Eisenhower did not debate Zhukov. He agreed with Zhukov’s description of the intent of Soviet policy. His “entire experience in Berlin with Marshal Zhukov had led him to place credence” in what Zhukov had told him.34
Zhukov then explained why the Soviets had so many armed forces at the ready. Soviet intelligence occasionally forwarded warnings to the leadership of the “readiness of [NATO] to annihilate the Soviet Union from bases located close to the Soviet frontiers.” Under those circumstances, Zhukov explained, Moscow had to be prudent. He reminded Eisenhower that they both had seen their countries fall victim to vicious surprise attacks in 1941. Six months before the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, the Soviets had been invaded by the Nazis. “These armaments,” Zhukov explained, “of course, were a burden on the Soviet economy, but [the Soviets did] not wish a repetition of 1941, and no more than the United States could afford to play fast and loose with their security.”35
Zhukov “urged” Eisenhower to take his word “as a soldier” that the Soviet Union wanted relief from this military standoff. He argued that the two countries “should work very seriously towards a détente.” He was hopeful that despite the fact that the United States was “a rich country,” America similarly welcomed “a relief from the armaments burden.”36
Eisenhower responded energetically. Like Zhukov, he assumed that responsible leaders in both countries opposed war. Nevertheless, Eisenhower also believed that the Cold War was as much a psychological phenomenon as a clash of interests. Careful not to seem too disparaging of the U.S. Congress or the American press in a meeting with a Soviet (recent leaks of documents surrounding the Yalta Conference were a reminder that such diplomatic documents do not stay secret for long), Eisenhower tried to explain the role of public opinion in restraining the U.S. government in moving toward détente. He cautioned Zhukov not to expect an improvement “overnight.” It would “take some time until the present psychological state of distrust and fear were overcome.”
The meeting continued over lunch, where the U.S. president became more expansive. When the Soviet marshal explained that putting an end to the polemics in Soviet and American statements might be a good first step, Eisenhower explained the limits on his presidential power. Khrushchev could control Pravda, but as president Eisenhower could control only one of the three branches of government in Washington and none of the press. “What was necessary,” Eisenhower said, “were some events or series of events which might change the psychological climate.”
Zhukov argued for the simultaneous dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and NATO. In their place he suggested an all-Europe security system. Here the two men did not attempt to resolve their differences over whether to describe a Communist Poland as a free country or one under Soviet military occupation.
Without revealing his hand, Eisenhower tested Zhukov’s reaction to the Open Skies proposal. He asked what Zhukov thought of an inspection system “of large installations such as airfields, long-range bombers and guided missile factories [that] could not be hidden.” When Zhukov indicated he liked the idea, Eisenhower carefully asked if such an idea would be “politically possible in the Soviet Union.” Zhukov’s response could not have been clearer. “[I]t would be entirely possible and while its detail should be studied, he was, in principle, in full agreement with the President’s remarks.” Zhukov said he understood that this inspection would be a guarantee against surprise attack.37
Eisenhower emerged from this reunion of wartime friends understandably confident that his Open Skies proposal could be the catalyst that would start changing the psychological climate. What he did not yet know was that in supporting an inspection system that could spot large installations, the Soviet marshal had been speaking for himself, not for his boss.
Khrushchev was furious when he heard the details of Eisenhower’s Open Skies proposal at the next day’s formal session. It was impossible for him to accept an inspection that preceded disarmament. If he allowed U.S. planes to spy on every Soviet airfield, Washington would quickly discover that his country was a nuclear paper tiger.
The Open Skies proposal created a rift between Zhukov and Khrushchev. The two men disagreed over whether transparency increased or decreased the threat of a U.S. first strike. “The enemy’s [military] potential is greater,” Khrushchev said. “Whoever has the greater potential is more interested in intelligence.”38 This disagreement did not end at Geneva. It became a source of tension between the two men, as Khrushchev’s views on the role of intelligence in disarmament only hardened, even as Soviet power grew.
