U.S. commanders had placed their entire 6,500-man garrison in Berlin on alert. The French command had ordered its 3,000 men held in barracks. The British had brought out two antitank guns near the Brandenburg Gate, about 600 yards away, and had sent armed patrols right up to the barbed-wire barricade at the gate. A New York Times reporter chronicled the scene for his readers: “It was like two chess players trying to come to grips in the middle of a disorganized board, with General Clay moving the American pieces and, presumably, Marshal Ivan S. Konev, the recently appointed Soviet Commander in East Germany moving the Soviet men…. As personal representative of President Kennedy, General Clay does not have a place in the regular chain of command. But…it is clear that his special position has given him the decisive voice in local decisions.”
Pike and his MPs were eager to stand up to the communists, having been frustrated that their commanders had kept them in barracks on August 13. It was three weeks after the border had been closed, and Pike and his men had been reduced to watching helplessly across the border as East German Young Pioneer construction brigades replaced the flimsy barbed-wire barrier with cinder blocks.
Pike had sought guidance from his superiors over whether he should do something to disrupt their handiwork, but he got what became a consistent message: U.S. soldiers should sit on their hands and watch the Wall rise.
On the evening of September 1, Pike would recall that one of the East Germans building the wall had glanced left and right to make sure no one was watching, and then said to him over the barbed wire, “Lieutenant, look how slowly I’m working. What are you waiting for?” He wanted the Americans to intervene.
Later, a police officer standing behind the worker said much the same: “Look, Lieutenant, my machine gun isn’t loaded. What are you waiting for?” In order to avoid an unwanted firefight, East German officers had not put bullets in the chambers of such border troops, and he was sharing that information with Pike so the U.S. would know it could strike.
Pike passed all that information to his superiors but was again told to show restraint.
The orders to begin the military escorts the previous Sunday were the biggest morale-booster of the year. Pike’s men were to hold the line, be vigilant, and fire upon communist border police should they engage. With rifles loaded and tanks protecting their rear, they had repeatedly guided Allied civilian cars and tourist buses through the border’s zigzag barriers.
Until Soviet tanks had rolled up that afternoon, the operation had worked as planned. Now all forces were frozen in place as commanders huddled in opposing headquarters on opposite sides of Berlin, awaiting instructions from Washington and Moscow.
Pike was relieved his fatigues were still dry. The paraphernalia he carried was hardly the stuff to stop Soviet tanks or infantry: an MP brassard wrapped around his upper left arm, a first-aid pouch, a canteen, handcuffs, a billy club, a .45 caliber automatic, and his rifle. Pike braced for a long and cold night. Looking through his binoculars at the young, frightened faces of his enemies, he worried “what would happen if one of those idiots took a shot at us—and then if the showdown became a shootout.”
Even as the Soviets were escalating their tank presence, Clay received new instructions from Washington to retreat. Rusk was warning Clay off the aggressive course Rusk himself had endorsed just three days earlier. Foy Kohler, the lead man at the State Department handling the Checkpoint Charlie showdown, had attached a note to Rusk’s cable that was intended to convince Clay that any appeal to Kennedy would be a waste of time. It read: “Approved by [Rusk] after consideration by the President.” Clay had seen plenty of political mushiness from Washington over the years, but nothing topped the message that followed.
“In the nature of things,” Rusk wrote, “we had long since decided that entry into Berlin is not a vital interest which would warrant determined recourse to force to protect and sustain. Having for this reason acquiesced in the building of the wall we must recognize frankly among ourselves that we thus went a long way in accepting the fact that the Soviets could, in the case of East Berlin, as they have done previously in other areas under their effective physical control, isolate their unwilling subjects.”
Rusk’s message was unmistakable: Clay should view Kennedy’s lack of resistance to the border closure as de facto acceptance that the Soviets could do whatever they wished on territory they currently controlled. Rusk said U.S. allies would not support stronger measures, “especially on the issue of showing credentials,” where the British had already caved.
