The manner of Clay’s appointment spoke again to Kennedy’s greater comfort at appearing tough than at actually being so. Kennedy increasingly feared Khrushchev might push him to the precipice of unleashing atomic weapons to defend Berlin, but he had not yet determined under what circumstances and in what manner he might be willing to do so. He had no idea what role, if any, Clay would play in the decision-making process.
Whatever his dilemmas, Kennedy’s popularity remained impregnable. A Gallup poll showed most Americans considered the string of Kennedy setbacks in 1961 to have been bad breaks rather than poor leadership. Kennedy’s approval rating would rise to 77 percent in October after hovering above 70 percent all year, having hit a high of 83 percent as the public circled its wagons around him following the Bay of Pigs. In the quarter century since Gallup had begun polling, only Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor and Harry Truman after Roosevelt’s death had enjoyed comparable popularity—and they had not sustained it nearly as long.
Kennedy was a keen reader of public opinion polls, which showed that a remarkable 64 percent of Americans would approve U.S. military intervention should the Soviets or the East Germans block access to West Berlin, while only 19 percent would be opposed. And more than 60 percent of Americans accepted that there would be war if the Soviets were determined to control Berlin.
With such a hawkish American electorate, Kennedy’s choice of Clay was a popular one. It was even more so for Berliners, who celebrated Clay’s arrival like that of a homecoming gladiator. From the tarmac of Tempelhof Airport, the site of his 1948 heroics, American tanks greeted him with a nineteen-gun salute. The West Berlin elite gathered to receive him in a hangar beneath a giant American flag flanked by two Berlin city banners. Unlike Kennedy, Clay spoke to all Berliners and not just to those of the West. He spoke of “our determination that Berlin and its people will always be free…. I came here with complete faith in our cause and with confidence in the courage and steadfastness of the people of Berlin.”
Licking the wounds from his election defeat two days earlier, West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt met Clay in Frankfurt and escorted him to Berlin on a Pan American Airlines flight. His defeat by Chancellor Adenauer was a bitter disappointment after an ugly campaign, during which his opponent had so sullied his character. However, Brandt had inflicted considerable damage on Adenauer as well, whom voters had punished due to worries about his age and his tepid response to the Berlin border closure. Adenauer’s Christian Democrats had remained the country’s largest political party, but the chancellor had lost his absolute majority and was left to bargain for his political survival with new coalition partners, the Free Democrats.
The Christian Democrats and their Bavarian partners, the Christian Social Union, had lost 5 percent of the vote from the previous election, for a total of just 45.3 percent. Brandt’s Social Democrats had gained 4.5 percent to achieve 36.2 percent of the vote. The liberal Free Democrats had become the third force in German politics, expanding their share of the vote by 4 percent to some 12.8 percent. The Berlin border closure had realigned German politics, and Adenauer would never fully recover.*
Brandt had appealed publicly to Berliners to provide Clay with a warm homecoming, but they had required little encouragement. Hundreds of thousands of Berliners stood two to three deep along Clay’s ten-mile motor route. Children waved small U.S. flags while sitting atop the shoulders of parents who had lived through the airlift. So many well-wishers showered bouquets on Clay that he was soon bathing in flowers in the back of his black Mercedes sedan.
Clay’s limited job description was to “report, recommend and advise.” Yet his intention from the beginning was to define his mandate more broadly and take full charge of American policy in the city in the manner of a military governor. That would put him on a collision course with men who had strongly opposed his appointment and whose authority was threatened by his arrival: General Lauris Norstad, NATO Supreme Commander, in Paris; General Bruce Clarke, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, in Heidelberg; and the U.S. ambassador to Germany, Walter Dowling, in Bonn.
Clay trumpeted that his new role would be to “demonstrate United States strength and determination” and to force the Soviets to acknowledge responsibility for their sector. He was determined to make clear that the four powers still ran Berlin and not East Germany, which he would expose as the puppet state that it was. Clay was distraught that the U.S. and its allies had allowed so many of their rights in Berlin to erode since his earlier days there, and he was determined to reverse that trend by the force of his will.
The State Department’s Martin Hillenbrand worried that Clay didn’t realize how much less freedom to maneuver he would have in Berlin now that the U.S. had lost its nuclear monopoly. Yet it was just that sort of defeatist thinking that Clay had rejected his entire career. Clay had launched the 1948 airlift on his own authority after President Truman had turned down his initial plan to send a full brigade storming up the Autobahn to reopen Berlin access. At the airlift’s peak operations, one cargo plane was landing every three minutes—shiny new C-54s and war-battered C-47s—filled with food and supplies.
Clay’s unexpected initial success had convinced President Truman to support the operation’s continuation, against resistance from Pentagon and State Department officials who complained that Clay was risking a new war just three years after the last one had ended. The so-called military experts of that time had told Clay that two million Berliners could not be sustained by air, which would require 4,000 tons of supplies per day. That was more than ten times the size of the Nazi airlift to the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad, an operation which had failed in the end.
Clay had defied the naysayers and won. It had been his life’s defining moment, and it would inform every decision he would make from the minute he landed in Berlin in September 1961.