At the cocktail session following the formal meeting, Khrushchev approached Eisenhower at the small buffet bar. Charles Bohlen, who was interpreting, heard him say, “Mr. President, we do not question the motive with which you put forward this proposal, but in effect whom are you trying to fool?” Before Eisenhower could respond, Khrushchev added, “In our eyes, this is a very transparent espionage device, and those advisers of yours who suggested it knew exactly what they were doing. You could hardly expect us to take this seriously.”39
The vehement rejection surprised the U.S. president. This had been his proposal, his personal effort to neutralize the combustible mixture of poor strategic intelligence and public anxiety within the highly charged environment in Washington. When Eisenhower tried to dispel Khrushchev’s suspicions by pointing to the fact that the surveillance would be mutual, the Soviet leader only promised “to study” the proposal, but he remained obdurate.40
Eisenhower’s and Dulles’s statements at Geneva concerning the German question were no more appealing to Khrushchev because they betrayed an unwillingness to recognize the legitimacy of East Germany as a separate political unit, let alone envision it as an equal partner in a European union. The West insisted that there could be no reduction in military forces in Europe, no collective security agreement, no minimal on-site inspection regime, before Germany reunified.
The conference ended on July 23 with an agreement to convene a meeting in October, again in Geneva, of the four foreign ministers to continue discussing European security. The Western and Soviet sides were no closer together on the central question of whether European disarmament or German reunification should come first. The Soviet position was that disarmament could occur before German reunification, but the Americans, French, and British disagreed. To ensure that the conference ended without rancor, the two sides agreed to have their foreign ministers discuss these two goals simultaneously in the hope of narrowing the gap later.
Despite the lack of movement on both disarmament and the German issue, that the Soviet delegation left in a good mood was a testament to the low expectations that it had in coming to this summit. Instead of seeing a defeat in the absence of any agreement, the Presidium’s representatives were delighted that they had been treated with respect by the other great powers and had effectively ended the Soviet Union’s diplomatic isolation. At the airport departure ceremony on July 24 Bulganin said that “what has already been done in Geneva is a new step in the relaxation of tension among nations [that] should contribute to the spirit of cooperation that one can already discern.”41 In Moscow Anastas Mikoyan, who was heading up the Kremlin in Khrushchev’s absence, told reporters that “the international environment has changed and the weather is good. When the weather is good, everything is good.”42
The actual weather was not very good for President Eisenhower, who arrived in a downpour at Washington’s National Airport on July 24. Fearful of any comparisons to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s return to London from the ill-fated Munich Conference with Adolf Hitler in 1938, Vice President Nixon had forbidden the use of umbrellas at the arrival ceremony.43 With rain “cascading off” his bald head, a sodden Eisenhower was understandably less exuberant than the Soviets about the new international climate as he spoke into the assembled microphones. He lauded the “many new contacts” formed between East and West but cautioned that “the coming months” would show what it all meant for world peace.44
VICE PRESIDENT Richard Nixon had rarely seen his friend Foster Dulles so tired. The secretary of state, who flew in two hours after the president, slumped into the backseat of his official car. Nixon rode back to Washington beside him and was the tonic that the older man seemed to need. Dulles easily unburdened himself.
“No one will ever realize what a tremendous burden this conference was to me,” said Dulles. As Nixon dictated that night in a taped diary entry, “[Dulles] said the President did a magnificent job but that, of course, it was necessary for him to keep the President advised of all of the curves that might be thrown so that in his extemporaneous remarks he would not make a statement which the other side might pick up and use against us.” In Dulles’s mind, the president was susceptible to saying the wrong things just because he wanted to make a good impression.