Rusk conceded to Clay that Kennedy was having difficulty convincing the Allies of the “real prospect” of armed conflict over West Berlin. Consequently, while the Kennedy administration wanted to demonstrate the illegality of the East German and Soviet actions of August 13, “we have not wished this to go so far as to constitute simply a demonstration of impotence, to focus world-wide public attention on the wrong issue and to arouse hopes and expectations on the part of West Berliners and the West Germans who in the end could only be disillusioned,” Rusk explained.
Clay had never been more convinced that appeasement would only encourage the Russian bear. Because of that, earlier that same day he had sent a telegram calling for “a raid in force” to knock down portions of the Wall should the East Germans respond to ongoing U.S. actions by shutting down Friedrichstrasse altogether, which he considered possible.
He outlined how it would work: tanks with bulldozer mounts would cross legally into East Germany, which was technically allowed under four-power rights, but then they would plow demonstratively through sections of the Wall on their way back. On October 26, NATO Supreme Commander Norstad had authorized General Watson to use “the present [Clay] plan for ‘nosing’ down the Friedrichstrasse barrier” if the East Germans blocked the crossing entirely. He instructed Watson to prepare an alternative plan in which the tanks would “nose down” different portions of the Wall simultaneously, “if practicable from a military standpoint, at several [two or more] other places as well as the Friedrichstrasse.”
He had added as an unmistakable message to Clay: “This alternate plan will not under any circumstances be placed in action without specific approval from me.”
In fact, Rusk’s new cable had shot down Norstad and Clay at the same time. “I am unable to see what national purpose would be accomplished by the proposed raid in force,” wrote Rusk. He added that Clay’s lesser goal of using a tank to open up the Friedrichstrasse crossing would be discussed that afternoon with the president.
However, said Rusk, given the importance of keeping “the three principal Allies together it seems quite possible that we cannot get agreement on even this much.” Rusk expressed his appreciation for Clay’s counsel but told him that at the moment it was far more important to keep the Allies together “in the face of the grave Soviet threat while at the same time building up pressures on Soviets against further unilateral action.”
The great General Lucius Clay of the 1948 Berlin Airlift was being hog-tied by Washington while Soviet tanks were pointing their barrels down his throat.
He had never felt so powerless.
THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1961
Marshal Konev complained to Khrushchev that the U.S. tanks were gunning their engines at the border and seemed prepared for a major operation. Having already provided the Soviet leader with the photographic evidence of Clay’s exercises in the woods, where tanks had practiced knocking down replicas of the Wall, he believed that Khrushchev needed to take seriously the prospect that the Americans might try to undo the Soviet success of August 13.
Khrushchev, who by this time was managing the crisis personally from Moscow despite his ongoing Party Congress, had already called for an additional twenty-three Soviet tanks to be brought into Berlin. “Take our tanks to the neighboring street,” he told Konev, “but let their engines run there in the same high gear. And put the noise and the roar from the tanks through amplifiers.”
Konev warned Khrushchev that if he challenged the Americans in such a way, the U.S. tanks “may rush forward.” He worried that the impetuous Khrushchev might overplay the Soviet hand and start a war.
“I don’t think so,” Khrushchev replied, “unless, of course, the minds of the American military have been made blind with hatred.”
CABINET ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
6:00 P.M., FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1961
An aide handed General Clay a note informing him of the Soviet increase in armor at Checkpoint Charlie just while he was in the midst of a telephone conversation with President Kennedy, who was huddled in the Cabinet Room in an emergency session with his national security team. By that time it seemed that all of Washington had turned against Clay except Kennedy, who had not yet revealed his hand.
To counteract the concerns of the president’s advisers, Clay reassured Kennedy that matters in Berlin were under control. He insisted that the Soviet decision to move twenty more tanks forward was a message of moderation, as the Soviets were merely mathematically matching the U.S. force capability in Berlin.
