At the same time and more than an ocean away, Soviet ships had begun landing secretly at eleven different Cuban ports with the makings of a Soviet nuclear missile force of sufficient range and potency to obliterate New York City or Washington, D.C. On July 26, the Soviet freighter Maria Ulyanova, named for Lenin’s mother, had docked in the port city of Cabañas as the first of eighty-five Soviet ships that would make 150 round-trips in the following ninety days. They were transporting combat forces and the components for some twenty-four medium-range and sixteen longer-range launchers, each of which would be equipped with a nuclear warhead and two ballistic missiles.
Back in West Berlin, police and news reporters—standing atop ladders to get a better view over the Wall—tracked and photographed Fechter’s bitter end. U.S. troops in battle dress stood by, following orders that they not assist would-be refugees unless they had already escaped communist territory. A gathering crowd of West Berliners screamed their protests, condemning the East Germans as murderers and the Americans as cowards. A U.S. military police lieutenant told one of the onlookers, “It’s not my problem,” an expression of resignation that would spread among outraged West Berliners through the next day’s newspapers.
For their part, East German border guards balked at hauling away the dying victim, needlessly fearful that they would be shot by American troops. Only after Fechter’s body went limp and the East Germans exploded smoke bombs to cover their work did a border patrol carry away the corpse. Still, a photographer captured a tableau oddly reminiscent of the removal of Jesus from the cross. Appearing the following day on the front page of the Berliner Morgenpost, it showed three helmeted police, two of them with tommy guns, holding Fechter aloft with his arms splayed and his wrists bloodstained.
Fechter’s murder snapped something inside West Berliners. The following day, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, protesting American impotence as angrily as they did communist inhumanity. Their accumulated feelings of anger and frustration produced what New York Times correspondent Sydney Gruson called an “almost unbelievable scene” of West Berlin police firing water cannons and tear gas to prevent their own people from storming the Wall. Wrote Gruson: “More than any single event since the wall was built, Peter Fechter’s lonely and brutal death has made the West Berliners feel a sense of helplessness in the face of the creeping encroachment being worked so subtly by the Communists.”
Meanwhile, over Cuba, CIA aerial photography by mid-August had captured the intensive Soviet maritime activity, given the volume of the deliveries and the sloppiness of execution. Soldiers unloaded vessels at night with streetlights doused and then forwarded shipments over dirt roads in camouflaged vehicles that were so long, troops had to knock down peasant homes to negotiate the turns. Frontline commanders—when not waging war on mosquitoes, heat, or monsoons—communicated their steady progress back to Moscow through couriers to avoid U.S. electronic intercepts.
On August 22, the CIA alerted the White House that as many as 5,000 Soviet personnel had arrived on more than twenty vessels with large quantities of transport, communication, and construction equipment. CIA analysts said the speed and magnitude of this influx of Soviet personnel and matériel to a non–Soviet bloc country was “unprecedented in Soviet military aid activities; clearly something new and different is taking place.” The missiles themselves would not arrive for another two months, however, and America’s spy services for the moment concluded that Moscow was likely augmenting Cuba’s air defense system.
Upon first reflection, there would seem to be little to connect the public killing of a teenage bricklayer in East Berlin and the clandestine arrival of Soviet troops and missile launcher parts in Cuba. Yet, taken together, they dramatically symbolized the two most significant aftershocks of Kennedy’s mishandling of the events surrounding Berlin in 1961:
The first would be longer-lasting: the freezing in place of the Cold War division of Europe for three more decades, with all of its human costs. The Wall’s construction not only stopped East Germany’s unraveling at a time when the country’s viability was in doubt; it also condemned another generation of tens of millions of East Europeans to authoritarian, Soviet-style rule with its limits on individual and national freedom.
The second aftershock would be more immediate: the Cuban Missile Crisis in late 1962 with its threat of nuclear war. Though history would celebrate Kennedy for his management of the Cuban crisis, Khrushchev would not have risked putting nuclear weapons in Cuba at all if he had not concluded from Berlin in 1961 that Kennedy was weak and indecisive.
The world now knows what President Kennedy did not envision at the time: that the Berlin Wall would fall in November 1989, that Germany and Berlin would be unified a year later in October 1990, and that the Soviet Union itself would collapse a year after that, at the end of 1991. Given the Cold War’s happy ending, it has been tempting for historians to give Kennedy more credit than he deserves for that outcome. By avoiding undue risk to stop the Berlin Wall’s construction, their argument goes, Kennedy prevented war and set the stage for Germany’s eventual unification, for the liberation of the Soviet bloc’s captive nations, and for the enlargement of a free and democratic Europe.
However, the record—informed by new evidence and a closer examination of existing accounts and documents—demands a less generous judgment. Two-time National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft correctly notes in this book’s foreword, “History, sadly, does not reveal its alternatives.” But it does provide unmistakable clues. We will never know whether a more resolute Kennedy could have brought an earlier end to the Cold War. What’s beyond dispute, however, is that Kennedy’s actions allowed East German leaders to stop just the sort of refugee flow that would be the country’s undoing twenty-eight years later. The facts also make clear that Kennedy’s actions in 1961 were never motivated primarily by a desire to keep West Berlin free.
