Ulbricht told Khrushchev that Adenauer and other West German officials were lobbying neutral countries to reduce the rights of East German consulates and trade offices. Adenauer was also trying to prevent East German participation in the next Olympic Games.
Ulbricht was most concerned with preventing any further procrastination now that Khrushchev seemed fully focused on Berlin. “Comrade Pervukhin informed us here that you would find it useful if a consultation of the first secretaries [of Communist Parties of the Soviet bloc] would take place as soon as possible.” Ulbricht said he thus had taken the liberty of appealing to leaders of Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to gather on July 20 and 21 to “discuss preparations for a peace treaty.”
Ulbricht wanted the entire socialist bloc to circle around him. “The goal of this meeting,” he said by way of instruction to Khrushchev, “should be an agreement on the political, diplomatic, economic and organizational preparation, and also measures for the coordination of radio and press agitation.”
MOSCOW
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7, 1961
Upon Khrushchev’s return to Moscow from Vienna, he ordered multiple copies of the summit minutes to be produced and distributed among friends and allies. He wanted his proficient handling of Kennedy to be known far and wide—particularly among his critics at home and abroad. He had the papers marked “Top Secret,” but he circulated them to a broader audience than was usual for such documents. One copy went to Castro in Cuba, though he was not yet considered a member of the socialist camp. Among the eighteen nations for distribution were also the noncommunist countries of Egypt, Iraq, India, Brazil, Cambodia, and Mexico. A senior Soviet would brief Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito.
Khrushchev was acting like the victor, wanting everyone to relive the championship match with him. He followed his tough line in Vienna with a harder and more dictatorial line at home, blaming rising Soviet civil discontent, vagrancy, crime, and unemployment on too much liberalization, sounding increasingly like his own neo-Stalinist critics. He also reversed reforms of the judicial system associated with his de-Stalinization.
“What liberals you’ve become!” he shot at Roman Rudenko, chief public prosecutor, as he criticized laws that were too soft on thieves, whom he thought should be shot.
“No matter how you scold me,” said Rudenko, “if the law does not provide for the death penalty, we can’t apply it.”
“The peasants have a saying: ‘Get rid of the bad seeds,’” Khrushchev responded. “Stalin had the correct position on these issues. He went too far, but we never had any mercy on criminals. Our fight with enemies should be merciless and well directed.”
Khrushchev pushed through changes that increased the use of the death penalty, grew the size of police units in the KGB, and reversed many of the liberalizing trends he himself had introduced.
While Kennedy headed home, worrying about what to tell America, Khrushchev was at the Indonesian embassy celebrating the sixtieth birthday of the country’s visiting leader, Sukarno.
The band struck up dance tunes out on the embassy’s lawn as various party leaders, including President Leonid Brezhnev and First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, at Khrushchev’s urging, got up to join a folk dance. Diplomats and prominent Russians kept time with rhythmic hand-clapping. Among the dancers was Prince Souvanna Phouma of Laos.
Sukarno himself took Khrushchev’s wife, Nina, onto the dance floor. Khrushchev’s post-Vienna high was infecting everyone. The Soviet leader took a baton at one point to lead the orchestra and told jokes throughout the evening. When Sukarno said he would want new Soviet loans in exchange for letting Khrushchev direct the band, the Soviet leader opened his coat, pulled out his pockets, and showed they were empty.
“Look, he robs me of everything,” he said to the crowd’s laughter.
Watching Mikoyan sway expertly, Khrushchev joked that his number two only kept his job because the party Central Committee had ruled that he was such a fine dancer. No one had seen Khrushchev so carefree since before the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the 1957 coup attempt against him.
When Sukarno said he wanted to kiss a pretty girl, Khrushchev’s wife searched the crowd before settling on a reluctant partner, whose husband was at first unwilling to make her available.
“Oh, please come,” said Nina. “You only have to kiss him once, not twice.”
So the girl gave the Indonesian leader his kiss.
Yet the enduring memory of the evening was when Sukarno drew Khrushchev to the dance floor for an awkward pas de deux. They danced a bit hand in hand before the euphoric Khrushchev performed solo. Khrushchev described his dance style as that of “a cow on ice,” heavy, uncertain, and with unsteady feet.
But on this occasion Khrushchev bent down and kicked his legs out, Cossack style. The heavyset Soviet leader looked unusually light on his feet.
12
ANGRY SUMMER
The construction workers of our capital are for the most part busy building apartment houses, and their working capacities are fully employed to that end. Nobody intends to put up a wall.
Walter Ulbricht, at a press conference, June 15, 1961
Somehow he does succeed in being a President, but only in the appearance of one.
Dean Acheson, writing to President Truman about his work on Berlin for President Kennedy, June 24, 1961
The issue over Berlin, which Khrushchev is now moving toward a crisis…is far more than an issue over that city. It is broader and deeper than even the German question as a whole. It has become an issue of resolution between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., the outcome of which will go far to determine the confidence of Europe—indeed, of the world—in the United States.
