Berlin 1961 (12 page)

Weary of Khrushchev’s lobbying barrage, Kennedy asked his friend David Bruce, whom he had tapped as ambassador to London, to help him frame a response to Khrushchev’s extended hand. Bruce was a veteran diplomat who had run America’s spy service in London during the war, and he had been Harry Truman’s ambassador to Paris.

After much eating and drinking at Menshikov’s residence on January 5, the Soviet ambassador gave Bruce a letter without letterhead or signature, which Menshikov said held his personal thoughts. Its unmistakable message: Khrushchev urgently wanted a summit and would go to great lengths to arrange it.

Menshikov told Bruce that Khrushchev believed under the Kennedy administration, the two countries could “resolve existing and dangerous differences.” However, the Soviet leader believed they could only relax tensions once the two great powers at the top levels had agreed on a program for peaceful coexistence. He said this would revolve around “two outstanding problems”—achieving disarmament and solving “the German question, including West Berlin.” Khrushchev wanted to meet Kennedy before the incoming president sat down with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, meetings Menshikov said he had heard were scheduled for February and March.

Bruce told the Soviet ambassador that the meetings with those key U.S. allies would occur later than that, but this did not alter Khrushchev’s underlying message: He hoped Kennedy would depart from the usual protocol of consulting with allies before meeting with his adversary. Menshikov said that Khrushchev was willing to accelerate preparations for such a meeting through either private or official conduits. As further incentive, Menshikov sent Bruce a hamper full of his country’s best vodka and caviar after the meeting. A few days later, he invited Bruce to lunch again to underscore his message.

Just nine days before his inauguration, Kennedy had sought from George Kennan—whom he would make his ambassador to Yugoslavia—further advice about how to handle this flurry of Soviet communication. Kennedy had been communicating on Soviet matters with Kennan, the legendary former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, since January 1959. In one letter, Kennedy had praised Kennan for standing against the “extreme rigidity” toward Moscow of Dean Acheson, President Truman’s secretary of state.

Kennan had inspired the U.S. foreign policy of Soviet communist “containment” with his long telegram from Moscow as a diplomat, which was followed by his famous and anonymously written
Foreign Affairs
article in July 1947, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Yet Kennan now opposed the hard-line doctrines toward Moscow that he had done so much to inspire. He thought the U.S. and its allies were now strong enough to enter into talks with Khrushchev, and he complained about U.S. militarists who had misinterpreted his thinking.

During the campaign, Kennan told Kennedy that as president he should “heighten the divisive tendencies within the Soviet bloc by improving relations with Moscow,” not through formal summits and agreements but rather by using private channels of communication with the Soviet government, aimed at reciprocal concessions. “These things are difficult,” Kennan had said, “but they are not, I reiterate, not impossible.” He said such contacts helped end the Berlin blockade in 1948 and the Korean War. He had urged Kennedy in an August 1960 letter that, should he be elected, his administration should “move quickly and boldly in the initial stages of its incumbency, before it becomes enmeshed in the procedural tangles of Washington and before it is itself placed on the defensive by the movement of events.”

Kennedy wrote back that he agreed with most of Kennan’s recommendations. Now that he was about to be president, however, he wanted guidance of a more concrete and immediate nature. While speaking to Kennan on a flight from New York to Washington on his private jet, the
Caroline
, Kennedy briefed Kennan on the barrage of Soviet messages and then showed him the Menshikov letter.

Kennan frowned as he read. He concluded by the letter’s stiff and tough language that it had been drafted in Khrushchev’s office but cleared by a wider circle that included both those who were for and those who were against closer relations with the U.S. Contrary to his earlier advice that Kennedy move fast to open up a dialogue with Moscow, he now told Kennedy the Soviets had no right to rush him in this manner, and that the president-elect should not respond before taking office. That said, Kennan suggested he should at that time communicate privately with Khrushchev, breaking Eisenhower’s habit of making almost every exchange with Khrushchev public.

Asked by Kennedy why Khrushchev was so eager to meet with him, Kennan said with characteristic insight that the U-2 incident and the growing intensity of the Chinese–Soviet conflict had weakened the Soviet leader, and he needed a breakthrough with the U.S. to reverse that trend. Khrushchev, Kennan explained, “hoped by the insertion of his own personality and the use of his powers of persuasion he could achieve such an agreement with the United States and recoup in this way his failing political fortunes.”

For Kennedy, it was the clearest and most convincing explanation of Khrushchev’s behavior he had heard. It coincided with his own understanding that domestic politics drove foreign policy issues more than most Americans understood—even in the authoritarian Soviet Union. It made sense to Kennedy that Khrushchev was seeking help to improve his imperiled political standing at home, but that was insufficient reason for Kennedy to act before he was ready. The president-elect again determined that Khrushchev could wait—and so could Berlin.

Thus, Kennedy’s inaugural address would be his first communication with the Soviet leader on Berlin, however indirect and shared with tens of millions of others. The most compelling line was also the one most quoted in Berlin newspapers the following day: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Yet Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric concealed a dearth of policy direction with regard to the Soviets. Kennedy was leaving all options open. Multiple rewrites altered only nuance, putting his indecision in more memorable form and excising language his speechwriter Ted Sorensen had drafted that might appear too soft toward the Soviets.

A first version read, for example: “…nor can two great and powerful nations forever continue on this reckless course, both overburdened by the staggering cost of modern weapons.”

