Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  Khrushchev dismissed Kennedy’s focus on nuclear disarmament, which he said would be impossible as long as the Berlin problem existed. If the U.S. used force to interfere with Soviet aims in Berlin, he said, then it would be met with force. If the U.S. wanted war, it would get war. Thompson had seen this saber-rattling side of Khrushchev before, but coming just days ahead of the Vienna meeting it was more unsettling.

  Khrushchev shrugged, however, saying that he did not expect conflict. “Only a madman would want war and Western leaders were not mad, although Hitler had been,” he said. Khrushchev pounded the table and talked of the horrors of war, which he knew so well. He could not believe Kennedy would bring on such a catastrophe because of Berlin.

  Thompson countered that it was Khrushchev, not Kennedy, who was creating the danger by threatening to alter the Berlin situation.

  Though that might be true, Khrushchev said, if hostilities were to break out, it would be the Americans and not the Soviets who would have to cross the frontier of Eastern Germany to defend Berlin and thus begin the war.

  Time and again during their dinner, Khrushchev said that it had been sixteen years since the Great War had been won, and that it was time to put an end to Berlin’s occupation. Khrushchev reminded Thompson that in his original 1958 Berlin ultimatum he had demanded satisfaction within six months. “Thirty months have now passed,” he said, fuming at Thompson’s suggestion that matters could be left as they currently stood in Berlin. The U.S. was trying to damage Soviet prestige, and this could not be allowed to continue, Khrushchev said.

  Thompson conceded that the U.S. could not stop Khrushchev from signing a peace treaty with East Germany, but the important question was whether the Soviet leader would use that moment to interfere with the U.S. right-of-access to Berlin. While Khrushchev was floating a trial balloon for the Vienna Summit of a tougher approach on Berlin, Thompson as well was testing what was likely to be Kennedy’s response.

  Thompson also said U.S. prestige everywhere in the world was at stake in its commitments to Berliners. Moreover, Washington feared that if it gave in to Soviet pressure and sacrificed Berlin, West Germany and Western Europe would be the next to fall. “The psychological effect would be disastrous to our position,” he told Khrushchev.

  Khrushchev scoffed at Thompson’s words, repeating what had become his frequent refrain: Berlin was really of little importance to either America or the Soviet Union, so why should they get so worked up about changing the city’s status?

  If Berlin were of such little significance, retorted Thompson, he doubted that Khrushchev would take such an enormous risk to gain the upper hand in the city.

  Khrushchev then put forward the proposal that he planned to present in Vienna: Nothing would prevent the U.S. from continuing to have troops in the “free city” of West Berlin. All that would change was that Washington in the future would have to negotiate those rights with East Germany, he said.

  Thompson probed, asking what elements of the problem troubled Khrushchev most, suggesting it might be the refugee problem. Khrushchev brushed aside that notion and said simply, “Berlin is a festering sore which has to be eliminated.”

  Khrushchev told Thompson that German reunification was impossible and that in fact no one really wanted it, including de Gaulle, Macmillan, and Adenauer. He said de Gaulle had told him not only that Germany should remain divided, but that it would be even better if it were divided into three parts.

  The soft-spoken Thompson saw no option but to return Khrushchev’s threat or be misinterpreted as giving him the green light on Berlin. “Well, if you use force,” said Thompson, “if you want to cut off our access and connections by force, then we will use force against force.”

  Khrushchev responded calmly and with a smile. Thompson had misunderstood him, he said. The mercurial Soviet said he didn’t plan to use force. He would simply sign the treaty and put an end to the rights the United States had won as “the conditions of capitulation.”

  Thompson’s later cable to Washington on his ice rink face-off reflected little of the importance of what he had just heard. For Khrushchev, it had been a dress rehearsal for what would follow. Thompson, however, played down Khrushchev’s bluster. He wrote that the Soviet leader was outlining in detail for the first time how a permanent division of the city might take place without violating American rights. Thompson repeated his conviction that Khrushchev would not force the Berlin issue until after his October Party Congress. In Vienna, Thompson reckoned, Khrushchev would “slide over the Berlin problem in a sweetness-and-light atmosphere.”