Dean Acheson, in a report on Berlin for President Kennedy, June 29, 1961
HOUSE OF MINISTRIES, EAST BERLIN
THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 1961
Walter Ulbricht’s decision to summon West Berlin–based correspondents to a press conference on his communist side of the border was so unprecedented that his propagandists did not even know how to go about inviting the reporters.
The problem was that Ulbricht had cut off all telephone trunk lines between the city’s two parts in 1952. So Ulbricht’s people had to dispatch a special operations team across the border, armed with rolls of West German ten-pfennig coins and a West Berlin press association membership list. Working from public telephone booths, they called Western correspondents one by one with a terse message: “Press conference. Chairman of the State Council of the German Democratic Republic Ulbricht. House of Ministries. Thursday. Eleven o’clock. You are invited.”
Three days later, some three hundred correspondents—roughly half of them representing each side of the city—crowded into a huge banquet hall where Hermann Göring had once entertained officers of the Third Reich’s Air Ministry. A huge hammer and compass, the East German national symbol, rose triumphantly behind the stage where the Nazi eagle and swastika had once stood.
By the time Ulbricht marched in, the room was already uncomfortably warm and stuffy from the combination of reporters’ body warmth, the hot day outside, and the lack of air-conditioning. Beside him was Gerhard Eisler, the legendary communist who ran East Germany’s broadcasting operations. Known to correspondents as East Germany’s Goebbels, he looked out at the crowd through small eyes magnified by thick bifocals. Though convicted as a Soviet spy in the U.S., he had jumped bail in 1950 and dramatically escaped New York aboard a Polish steamer before making his way to the newly created East Germany. Western reporters whispered to each other what they knew about Eisler.
Mutual Broadcasting Network correspondent Norman Gelb soaked in the atmosphere. He had never seen Ulbricht so close up, and he wondered how this short, unassuming, tight-lipped gray man with the shrill voice and rimless glasses had survived so many Soviet and East German power struggles. Though his neatly trimmed goatee gave him an intended resemblance to Lenin, Gelb thought Ulbricht looked more like an aging office manager than a dictator.
Timed to coincide with Khrushchev’s first public report on the Vienna Summit in Moscow, Ulbricht’s long opening statement disappointed correspondents who had come expecting something of historic consequence. Ulbricht’s purpose in organizing the extraordinary meeting only grew clearer after he began taking questions, two or three at a time, which he answered with long lectures that made follow-ups impossible.
Correspondents scribbled furiously as Ulbricht declared that West Berlin’s character would change dramatically after East Germany signed its peace treaty with the Soviets, with or without Western agreement. As a “free city,” he said, it was “self-evident that so-called refugee camps in West Berlin will be closed and persons who occupy themselves with traffic in mankind will leave Berlin.” He said that would also mean the shuttering of U.S., British, French, and West German “espionage centers” operating in West Berlin. Ulbricht said East German travel thereafter would be more strictly regulated and that only those who obtained permission from the Interior Ministry would be able to leave the country.
Annamarie Doherr, a correspondent for the left-leaning Frankfurter Rundschau, pressed Ulbricht for more details. She wondered how Ulbricht would achieve control over travel, given the open East Berlin border. “Mr. Chairman,” she said, “does the creation of a ‘free city,’ as you term it, mean the state boundaries of the German Democratic Republic will be erected at the Brandenburg Gate?” She wanted to know whether he was committed to carrying through his plan “with all of its consequences,” which included a potential war.
Ulbricht’s face was passive, and his cold eyes remained unchanged. He answered without emotion: “I understand your question as implying that there are people in West Germany who would like to see us mobilize the construction workers of the capital of the GDR for the purpose of building a wall.” He paused, looked down on the short, plump Frau Doherr from the rostrum, and then continued. “I am not aware of any such intention. The construction workers of our capital are for the most part busy building apartment houses, and their working capacities are fully employed to that end. Nobody intends to put up a wall.”
It was Ulbricht’s first public mention ever of a “wall,” though the reporter had not mentioned such a barrier herself. He had shown his hand, yet none of the media would pick up on it in their reports that would follow. It sounded to them like more of Ulbricht’s usual obfuscation.
At six o’clock that evening, East Germans could watch Khrushchev’s own report about the Vienna Summit’s outcome on state television. The Soviet leader bluntly declared: “A peace treaty with Germany cannot be postponed any longer.” By design, the edited replay of Ulbricht’s press conference followed the Soviet leader’s statement at eight p.m.
The chilling effect was immediate. Despite increased monitoring of borders by security officers, the following day would bring the biggest one-day outflow of refugees of the year: a record 4,770, which would have amounted to 1.74 million people on an annualized basis from a population of just 17 million. The term increasingly used to describe the flight, Torschlusspanik—the fear of the door’s closing before you can pass through it—described the panicked mood that was spreading like a rash across East Germany after Ulbricht’s speech.
Some commentators at the time believed the rapid increase in refugees showed that Ulbricht had miscalculated the potential impact of the press conference. More likely, it was all part of the East German’s endgame. For all of Khrushchev’s increased public expressions of determination regarding Berlin, Ulbricht knew the Soviet leader had not entirely thought through his next step after Vienna.
