Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  Kennedy carried with him to London and Prime Minister Macmillan the aide-mémoire that detailed the Soviet demands for a German settlement within six months, “or else.” If the Soviets made it public, as Kennedy had to assume they would, his critics would accuse him of having walked into a Berlin trap in Vienna that he should have seen coming.

  Kennedy wanted to vent, but how did he play the outcome of the meeting to a media entourage that had become such an extension of himself? Did he spin it as an amiable exchange, as he had instructed his Soviet expert Bohlen to do in his planned press briefings?

  No. Kennedy decided to leave behind in Vienna his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to brief the journalism industry’s top reporters about the summit’s “somber” outcome. Before leaving, the president would meet privately in a room at the ambassador’s residence with New York Times writer James “Scotty” Reston. He told O’Donnell he wanted to get across to Americans “the seriousness of the situation, and the New York Times would be the place to do it. I’ll give Scotty a grim picture.”

  Still, he was not yet convinced Khrushchev would deliver on his Berlin threat. Perhaps de Gaulle was right when he said Khrushchev would bluff and bluster and continue to delay on Berlin as he had thus far. “Anybody who talks the way he did today and really means it would be crazy, and I’m sure he’s not crazy,” Kennedy told O’Donnell, not feeling very certain about that at all.

  At age fifty-two, the Scottish-born Reston had already won two Pulitzer Prizes and was perhaps the most influential and most broadly read journalist in Washington. He was dressed in his usual tweed and bow tie and was chewing his briar pipe while Kennedy debriefed him under ground rules that he would neither quote the president nor mention their private meeting.

  Kennedy wore a hat pulled low on his forehead as he sunk into the sofa. It would be one of the most candid sessions ever between a reporter and a commander in chief.

  Having an exclusive from Kennedy on the Vienna Summit with 1,500 other reporters out jockeying for access was a coup of some significance for Reston in the new TV age that he so despised. It would be made all the more meaningful by what Kennedy would tell him in a darkened room behind closed blinds so as to conceal their meeting from other reporters.

  “How was it?” asked Reston.

  “Worst thing in my life,” said Kennedy. “He savaged me.”

  Reston jotted in his notebook: “Not the usual bullshit. There is a look a man has when he has to tell the truth.”

  Kennedy, deep in the sofa next to Reston, said Khrushchev had violently attacked him on American imperialism—and that he’d turned particularly aggressive on Berlin. “I’ve got two problems,” he told Reston. “First, to figure out why he did it, and in such a hostile way. And second, to figure out what we can do about it.”

  Reston rightly concluded in his New York Times report, which carefully protected the confidentiality of his Kennedy meeting, that the president “was astonished by the rigidity and toughness of the Soviet leader.” He called the meeting acrimonious, and rightly said that Kennedy left Vienna pessimistic on issues across the board. In particular, the president “definitely got the impression that the German question was going to be a very near thing.”

  Kennedy told Reston that, because of the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev “thought that anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken. And anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts. So he just beat the hell out of me…. I’ve got a terrible problem.”

  Kennedy had conjured up a quick analysis of the dangers this posed and how he had to deal with them. “If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.” He told Reston that among other things he would increase the military budget and send another division to Germany.

  On the flight to London, Kennedy called O’Donnell to his cabin, wanting to vent some more but out of hearing range of Rusk, Bohlen, and the others on Air Force One. Despair had already darkened the mood so much throughout the plane that Kennedy’s Air Force liaison Godfrey McHugh compared it to “riding with the losing baseball team after the World Series. Nobody said very much.”

  Kennedy had started his presidency determined to put Berlin on a back burner. Yet now it threatened to blow up in his face. He was overwhelmed by fear that the matter of preserving certain West German and Allied rights in West Berlin could start a nuclear war.

  “All wars start from stupidity,” Kennedy said to O’Donnell. “God knows I’m not an isolationist, but it seems particularly stupid to risk killing a million Americans over an argument about access rights on an Autobahn in the Soviet zone of Germany, or because the Germans want Germany reunified. If I’m going to treat Russia with a nuclear war, it will have to be for much bigger and more important reasons than that. Before I back Khrushchev against the wall and put him to a final test, the freedom of all Western Europe will have to be at stake.”

