Khrushchev vowed the Soviets would not be the first ones to resume testing—then waved away the idea of a treaty.
The real danger, he said, “the bone in my throat,” was Berlin.
East Berlin was now losing a thousand people a day. The best-educated youth and the most highly skilled workers were being lured away by the West. It was time for the entire city, East and West, to come under the control of East Germany.
The United States, Kennedy responded, would never abandon West Berlin. Freedom around the world, including in West Berlin, was what the Americans had fought for in World War II.
But the Soviets, Khrushchev shot back, had paid a far higher price for victory in World War II than anyone. The Americans and British were proud, rightfully, of their role in saving the world from Adolf Hitler. But of the three big Allied powers—the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union—the Soviets took 95 percent of the casualties in the war with Germany. And it was personal—one of Khrushchev’s own sons, Leonid, was killed in the war.
Kennedy pointed out that his older brother, Joe, had also died fighting in Europe.
Khrushchev was unmoved. “If the U.S. wants to start a war over Germany, let it be so,” he said, waving his arm. “If there is any madman who wants war, he should be put in a straitjacket!”
They broke for lunch. Then the combat continued.
Kennedy circled back to his original point—that both sides had to step back from the cliff’s edge before it was too late.
“We can destroy each other,” he said.
“Yes, Mr. President, I agree.”
So don’t seize West Berlin, Kennedy cautioned. Don’t force us to act.
“Force would be met by force,” Khrushchev warned. “If the U.S. wants war, that’s its problem.”
And that’s how the summit ended, with the Soviet leader promising to take action in Berlin by December. “And if there is any attempt to interfere with these plans,” warned Khrushchev, “there will be war.”
“Then there will be war,” Kennedy said. “It’s going to be a very cold winter.”
* * *
The president returned to the U.S. ambassador’s residence with a hat—and he hated hats—pulled low over his forehead. He dropped onto a couch and let out a long sigh.
“How was it?” asked New York Times reporter James Reston, who’d arranged to interview Kennedy after the meeting.
“Worst thing in my life,” Kennedy said. “He savaged me.”
Khrushchev, meanwhile, was in the mood to dance.
Back in Moscow a few days later, the Soviet premier attended a garden party at the Indonesian embassy. He joked, he sang, he banged on drums. When the musicians broke into a traditional Russian folk tune, Khrushchev showed off his moves on the dance floor while the crowd surrounded him, clapping in time with the music.
TIME TO START
SOON AFTER COMING HOME FROM Europe, John and Jackie Kennedy were sitting in the Oval Office when the Soviet ambassador to the United States stepped into the room flanked by two members of his staff. In one staffer’s arms was a fluffy white puppy.
The president stared at the dog, then turned to his wife when he heard her gasp.
“I was only trying to make some conversation,” she whispered.
The Soviet ambassador introduced Pushinka, daughter to Strelka, who had orbited earth in a Soviet spacecraft. Pushinka, the ambassador explained, was a generous gift from Nikita Khrushchev to the Kennedys. Of course, the dog was also a poke in the eye—an adorable reminder of Soviet victories in the space and rocket race.
Kennedy thanked the ambassador. Then he sent the puppy to a military hospital to be checked for hidden listening devices.
She came back clean.
* * *
In the Ministry of Defense building in Moscow, Oleg Penkovsky shut himself in a room of secret files. He jammed a chair under the doorknob. He took out his mini Minox camera, opened a folder with technical specs of Soviet missiles, and began snapping pictures.
On the afternoon of July 2, Penkovsky took a break from the office and walked to a nearby park. He strolled along a tree-lined path, taking in the details—retired people on benches, mothers and children, vendors selling ice cream. She’d be here somewhere, he knew. Anne, that was the code name. He’d seen a photo of her back in the London hotel. An English woman, thirty-two, with dark hair. She’d have a baby boy in a carriage and two young daughters.
There she was, sitting on a bench, the girls playing nearby. He walked past without making eye contact. Too many people around.
A few minutes later it began to rain. A lucky break. People started leaving the park.
Penkovsky walked back to the woman. He stopped at the carriage and smiled at the baby. He pulled a small box of colorful vitamin C drops from his pocket and held it out to the mother—for the girls, he gestured.
She nodded thanks and slid the vitamins under the baby’s blanket.
Anne’s real name was Janet Chisholm. A former employee of MI6, she spoke Russian and French and was married to Ruari Chisholm, a diplomatic officer at the British embassy. Supposedly. His real job was head of the MI6 station in Moscow.
The Chisholms were used to surveillance. They’d found listening devices hidden in the walls of their Moscow apartment. House cleaners openly went through their drawers. Janet fired the first one she caught, but what was the point? They were working for the KGB, she realized. They’d just send someone else. It was not an ideal environment in which to try to collect documents from a Soviet spy. But MI6 needed someone to take the risky role of courier. Janet Chisholm stepped up.