WEST BERLIN
MID-SEPTEMBER, 1961
A month after the August 13 border closure, construction crews along the entire border zone were replacing temporary barriers with a more formidable and permanent Todesstreifen, or death strips. East German authorities each day were dispatching brigades of so-called volunteers to help dig the trenches and clear the trees and shrubbery from a broad no-man’s-land that would contain the quickly expanding Wall.
The East German newspaper Sonntag bragged that construction teams included scientists, philologists, historians, doctors, filmmakers, street builders, journalists, and retail sales staff. “An entire people are working at the wall,” it declared proudly. The inmates were laying the foundation for their own prison. Each week, a handful of these “volunteers” used their proximity to the wall to jump over or slip through one of its vanishing weak spots. The more dramatic stories became legend.
At age twenty-one, agricultural engineering student Albrecht Peter Roos began to plot his escape while working on just such a construction crew near the Brandenburg Gate. His two sisters already lived in West Germany, and he wanted to join them rather than build a better barrier to make that impossible. When the workers took a break for lunch, Roos sought his police minder’s permission to relieve himself.
The guard shrugged. “Just be quick,” he replied.
So Roos retreated to the adjacent woods, only to stumble over two other students hiding in the underbrush who had the same hope of escape. Leading their westward sprint, Roos scrambled through a ditch and under a fence and then rushed to a barbed-wire coil just beyond the fence that ensnared him. With the help of the two others, he negotiated his way out and then helped them through. Bleeding from dozens of cuts through their shredded clothes, the three then ran in a furious zigzag course to the West, fearing guards that had come up from behind would fire upon them.
A West Berlin policeman embraced them on free ground with the reward of a bottle of wine and the first banana Roos had ever seen or eaten.
Each day, West Berlin newspapers splashed across their pages similarly harrowing stories of escape. There was the tale of the twen
ty-four-year-old ambulance driver who drove his vehicle through the barbed wire at Prinzenstrasse in a hail of machine-gun fire. Photos showed him smiling and unscratched beside his bullet-pierced vehicle. There were the three East Berliners who crashed through the barrier at Bouchestrasse in their 6.5-ton truck, only to be stranded atop the curb that marked the borderline. They scampered the rest of the way to freedom, eluding police shots. A West Berlin policeman triumphantly threw their keys back over the barrier to the Vopos.
What the border closure altered most for Berliners was Sunday afternoon, the traditional German gathering time for family and friends. With phone connections cut off, East and West Berliners communicated with each other from opposite sides of the barrier from platforms and ladders, some holding up newborn babies for viewing by grandparents, some bearing placards with loving messages in big, bold letters that could be read from afar.
Quickly, the bizarre had become routine. West Berlin brides and grooms in wedding costume made their way to the Wall so that family members could wave congratulations from the East. At designated times, children came to the Wall to climb ladders and visit from afar with parents and grandparents. East German police who had wearied of West Berlin hecklers dispersed them across the divide with water cannons and tear gas at border points in the districts of Neukölln, Kreuzberg, and Zehlendorf.
Tour buses showed off the city’s newest attractions: a bricked-up church on the border, blocked cemetery gates, sad people behind barbed wire—strange animals in a surreal zoo. One tour guide told a busload from the Netherlands that another handful of refugees would escape that night—another aspect of Berliners’ new way of life.
STEINSTÜCKEN ENCLAVE, WEST BERLIN
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1961
General Clay acted immediately to ensure that the East Germans and Soviets didn’t miss his arrival.
Within forty-eight hours of landing in Berlin, he directed his irresistible focus on the curious drama of some 190 stranded residents of Steinstücken, some 42 families in all. Through an accident of geography, the tiny exclave of West Berlin’s Zehlendorf district—located in the southwest corner of the U.S. sector of Berlin—was separated from West Berlin by a sliver of Soviet zone. The only access was a short winding road, which since 1945 had been controlled by East German police.
As a result of August 13, the secluded hamlet became the most vulnerable part of West Berlin and thus the West. East German police had surrounded Steinstücken with barbed wire and barriers, later reinforcing them with watch towers and a hundred-meter-wide no-man’s-land. They denied access to all nonresidents, and with each day those inside the landlocked community lived in growing despair about their future.
East German authorities threatened to storm the village to recover an East German who had taken refuge there, only to discover that he had no way out. Widespread rumor had it that Ulbricht would claim the community as his own by year’s end if the West continued to show no intention of protecting it. East Germany had done the same with other, similarly precarious pieces of West Berlin territory, but those areas were less sensitive, since they were uninhabited garden plots or forestland.
Without divulging his plans to U.S. superiors or communist authorities, on September 21, at a few minutes before eleven a.m., Clay flew to Steinstücken aboard a military helicopter, with two other helicopters protecting his flanks. He delivered the community two things it lacked: a TV set and hope. A large crowd quickly surrounded his chopper as it landed in a grassy field. At Clay’s request, the mayor met with him at Restaurant Steinstücken, the village’s only dining establishment, bar, and grocery store. They broke open a bottle of wine and drank generously from it while discussing the village’s fears and what could be done about them.