Dulles confessed that he was never sure how well his man would perform in high-level negotiations. In the car with Nixon, the secretary of state revealed that he was relieved that the United States had “not lost anything” in Geneva, with the implication that the president might have committed some harmful faux pas. The conference safely over, Dulles allowed himself the luxury of admitting that there had been at least one possible benefit of the experience: “The President had been exposed to the Communists.” In particular, the meeting for which the president had held out such hope—and for which Dulles had shown nothing but polite disdain—was a bust. Eisenhower’s visit with his wartime “buddy” Marshal Zhukov, Dulles related, “had not amounted to much except that it was good for the President to meet with Zhukov in this manner and to learn for himself that even a man he considered to be a friend would invariably take the hard Communist line whenever he attended a conference.”
FOLLOWING THE CONFERENCE, the American press described it as a good first step. “Geneva was not a third act, but a prologue,” said the Baltimore Sun.45 The St. Louis Globe-Democrat remarked in the same vein: “[Geneva] did illuminate the road—and…if the world will be patient and forbearing, the way is not now quite so long.”46 The New York Times editorialized: “We cannot disarm, we cannot wholly trust any agreement with Soviet Russia, until the Iron Curtain is down and freedom is established on Soviet soil. First things must come first—and these are first things. But a third World War would be no solution. A modus vivendi to avoid that frightful tragedy is essential, and we now seem a little nearer to it.”47
In Moscow Khrushchev decided to continue his peace offensive. Although none of his disarmament proposals had received any detailed notice from the West at Geneva, the first secretary believed that the Soviet position was strategically and tactically wise. In July the Kremlin announced a unilateral cut in the Soviet armed forces of 640,000. In the last five years of his life Stalin had increased the size of the Soviet forces by 50 percent, and Khrushchev intended to bring that number below four million.48
A second initiative was even more dramatic. Khrushchev believed that ultimately relations were bound to improve between West Germany and the Soviet Union because of the lure of the Russian market for German capital. As a young man Khrushchev had worked as an administrator of a mine in the Ukraine. The technology used in the mine was made by the German conglomerate Thyssen, and Khrushchev later often referred to this personal experience to make a point of the mutual interests of German capitalists and Soviet Communists.49 As far as he was concerned, this period of close and beneficial economic cooperation between the countries in the 1920s, known as the Rapallo era after the Italian town where a major agreement between the two governments was signed in 1922, represented a model for how West Germany and the Soviet Union should interact again. The Rapallo Treaty brought German recognition of the Soviet Union and the cancellation of war debts and established preferential trade between the two countries. The fact that Konrad Adenauer’s party, the Christian Democrats, received significant support from the big German industrialists who were likely to benefit from renewed trade with Russia was an incentive for Khrushchev to make an effort to cultivate the German chancellor.
Khrushchev’s first overture to Bonn had actually preceded Geneva. In early June, almost a month after the ratification of the Paris agreements, the Kremlin had issued a formal invitation to Adenauer to visit Moscow and discuss the possible normalization of relations.
If there was one man who seemed less likely than John Foster Dulles to provide Moscow with a diplomatic opening in 1955, it was the seventy-nine-year-old Konrad Adenauer. In his public speeches, the chancellor proclaimed the Federal Republic of Germany as the most anti-Communist state in Europe, and the KGB agreed that at the very least he was the most anti-Communist leader in Europe. “Adenauer,” the intelligence service reported to the Kremlin in 1955, “is a savage enemy of the Soviet Union.”50 A Soviet intelligence source in West Germany had described the chancellor as convinced that “any kind of negotiation with the Soviet Union is akin to a pact with the devil.”51
In June the Soviets invited him to Moscow anyway. Adenauer waited until after Geneva to say yes. After the date of the visit was set for early September, Adenauer virtually ensured that not much good would come of his visit. He announced in a speech in August that there could be no normalization of relations with Moscow unless the Kremlin agreed to the reunification of Germany and the release of the remaining German prisoners of war still detained in Russia.