  Thompson nevertheless suggested that Kennedy in Vienna offer Khrushchev a Berlin formula that would enable both sides to save face, as the problem would likely come to a head later in the year. Otherwise, he wrote, “war would hang in the balance.”

  On the same day, Kennedy was getting a different reading from Berlin. The head of the U.S. Mission there, diplomat E. Allan Lightner Jr., said Moscow could “live with Berlin status quo for some time,” and that Khrushchev had no timetable for action. Thus, argued Lightner, Kennedy could deter Khrushchev in Vienna by sending a sharp message that the U.S. was determined to defend the city’s freedom, and that “the Soviets should keep their hands off Berlin.”

  Lightner wanted to ensure that Kennedy knew the consequences of showing weakness in Vienna. “Any indication the President is willing to discuss interim solutions, compromises, or a modus vivendi,” he said, “would reduce the impact of warning Khrushchev of the dire consequences of his miscalculating our resolve.”

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  THURSDAY, MAY 25, 1961

  Like an author seeing the first unsatisfying drafts of his presidency, Kennedy opted to deliver a second State of the Union speech on May 25—“a Special Address to the Nation on Urgent National Needs”—just twelve weeks after the first. It reflected his recognition that before Vienna and after the Bay of Pigs, he needed to set the stage by sending Khrushchev an unmistakable message of resolve.

  Bobby Kennedy had used one of his Bolshakov meetings to forewarn Khrushchev that although the president’s rhetoric in the speech would be harsh, this didn’t lessen his brother’s desire to cooperate. However, the Bolshakov channel was not a sufficient means to convey a message of strength that was intended as much for a domestic audience as for Khrushchev.

  Standing before a joint session of Congress and a national television audience, Kennedy explained that American presidents had on occasion during “extraordinary times” provided a second State of the Union during a single year. These were such times, he said. As the United States was responsible for freedom’s cause in the world, he declared that he was going to unveil “a freedom doctrine.”

  The president’s forty-eight-minute midday speech was interrupted by applause seventeen times. He stressed the need to maintain a healthy American economy, and he celebrated the end of the recession and beginning of recovery. He spoke of the world’s southern hemisphere as the “lands of the rising peoples”—Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Mideast—where the adversaries of freedom had to be countered on “the world’s great battleground.”

  Kennedy called for a defense spending increase of some $700 million to expand and modernize the military, to overtake the Soviets in the arms race, and to reorganize civil defense with a threefold increase in money for fallout shelters. He wanted to enlist 15,000 more Marines and put a greater focus on fighting guerrilla wars in the Third World by expanding the supply of howitzers, helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and battle-ready reserve units. Most important, he declared that the United States by the end of the decade would put a man on the moon and return him to Earth. It was a race he was determined to win against the Soviets, who had put the first satellite and man into space.

  With the Vienna Summit just nine days off, his message to the American people was that the world was growing more dangerous by the hour, that America had a global responsibility as freedom’s champion, and that it thus must accep
t the sacrifices required. He set the bar low for what could be achieved with so difficult an adversary, saving just one paragraph for discussion of the Vienna meeting.

  “No formal agenda is planned and no negotiations will be undertaken,” he said.

  MOSCOW

  FRIDAY, MAY 26, 1961

  Directly responding to what he perceived as Kennedy’s shot across his bow, Khrushchev called together his most critical constituency, the Communist Party’s ruling Presidium. As usual, his decision to bring the stenographer to the meeting was a sign to its attendees that he intended to say something significant.

  He told his Presidium colleagues that Kennedy was “a son of a bitch.” Despite that, he attached great significance to the Vienna Summit because he would use it to bring to a head what he referred to as “the German question.” He outlined the solution that he would propose, using much the same description that he had employed with Ambassador Thompson.

  Could the steps he was proposing to change Berlin’s status prompt nuclear war? he asked his fellow Soviet leaders. Yes, he answered, and then he outlined why he considered such a conflict to be 95 percent unlikely.