During his first year in office, Kennedy was not focused on rolling back communism in Europe, but instead was trying to stop its spread to the developing world. Regarding Berlin, he was most concerned about avoiding instability and miscalculations that would lead to nuclear war. Unlike his predecessors, Presidents Eisenhower and Truman, he was dismissive both of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his dreams of German unification.
Perhaps the best judge of Kennedy’s poor showing in 1961 was the president himself. He was privately candid about his mishandling of the Bay of Pigs crisis and the Vienna Summit. When, on September 22—more than a month after the border closure—Detroit News journalist Elie Abel sought Kennedy’s cooperation for a book he wished to write on Kennedy’s first year in office, the president responded, “Why would anyone want to write a book about an administration that has nothing to show for itself but a string of disasters?”
It was a refreshing expression of self-awareness about a year that had been marked by Kennedy’s inconsistency, indecision, and policy failure.
Though Kennedy’s election campaign had focused on fresh ideas and the urgent need for change, when it came to Berlin, he was more focused on maintaining the fragile status quo. He believed that one should only address the more intractable Berlin situation after a confidence-building process of negotiations on a nuclear test ban agreement and other arms control matters.
Then, in the first days of his administration, Kennedy failed to seize the best opportunity that would be available to him for a breakthrough in relations due to an amateur’s misreading of Khrushchev’s signals. The Soviet leader had demonstrated a new willingness to cooperate with the U.S. through a series of unilateral gestures that included the release of captured U.S. airmen on the morning after Kennedy’s inauguration. Instead, Kennedy decided that Khrushchev was escalating the Cold War to test him, a conclusion he had reached largely by overinterpreting the harsh rhetoric of a routine speech delivered to rally party propagandists.
What followed was Kennedy’s alarmist State of the Union speech. With considerable hyperbole, Kennedy t
old the nation what he had learned in less than two weeks in office that had prompted him to alter the far more cautious tone of his inaugural speech:
Each day, the crises multiply. Each day, their solution grows more difficult. Each day, we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger. I feel I must inform the Congress that our analyses over the last ten days make it clear that, in each of the principal areas of the crisis, the tide of events has been running out—and time has not been our friend.
The iconic moment for Kennedy’s first-year indecisiveness came with the Bay of Pigs debacle in April, when the president neither canceled an operation that had been spawned in the Eisenhower administration nor gave it the resources required for success. From that point forward, Kennedy rightly worried that Khrushchev had concluded he was weak, particularly given the Soviet leader’s more resolute response to the Hungarian uprising of 1956. As Kennedy told columnist James Reston after the Soviet leader had mauled him at the Vienna Summit, Khrushchev “thought anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken. And anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts. He just beat the hell out of me,” he told Reston. “I’ve got a terrible problem.”
After Khrushchev’s threat in Vienna to unilaterally change Berlin’s status by year’s end, Kennedy countered with escalated rhetoric, increased defense spending, greater troop readiness, and a review of military contingencies, including the U.S. nuclear response plan. Yet he was always a step behind the Soviets. When East German forces with Soviet backing closed the Berlin border on August 13 with such remarkable speed and efficiency, the U.S. and its allies seemed to have been caught flat-footed.
Accounts from the period suggest Kennedy was caught entirely by surprise. However, upon closer scrutiny, it is clear not only that Kennedy anticipated some Soviet action similar to what followed, but also that he helped write the script for it. Kennedy privately responded with relief rather than outrage, opting neither to disrupt the border closure when he had the chance nor punish his communist rivals with sanctions. He famously told aides, “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
The consistent message he had sent Khrushchev—directly in Vienna and indirectly thereafter through public speeches and back-channel messages—was that the Soviet leader could do whatever he wished on the territory he controlled as long as he didn’t touch West Berlin or Allied access to the city.
As Kennedy told White House economic adviser Walter Rostow several days before the border closure, “Khrushchev is losing East Germany. He cannot let that happen. If East Germany goes, so will Poland and all of Eastern Europe. He will have to do something to slow the flow of refugees. Perhaps a wall. And we won’t be able to prevent it. I can hold the Alliance together to defend West Berlin, but I cannot act to keep East Berlin open.”
On August 13, 1961, Khrushchev and Ulbricht could act with relative confidence that Kennedy would not respond as long as they remained within the guardrails he himself had established. Probably for that reason they constructed the Wall in its entirety not directly on the border but safely a few paces back in East Berlin. Disdainful of German unification aspirations and willing to accept the existing European balance of power, Kennedy was driven by the mistaken hope that by making the Soviets feel more secure in Berlin, he would increase the chances for fruitful negotiations on a wider range of issues. Instead, as the Cuban crisis would later show, Kennedy’s inaction in Berlin only encouraged greater Soviet misbehavior.
