Their husbands struck the same contrast. Kennedy was in black tie and Khrushchev in a plain dark suit and checkered gray tie. Waiters in white gloves, knee breeches, and gold braid moved through the corridors and across the spacious rooms bearing silver trays laden with drinks.
“Mr. Khrushchev,” a photographer asked, “won’t you shake hands with Mr. Kennedy for us?”
“I’d like to shake her hand first.” Khrushchev grinned and nodded to the president’s wife.
Associated Press reporter Eddy Gilmore scribbled that beside Jackie “the tough and often belligerent Communist leader looked like a smitten schoolboy when the ice thaws along the Volga in springtime.” Khrushchev went out of his way to sit beside Jackie while the chamber ensemble of the Vienna Philharmonic played Mozart and then the Vienna State Opera’s dance company performed the “Blue Danube” waltz.
Kennedy’s performance was not nearly as graceful. Just before the music began, he lowered himself onto a chair, only to find that it already held Khrushchev’s wife. He stopped just short of landing in her lap.
He smiled an apology. The Vienna Summit wasn’t going well at all.
11
VIENNA: THE THREAT OF WAR
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….
Premier Khrushchev to President Kennedy, Vienna, June 4, 1961
I never met a man like this. I talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes and he just looked at me as if to say, “So what?” My impression was he just didn’t give a damn if it came to that.
President Kennedy to reporter Hugh Sidey, Time, June 1961
SOVIET EMBASSY, VIENNA
10:15 A.M., SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1961
Standing before the Soviet embassy, Nikita Khrushchev shifted from side to side like a boxer eager to come back out of his corner after having won the opening rounds. A wide grin revealed the gap in his front teeth as he thrust out his small, plump hand to greet Kennedy.
For all the Soviet state’s working-class pretensions, Moscow’s embassy was unashamedly imperial. Acquired by Tsarist Russia in the late nineteenth century, its neo-Renaissance facade opened up to a grand entry hall of natural granite and marble. “I greet you on a small piece of Soviet territory,” said Khrushchev to Kennedy. He then threw out a Russian proverb whose meaning escaped Kennedy: “Sometimes we drink out of a small glass but we speak with great feelings.”
After some nine minutes of small talk, none of it memorable, Khrushchev took his American guests through a pillared corridor to a wide staircase that led to the second floor. There they sat on sofas in a twenty-foot-square conference room with red damask walls.
The manner in which the two men had spent the morning ahead of their second day’s meeting spoke to their differences. The Catholic Kennedys had listened to the Vienna Boys’ Choir and had taken Mass from Cardinal Franz König in the Gothic magnificence of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The First Lady’s eyes had welled up as she fell to her knees to pray. When the Kennedys emerged from worship, a throng cheered on the cobblestoned square outside. At about the same time, a far smaller and less enthusiastic crowd watched with curiosity as the leader of the atheist Soviet Union laid a wreath at the Soviet war memorial at the Schwarzenbergplatz. Locals knew it bitterly as the “monument to the unknown rapist.”
In the conference room where the two delegations gathered, the matching red curtains were pulled shut. They concealed the embassy’s tall and broad windows and created an atmosphere of gloom, keeping out the day’s bright sun. Kennedy began with the same sort of small talk he had employed the first day, asking the Soviet premier about his childhood. Khrushchev had no interest in discussing his peasant origins with this child of privilege. So he was curt, saying only that he was born in a Russian village near Kursk, less than ten kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
Shifting quickly to the present, he said the Soviet Union had recently found very large deposits of iron ore near Kursk, estimated at 30 billion tons. He said total reserves were likely to be ten times greater than that. By comparison, he reminded Kennedy, total iron ore deposits of the U.S. were only a fraction of that, at 5 billion tons. “Soviet deposits will be sufficient to cover the needs of the entire world for a long time to come,” he said.
In the first minutes of Day Two in Vienna, Khrushchev had turned what might have been a personal exchange about family matters into a boast about his country’s superior resource base. He did not ask about the president’s upbringing, about which he knew quite enough. Impatiently, he suggested they move on to the day’s purpose: discussing Berlin and its future.
In its edition of that morning, the London Times had quoted a British diplomat on his concerns about the Vienna Summit. “We hope the lad will be able to get out of the bear cage without being too badly mauled,” he had said. And Khrushchev had come out at the beginning of the second day with his claws bared. Despite progress their delegations had made overnight on Laos, he was unwilling to seize upon the issue as an example of how the two sides could reduce tensions.
U.S. and Soviet foreign secretaries and their staffs had reached agreement that they would accept a neutral Laos. It was a concession that could be politically costly to Khrushchev, as it would be opposed by the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and the Pathet Lao, the Laotian communist movement. Instead of embracing Kennedy over the accord, however, Khrushchev accused him of “megalomania and delusions of grandeur” for insisting that the U.S. would continue to safeguard its commitments in Asia.
Beyond that, Khrushchev resisted all of Kennedy’s efforts to steer talks toward nuclear test ban issues. He rejected the president’s logic that only an overall improvement of relations could open the way to an eventual Berlin settlement. For Khrushchev, Berlin had to come first.