  Only Anastas Mikoyan among his party chieftains dared differ with the Soviet leader. He argued that Khrushchev underestimated the American willingness and ability to engage in conventional war over Berlin. Shifting from previous attacks that focused more on West Germany and Adenauer as the threat, Khrushchev told those gathered that the United States was the most dangerous of all countries to the Soviets. In his love-hate relationship with America, he had turned the needle back to loathing in preparation for the Vienna Summit, a clear indication to his leadership of what outcome he expected.

  Khrushchev repeated his increasingly obsessive view that although he was meeting with Kennedy, it was the Pentagon and the CIA that ran the United States, something he said that he had already experienced during his dealings with Eisenhower. He said it was for this reason one could not trust that American leaders could make decisions based on logical principles. “That’s why certain forces could emerge and find a pretext to go to war against us,” he said.

  Khrushchev told his comrades that he was prepared to risk war and that he also knew how best to avoid it. He said America’s European allies and world public opinion would restrain Kennedy from responding with nuclear weapons to any change in Berlin’s status. He said de Gaulle and Macmillan would never support an American lurch toward war because they understood that the Soviets’ primary nuclear targets, given the range of Moscow’s missiles, would be in Europe.

  “They are intelligent people, and they understand this,” he said.

  Khrushchev then laid out exactly how the Berlin situation would unfold after the six-month ultimatum he would issue in Vienna. He would sign a peace treaty unilaterally with the East German government, and then he would turn over to it all the access routes to West Berlin. “We do not encroach on West Berlin, we do not declare a blockade,” he said, thus providing no pretext for military action. “We show that we are ready to permit air traffic but on the condition that Western planes land at airports in the GDR [not West Berlin]. We do not demand a withdrawal of troops. However, we consider them illegal, though we won’t use any strong-arm methods for their removal. We will not cut off delivery of foodstuffs and will not sever any other lifelines. We will adhere to a policy of noninfringement and noninvolvement in the affairs of West Berlin. Therefore, I don’t believe that because the state of war and the occupational regime are coming to an end it would unleash a war.”

  Mikoyan was alone in warning Khrushchev that the probability of war was higher than the Soviet leader estimated. Out of respect for Khrushchev, however, he put it at only a slightly greater 10 percent rather than Khrushchev’s 5 percent. “In my opinion, they could initiate military action without atomic weapons,” he said.

  Khrushchev shot back that Kennedy so feared war that he would not react militarily. He told the Presidium they perhaps would have to compromise in Laos, Cuba, or the Congo, where the conventional balance was less clear, but around Berlin the Kremlin’s superiority was unquestionable.

  To ensure this became even more so, Khrushchev ordered Defense Secretary Rodion Malinovsky, Soviet Army Chief of Staff Matvei Zakharov, and Warsaw Pact Commander Andrei Grechko—who sat before him—“to thoroughly examine the correlation of forces in Germany and to see what is needed.” He was willing to spend the rubles required, he told them. Their first move had to be increasing artillery and basic weapons, and then they had to be ready to reposition more weaponry if the Soviet Union was provoked further. He wanted a report from his commanders in two weeks’ time about how they would plan to execute a Berlin operation, and he expected within six months to be able to match his tough words in Vienna with an improved military capability.

  Mikoyan countered that Khrushchev was backing Kennedy into a dangerous position where he would have no option but to respond militarily. Mikoyan suggested that Khrushchev continue to allow air traffic to arrive in West Berlin, which might make his Berlin solution more palatable to Kennedy.

  Khrushchev disagreed. He reminded his comrades that East Germany was imploding. Thousands of professionals were fleeing the country each week. A failure to take firm action to stop this would not only make Ulbricht anxious but raise doubts among its Warsaw Pact allies, who would “sense in this action our inconsistency and uncertainty.”

  Not only would Khrushchev be willing to shut down the air corridor, he said, looking toward Mikoyan, but he would also shoot down any Allied plane that tried to land in West Berlin. “Our position is very strong, but we will have, of course, to really intimidate them now. For example, if there is any flying around, we will have to bring aircraft down. Could they respond with provocative acts? They could…. If we want to carry out our policy, and if we want it to be acknowledged, respected and feared, it is necessary to be firm.”