Scholars have long wondered whether Kennedy provided even more explicit approval in advance for the Berlin Wall’s construction. If such communication occurred, it likely would have come during the regular meetings of the president’s brother Robert and Soviet intermediary Georgi Bolshakov, the Soviet military intelligence agent who had established himself as the secret conduit between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Bobby would later apologize for failing to keep a record of those conversations. Bolshakov’s own available account sheds no light on his talks with Bobby just before or after the border closure, and Kremlin and Soviet intelligence archives that could provide clues remain closed.
In spite of that, however, the resemblance is so striking between the course Kennedy had endorsed and what the Soviets and East Germans executed as to be more than coincidental. Kennedy provided Khrushchev greater latitude for action in Berlin than any of his predecessors had done. The declassified transcripts of their Vienna Summit detail the de facto deal Kennedy was willing to strike: He would give Khrushchev a free hand to seal Berlin’s border in exchange for a guarantee that the Soviets would not disrupt West Berlin’s continued freedom or Allied access to the city. Senior U.S. officials who would read the Vienna transcripts later would be shocked by Kennedy’s unprecedented willingness to recognize the postwar division of Europe as permanent in the interest of achieving stability. As Kennedy told Khrushchev on the first day of their Vienna talks, “It was crucial to have the changes occurring in the world and affecting the balance of power take place in a way that would not involve the prestige of the treaty commitments of our two countries.”
The next day Kennedy would extend this line of argument more explicitly to Berlin, repetitively restricting America’s commitment to “West Berlin” and not to all of Berlin as his predecessors had. Kennedy drove home that distinction publicly on July 25 in a live, televised speech whose message of retreat to Khrushchev over Berlin was so clear that it unsettled U.S. policy-makers who had so carefully crafted the language of diplomacy since World War II.
Two weeks before the Berlin border closure, on July 30, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman William Fulbright said of the Berlin border on national television: “The truth of the matter is, I think, the Russians have the power to close it in any case…. Next week, if they chose to close their borders, they could, without violating any treaty. I don’t understand why the East Germans don’t close their border, because I think they have a right to close it.”
With that, the Arkansas senator had said publicly what Kennedy was thinking privately. The president did nothing to repudiate him, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy privately told Kennedy that he considered Fulbright’s words “helpful.” Without any countervailing presidential statement, Khrushchev concluded that Fulbright had delivered a deliberate signal, and he said as much both to East German leader Walter Ulbricht and visiting Italian President Amintore Fanfani. “When the border is closed,” Khrushchev told Ulbricht, “the Americans and West Germans will be happy. [U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Llewellyn] Thompson told me that this [refugee] flight is causing the West Germans a lot of trouble. So when we institute these controls, everyone will be satisfied. And beyond that, they will feel your power.”
“Yes,” replied Ulbricht, “and we will have achieved stability.” It was the one thing that unified Ulbricht, Khrushchev, and Kennedy: the desire for East German stability.
Throughout 1961, Berlin was an unwanted, inherited problem for Kennedy, and never a cause that he wished to champion. Speaking from the steaming waters of his giant golden bathtub in Paris during a break in his talks with de Gaulle, Kennedy complained to aides Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, “It seems silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty preserving Berlin as the future capital of a unified Germany when all of us know that Germany will probably never be reunified.” On the plane to London after the Vienna Summit, Kennedy again complained to O’Donnell, “We didn’t cause the disunity in Germany. We aren’t really responsible for the four-power occupation of Berlin, a mistake neither we nor the Russians should have agreed to in the first place.”
If establishing the Cold War’s terms for another three decades was the powerful long-term outcome of Berlin 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the most significant short-term aftershock. In the minds of Kennedy and Khrushchev, the Cuban and Berlin situations were inextricably linked.
Critics called Khrushchev’s scheme to put nuclear missiles in Cuba a reckless
gamble, but from the Soviet leader’s perspective it was a calculated risk based on what he knew of Kennedy. At the end of 1961, he told a group of Soviet officials that he had learned Kennedy would do almost anything to avoid nuclear war. “I know for certain,” he had said, “that Kennedy doesn’t have a strong background, nor, generally speaking, does he have the courage to stand up to a serious challenge.” Regarding Cuba, he told his son Sergei that Kennedy “would make a fuss, make more of a fuss, and then agree.”
Despite all his first-year setbacks, Kennedy remained so willing to provide Khrushchev concessions to reach a Berlin deal that a proposal he made in April 1962 triggered a significant clash with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. What Kennedy called a “Principles Paper” proposed an “International Access Authority” that would transfer control of access to Berlin from the four powers to a newly created body through which the Soviets and East Germans could block entry by anyone they wished. All Kennedy sought in return was Kremlin acceptance of continued Allied military presence and rights in West Berlin.
The document so directly lifted Soviet language that in a copy passed by Washington to Moscow, the drafters had underscored sections to show what they had borrowed. Beyond that, the paper dropped any mention of German reunification as an eventual goal to be achieved through free elections, which had previously been a nonnegotiable point with Moscow. Never had U.S. proposals so closely resembled Soviet positions or strayed so far from those of Adenauer. At first, Kennedy provided Adenauer only one day for response to a draft. He extended that to forty-eight hours only after angry West German protests.
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