Berlin 1961 (10 page)

Ulbricht wanted Khrushchev to know that time was running out. “The situation in Berlin has become complicated, not in our favor,” he said. He told Khrushchev that West Berlin’s economy was rapidly growing stronger, illustrated by the fact that some 50,000 East Berliners crossed the border each day to work for the West’s higher wages. The tension in the city was growing in rough proportion to the widening gap in living standards between East and West.

“We still have not taken corresponding countermeasures,” Ulbricht complained. He said he was also losing the battle for the minds of the intelligentsia, a great number of whom were leaving as refugees. Ulbricht told Khrushchev he couldn’t compete because West Berlin teachers earned some 200 to 300 marks more a month than teachers in the East, and doctors earned twice the Eastern salaries. He didn’t have the means to match such salaries, and lacked the ability to produce sufficient consumer goods—even if he could provide East Germans with the money to buy them.

Khrushchev promised Ulbricht further economic assistance.

The Soviet leader shrugged. Perhaps he would have to put Soviet rockets on military alert as he maneuvered to alter Berlin’s status, but he was confident the West would not start a war over the city’s freedom. “Luckily, our adversaries still haven’t gone crazy; they still think and their nerves still aren’t bad.” If Kennedy would not negotiate, Khrushchev told Ulbricht, he would move forward unilaterally, “and let them see their defeat.”

With an exasperated sigh, Khrushchev told Ulbricht, “We must be finished with this situation sometime.”

3

KENNEDY: A PRESIDENT’S EDUCATION

We can live with the status quo in Berlin but can take no real initiative to change it for the better. To a greater or lesser degree, the Soviets and East Germans can, whenever they are willing to assume the political consequences, change it for the worse.

Martin Hillenbrand, State Department chief of German affairs, transition memo to President Kennedy, January 1961

So let us begin anew, remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof.

President Kennedy, inaugural address, January 20, 1961

OVAL OFFICE, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
THURSDAY MORNING, JANUARY
19, 1961

T
he oldest president in U.S. history reckoned it was time to introduce the youngest man ever elected to the office to the most fearsome part of the job. It was Inauguration Eve, and in less than twenty-four hours, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, age seventy, would hand off America’s nuclear football to Senator John F. Kennedy, age forty-three, transferring to him the most destructive capability any single country had ever possessed.

And he would have it at a time when Eisenhower feared that miscalculation over numerous U.S.–Soviet flashpoints around the world, the most sensitive of them all being Berlin, could trigger a nuclear exchange. So Eisenhower planned to take Kennedy aside for a private chat on how such a war would be conducted, a session he would close with a memorable bit of show-and-tell using the paraphernalia of the world’s most powerful individual.

Eisenhower worried about Kennedy’s readiness for such responsibility. Among friends, he dismissed Kennedy as “Little Boy Blue” or “that young whippersnapper” when he wasn’t mocking him as “that young genius.” As Supreme Commander of all Allied forces in Europe during the last two years of World War II, Eisenhower had overseen the invasion and occupation of France and Germany. As a Navy lieutenant, Kennedy had piloted nothing more significant than a PT boat, a torpedo-bearing vessel so small that its squadrons were called “mosquito fleets.”

It was true; Kennedy had been decorated as a war hero after saving the lives of eleven crew members, but only after he had inexplicably allowed his PT-109 to be rammed by a lumbering Japanese destroyer. Eisenhower’s military friends didn’t buy the “dark-of-night, fog-of-war” explanation, and instead suspected Kennedy of negligence, though he was spared an investigation.

Eisenhower doubted young Kennedy ever would have achieved the presidency without his father Joe’s deep pockets and insatiable parental ambition. During the war, Joe Sr. had tasked his cousin Joe Kane, a Boston political insider, to game the electoral viability of both his eldest son Joe and Jack. It also was his father who placed the story of Jack’s bravery with author and family friend John Hersey. Its publication in
Reader’s Digest
and then the
New Yorker
helped launch Jack’s political career. A year after Jack’s anointment as a hero, Joe Jr. died in action while piloting an experimental, high-risk bombing mission. He was supposed to have ejected from an explosive-laden B-24 Liberator before the plane, now a guided missile, continued by remote control toward a German V-bomb base—but it detonated prematurely. Those who knew the family best wondered if his death hadn’t ultimately been the result of the sibling rivalry their father had nurtured over the years. A reckless gamble to outdo his younger brother may have cost Joe Jr. his life.