That said, the Soviets were nervous enough about the Checkpoint Charlie showdown, and its potential for escalation, that Khrushchev had put his nuclear strike forces on special alert status for the first time ever over a U.S.–Soviet dispute. Khrushchev could not be sure that matters would not spin out of control, and he was preparing for all possibilities.
Clay’s view was clear: “If the Soviets don’t want war over West Berlin, we can’t start it. If they do, there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” The general was willing to gamble they didn’t want a war and believed that the U.S. should push back. However, the president was holding the dice and was unwilling to take the risk.
What Clay would never know was that Kennedy was so unnerved by the Checkpoint Charlie showdown that he had dispatched his brother to solve the crisis with his regular interlocutor of the past six months, the Soviet spy Georgi Bolshakov. At the same time he was again working a second, more traditional channel through Ambassador Thompson in Moscow, just as he had done before the Vienna Summit.
The president wasn’t turning to the Bolshakov back channel because of its proven success. Bobby’s meetings with Bolshakov before Vienna had done little to prepare him for Khrushchev’s ambush on Berlin. At a dangerous moment, however, Bolshakov was the fastest and most direct line to Khrushchev.
By late October, Bobby knew how to arrange a meeting with Bolshakov rapidly, and where the media would not find them. James Symington, Bobby’s assistant at the Office of the Attorney General, thought his boss had warmed up to “Georgi” partly due to his “predilection for harmless buffoons.” They met every fortnight or so, and Bobby discussed with him “most of the major matters dealing with the Soviet Union and the United States.”
The president’s brother made arrangements for the meetings himself, and would later regret that “unfortunately—stupidly—I didn’t write many of the things down. I just delivered the messages verbally to my brother and he’d act on them and I think sometimes he’d tell the State Department and sometimes he didn’t.”
The first Bobby Kennedy–Bolshakov meeting about the rising border tensions at Checkpoint Charlie came at 5:30 p.m. on October 26, one day before Soviet tanks rolled up to the crossing. According to the recollection of the president’s brother, the second and crucial negotiations came at 11:30 p.m. Washington time on October 27, or 5:30 in the morning on October 28 in Berlin, at a time when the two sides’ tanks and soldiers were positioned across from each other in the damp, cold autumn dawn.
Bobby Kennedy recalled that he told Bolshakov, “The situation in Berlin has become more difficult.” He complained that Foreign Minister Gromyko had rebuffed Ambassador Thompson’s efforts that day to defuse the crisis. “It is our opinion that such an attitude is not helpful at a time when efforts are being made to find a way to resolve this problem,” said Kennedy. He appealed for a “period of relative moderation and calm over the course of the next four to six weeks.”
The attorney general would later recall that he then told Bolshakov, “The President would like them to take their tanks out of there in twenty-four hours.” And that’s precisely what Khrushchev would do. Bobby would later say that their exchange on the tank showdown at Checkpoint Charlie demonstrated that Bolshakov “delivered effectively when it was a matter of importance.”
What no one recorded were the details of the agreement. However, from that point forward, the U.S. stopped its military escorts of civilians, and Clay no longer challenged East German authority at the border points. Whatever contingencies Clay had scripted to knock through portions of the Wall were shelved, and the shovels mounted to tanks to knock portions of the Wall were removed and put in storage.
Absent any resistance, East Germany further reinforced and expanded its Wall.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
10:00 P.M., FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1961
On Friday night, October 27, Secretary of State Rusk sent a telegram to the U.S. Mission in Berlin that declared victory while engaging in retreat. The cable noted that the crucial decision ending the Berlin Crisis had been taken at a meeting at the White House at 5:00 p.m. attended by the president, Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, Kohler, and Hillenbrand. It would be sent to NATO and all the U.S. embassies in the three chief Allied capitals. Almost as an afterthought, Clay was copied as well.
