Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  Tony Sherman, a member of the Kennedy security detail from Salt Lake City, would later recall days when Kennedy “would not work at all.” Sherman had not liked the fact that his job responsibilities included alerting Kennedy’s aides when his wife’s sudden arrival might uncover his philandering. Agent William T. McIntyre of Phoenix worried that as a sworn law enforcer, he was being asked to look the other way at illegal procurement of prostitutes. Agent Joseph Paolella of Los Angeles adored Kennedy and the fact that he always remembered his security men’s names, but he worried that the U.S. president could be blackmailed by an enemy over his in-fidelities. He and other agents referred to one of Kennedy’s guests that weekend, Peter Lawford, as “Rancid Ass,” for his overdrinking and aggressiveness with women.

  With all that revelry in the background, Kennedy was putting the final touches on one of the most important speeches of his presidency, and his first important signal to the world of how he intended to handle Moscow and nuclear arms control after the Berlin border closure. It would also come just four days after an airplane crash in Africa had killed United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. The Soviets were campaigning to have Hammarskjöld replaced by a three-person directorate that would represent the West, the communist world, and “neutrals.”

  Kennedy’s public approval ratings defied gravity, but the president knew that beneath them lay a string of foreign policy setbacks and festering domestic problems that over time could undermine his leadership. Before he left Washington that Friday for Hyannis Port, he had met briefly with Detroit News Washington bureau chief Elie Abel, who had been asked by a New York publisher to write a book on the president’s first term and was seeking Kennedy’s cooperation. Sitting together in the White House living quarters, with Marine One’s engines roaring in the background, Abel drank a Bloody Mary while Kennedy tried to dissuade him from the project. “Why would anyone write a book about an administration that has nothing to show for itself but a string of disasters?” he asked.

  Abel found himself in the curious position of trying to convince Kennedy that, despite his rough start, in the end he would do great things, and he and his friends would all be proud of his administration.

  On Sunday, Kennedy landed with Lawford at the Marine Air Terminal of New York’s La Guardia Airport at 6:35 p.m., where they were greeted by Mayor Robert Wagner, Secretary of State Rusk, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson. Pierre Salinger, the president’s portly, bon vivant press secretary, had arrived ahead of them in response to an urgent call from Soviet spy Georgi Bolshakov, who had continued to play his role as unofficial conduit to Khrushchev. Bolshakov had said it was urgent that Salinger meet with Mikhail Kharlamov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry press director, who had an urgent message for the president.

  Bolshakov had grown increasingly comfortable in his role, having operated without a leak and to the satisfaction of his superiors for several months. Though he remained a mid-ranking military intelligence agent, he was now custodian of a well-established and frequently employed direct line to Khrushchev. Salinger considered Bolshakov to be “a one-man troika in himself…interpreter, editor and spy.”

  Following Salinger’s instructions, at 7:15 p.m. on Sunday Bolshakov brought Kharlamov through a little-watched side entrance into the Carlyle, the hotel that served as the president’s residence in New York. Reporters constantly loitered in the lobby, hoping for presidential sightings, so a Secret Service agent took the two Soviets up a back elevator.

  Salinger was taken aback by Kharlamov’s opening words: “The storm in Berlin is over.”

  By his reckoning, Salinger had told Kharlamov, the Berlin situation couldn’t be much worse.

  “Just wait, my friend,” he said.

  Kharlamov asked whether the president had received a message that Khrushchev had sent to him through New York Times Paris correspondent Cyrus L. Sulzberger, who had conducted an interview with the Soviet leader in early September.

  Salinger said he hadn’t. The fact was, however, that on September 10 Sulzberger had relayed to Kennedy a personal note that Khrushchev had given him during an interview just five days earlier, although Kennedy had not yet responded.

  Khrushchev had told Sulzberger, “If you are personally able to meet with President Kennedy, I wish you would tell him I would not be loath to establishing some sort of informal contact with him to find a means of settling the [Berlin] crisis without damaging the prestige of the United States—on the basis of a German peace treaty and [the establishment of the] Free City of West Berlin.” He had suggested Kennedy use informal contacts to relay his view on Khrushchev’s ideas, and “to figure out various forms and stages and how to prepare public opinion and not endanger the prestige of the United States.”

  Kharlamov repeated for Salinger the essence of the Khrushchev message, speaking faster and more excitedly than Bolshakov could translate. So Salinger asked him to slow down, explaining that they had time. The president was out for dinner and a Broadway play, he said, and he wouldn’t be back at the hotel until past midnight.

  Taking a deep breath, Kharlamov said the situation was urgent. Khrushchev considered Kennedy’s plans for a U.S. military buildup in Europe to be an imminent danger. That was why the Soviet leader had told Sulzberger about his eagerness to establish a private channel to Kennedy to reach a German settlement.

  Khrushchev wanted another summit with Kennedy to consider American proposals on Berlin, Kharlamov said. He would leave the timing to Kennedy because of the president’s “obvious political difficulties.” But he was in a hurry. Kharlamov talked of the continuing “intense pressure” within the communist bloc on Khrushchev to conclude a peace treaty with East Germany. Beyond that, he said, the danger of a major military incident in Berlin remained far too great to delay a settlement.