On the cold, overcast morning, Kennedy pulled up to the White House at 8:57, after an eight-minute drive from his Georgetown home. It was a rare show of punctuality for the habitually tardy Kennedy. The morning newspapers were sprinkled with Kennedy family biographies and artists’ renderings of Cabinet wives’ elegant ball gowns. The dowdy Eisenhower era was over. On a more serious note, General Thomas S. Power, chief of the Strategic Air Command, announced that for the first time the U.S. would conduct round-the-clock nuclear-armed bomber flights to keep America in a constant state of readiness against surprise attack.

Ahead of the meeting, Kennedy’s transition chief, legendary Washington lawyer Clark Clifford, had sent Eisenhower’s people a list of issues that Kennedy wished to discuss, since they might bite him during his first days in office: Laos; Algeria; the Congo; Cuba; the Dominican Republic; Berlin; disarmament and nuclear test talks; basic economic, fiscal, and monetary policies; and “an appraisal of war requirements versus capabilities.”

That last point was Kennedy’s shorthand for an issue that had come to occupy him more the closer he got to occupying the Oval Office: “How would I fight a nuclear war, if it comes to that.” He wasn’t at all certain he or the American people—the voters required for his reelection—would be willing to deliver on solemn U.S. commitments to defend Berlin if those commitments required the risk of a nuclear war that could cost millions of American lives.

After their first transition meeting on December 6, Eisenhower had revised some of his negative views of Kennedy. Eisenhower told Democratic political operative George E. Allen, a Clifford friend, that he had been “misinformed and mistaken about this young man. He’s one of the ablest, brightest minds I’ve ever come across.” Though still uneasy about Kennedy’s youth and lack of experience, Eisenhower had been comforted by Kennedy’s grasp of the issues he would be facing.

Kennedy had been less taken with “Ike,” whom he referred to among friends as “that old asshole.” He told his younger brother Bobby, who was to become his new attorney general, that he had found the outgoing president to be intellectually ponderous and inadequately informed about issues he should have known intimately.

Kennedy believed the Eisenhower administration had accomplished little of consequence, having treaded water in a dangerous riptide of history that could pull the U.S. under. The most obvious example was the festering problem of Berlin. He was designing his presidency for greater accomplishment, taking as his role models Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. In contrasting Eisenhower with Kennedy, French Ambassador Hervé Alphand saw the president-elect as a man who had “an enormous memory of facts, of figures, of history, he had complete knowledge of the problems he had to discuss…a will to achieve for his country and for the world a great design, to be, in other words, a great President.”

There were two great obstacles to his quest for greatness: his lack of any clear mandate after the narrowest electoral victory since 1886, and the fact that Lincoln and Roosevelt had found their place in history through war, a horrifying prospect to be avoided, since these days that could mean a nuclear holocaust.

Kennedy was perplexed that he had been elected with only a fraction less than 50 percent of the vote, over a man like Nixon, whom he considered so personally unappealing. “How did I manage to beat a guy like this by only a hundred thousand votes?” he complained to friend Kenneth O’Donnell, who would become a White House aide.

And his coattails had been short. Though the Democrats had kept their commanding majorities in Congress, they had lost one Senate seat and twenty House seats. The Southern Democrats, who had gained the most, would form a caucus with the Republicans in favor of a hard line toward the Soviets and Berlin. Kennedy likely would not have won at all had he not in the campaign been more hawkish toward Moscow than Nixon. To further burnish his conservative anti-Soviet credentials, and perhaps to prevent release of damaging intelligence about his past, Kennedy had also made the unconventional decision to keep in office Eisenhower’s CIA and FBI directors, Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover. A curious similarity between Kennedy and Khrushchev was emerging: both were being coaxed by their domestic constituencies more toward confrontation than conciliation.