  Those who had worked so hard to brief Kennedy ahead of the summit were most disappointed of all, particularly members of Ambassador Thompson’s staff, who saw that most of their advice had been ignored. One of them, Kempton Jenkins, would reflect later that it had been “the golden opportunity for [Kennedy] to be charming, to have Jackie charm Khrushchev, and then have Kennedy come in and say, ‘Now look, I want to say this perfectly straight. Get your bloody hands off Berlin or we’ll destroy you.’”

  They were terms Khrushchev would have understood. The U.S. had such nuclear superiority that Kennedy did not need to take the Vienna beating. Jenkins, who closely examined the transcripts later, regretted Kennedy “never did” deliver a tough message to Khrushchev: “He was constantly talking about: We’ve got to find a way out. What can we do to reassure you? We don’t want you to distrust our motives. We’re not aggressive.” The president had further confirmed Khrushchev’s growing impression he could be easily outmaneuvered, and from that point forward Khrushchev would act more aggressively in the conviction that there would be little price to pay.

  Kennedy’s predecessors had defended West Berlin so resolutely partly in hopes of eventually breaking communist control of East Germany, and to support the West German government’s claim to the city as the future capital of a unified country. Kennedy believed in none of that and wanted to avoid failure in Berlin because he thought that withdrawal there could turn West Germany against the U.S. and Britain, and would likely lead to a breakup of NATO.

  Speaking with O’Donnell en route to London, Kennedy expressed a surprising sympathy for Khrushchev’s predicament in Berlin. He knew that the Soviet problem was an economic one, and that West Berlin’s thriving capitalism was draining East Germany of its talent.

  “You can’t blame Khrushchev for being sore about that,” he told O’Donnell.

  Though he had just been beaten up by Khrushchev, Kennedy directed his venom against Adenauer and his Germans, who continually complained he wasn’t tough enough with the Soviets. He was not about to go to war over Berlin—though that was precisely what postwar agreements obligated him to do. “We didn’t cause the disunity in Germany,” he told O’Donnell. “We aren’t really responsible for the four-power occupation of Berlin, a mistake neither we nor the Russians should have agreed to in the first place. But now the West Germans would like us to drive the Russians out of East Germany.”

  Kennedy complained, “It’s not enough for us to be spending a tremendous amount of money on the military defense of Western Europe, and particularly on the defense of West Germany, while West Germany becomes the fastest-growing industrial power in the world. Well, if they think we are rushing into a war over Berlin, except as a last desperate move to save the NATO alliance, they’ve got another thing coming!”

  As their plane descended to London, the president told O’Donnell that he doubted Khrushchev, “for all his shouting,” would actually do what he threatened. But Kennedy was also going to be careful not to provoke the Soviet into a
rash countermove in response to a sudden U.S. military action. “If we’re going to have to start a nuclear war,” he said, “we’ll have to fix things so it will be started by the President of the United States, and nobody else. Not by a trigger-happy sergeant on a truck convoy at a checkpoint in East Germany.”

  LONDON

  MONDAY MORNING, JUNE 5, 1961

  British Prime Minister Macmillan immediately sensed Kennedy’s anguish—both the physical pain in his back and the psychological torment from his meeting with Khrushchev.

  While they talked, U.S. officials in crisis mode fanned out across Europe to brief key allies on what amounted to a new Soviet ultimatum. Rusk in Paris visited with de Gaulle and NATO. State Department officials Foy Kohler and Martin Hillenbrand flew to Bonn to brief Adenauer.

  The British prime minister called off the formal morning meeting planned with the president—“Foreign Office and all that”—and instead invited him up to his private quarters at Admiralty House, as 10 Downing Street was closed for repairs. They sat for nearly three hours on their own, from 10:30 a.m. to 1:25 p.m., an hour longer than had been scheduled, during which Macmillan mostly listened while feeding Kennedy sandwiches and whiskey. They then reconvened with Foreign Secretary Lord Home until 3:00 p.m. Their talks that day would help shape Kennedy’s closest, most trusting relationship with a foreign leader. He liked the elder Brit’s dry wit, deep intelligence, and nonchalance about the most serious matters.