  Khrushchev also wanted to influence or at least know the content of Kennedy’s Monday speech because he wished to avoid anything, at a time of rising tensions, that might give new hope to his opponents ahead of the Party Congress at the end of October. Kharlamov told Salinger that the Soviet leader “hopes your president’s speech to the UN won’t be another warlike ultimatum like the one on July 25…. He didn’t like that at all.”

  Salinger left a message for Kennedy to call as soon as he returned to his room. He then poured scotch and soda for his Russian guests. When they left nearly two hours later, Salinger promised he’d give them the president’s response the next morning at 11:30, ahead of Kennedy’s UN speech.

  Kennedy called Salinger at 1:00 a.m. and invited him to his thirty-fourth-floor duplex at the Carlyle. It was his New York “home,” rented by his father and furnished with fine French antiques. With the draperies open as they were that night, the apartment offered a glittering view of New York’s skyline. Salinger found Kennedy in bed in white pajamas, chewing on an unlit cigar and reading. At the president’s request, Salinger repeated the key points of his conversation with Kharlamov several times.

  The president told Salinger that Sulzberger had communicated nothing to him from his Khrushchev meeting, so the message had likely not reached Kennedy. Kennedy rose from his bed and looked out over Manhattan. He told Salinger that it was good news “if Khrushchev is ready to listen to our views on Germany,” and it probably meant that he would not unilaterally sign a peace treaty with the Ulbricht regime that year and prompt yet another crisis. Yet Kennedy believed Moscow’s continued insistence on a peace treaty recognizing East Germany still raised the specter of war if Khrushchev endangered West Berlin access.

  The president called Secretary Rusk at 1:30 a.m., and together they settled on a message that Salinger would deliver to the Soviets the next morning. Salinger scribbled on hotel stationery as the president dictated. He would tell the Soviets that Kennedy was “cautiously receptive” to the proposal for an early summit on Berlin, but he wanted the Soviets to demonstrate good faith in achieving Laotian neutrality. Only then would a summit on the more difficult question of Ge
rmany be likely to produce “significant agreement.”

  The tone was to be cordial but cautious. Though Kennedy and Khrushchev had agreed on a unified, neutral Laos in Vienna, the Soviets had stood by as North Vietnam added to the military capability of the communist Pathet Lao, and Moscow was contributing two-thirds of the cost to maintaining its expanding secret army. Salinger would repeat the president’s exact words to Kharlamov: “We would be watching and waiting,” was the message Kennedy wanted Salinger to pass to the Soviets.

  Kennedy reviewed his UN speech with Salinger until 3:00 a.m. The final text was more moderate than the Soviets might have anticipated. The language was particularly cautious regarding Berlin.

  The president had been agonizing over the speech for weeks. Though the next election was not for another three years, Kennedy’s domestic opponents had begun to sense his weakness. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and leading Republican, had abandoned his previous restraint on attacking Kennedy over Berlin and said West German fears of abandonment were “perfectly justified.” Said Goldwater, “Anytime diplomats begin talking of negotiations in a Soviet-created situation where there is nothing to negotiate, it is time for the defenders of freedom to become wary.” He told a conference of Republicans on September 28 that if elections were held the next day, they would win with the largest Republican landslide ever.

  Kennedy needed to retake the initiative. Khrushchev “had spit in our eye three times,” Kennedy complained to his ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson. “He has had a succession of apparent victories—space, Cuba, the thirteenth of August…. He wants to give out the feeling that he has us on the run.”

  Vice President Lyndon Johnson argued to the president that he couldn’t demand disarmament in New York and then return to Washington and call out more divisions and restart underground nuclear testing, which is exactly what Kennedy planned to do. The president had learned from ten months of dealing with Khrushchev that one could combat the man only in contradictions.

  Kennedy’s performance at the UN was formidable, fed by his increasing fixation on the prospect of nuclear conflict. That, in turn, had been shaped by secret meetings spent determining with his top advisers the rich detail of exactly how he would execute a nuclear war plan, right down to specific Soviet body counts. Every word of his speech reflected his increasing preoccupation with that burden.

  “A nuclear disaster,” Kennedy told the General Assembly, “spread by wind and water and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to mankind.”

  He outlined his proposal for “general and complete disarmament” under effective international control. “Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable,” he said. “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

  Buried within the speech was a conciliatory message for Moscow on Berlin. Noticed by only the initiated, it suggested Soviet concerns over East Germany had been justified and repeated Kennedy’s view, one that had so distressed veteran diplomats, that U.S. interests in Europe did not stretch beyond West Berlin. Though Salinger would later insist Kennedy had not altered his speech that night, the language would satisfy Khrushchev.

  “We are committed to no rigid formulas,” he said. “We see no perfect solution. We recognize that troops and tanks can, for a time, keep a nation divided against its will, however unwise that policy might seem to us. But we believe a peaceful agreement is possible which protects the freedom of West Berlin and Allied presence and access, while recognizing the historic and legitimate interests of others in assuring European security.”