His meager margin over Nixon made Kennedy all the more keen to observe Eisenhower that day, figuring he could learn a great deal from the calm and reassuring manner that had won the outgoing president two terms and such widespread public affection. Kennedy would have to build his personal popularity as quickly as possible to take on all the issues in front of him.

During his transition briefings on nuclear strategy, nothing concerned Kennedy more than the fact that Eisenhower had left him such limited and inflexible war-fighting options. Should the Soviets overrun Berlin, Kennedy had no alternative to either a conventional conflict that the Soviets invariably would win or an all-out atomic exchange that he and America’s allies would be reluctant to fight. For that reason, it would have seemed natural for Berlin contingencies to have been at the top of Kennedy’s agenda that morning.

Instead, the two teams focused far greater attention on the raging conflict in Laos and the growing danger that the Southeast Asian country could fall into communist hands as the first of multiple dominoes. Though the crisis in Berlin was of greater significance, Kennedy had been told time and again that that situation was a frozen conflict without a foreseeable solution, and thus his initial energies were best spent on other matters.

A transition document prepared by the Eisenhower team for Kennedy warned the new president—a man who prided himself on big thinking—that it was the small issues he had to watch out for regarding Berlin, everything from detailed agreements ensuring unfettered travel to and from West Berlin to a host of arcane practices under four-power agreements that protected West Berliners’ rights and Allied presence.

“Current Soviet tactics,” the memo said, “are to seek to win Berlin by whittling away at the Western position to make it hard for us to demonstrate that the real issue in each minor incident is the survival of free Berlin. Our immediate problem is to counter these ‘salami tactics.’…We have tried in every way possible to convince the Soviets that as a last resort we would fight for Berlin.” The paper warned the president-elect that he would face an early effort by Khrushchev to revive Berlin talks, with the aim of gaining the withdrawal of Western troops from the city.

However, Eisenhower’s team had no good advice for Kennedy about how he could more effectively deal with all this, aside from simply standing his ground. “No one has yet been able to devise an acceptable and negotiable formula to solve the Berlin problem separate from a solution for Germany as a whole,” the transition document said. For the moment, the U.S. position was that Germany should someday be unified through free elections across West and East Germany—and no one anticipated that happening at any point soon, if at all. Hence, the memo said, “the principal Western tactic has been to gain time and demonstrate determination to protect West Berlin, while seeking a basis for solution. The problem is increasingly one of convincing the USSR that the Western Powers have the will and the means to maintain their position.”

Martin Hillenbrand, the director of the State Department’s Office of German Affairs, put it more sharply in his own transition memo. He led a Berlin task force established by Eisenhower after Khrushchev’s 1958 Berlin ultimatum, and it met almost daily on issues large and small. It included representatives of most agencies of the U.S. government, as well as the French, British, and German ambassadors.

“We can live with the status quo in Berlin but can take no real initiative to change it for the better,” he wrote. “To a greater or lesser degree, the Soviets and East Germans can, whenever they are willing to assume the political consequences, change it for the worse…. However impelling the urge to find some new approach to the problem, the ineluctable facts of the situation strictly limit the practical courses of actions open to the West.”

What Kennedy was hearing from multiple sources was that the stirring message of change that had gotten him elected didn’t apply to Berlin, where his advisers were asking him to defend an unsatisfying status quo. It went against all his instincts, and his promises to the electorate to bring creativity to the problems the Eisenhower administration had failed to address. After weighing his options, Kennedy elected to put Berlin on a back burner while he addressed issues where it seemed he could find quicker agreement.

So Kennedy’s priority with Moscow would be the pursuit of nuclear test ban talks, which he saw as a confidence-building measure to warm up the chilly U.S.–Soviet relationship. Kennedy’s logic was that once he had improved the overall tone of relations through arms negotiations, he could then return to the more intractable matter of Berlin. That would give rise, however, to what would become the first and greatest point of disagreement between Kennedy and Khrushchev—the pace and priority of negotiating a Berlin solution.