  “For the first time in his life,” Macmillan would recall later, regarding the Vienna Summit, “Kennedy met a man who was impervious to his charm.” The president appeared to him “rather stunned—‘baffled’ would perhaps be fairer…impressed and shocked.” Macmillan saw that Kennedy had been overwhelmed by Khrushchev’s ruthlessness and barbarity—rather like meeting Napoleon “at the height of his power for the first time,” or like Neville Chamberlain “trying to hold a conversation with Herr Hitler.”

  Macmillan told Kennedy that the simple position for the West to take “would be to say that the Russians could do what they liked about a treaty with the DDR [East Germany], but the West stood on their rights and would meet any attack on these with all the force at their command.”

  Kennedy said it was precisely that threat which had stopped Soviet action to that point. Unfortunately, he said, Khrushchev perceived the West as weaker after recent events in Laos and “elsewhere”—a euphemism for Cuba. After all, even in 1949 when the West had a nuclear monopoly, it had not been prepared to force its way into West Berlin, and the Russians knew that they were now relatively stronger than they were twelve years earlier, said Kennedy.

  Lord Home feared Khrushchev was being forced into action over Berlin due to his difficulties with the East German refugees and related problems with other satellites. Khrushchev “might feel that he had to find a way of stopping this,” he said. Once Khrushchev’s new aide-mémoire on Berlin was made public, Lord Home said it would put the West in an uncomfortable position, “as on the face of it, it appears fairly reasonable.”

  Kennedy wanted help from the British in composing a speech that he would deliver the next day in Washington. It would need to state Khrushchev’s views, strongly reaffirm Western commitment to West Berlin, and restate Berliners’ right of free choice about their future. The truth, said Macmillan, was that “whatever might be happening in other parts of the world, in Berlin the West was winning. It was a very poor advertisement for the Soviet system that so many people should seek to leave the Communist paradise.”

  Kennedy and Macmillan agreed to step up military and other contingency planning on Berlin with an emphasis on what the West should do (1) if the Russians signed a treaty with East Germany, (2) if after the signing of a treaty, civilian supplies were interrupted, and/or (3) Western military supplies were interfered with. Home wanted Kennedy to present counterproposals to the Soviets on their aide-mémoire. Kennedy disagreed, fearing a proposal for Berlin negotiations might appear yet another “sign of weakness.”

  While flying back to the U.S., Kennedy sat in his shorts with his top aides sitting around him. His eyes were red and watery, betraying how dead tired he felt. His back was throbbing in pain—though even Kennedy would never know how much his illnesses and the concoctions he took against them had impaired his Vienna performance. He shook his head, stared down at his feet, and at one point hugged his bare legs, muttering about Khrushchev’s unbending manner and what dangers might follow.

  Kennedy told his secretary Evelyn Lincoln that he wanted to get some rest to prepare himself for a busy day in Washington. He asked her to file away safely the classified documents that he had been scouring. As she worked, she came upon a slip of paper on which Kennedy had scrawled two lines:

  I know there is a God—and I see a storm coming;

  If He has a place for me, I believe I am ready.

  Lincoln did not know what to make of the paper, but it worried her. She could not know that Kennedy had written down from memory a partial quote from Abraham Lincoln, speaking to an Illinois educator in the spring of 1860 regarding his determination to halt slavery. The note was likely not about inviting death—Evelyn Lincoln’s interpretation—but rather about recognizing a calling.

  Bobby sat with his brother upon his return. Tears were running down the president’s cheeks, produced by a mixture of the stress he was feeling and the decisions ahead. Bobby would recall later that he had “never seen my brother cry before about something like this. I was up in my bedroom with him and he looked at me and said, ‘Bobby, if nuclear exchange comes, it doesn’t matter about us. We’ve had a good life, we’re adults. We bring these things on ourselves. The thought, though, of women and children perishing in a nuclear exchange. I can’t adjust to that.’”