The first meeting had gone well. She led her daughters back to their apartment with a vitamin box full of Soviet secrets under her baby son’s blanket.
* * *
Two days later, on July 4, Oleg Penkovsky was called into his boss’s office.
And given a promotion.
Everyone was impressed with the intelligence he’d brought back from London, Penkovsky was told. He should plan more of these “friendly tours” to cities in the West.
Penkovsky promised to get right on it.
He was now in the rare position of being a double agent. Both sides trusted him. Both sides were sure he was working for them.
* * *
“You know,” John Kennedy told his guests, “they have an atom bomb on the third floor of the embassy.”
The president had invited a few friends to dinner. Knowing his love of spy novels, they figured he was joking about the Soviets having an actual fission device hidden in the Soviet embassy in Washington.
Kennedy wasn’t joking. The Soviets had sneaked in the parts, he said, and assembled them in the embassy attic.
“If things get too bad and war is inevitable, they will set it off and that’s the end of the White House and the rest of the city. That’s what I’m told.”
Kennedy was almost certainly wrong about there being a bomb in the city—it’s probably another example of the big eyes of fear. But the fact that he believed it tells us a lot about his state of mind in the summer of 1961. The Cold War was heading in a terrifying direction.
“Ever since the longbow,” he said that summer, “when man had developed new weapons and stockpiled them, somebody has come along and used them. I don’t know how we escape it with nuclear weapons.”
* * *
On July 10, in the Oval Hall of the Kremlin, Nikita Khrushchev spoke to a large group of party leaders, military officers, and atomic scientists. It was time, Khrushchev had decided, for the Soviet Union to resume testing hydrogen bombs.
The Soviets were behind America in terms of the might of their arsenal. The ongoing embarrassment of East Berlin was also a factor. How could they convince the world of the wonders of communism when people were leaving by the thousands? Something had to be done to strengthen the Soviet position.
Khrushchev announced his decision. It was not up for discussion.
Andrei Sakharov, the physici
st who led the Soviet hydrogen bomb program, borrowed a piece of paper from a scientist next to him. More tests, he wrote, and ever more powerful bombs, would only make the world more dangerous for everyone. He passed the note to Khrushchev.
Khrushchev glanced at it. Then at Sakharov.
An hour later, they took a break for wine and caviar. Khrushchev stood to make a toast.
“Sakharov writes that we don’t need tests,” he began, holding up the piece of paper. “But Sakharov goes further. He’s moved beyond science into politics. Here he’s poking his nose where it doesn’t belong.”
Powerful men stared down at their plates. Andrei Sakharov was utterly alone.
“Leave politics to us—we’re the specialists,” the premier continued, growing louder and redder as he worked himself up. “You make your bombs and test them, and we won’t interfere with you; we’ll help you. But remember, we have to conduct our policies from a position of strength. We don’t advertise it, but that’s how it is! There can’t be any other policy. Our opponents don’t understand any other language.”
* * *
Television lights shined on the president’s desk. The air-conditioning was off. The Oval Office was quiet, bright, and sweltering. John Kennedy sat at his desk, sweating through his makeup, waiting to address the nation.
Kennedy did not yet know that the Soviets were about to resume nuclear tests, though that would have fit in with his theme for the evening—Berlin, Khrushchev’s constant threats, and the danger of nuclear war.
West Berlin, Kennedy told the American people, was “the great testing place of Western courage and will.” The Soviets already controlled a billion people and a huge chunk of the globe. If the United States were to retreat from Berlin, the communists would move closer to world domination. “We do not want to fight,” he said, “but we have fought before.”
Kennedy announced that he would ask Congress for more defense spending. Planes with hydrogen bombs would be on alert at all times. “An attack upon that city,” he said of West Berlin, “will be regarded as an attack upon us all.”
Which brought him to the larger point he needed to discuss.
“In the thermonuclear age, any misjudgment on either side about the intentions of the other could rain more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars of human history.” In this frightening new world, each American had a new responsibility: know what to do in case of nuclear war. Do your part to help the country live on. “In the event of an attack,” Kennedy said, “the lives of those families which are not hit in a nuclear blast and fire can still be saved—if they can be warned to take shelter and if that shelter is available.”
Give yourself a chance. Make a plan. Stock up supplies. Build shelters.
“The time to start,” he said, “is now.”
* * *
Americans, who had been listening to warnings about nuclear war for ten years, got the message. The sales of shovels shot up after Kennedy’s speech. Also canned food, bottled water, guns, and Geiger counters to measure radiation. People dug holes in their yards or carved out shelter spaces in basements of homes and apartment buildings. “If war never comes,” a Life magazine article suggested, “children can claim it for a hideaway, father can use it for poker games, and mother can count on it as a guest room.” The government’s Civil Defense department printed millions of posters and pamphlets, urging every American to prepare for the worst.