Yet each of Ulbricht’s moves was carefully calibrated. By making matters worse for himself over the short term, he would make Khrushchev digest ever more deeply the unacceptable cost of further inaction.
Ulbricht was determined not to lose the post-Vienna momentum.
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
FRIDAY, JUNE 16, 1961
Given his well-known criticism of Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs performance, Dean Acheson was flattered and a little surprised that Kennedy was turning to him again for advice. The president’s questions to him were as simple as they were difficult to answer: How did he counter Khrushchev after his Vienna ultimatum? How seriously should the president take the Soviet leader’s Berlin threat—and what should he do about it?
The Acheson relationship to Kennedy had become an increasingly complex one. The two men had grown acquainted with each other in the late 1950s, when then Senator Kennedy had occasionally driven his Georgetown neighbor home from meetings on Capitol Hill. What the young Kennedy didn’t know was how much Acheson detested Kennedy’s father, not only for his support for an American foreign policy of isolationism, but also for the dishonest way in which Acheson believed he had come about his riches. Acheson believed it was those ill-gotten gains that had then bought the White House for his son.
For President Kennedy, however, Acheson provided perhaps his best option for clear answers to urgent questions. Acheson regarded his job that day as cutting through the mush of administration decision-making represented by the “Interdepartmental Coordinating Group on Berlin Contingency Planning,” better known as the Berlin Task Force. Acheson assured the men in the room that his purpose “was not to interfere with any present operation but rather to stimulate further thought and activity.”
He said the task force had to take Khrushchev’s threats in Vienna at face value, and thus their Berlin contingency planning was no longer a theoretical exercise. Decisions had to be made, he said. The cost of inaction was enormous, as was the danger of failing to reverse Khrushchev’s growing perception of American weakness. The issue of Berlin involved “deeply the prestige of the United States and perhaps its very survival.”
Because he didn’t believe a political solution was available, he said the question was now whether they had the political will to make difficult decisions, “regardless of the opinions of our allies.” Khrushchev was “now willing to do what he [has] not been willing to do before,” said Acheson, “undoubtedly due to the feeling that the U.S. [will] not oppose him with nuclear weapons.”
If the U.S. was unwilling to do that, Acheson continued, it could not oppose Russian advances. Acheson was little interested in hearing the views of others in the room. He was there to convert them to his own thinking. He believed that the Kennedy administration was entering the worst of all worlds. The more Khrushchev doubted the U.S. willingness to use nuclear weapons, the more he might test Kennedy to the point that the president would have no other choice but to use them. “Nuclear weapons should not be looked upon as the last and largest weapon to be used,” he said, “but as the first step in a new policy in protecting the United States from the failure of a policy of deterrence.”
Acheson’s hard line had won him many enemies in the Democratic Party and among the senior officials gathered in the room. He told them that inaction now regarding Berlin would have a ripple effect far beyond the city that would endanger U.S. interests around the world. “Berlin is vital to the power position of the U.S.,” he said. “Withdrawal would destroy our power position.” Thus, they had “to act so as neither to invite a series of defeats nor precipitate ourselves into the ultimate catastrophe.”
With apologies to the Joint Chiefs and the secretary of defense, who he conceded would in the end decide the military issues, Acheson then outlined what he would propose to President Kennedy. Acheson wanted a more intensive training of U.S. reserves than their usual summer routine so that they would be in battle-ready condition. He wanted the U.S. to fly “STRAC units”—Strategic Army Corps operations—to Europe, and, after their exercises, leave part of them behind to increase Allied strength near the front. He envisioned crash programs for Polaris and other missile systems and submarines to improve nuclear capability. He wanted the U.S. to resume nuclear testing and, in violation of Kennedy’s promise to Khrushchev, also restart the sort of reconnaissance flights that had triggered the capture of
the U-2 and RB-47 airmen and the breakdown of U.S.–Soviet relations. He wanted aircraft carriers deployed in positions that better helped defend Berlin.
The men in the room were stunned. Acheson was proposing nothing less than a full military mobilization that would place the United States on a war footing. If Acheson reflected Kennedy’s thinking in any way, they were witnessing a historic turning point in the confrontation with Moscow over Berlin.
Acheson continued in a similar vein. He wanted a substantial increase in the military budget and a proclamation of a national emergency so that Americans got the point, supported by congressional resolutions. All this would, of course, require preparing the American people and Congress psychologically. For that, Acheson suggested a large program of air raid shelter construction as a means of galvanizing the population.
He wanted a general alert of the Strategic Air Command and a movement of troops to Europe. If none of this had any impact on the Soviets, he wanted a garrison airlift for Berlin and a continued testing of checkpoints through increased ground traffic to ensure access remained open. That might be followed “by a military movement indicating the eventual use of tactical nuclear weapons and then strategic nuclear weapons.”
Acheson anticipated Allied protests, particularly from the British. “It would be important to bring our allies along,” he said, “but we should be prepared to go without them unless the Germans buckled.” Acheson was convinced his friend Adenauer would support his plan, and that was most crucial, as it would be German troops and interests that would be most at stake. “We should be prepared to go to the bitter end if the Germans go along with us,” he said.
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