  Journalist Stewart Alsop, a longtime friend of the president, had seen Kennedy on his London visit at Westminster Cathedral during the christening of the newborn child of Stanislaw Radziwill, whose third wife was Jacqueline Kennedy’s younger sister, Lee Bouvier. It was a grand affair, attended by the prime minister and all the Kennedy family. The president coaxed Alsop into a corner and talked to him for fifteen minutes about all he had just been through. “I had the sense that the thing had come to him as a very great shock, which he was beginning to adjust to.”

  Alsop had considered the Bay of Pigs to be the moment that had “cured any illusions that Kennedy had about the certainty of success” after a life in which he had experienced very few failures. Alsop considered Vienna a more serious moment because of the difference between Cuba’s lesson that one can fail at a very big thing and the prospect of another failure that could lead to nuclear war.

  Kennedy had been in office four months and sixteen days, but Alsop believed it was in Vienna that he truly became the American commander in chief. He had confronted there the brutal nature of his enemy and the reality that Berlin would be their battleground.

  “After that was when he really began to be president in the full sense of the word,” Alsop believed.

  EAST BERLIN

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7, 1961

  East German leader Walter Ulbricht could hardly believe his good fortune as he was briefed on the Vienna talks by Mikhail Pervukhin, the Soviet ambassador to East Germany. He grew all the more satisfied as he received further details from leading officers of the Soviet High Commission in Karlshorst, with whom he spoke at the end of almost every day.

  The previous three days and nights of military exercises—bringing together his National People’s Army with their Soviet counterparts—had demonstrated that Ulbricht was ready militarily for whatever the West might throw at him when Khrushchev finally acted on Berlin. Ulbricht’s soldiers had impressed Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky and Andrei Grechko, commander of all Warsaw Pact forces, who considered the exercise sufficiently important to oversee it themselves. East German soldiers had proved themselves to be far more disciplined in the field than Soviet officers had anticipated.

  As Ulbricht ended one
of his routine twelve-hour days, he was satisfied as his chauffeur drove him to his new home at Wandlitz, some twenty miles northeast of Berlin on the edge of a thick forest. Ulbricht had not felt so optimistic in months, perhaps years, as his chauffeur drove him past the neat gardens and stuccoed villas of the Pankow district.

  Pervukhin had delivered to him a copy of the Soviet aide-mémoire that Khrushchev had passed to Kennedy in Vienna. Many of Ulbricht’s ideas regarding Berlin’s future, stubbornly repeated in numerous letters over many months, had made it into Khrushchev’s official language. Pervukhin told Ulbricht that Moscow would go public with the document in two days.

  Ulbricht was confident this time that Khrushchev would not be able to walk away from his Berlin ultimatum. Khrushchev was also getting tougher on Germany in other respects. Foreign Minister Gromyko had lodged an angry protest with the British, French, and U.S. embassies in Moscow about Chancellor Adenauer’s decision for the first time to schedule a plenary meeting in West Berlin of the Bundesrat, the upper house of the West Berlin parliament, on June 16. He called the move a “major new provocation” against all socialist states.

  After badgering Khrushchev for so long, Ulbricht wrote a letter that day to the Soviet leader that dripped with ingratiating sentiment. “We warmly thank the [Communist Party] Presidium and you, dear friend,” he said, “for the great efforts which you are undertaking for the achievement of a peace treaty and the resolution of the West Berlin issue.”

  Ulbricht wrote that he not only fully agreed with the wording of the ultimatum, but that he also embraced Khrushchev’s summit performance and his representation of the Communist Party, the Soviet government, and the socialist camp.

  “This was a great political accomplishment,” he wrote.

  Yet Ulbricht also realized much of what had been accomplished had come due to his pressure, and he was not about to let up now. He spent much of the letter complaining about growing West German “revanchism” that threatened them both. The West German Economics Ministry had threatened to repeal its trade treaty with East Germany should a peace treaty be concluded. The cost to the East German economy would be great, as it would then be treated “as a foreign state, which would have to pay for its daily purchases in West Germany in foreign currency” it did not have.