Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  Smirnov wooed and threatened Adenauer along the usual Soviet lines. He spoke of how constructively Moscow had worked with Adenauer while reminding him of his country’s certain destruction should he forget Germany’s role in the last two world wars and pursue what he called warlike activities and escalation now.

  During his meeting with Smirnov, Adenauer chose not to condemn the Soviets or Khrushchev. Instead, he extended thanks to the Soviet leader for his greetings, warmly recalled his last meeting with Khrushchev, and spoke of his focus on winning the September 17 elections.

  Only at that point did he mention Berlin. “We’re dealing in my view here with an aggravating and unpleasant matter, which has been played up way beyond the necessary,” he told Smirnov. “I would be grateful if the Soviet government could calm the situation.” Adenauer said he worried and “quite openly feared” that developments in Berlin and the Soviet zone “under some conditions could lead to bloodshed.” He said plaintively, “I would be grateful if the Soviet government could prevent such an occurrence.”

  If his approach to the Soviets was one of restraint, it was quite the opposite when it came to his political opponent, Willy Brandt. Adenauer knew the border closure would hurt him with voters. He also knew an increasing number of them were questioning whether the old man was still fit enough to lead, and that Brandt had moved his Social Democrats to the more acceptable political center. He hoped voters would weigh all that against West Germany’s thriving economy and the stability he had achieved for his country within the Western alliance.

  Less than forty-eight hours after the communists had closed the border, Adenauer had campaigned in the Bavarian city of Regensburg rather than rushing to Berlin. He told the crowd he did not wish to inflame the situation by grandstanding in Berlin. Instead of attacking the communists, he took a nasty swipe at Brandt’s character, for the first time referring publicly to his illegitimate birth. “If ever anyone has been treated with the greatest consideration by his political opponents,” said Adenauer, “it is Herr Brandt, alias Frahm,” a reference to his unwed mother’s maiden name, which Brandt had discarded while in wartime exile.

  At an August 29 campaign speech that followed in Hagen, Westphalia, Adenauer told a partisan crowd that Khrushchev had shut down the Berlin border so as to help the socialist Brandt in the upcoming elections. The German press attacked Adenauer for turning so viciously on Brandt, but among voters Adenauer was effectively sowing doubts about his opponent.

  Brandt, who until then had responded with restraint, lashed back. “The old gentleman really cannot grasp what’s going on anymore.” He advised Adenauer to seek “ein friedliches Lebensabend”—a peaceful retirement. Brandt calculated that his best strategy was to announce that he was abandoning electioneering altogether. “For me all that matters is the struggle for Berlin,” he said, announcing that he would reduce his election work to one day each week and otherwise focus on “Germany’s destiny.”

  Brandt realized that perhaps the most important factor with voters was how he handled the Americans. On the day of his rally, West Germany’s most-read newspaper, Bild-Zeitung, with its circulation of 3.7 million, covered the entire top half of its front page with a headline that captured the public mood: THE EAST ACTS—AND THE WEST? THE WEST DOES NOTHING.

  The editors had placed large photographs of the three Allied leaders under the story with derisive cutlines: “President Kennedy remains silent / Macmillan goes hunting / And Adenauer insults Brandt.”

  In an accompanying front-page editorial, Bild said:

  We entered the Western alliance because we believed this would be the best solution for Germany as well as for the West. The majority of Germans, the overwhelming majority, is still convinced of this. But this conviction is not strengthened if some of our partners, at a moment when the German cause is in great danger, coolly declare: “Allied rights have not been touched.”

  The German cause is in the greatest danger. Three days already and so far nothing has happened apart from a paper protest by the Allied commandants.

  We are disillusioned!

  The more sober Berlin broadsheet Der Tagesspiegel captured the spirit of the day in a giant four-panel cartoon that was so popular it was being passed from person to person around Berlin.

  The primary character in each panel, labeled THE WEST, is portrayed as an aging, bald American man in a dark suit and a bow tie and with a raised, lecturing finger.

  In the first frame, the West winces from Stalin’s blows to his head with a club labeled GERMANY’S VISION. He says only, “[Hit me] Once more and I’ll take out my big stick.” The second panel shows the West with two bumps, the new one marked HUNGARY. The third frame has a diminutive Ulbricht bashing the West with a club stamped CLOSING OF THE INTERCITY BORDER. The final panel shows a bruised and beaten West, standing by himself pathetically above the caption UND SO WEITER—“And so on.”

  After wiping the sweat from his brow, Brandt told the 250,000 Berliners standing before him that through the border closure the Soviets had “given their pet dog Ulbricht a little extra leash” with his “regime of injustice.” Brandt captured the frustration of the crowd, saying, “We cannot help our fellow citizens in the sector and our countrymen in the Zone bear this burden, and that is for us the bitterest pill to swallow! We can only help them bear it in showing them that we will rise to stand with them in this desperate hour!”

  The crowd exploded with relief that Brandt had finally expressed their dismay.

  Brandt drew parallels between the Ulbricht dictatorship and the Third Reich. He called the border closure “a new version of the occupation of the Rhineland by Hitler. Only today the man is named Ulbricht.” He had to shout above the crowd’s deafening cheers in a raspy voice made hoarse from the campaign trail and his chain-smoking.