General Clay spent only fifty minutes in Steinstücken, but it was enough to prompt East Berlin’s Neues Deutschland newspaper to brand his action as a “war-like move in an otherwise calm situation.” The British embassy protested in Washington that Clay was taking too much risk for too little gain.
To show he would not be bullied, the following day Clay helicoptered in a three-man detachment from the 278th Military Police Company to establish Steinstücken’s first U.S. outpost, and it would remain for the next decade. Military Police Lieutenant Vern Pike flew in to help set up command in the mayor’s basement, running the communications antennas up his chimney. Clay then ordered General Watson, the local commander, to organize a ground offensive scheduled for three days later, on September 24, to “liberate” Steinstücken by using two companies to punch a corridor through Berlin’s new barrier to the community.
By coincidence, European Commander General Bruce C. Clarke arrived by train that morning from Heidelberg to inspect his Berlin operation. Over breakfast, Watson and Brigadier General Frederick O. Hartel happily told their direct superior he had arrived on “an interesting morning” because three hours later they would begin the Steinstücken operation.
“Who told you to do that?” Clarke protested to Watson.
“General Clay,” Watson responded.
“Al,” Clarke complained, “don’t you know who you work for? Don’t you know who writes your efficiency report?”
Clarke instructed his underlings to take no further orders from Clay and to withdraw their troops from the woods and send them back to their barracks. He then found Clay in his office and, pointing to a red phone on his desk, angrily challenged him to call Kennedy, or to “take your cotton-picking fingers off my troops.”
Responded Clay, “Well, Bruce, I can see that we are not going to get along.”
Clay was convinced he knew how far to push the Soviets and that he was on safe ground because Moscow “could not allow a minor issue [like Steinstücken] to become an international incident through mishandling by their East German puppets.”
A few days later, U.S. troops evacuated seven East Germans who had driven their truck through the mayor’s backyard fence while seeking refuge. Military police cut their hair short so they looked like GIs, put them in MP uniforms and helmets, and then evacuated them in a U.S. military helicopter. Although East German authorities threatened to shoot down the helicopter, Clay had gambled right that Moscow would not let them risk it.
The flights to and from Steinstücken became routine practice, usually ferrying MPs back and forth from their base but sometimes ushering out refugees. Clay not only felt he had proved a point to Berliners and his own superiors, but that he had also reinforced his own conviction, born in 1948, that the Soviets would back down when confronted by a determined West.
Emboldened, Clay pressed on. He announced that the U.S. military would resume patrols that Washington had stopped six years earlier along the Autobahn. It was his answer to new East German police harassment of American vehicles, which were sometimes held up for hours for inspections. The patrols would intervene in any incident involving an American car. Within a short time, the problems ended.
West Berliners were elated. The Berliner Morgenpost splashed a photo on its front page of General Clay kissing his wife, Marjorie, as she arrived in Tempelhof Airport. The caption read: “Every Berlin child knows the accomplishments of this American for our city’s freedom. His latest actions warm the hearts of Berliners: the stationing of a U.S. commando in Steinstücken and the resumption of military patrols of the Autobahn.”
What they couldn’t know was that Clay’s most dangerous enemies were already planning a counterattack—in Washington. The last time Clay had exceeded orders in Berlin, President Truman had covered his back. Clay had no way of knowing whether Kennedy would do the same now, but he was about to find out.
HYANNIS PORT, MASSACHUSETTS
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1961
The usual ilk of weekend guests were gathering at the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port compound, where President Kennedy was working on a speech that he would deliver to the United Nations General Assembly the next day.
They included the president’s brother Teddy; their brother-in-l
aw, the actor Peter Lawford; Frank Sinatra; and the Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa and his latest wife. Sinatra had arrived with what father Joseph Kennedy’s chauffeur Frank Saunders called “a crowd of jet-setters and beautiful people,” among them women who looked liked prostitutes to him. The maids were abuzz about it all.
Saunders would later claim that he heard party noises during the night and wandered to the main house from his cabin to return Joe Kennedy’s riding boots to him. He said he had stumbled upon the old man in the back hallway fondling a giggling, buxom female.
“My riding boots!” Saunders heard him exclaim. “Just in time!”
It was all part of the raucous background noise of the Kennedy administration and the barely controlled chaos of Kennedy’s personal life and that of those around him. The public image of the workaholic, speed-reading, family-man president was in stark contrast to the reality that would emerge only years later through the eyewitness reports from, among others, his Secret Service agents. They were men who lacked the single-minded motivation of his closest aides and family to burnish the Kennedy image—and they worried about the security dangers of Kennedy’s womanizing.
Larry Newman, who had joined the Secret Service in 1960, was less worried about the morality issues involved than he was that the president’s chief procurer of women, Dave Powers, would not allow security checks or searches of any of the women who were escorted past bodyguards. This was at a time when all the agents around the president had been warned that Fidel Castro might be planning a revenge hit over the Bay of Pigs. “We didn’t know if the President the next morning would be dead or alive,” Newman recalled later to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Newman said agents only half jokingly debated among themselves who would draw the black bean to testify before the appropriate House subcommittee should the president be harmed.
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