Some families built their bunkers in secret, worried that neighbors might come knocking. “When I get my shelter finished,” announced one man in the suburbs of Chicago, “I’m going to mount a machine gun at the hatch to keep the neighbors out.”
A civil defense official in Las Vegas, Nevada, recommended the formation of a five-thousand-man militia—not to fight Russians, but to beat back Californians who might arrive once the bombs began to fall.
* * *
“The United States is openly preparing for war,” Radio Moscow beamed to the world shortly after the president’s speech. “If a third world war breaks out, no ocean will protect America. It is very dangerous to play with fire in the age of hydrogen bombs and ballistic rockets.”
The Soviet Union, meanwhile, went on openly preparing for war.
Tens of thousands of government officials worked to teach the entire population what to do if the Americans attacked. Average Soviet citizens had no money for private bunkers, so the focus was on building public shelters in the basements of large buildings. If the warning sounded, Soviet civil defense planners explained, up to two million people could fit into the subway tunnels under Moscow.
* * *
In early August, Walter Ulbricht, the dictator of East Germany, traveled to Moscow to meet with Nikita Khrushchev about the ongoing crisis in Berlin. Ulbricht proposed a way to solve the problem once and for all. He just needed backing from Moscow.
Khrushchev agreed to the plan. “When would it be best for you to do this?” he asked. “Do it when you want. We can do it at any time.”
Ulbricht proposed starting on August 13.
Khrushchev chuckled. In the West, he pointed out, the number thirteen was considered unlucky.
“For us,” he added, “it would be a very lucky day indeed.”
THE BERLIN WALL
“MOTHER, GO AWAY. IT’S SUNDAY.”
It was early on the morning of August 13 and Harry Seidel was sleeping—or trying to—in the East Berlin apartment he shared with his mother, wife, and baby son.
Harry’s mother shook his shoulder again. “You must get up. They’ve closed the frontier.”
“They’ve what!”
He shot out of bed and ran to the radio. It was true—the East German police were blocking the border to West Berlin. It had to be done, the government claimed, to protect the citizens of the East from the evil capitalists of the West.
Seidel threw on his riding clothes and rolled his racing bike to the front door.
“Where are you going, Harry?” asked Rotraut, his wife.
“To think,” he said. “And to look.”
Harry Seidel got on his bike and pedaled toward the border. Just two years before, he’d been one of the top young cyclists in East Germany. The government paid him to train and race, prepping him for the 1960 Olympics in Rome. But when pressed by officials, he refused to take steroids. Or to join the Communist Party. The training money evaporated. Seidel took a job delivering morning newspapers in West Berlin. He was one of about eighty thousand East Berliners who crossed the border every day for work—though that would not be possible now.
As he rode through the city on this warm summer morning, Seidel saw Soviet-made tanks blocking intersections. He watched soldiers and police unrolling barbed-wire fences across streets connecting East and West Berlin. In an instant, the barriers separated people from their schools and jobs, their friends and families. Seidel saw a man in the West, with tears in his eyes, staring through barbed wire at a two-year-old boy holding the hand of an old woman in the East. “Please,” the man kept saying. “Please do something. It’s my son.”
The West Berlin police could do nothing.
But maybe Harry Seidel could.
* * *
John Kennedy was sailing off the coast of Cape Cod when he got the news from Berlin. He hurried back to shore and called the White House from his family’s vacation home.
The president’s worst fear was that the Soviets and East Germans were seizing West Berlin, in which case he’d have only minutes to decide whether or not to respond with nuclear bombs. But that did not seem to be the case. He was relieved.
“It’s not a very nice solution,” Kennedy said. “But a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
* * *
Thousands of West Berliners lined the border, some just curious, some throwing stones over the barbed wire at East German police, taunting them with insults:
“Pigs!”
“Nazis!”
The police fired back with ca
nisters of tear gas. U.S. Army helicopters hovered overhead, just watching. The fence was on East German territory. Short of invasion, there wasn’t much the Americans could do.
In some spots, apartment buildings lined the border between East and West, and people jumped out windows in the East and landed in the West. When East German police began boarding up lower-story windows facing the West, people climbed to higher floors. West Berlin firefighters raced to the scene and held out nets to catch people as they jumped to freedom. Ida Siekmann, a fifty-nine-year-old nurse, died after leaping from a third-story window, becoming the first person to die attempting to escape from East Berlin.
The first to be killed by police was a twenty-four-year-old tailor named Günter Litfin, who jumped fully clothed into Berlin’s Spree River and tried to swim across the water separating East and West. East German police on a bridge opened fire. Litfin raised his hands in surrender. The police shot him through the neck. Then they went to his mother’s apartment and trashed the place, tossing clothes from drawers, slicing open mattresses, smashing appliances.
“Your son has been shot dead,” they told her. “He was a criminal.”
In the days after August 13, the East Germans fortified the border with watchtowers and bright floodlights—just like a prison. They began replacing the barbed wire fences with permanent slabs of concrete.
* * *
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