled suits and shirts with clashing ties—had made him such an object of derision during the 1950s that he had become the butt of jokes among East German citizens (in their bolder or more inebriated moments) and West Berlin cabaret comedians alike. Perhaps in response, Ulbricht had shortened his speeches and begun to wear more neatly pressed double-breasted suits with silver ties. However, those changes had done little to alter his public image.
Like Stalin, Ulbricht was an organizational zealot who remembered people’s names and closely cataloged their loyalties and personal foibles. It was useful data for manipulating friends and destroying enemies. He lacked rhetorical skill and personal warmth, deficits that made it impossible for him to ever gain public popularity, but he compensated with methodical organization skills that would be crucial to running a centrally planned, authoritarian system. Though his East Germany provided a far smaller canvas than that of Stalin’s Soviet empire, he shared the Soviet dictator’s knack for taking and holding power against all odds to achieve improbable outcomes.
Ulbricht was also a man of precision and habit. He started every day with ten minutes of calisthenics and preached to his countrymen in rhyming slogans about the value of regular exercise. Before skating on winter evenings across his private lake with his wife, Lotte, he demanded that the staff smooth the surface so that it did not show a scratch. The fact that Ulbricht, unlike Stalin, did not execute his real or perceived enemies did not alter the single-minded purpose with which he had imposed a Bolshevik system on the Soviet-occupied third
of a broken postwar Germany. And he had done so against the instructions of Stalin and other Kremlin officials, who had doubted their own particular style of communism would take among Germans, and thus dared not impose it.
Ulbricht had no such qualms. Almost from the hour of Nazi Germany’s collapse, Ulbricht’s vision had shaped the Soviet-occupied zone. At six in the morning on April 30, 1945, just hours before Hitler’s death, a bus picked up the future East German leader and ten other German leftists—known as the Ulbricht Gruppe—from the Hotel Lux, the wartime hostelry for exiled communist leaders. Ulbricht’s assignment from Stalin was to help create a provisional government and rebuild the German Communist Party.
Wolfgang Leonhard, the youngest member of the group at age twenty-three, observed that from the moment they landed, “Ulbricht behaved like a dictator” over local communists, whom he considered unfit to rule postwar Germany. Ulbricht had fled Nazi Germany to fight in the Spanish Civil War before retreating to exile in Moscow, and he didn’t hide his disdain for German communists who had remained inside the Third Reich but who had done so little to bring down Hitler—leaving the job to foreigners.
Ulbricht provided a preview of his leadership style when he received a group of a hundred communist district leaders in May 1945 to provide them with their orders. Several of them stood to argue that their most urgent task was to heal the social wounds from widespread incidents of Soviet soldiers raping German women. Some called upon Ulbricht to provide doctors with permission to abort the resulting pregnancies. Others sought a public condemnation of the Red Army’s excesses.
Ulbricht snapped. “People who get so worked up about such things today would have done much better to get worked up when Hitler began the war,” he said. “Any concession to these emotions is for us quite simply out of the question…. I will not allow the debate to be continued. The conference is adjourned.”
Berlin 1961 Page 12