“Probes to date have accomplished their purpose,” Rusk lied. Kennedy and Clay could argue that Soviet tanks’ appearance at the border was their victory, proving their point that it was Moscow and not East Berlin that still controlled events in the city.
Yet it was clear Rusk was waving the white flag. The cable declared, “Further probes by U.S. personnel wearing civilian clothes and riding in official U.S. vehicles or privately owned vehicles bearing plates of U.S. Armed Forces and using armed guards or military escort will be deferred.”
Just in case his point was missed, Rusk’s next instruction made clear that the president wanted Clay to avoid any further confrontation with the East Germans or the Soviets. “U.S. civilian officials,” it said, “will for the time being refrain from going into East Berlin except that one civilian official will attempt daily to enter East Berlin in a privately owned vehicle without armed escort.”
Clay would stay for another several months, but his enemies had won. Rusk drove home that reality further, saying, “For the time being nothing further can be done on the spot since the matter has now moved to the highest government levels…. Instructions have been issued to defer any further civilian probes with armed escorts into East Berlin.”
Even as stubborn a man as Clay knew he had to stand down.
PALACE OF CONGRESSES, MOSCOW
SATURDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 28, 1961
After an evening of tension at the Berlin border, Marshal Konev met with Khrushchev in Moscow as his long Party Congress entered its final two days. Konev reported to Khrushchev that the situation at the border in Berlin was unchanged. No one was moving, he told the Soviet leader, “except when the tank operators on both sides would climb out and walk around to warm up.”
Khrushchev instructed Konev to withdraw Soviet tanks first. “I’m sure that within twenty minutes or however long it takes them to get their instructions, the American tanks will pull back, too,” he said, speaking with the confidence of a man who had made a deal.
“They can’t turn their tanks around and pull them back as long as our guns are pointing at them,” Khrushchev said. “They’ve gotten themselves into a difficult situation, and they don’t know how to get out of it…. So let’s give them one.”
Shortly after 10:30 on Saturday morning, the first Soviet tanks retreated from Checkpoint Charlie. Some of them were covered by flowers, garlands put on them that morning by members of the Freie Deutsche Jugend, the party’s youth organization.
After a half hour’s wait, the U.S. tanks pulled back as well.
With that, the Cold Wa
r’s most perilous moment ended with a whimper. However, the aftershocks of Berlin 1961 would be dramatic and long-lasting. They would shake the world a year later in Cuba—and they would shape the world for three decades to come.
Epilogue
AFTERSHOCKS
I recognize fully that Khrushchev’s main intention may be to increase his chances at Berlin, and we shall be ready to take a full role there as well as in the Caribbean. What is essential at this moment of highest test is that Khrushchev should discover that if he is counting on weakness or irresolution, he has miscalculated.
President Kennedy, in a secret cable informing British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of the photographic evidence of Cuban missiles, October 21, 1962
There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin….
All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
President Kennedy, in a speech to Berliners, June 26, 1963
BERLIN AND HAVANA
MID-AUGUST 1962
A year after President John F. Kennedy acquiesced to the communist construction of the Berlin Wall, two dramas occurring five thousand miles apart illustrated the high cost of one of the worst inaugural-year performances of any modern U.S. president.
The first scene unfolded on August 17 under the spotlight of a Berlin summer sun just minutes after two in the afternoon, when eighteen-year-old bricklayer Peter Fechter and his friend Helmut Kulbeik began their sprint toward freedom across the so-called death strip, the no-man’s-land that lay before the Wall. The first of thirty-five police shots came after the two had squirmed through an intermediary barrier of barbed wire. Two bullets pierced Fechter’s back and stomach as he watched his more agile friend leap to freedom over strands of barbed wire that adorned the barrier’s crown. Fechter collapsed at the base of the wall, where he lay in a quivering fetal position with his arms folded across his chest, his left shoe half off and the white of his ankle showing. For most of an hour, his failing voice cried out for help as his life bled out through multiple wounds.
Berlin 1961 Page 53