Pushing for the test ban, Kennedy drew upon a Chinese proverb: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
“You seem to know the Chinese very well,” Khrushchev said.
“We may both get to know them better,” responded Kennedy.
Khrushchev smiled. “I know them well enough now,” he said. It was an unusual slip for the Soviet, a brief glimpse into his frustration with Mao.
However, the Soviets would doctor the final transcript, which would be provided to Beijing, adding another sentence that Khrushchev actually had never said to Kennedy: “China is our neighbor, our friend, and our ally.”
The most important exchange of the summit began with a Khrushchev warning. The Soviet leader prefaced his statement by saying Moscow had waited as long as it could for a Berlin solution. He said the position he was about to outline regarding Berlin would “affect the relations between our two countries to a great extent and even more so if the U.S. were to misunderstand the Soviet position.”
At that point, both men’s advisers sat forward, knowing that everything else had been foreplay for this moment. “Sixteen years have passed since World War II,” said Khrushchev. “The USSR lost twenty million people in that war and much of its territory was devastated. Now Germany, the country which unleashed World War II, has again acquired military power and has assumed a predominant position in NATO. Its generals hold high offices in that organization. This constitutes a threat of World War III, which would be even more devastating than World War II.”
For that reason, he told Kennedy, Moscow refused to tolerate any further delay regarding Berlin, because only West German militarists would gain from it. He said German unification was not a practical possibility and that even Germans didn’t want it. So the Soviets would begin to act from the “actual state of affairs, namely, that two German States exist.”
Khrushchev told Kennedy that it was his preference to reach agreement personally with him on a war-ending treaty that would alter Berlin’s status. If that wasn’t possible, however, he would act alone and end all postwar c
ommitments made by the Soviets. He said thereafter West Berlin would be a “free city” where U.S. troops could remain, but only coexisting with Soviet troops. The Soviets would then join the U.S. in ensuring “what the West calls West Berlin’s freedom.” Moscow would also be “agreeable” to the presence of neutral troops or UN guarantees.
Kennedy began his response by thanking Khrushchev for “setting forth his views in such a frank manner.” Shot up with painkillers and amphetamines and snug in his corset, Kennedy realized Khrushchev had just delivered what amounted to a new ultimatum on Berlin. That required a clear and sharp response. It was a moment Kennedy had prepared for, and he measured each word carefully.
He stressed that the two men were talking no longer about lesser issues such as Laos but rather about the far more crucial topic of Berlin. This place was “of greatest interest to the U.S. We are in Berlin not because of someone’s sufferance. We fought our way there.” And though the U.S. casualties in World War II had not been as high as those of the Soviet Union, Kennedy said, “we are in Berlin not by agreement of East Germans but by contractual rights….
“This is an area,” said Kennedy, “where every President of the U.S. since World War II has been committed by treaty and other contractual rights and where every President has reaffirmed his faithfulness to those obligations. If we were expelled from that area, and if we accepted the loss of our rights, no one would have any confidence in U.S. commitments and pledges. U.S. national security is involved in this matter, because if we were to accept the Soviet proposal, U.S. commitments would be regarded as a mere scrap of paper.”
At the Vienna Summit until that point, words had tumbled over each other without consequence. Yet now note-takers sat forward, precisely scribbling their leaders’ verbatim comments. The world’s two most powerful men were facing off over their most intractable and explosive issue.
It was the stuff of history.
“West Europe is vital to our national security and we have supported it in two wars,” Kennedy said. “If we were to leave West Berlin, Europe would be abandoned as well. So when we are talking about West Berlin, we are also talking about West Europe.”
What was new for the Soviets was Kennedy’s repeated emphasis on the qualifying word of “West” in front of Berlin. No U.S. president had previously differentiated so clearly between his commitment to all of Berlin and to West Berlin. In perhaps the most important manhood moment of his presidency, Kennedy had made a unilateral concession. He reminded Khrushchev that the Soviet leader in their first day’s talks had agreed that “the ratios of [military] power today are equal.” So he thought it “difficult to understand” why a country like the Soviet Union, with such considerable achievements in space and economy, should suggest that the U.S. leave a place of such vital interest where it was already established. He said the U.S. would never be willing to agree to give up rights it had “won by war.”
Khrushchev’s face reddened, as if it were a thermometer measuring a rise in his internal temperature. He interrupted to say that he understood Kennedy’s words to mean the president did not want a peace treaty. He spat derisively that Kennedy’s statement on U.S. national security sounded like “the U.S. might wish to go to Moscow [with its troops] because that too would, of course, improve its position.”
“The U.S. is not asking to go anywhere,” Kennedy responded. “We are not talking about the U.S. going to Moscow or of the USSR going to New York. What we are talking about is that we are in Berlin and have been there for fifteen years. We suggest that we stay there.”