  Khrushchev ended his war council with a discussion of whether he should exchange gifts with Kennedy in Vienna, according to the usual protocol.

  Foreign Ministry officials suggested he give President Kennedy twelve cans of the finest black caviar and phonographic records of Soviet and Russian music. Among other gifts, his aides had a silver coffee service in mind for Mrs. Kennedy. They wanted Khrushchev’s approval.

  “One can exchange presents even before a war,” Khrushchev responded.

  HYANNIS PORT, MASSACHUSETTS

  SATURDAY, MAY 27, 1961

  Kennedy lifted off in a rainstorm aboard Air Force One from Andrews Air Force Base, bound for Hyannis Port. In just three days he would land in Paris and meet de Gaulle, and in just one week’s time he would be in Vienna with Khrushchev. His father had decorated the president’s sleeping quarters with pictures of voluptuous women—a practical joke from a fellow womanizer just before his son’s forty-fourth birthday.

  Kennedy was retreating to the family compound to briefly celebrate and bury himself in his briefing books on issues ranging from the nuclear balance to Khrushchev’s psychological makeup. What U.S. intelligence services painted was a picture of a man who would try to charm him one moment and bully him the next; a gambler who would test him; a true-believing Marxist who wanted to coexist but compete; a crude and insecure leader of peasant upbringing and cunning who above all was unpredictable.

  The president could only hope that Khrushchev’s background briefings on U.S. leadership were less revealing. His back pain was as bad as at any time in his administration, made worse by an injury he had suffered during the ceremonial planting of a tree in Canada a few days earlier. Alongside his paperwork, he would pack anesthetic procaine for his back, cortisone for his Addison’s disease, and a cocktail of vitamins, enzymes, and amphetamines for flagging energy and other maladies.

  He was using crutches, though never in public, limping around like an already injured athlete preparing for a championship match.

  10

  VIENNA: LITTLE BOY BLUE MEETS AL CAPONE

  So
we’re stuck in a ridiculous situation. It seems silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty preserving Berlin as the future capital of a reunified Germany when all of us know that Germany will probably never be reunified. But we’re committed to that agreement, and so are the Russians, so we can’t let them back out of it.

  President Kennedy to his aides as he soaked in his bathtub, June 1, 1961, Paris

  The U.S. is unwilling to normalize the situation in the most dangerous spot in the world. The USSR wants to perform an operation on this sore spot—to eliminate this thorn, this ulcer—without prejudicing the interests of any side, but rather to the satisfaction of all peoples of the world.

  Premier Khrushchev to President Kennedy, June 4, 1961, Vienna

  PARIS

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 31, 1961

  For all the adoring French crowds, grand Gallic meals, and media hype generated by a thousand correspondents covering his trip, President Kennedy’s favorite moments in Paris were spent submerged in a giant, gold-plated bathtub in the “King’s Chamber” of a nineteenth-century palace on the Quai d’Orsay.

  “God, we ought to have a tub like this in the White House,” the president said to his troubleshooter Kenny O’Donnell, as he soaked himself in the deep, steaming waters to relieve his excruciating back pain. O’Donnell reckoned the vessel was about as long and wide as a Ping-Pong table. Aide David Powers suggested that if the president “played his cards right,” de Gaulle might give it to him as a souvenir.

  So began what the three men would come to refer to as their “tub talks” in the vast suite of rooms of the Palais des Affaires étrangères, where de Gaulle had put up Kennedy for his three-day stay in Paris en route to Vienna. During the breaks in the president’s packed schedule, Kennedy would soak and share his latest experiences with his two closest friends in the White House, veterans both of World War II and his political campaigns. By title, O’Donnell was White House appointments secretary, but his long relationship with the Kennedys had begun when he was Bobby’s roommate at Harvard. Powers was Kennedy’s affable man Friday who kept him amused, on schedule, and well supplied with sexual partners.