  Kennedy closed with his growing sense of historic moment: “The events and the decisions of the next ten months may well decide the fate of man for the next ten thousand years…. And we in this hall shall be remembered either as part of the generation that turned this planet into a flaming funeral pyre or the generation that met its vow to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’”

  Though put in poetic terms, he closed again with an offer of talks, without using a word of his speech to reproach Moscow over the August border closure. “We shall never negotiate out of fear, and we shall never fear to negotiate…. For together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames.”

  The speech’s soaring rhetoric would help establish Kennedy’s reputation as a world leader. U.S. Senator Mike Mansfield called it “one of the great speeches of our generation.” Yet those hearing the speech in West Berlin could not miss Kennedy’s willingness to compromise further at their expense or his lack of resolve to remove the barrier that divided them.

  Perhaps most telling was East German praise for the speech. The Ulbricht regime hailed it as a milestone toward peaceful coexistence. The party newspaper Neues Deutschland called it “remarkable; remarkable because it showed American willingness to negotiate.”

  West German editorialists focused not on the speech’s flourishes but on its wishy-washy language. Bild-Zeitung wondered bitterly whether Kennedy’s reference to “the historic and legitimate interests of others” was suggesting that Moscow had the right “to split Germany or renounce reunification.”

  West German Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano told a party caucus of his Christian Democratic Union that the country must “brace itself with all its strength against tendencies to get a Berlin settlement at West Germany’s expense.”

  West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer complained to friends that the president didn’t mention German unification once at the United Nations. Kennedy also left out the ritual call for all-German free elections. He seemed to be retreating on all questions of principle regarding Berlin. Kennedy had not even done the bare minimum: demand that free circulation of people return to Berlin. Adenauer set in motion a trip to Washington in hopes of getting Kennedy back on message, if it wasn’t already too late.

  Adenauer’s fears that Kennedy might abandon West Germany had grown so great that on August 29 he had reached out to Khrushchev with a secret message through West German Ambassador Kroll. Despite his public stance against any talks with Moscow, privately he was urging the Soviet to join new negotiations. “The two greatest dangers,” he said, “are when tanks stand opposite tanks, at a distance of just some meters, as is the case now in Berlin, and the even greater danger of an incorrect assessment of the situation.”

  In the Berliner Morgenpost, a readers’ debate raged over whether or not one could still trust the Americans to defend Berlin’s freedom. One contributor from the city district of Steglitz asked whether the West was writing the Soviet Union a blank check to do what it wanted in West Berlin by the end of that year. Another writer said Marxists had it right that U.S. capitalism’s abundance had created an indecisive and indifferent society—“although it is five minutes before midnight.”

  Beside these letters was one from Raymond Aron, the famous French philosopher, echoing French leader Charles de Gaulle’s warning in a television appearance that week. “What is at stake,” wrote Aron, “isn’t just the fate of two million Berliners. It is the capability of the United States to convince Khrushchev that it has the tenacity not to give in to horse trading.”

  West Berliners were confused by their guarantor’s mixed messages. One day General Clay had landed in Steinstücken and flexed U.S. muscle through his patrols on their Autobahn. The next day Kennedy gave a speech that continued the American retreat. Kennedy had not even mentioned the Wall’s existence or the fact that East Germans were further fortifying it every day.

  New York Times columnist James “Scotty” Reston wrote that Kennedy “has talked like Churchill but acted like Chamberlain.” In the same column, Reston reported on a leaked Kenned
y memo regarding Clay’s confrontational Berlin measures in which the president asked senior officials why his policy of seeking negotiations on Berlin was being misunderstood.

  Reading the tea leaves and intelligence reports, Khrushchev was beginning to sense that Clay’s hard line in Berlin was nothing more than a retired general’s bold improvisation that lacked presidential blessing. There was sufficient sign of disagreement in U.S. policy circles that it was time to probe the differences.

  So Marshal Konev dispatched a sharp note to General Watson demanding that Clay’s “illegal” Autobahn patrols end. His letter, he stressed, wasn’t a “protest but a warning.” The Kennedy administration ordered Clay’s Autobahn patrols to stop after a week of successful operations. General Konev’s allies had been Clay’s American enemies.

  On September 27, General Clarke flew to Berlin to reprimand his commander again. After a ceremonial lunch with Clay for press purposes, General Clarke again advised General Watson, his Berlin commander, that U.S. forces could no longer be used to counteract Soviet or East German actions without his approval. The East German press got wind of Clay’s differences with the Kennedy administration and made much of it.

  Clarke then got wind of another secret Clay operation.

  Clay had ordered army engineers to construct barriers in a secluded forest on the outskirts of Berlin that would replicate the Wall as closely as possible. U.S. troops then mounted bulldozer attachments on their tanks, and Clay supervised as they crashed through the barriers, using different speeds and height placements for the shovels to achieve maximum efficiency. Clay’s purpose was to determine the best way to punch a hole through the barrier should the opportunity or necessity present itself.

  “As soon as I learned of it,” General Clarke would later write in a private correspondence, “I stopped it and got rid of what had been done.”