The KGB and the Soviet Foreign Ministry were divided over whether there was any hope for a breakthrough. On the basis of its extensive study of Adenauer’s past, the KGB was the more sanguine. “The distinguishing features of Adenauer as a politician,” it reported to Khrushchev and the other Soviet negotiators, “are caution, dexterity, a demonstrated willingness to compromise, a moderate patience for leading the most difficult negotiations, slyness, a lack of fastidiousness as to means and a persistence as to ends.”52 The intelligence service also had informants telling them that changes in the West German political scene would require this clever man to be more tolerant of dealing with the East, if he wished to remain popular. From the chief editor of the influential Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Khrushchev’s agents learned that Adenauer was a victim of his own success. Having presided over the rebirth of the German economy after its destruction in World War II and the integration of the Federal Republic into NATO, he now faced the question of how he intended to use this new power in Europe. This might require him to be a statesman. The Soviet Foreign Ministry had had a hard time getting around the language of Adenauer’s August declaration. Molotov’s people assumed that he was setting the stage to blame the division of Germany and the international tensions on Moscow.53
Of the men in the Kremlin, only Bulganin had met Adenauer before. Bulganin had visited Cologne in the 1920s, when he was a top administrator of the city of Moscow. At the time Adenauer had been Cologne’s mayor. Bulganin remembered Adenauer as quite polite, and he had a generally positive impression of the man.
THE EISENHOWER administration was unhappy that Adenauer planned to make this trip to Moscow. Although there was no question he was anti-Communist, the West German leader tended to exaggerate the strength of the Soviet Union, which the United States worried might cause him to reach bad agreements with Moscow just to prevent a war. On the eve of the chancellor’s trip Dulles wrote to Adenauer to calm those fears: “Let us first of all remember that the present policies of the Soviet Union are born not out of its strength, but out of its weakness; not out of its successes, but out of its failures.”54 The secretary of state pointed out that Moscow realized it could not provide both guns and butter and its citizens wanted more butter. He also told Adenauer that this was not the time to relax the pressure on Moscow. “[T]hey teach the tactics of retreat, in order to gain a respite, and if they now want this respite, which seems to be the case, we have, I think, a possibility of getting the reunification of Germany as the price they must pay. Whether, and how quickly, they will pay that price remains to be seen. But I think there is a good chance that unification, on your
terms, can be achieved in a couple of years if we are stout.”55
Adenauer, however, turned out to be as crafty and subtle as some of Khrushchev’s advisers had suggested. In Moscow, he dumped the approach that the U.S. State Department had hoped for. After a few days of frank discussions with Bulganin, Khrushchev, and Mikoyan, the West German revoked the requirement that Moscow had to promise to move ahead on German reunification. When Bulganin offered to repatriate the nine thousand or so Germans still in Soviet captivity, this was enough for Adenauer to approve the normalization of relations. By the end of 1955 the Soviet Union and West Germany had exchanged ambassadors.
Moscow kept an eye on the reaction of its own German allies. Continued nonrecognition of East Germany was one area where Adenauer still refused to budge. Bonn would talk to Moscow but not to East Berlin. Following the Adenauer visit, Bulganin and Khrushchev each traveled to East Berlin to assure the East Germans and the world that Moscow’s commitment to German communism remained firm. “If anyone…expects us to forget the doctrine of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, he is making a tremendous mistake,” Khrushchev told the East Germans. “Those who wait for this will have to wait until a shrimp learns to whistle.”56
WHEN THE WESTERN powers outmaneuvered Molotov at the foreign ministers’ conference in Geneva in October 1955, Khrushchev was able to hammer the last nail in the coffin of Stalin’s German policy. In the weeks before the conference the Western powers had come up with a modified version of the Eden Plan. If Germany were allow to reunify and after elections chose to join NATO, the Soviets would get a demilitarized zone along the former East-West divide in Germany and a collective security treaty—a “treaty of assurance on the reunification of Germany”—whereby NATO would defend Moscow if any of its members attacked the Soviet Union. Designed to appeal to the German public, this proposal tested the Soviet rhetorical commitment to German reunification and to German self-determination.
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