  Brandt paused before the most sensitive part of the speech, during which he directly addressed the U.S. and Kennedy. He began by defending the Americans, to the displeasure of many of his listeners. “Without them,” he said, “the tanks would have rolled on.”

  The crowd only began to applaud when he voiced their own disappointment with Kennedy.

  “[But] Berlin expects more than words,” he said. “It expects political action.” The crowd erupted in cheers when he told them that he had written to President Kennedy with that opinion. “I told him our views in all frankness,” he said to roars of approval. Brandt saw in their eyes the political appeal of an attack on the Americans even as they knew how powerless they were to take on the Soviets alone.

  OVAL OFFICE, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  WEDNESDAY MORNING, AUGUST 16, 1961

  President Kennedy was enraged.

  He considered the letter from Mayor Brandt, which rested atop his morning correspondence, to be insulting and impertinent. Even given Berlin’s situation, it overstepped the sort of language any city mayor should use with the American president. With each line that he read, Kennedy grew more certain that the letter’s primary purpose was to serve Brandt’s electoral campaign.

  Brandt called the border closure an encroachment that was “the most serious in the postwar history of this city since the blockade.” In a surprisingly direct rebuke of the Kennedy administration, he wrote, “While in the past Allied Commandants have even protested against parades by the so-called National People’s Army in East Berlin, this time, after military occupation of the East Sector by the People’s Army, they have limited themselves to delayed and not very vigorous steps.” He charged that the Allies had thus endorsed the “illegal sovereignty of the East Berlin government.”

  Brandt protested, “We now have a state of accomplished extortion.”

  He told Kennedy that although this had not weakened West Berliners’ will to resist, “it has tended to arouse doubts as to the determination of the three powers and their ability to react.” He conceded Kennedy’s argument that existing four-power guarantees applied only to West Berlin and its people, the presence of troops th
ere, and their access routes. “However,” he stressed, “this is a matter of a deep wound in the life of the German people.”

  Brandt warned Kennedy that Berlin could become “like a ghetto” and lose “its function as a refuge of freedom and a symbol of hope for unification. Worse,” he said, “instead of flight to Berlin, we might then experience the beginning of flight from Berlin” as its citizens lost confidence in the city’s future.

  Brandt’s letter then set out a series of proposals, again ignoring the fact that he was only a city mayor or that this was a level of bilateral exchange that belonged more properly to the chancellor. He called upon Kennedy to introduce a new, three-power status for West Berlin that would exclude the Soviets but include the French and British. He wanted Kennedy to bring the Berlin question before the United Nations, as the Soviet Union “has violated the Declaration of Human Rights in most flagrant manner.” Finally, he said, “It would be welcomed if the American garrison were to be demonstratively strengthened.”

  Brandt closed with the line “I consider the situation serious enough, Mr. President, to write to you in all frankness as is possible only between friends who trust each other completely.” Then he signed it “Your Willy Brandt.”

  Kennedy fumed. The letter was political dynamite. Already stung by charges that he had demonstrated weakness in Cuba, Laos, and Vienna, Kennedy considered it salt on an open wound. The final line, in which Brandt referred to his relationship of trust with the president, irked Kennedy most.

  “Trust?” Kennedy spat as he angrily waved the letter at his press secretary, Pierre Salinger. “I don’t trust this man at all. He’s in the middle of a campaign against old Adenauer and wants to drag me in. Where does he get off calling me a friend?”

  The State Department and the White House were furious that Brandt had revealed the existence of the letter at a rally before Kennedy had even received it—driving home its electoral purpose. Administration officials briefed the press in that fashion, setting off a storm of negative U.S. media comment. The Daily News called Brandt’s letter “rude and presumptuous.” The Washington Evening Star’s commentator William S. White condemned Brandt as a “mere mayor” trying to “take over the foreign policy, not only of his own country, but of all the West by addressing personal notes to the President of the United States…. It is easy for demagogues to whip up excited crowds, as Mr. Brandt is doing, to pour scorn on the West for inaction.”

  Brandt would later take credit for his letter shifting Kennedy to a more active defense of Berlin, yet perhaps more decisive was the journalist Marguerite Higgins, to whom Kennedy had shown the letter with disgust while sitting in his rocking chair in the Oval Office. The well-known U.S. war reporter, who had covered both World War II and the Korean conflict, was at age forty-one a personal friend of the president. “Mr. President, I must tell you quite openly,” she said, “that in Berlin the suspicion is growing that you want to sell out the West Berliners.”

  Kennedy came to accept that he had to take some action quickly to reassure Berliners, Americans, and Soviets alike that he remained ready to stand up to the Kremlin. Two days after receiving the Brandt letter, Kennedy wrote back to the mayor that he planned to dispatch to Berlin both Vice President Johnson and General Lucius Clay, the hero of the Berlin Airlift in 1948 and a friend of Marguerite Higgins.

  He would take Brandt’s advice that he send more troops to Berlin, but his letter would make clear it wasn’t a lowly mayor who had prompted the decision. “On careful consideration,” he wrote to Brandt, “I myself have decided that the best immediate response is a significant reinforcement of the Western garrisons.”