Returning to a course he had tried a day earlier without success, Kennedy explored a more conciliatory path. He said that he knew the situation in Berlin “is not a satisfactory one.” That said, added Kennedy, “conditions in many parts of the world are not satisfactory,” and it was not the right time to change the balance in Berlin or in the world more generally. “If this balance should change, the situation in West Europe as a whole would change, and this would be a most serious blow to the U.S.,” he said. “Mr. Khrushchev would not accept similar loss and we cannot accept it either.”
Until that point, Khrushchev had largely held his usual bombast in check. Yet now his arms were waving, his face turned crimson, and his voice rose to a truculent pitch as his words tumbled out in staccato spurts like angry machine-gun fire. “The U.S. is unwilling to normalize the situation in the most dangerous spot in the world,” he said. “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.”
The Soviet Union was not going to change Berlin by “intrigue or threat” but by “solemnly signing a peace treaty. Now the President says that this action is directed against the interests of the U.S. Such a statement is difficult to understand indeed.” The Soviets did not want to change existing boundaries, he argued, but were only trying to formalize them so as to “impede those people who want a new war.”
Khrushchev spoke derisively of Adenauer’s desire to revise Germany’s borders and regain territory it had lost after World War II. “Hitler spoke of Germany’s need for Lebensraum to the Urals,” he said. “Hitler’s generals, who had helped him in his designs to execute his plans, are [now] high commanders in NATO.”
He said the logic of the U.S. needing to protect its interests in Berlin “cannot be understood and the USSR cannot accept it.” He told the president he was sorry, but that “no force in the world” would stop Moscow from moving forward on its peace treaty.
He repeated again that sixteen years had passed since the war. How much longer did Kennedy want Moscow to wait? Another sixteen years? Perhaps thirty years?
Khrushchev looked around the room at his colleagues and then said with a wave of his arm that he had lost a son in the last war, that Gromyko had lost two brothers, and that Mikoyan had also lost a son. “There is not a single family in the USSR or the leadership of the USSR that did not lose at least one of its members in the war.” He conceded that American mothers mourn their sons just as deeply as do Soviet mothers, but that while the U.S. had lost thousands, the USSR had lost millions.
He then declared: “The USSR will sign a peace treaty and the sovereignty of the GDR will be observed. Any violation of that sovereignty will be regarded by the USSR as an act of open aggression” with all its attendant consequences.
Khrushchev was threatening war, just as de Gaulle had predicted. The American delegation sat in stunned silence as they awaited Kennedy’s response.
The president calmly asked whether access routes to Berlin would remain open after the Soviets had agreed to such a peace treaty. Kennedy had already decided he could accept an outcome under which the Soviets concluded a treaty with the East Germans but did nothing to impede Western rights in West Berlin or Allied access to the city.
Khrushchev, however, said the new treaty would alter freedom of access.
That crossed Kennedy’s red line.
“This presents us with a most serious challenge and no one can foresee how serious the consequences might be,” said Kennedy. He said it was not his wish to come to Vienna only to “be denied our position in West Berlin and our access to that city.” He said he had hoped relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could be improved through the Vienna Summit, but instead they were worsening. Kennedy said it was Moscow’s business if it wanted to transfer its rights in Berlin to the East Germans, but the president could not allow Moscow to give away American rights.
Khrushchev began to probe the U.S. position. He wanted to know if an interim arrangement still might be possible along the lines that Eisenhower had discussed with him—something that protected the prestige of both countries. All sides could set a time limit of six months for the two Germanys to negotiate a unification arrangement. If they failed during that time—and Khrushchev was convinced they would—“anyone would be free to conclude a peace treaty.”
Khrushchev said that even if the U.S. disagreed with the Soviet proposal, it should understand “the USSR can no longer delay” and would take action by year’s end that would make all access to West Berlin subject to East German control. He based his right to act on a statistical analysis of the difference in the price the two sides had paid to defeat the Germans—the 20 million–plus people the Soviets had lost in World War II, compared to only 143,000 U.S. military dead.
Kennedy said it was those losses that motivated him to avoid a new war.
Repeating the word that he so hated, the Soviet leader reminded Kennedy of his worry that the Soviets might “miscalculate.” It seemed to Khrushchev it was the Americans who were in danger of miscalculation. “If the U.S. should start a war over Berlin, let it be so,” he said. “That is what the Pentagon has been wanting. However, Adenauer and Macmillan know very well what war means. If there is any madman who wants war, he should be put in a straitjacket!”
Kennedy’s team was stunned again. Now Khrushchev had used the word “war,” and he had done so three times. That was unheard-of in diplomatic discussions at every level.
As if to close the matter, Khrushchev flatly stated that the USSR would sign a peace treaty by the end of the year, altering Western rights in Berlin for all time, but that he was confident common sense and peace would prevail.
The Soviet leader had not yet responded to what amounted to a Kennedy proposal, so the president probed again. Kennedy stressed that he would not regard a peace treaty in itself as a belligerent act if Khrushchev left West Berlin untouched. “However, a peace treaty denying us our contractual rights is a belligerent act,” he said. “What is belligerent is transfer of our rights to East Germany.”
Berlin 1961 Page 28