  He said that what was important wasn’t the number of troops, which would be small, but that the reinforcements would be seen as the U.S. response to Moscow’s demand that Allied soldiers leave Berlin altogether. “We believe that even a modest reinforcement will underline our rejection of this concept,” he said.

  However, Kennedy rejected Brandt’s other suggestions. He said the mayor’s notion of three-power status for West Berlin would weaken the four-power basis for an Allied protest of the border closing. He would also not pursue Brandt’s idea of an appeal to the United Nations, as it was “unlikely to be fruitful.” “Grave as the matter is,” he wrote, “there are, as you say, no steps available to us which can force a significant material change in this present situation. Since it represents a resounding confession of failure and of political weakness, this brutal border closing evidently represents a basic Soviet decision which only war could reverse. Neither you nor we, nor any of our Allies, have ever supposed that we should go to war on this point.”

  Kennedy’s logic was that the Soviet action was “too serious for inadequate responses.” By that measure, any action short of war seemed inadequate to him, and thus he objected to all the remedies he had heard thus far, including “most of the suggestions in your own letter.”

  Tossing the mayor a bone that would cost Kennedy nothing, he supported Brandt’s notion of “an appropriate plebiscite demonstrating the continuing conviction of West Berlin that its destiny is freedom in connection with the West.”

  Kennedy didn’t like rewarding Brandt for pulling him into his messy, petty German politics. On the other hand, he had his own domestic political reasons for a demonstration of strength. If anyone understood how deeply intertwined America’s domestic and foreign policies were, it was Kennedy.

  Brandt read Kennedy’s response with disappointment, believing the U.S. president had “thrown us in the frying pan.” American reporters were writing with the confidence of the well-briefed that the border closure had shocked and depressed Kennedy. But the truth was quite different.

  Among those who were closest to him, Kennedy did not hide his relief. He considered the border closure a potentially positive turning point that could help lead to the end of the Berlin Crisis that had been hanging over him like a Damoclean nuclear sword. He thought the fact that West Berlin had remained untouched illustrated the limits of Khrushchev’s ambitions—and the relative caution with which he would execute them.

  “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” Kennedy said to his friend and aide Kenny O’Donnell. “There wouldn’t be any need of a wall if he planned to occupy the whole city. This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

  The communist move also allowed Kennedy to score public opinion points for the U.S. across the world. The communist enemy had been forced to build a barrier around its people to lock them in. Nothing could have been more damning. One couldn’t buy a better argument in favor of the free world, even if the cost was the freedom of East Berliners, and, more broadly, Eastern Europeans.

  Kennedy thought of himself as a pragmatic man, and the Eastern Europeans were beyond any reasonable hope of liberation anyway.

  Kennedy had little sympathy for the East Germans, and told journalist James “Scotty” Reston that the U.S. had given them ample time to break out of their jail, as the Berlin border had been open from the establishment of the Soviet zone after World War II to August 13, 1961.

  In the first days after the Wall went up, a similar Kennedy remark reached an alarmed West German ambassador, Wilhelm Grewe, and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer: “After all, the East Germans have had more than fifteen years to reflect on whether they wanted to stay in East Germany or go to the West.” Grewe watched and worried as this callous statement further poisoned the already toxic atmosphere with Adenauer.

  “Also,” Grewe would later recall of Kennedy, “I got the feeling that sometimes he was not absolutely sure himself whether it was appropriate to preserve a completely passive attitude at that time, or whether he should have tried a more active policy to prevent the erection of the wall.” Kennedy expressed his self-doubt with the sort of question he posed to Grewe: “Well, do you feel we should have handled this business otherwise?” The matter would occupy t
he president more with each day’s distance from August 13 and the greater realization that the border closure was not making relations with Khrushchev any easier.

  THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW

  MID-AUGUST, 1961

  Khrushchev congratulated himself on having outmaneuvered the U.S., the British, and the French without military conflict, political backlash, or even the most modest of economic sanctions.

  His son Sergei saw him initially sigh with relief after August 13, and then grow more delighted over time as he reflected upon his achievement. Had Khrushchev not acted at all, the Soviet bloc might have begun to unravel with the implosion of its westernmost outpost. With refugees bleeding out of Berlin, his enemies would have sought his head on a platter at the Party Congress, egged on by Mao.

  Khrushchev also reflected later on how “war could have broken out” if he had miscalculated. He had read Kennedy’s signals perfectly, which had provided a road map for his action. The only interest Kennedy had professed was in preserving West Berlin’s status and access to the city, which Khrushchev had been careful not to touch. He had been confident that Kennedy would do nothing to help liberate East Germans or contest whatever the Soviets chose to do within their own zone.

  Khrushchev believed he had achieved even more than he could have expected from a peace treaty. In a treaty, Kennedy would have forced him to accept language recognizing the need for German unification over time through free elections. Now he had every reason to hope that the Western commitment to the city would continue to erode, along with the morale of West Berliners, who might decide to abandon their city in droves, doubting that the Allies would continue to defend their freedoms and connection to West Germany.