Kennedy, however, did not want to call the U.S. course either “reckless” or unsustainable. So the final text took those two ideas out and instead read: “…neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course—both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons.”

An initial draft read: “And if the fruits of cooperation prove sweeter than the drugs of suspicion, let both sides join ultimately in creating a true world order—neither a Pax Americana, nor a Pax Russiana, nor even a balance of power—but a community of power.”

A final text nixed the notion of a “community of power” with the communists, which congressional hawks would have called naive. The final version read: “And if a beachhead of cooperation can push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law….”

He mentioned no countries or places by name—neither the Soviet Union, nor Berlin, nor any other. The German newspaper
Die Welt
praised the “new wind” from America, which was “hard but refreshing. What we Germans notice, though: No word on Berlin!”

Instead of mentioning Khrushchev by name, Kennedy spoke only of those “who would make themselves our adversary,” having changed the word “enemy” to “adversary” at the suggestion of columnist friend Walter Lippmann. Kennedy prescribed projects of potential cooperation: exploration of the heavens and oceans, negotiation of arms control and inspection regimes, and cooperation in science to cure disease.

There was enough in the speech to please America’s hard-liners. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona applauded enthusiastically after the line about paying any price for liberty. Having achieved no progress in getting his boss an early meeting with Kennedy, Soviet Ambassador Menshikov sat impassively throughout with a gray hat pulled down over his eyes, a white scarf pulled up over his neck, and his frame wrapped in a large, gray overcoat.

Just as important as his words that day was Kennedy’s appearance, which in the competition for global favor was more than a superficial factor. The world was inspired by the charismatic smile that lit up a face bronzed during his preinaugural vacation in Florida. What no one sensed was Kennedy’s underlying ill health: he had swallowed a cocktail of pills that day for his bad stomach and his aching back, and he had taken an extra dose of cortisone to control the telltale swelling that came with his treatments for Addison’s disease. As he had looked in the mirror just four days before his swearing-in, Kennedy had spoken with shock to his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, about the impact of his treatments. “My God, look at that fat face,” he said. “If I don’t lose five pounds this week, we might have to call off the Inauguration.”

Evelyn Lincoln would help monitor the multiple medications for a young president who in many respects was far less healthy than Khrushchev, twenty-three years his senior. Kennedy could only hope that the KGB operatives digging up whatever they could find on the true state of his health did not discover the truth. To knock down rumors about his illnesses, the Kennedy team had put two doctors before the press. And just two days before the inauguration, the magazine
Today’s Health
, working from a report issued by the Kennedy team, had covered the president-elect’s medical history more extensively than it had any other previous president’s. It quoted his physicians on his “superb physical condition” that made him “quite capable of shouldering the burdens of the Presidency.” The article said that the fact he had overcome his many ailments demonstrated “his barb wire toughness.” It said he drank and smoked little, that he enjoyed an occasional cold beer at dinner, and that his only cocktail was a daiquiri. He didn’t smoke cigarettes—only a cigar now and again. It reported authoritatively that he kept his weight at 165 pounds and that he had no special diet, which concealed the fact that he preferred bland foods because of a bad stomach.

A closer read left plenty of reason for concern. The article listed adult health issues that included “attacks of jaundice, malaria, sciatica, and two back injuries.” All it said about his Addison’s disease, without mentioning it by name, was that Kennedy takes “medication by mouth for the aftermath of adrenal insufficiency and has an endocrinologic examination twice a year.” It noted he wore a quarter-inch lift in his shoes “and even beach sandals” to ease back pain caused by a slightly shorter left leg.

Perhaps never in American presidential history had youthful image and ailing reality stood in such contrast. While others at the inauguration wore top hats and heavy coats against the chill, Kennedy took the oath of office without overcoat or hat. With only an electric space heater to warm him in an open reviewing box, he watched the inaugural parade for more than three hours with his new vice president, Lyndon Johnson.

The next morning’s papers around the world painted the portrait of Kennedy that he wanted. Columnist Mary McGrory of the
Washington Evening Star
compared him to a Hemingway hero. “He has conquered serious illness. He is as graceful as a greyhound and can be as beguiling as a sunny day.”

Yet for all Kennedy’s success at shaping media coverage ahead of his inauguration, he would quickly discover he had less influence over the actions of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. When Kennedy woke up at about eight in the Lincoln Bedroom on his first morning in office, he found that atop the congratulatory cables from around the world was the offer of an inaugural gift from Moscow that would be the first gambit in U.S.–Soviet relations during his presidency. Given the right conditions, Khrushchev would release the two airmen of the RB-47 reconnaissance plane who had been sitting in a Soviet prison since their capture the previous summer.

It would be an early introduction for Kennedy to the world of U.S.–Soviet intrigue that swirled around Berlin, a place where, he would quickly learn, even seeming victories often contained hidden dangers.

The “Sniper” Comes In from the Cold

JANUARY 4, 1961

David Murphy, the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Berlin base, was hungry for success stories. So his heartbeat accelerated when he heard that his most valuable asset—a Polish agent with the code name of
Heckenschütze,
or Sniper—had phoned the secret number he had been given for emergencies over the Christmas holidays. Certain that his cover had been blown, Sniper wanted to defect. “Are you ready to give me and my wife protection?” he asked.

Murphy had warned the CIA station’s special Berlin switchboard operators that if they missed Sniper’s call on the number that was designated only for him “they would be on the next boat home.” The caller had only said he was passing on the message on behalf of a Herr Kowalski, a code that began a set of prearranged responses. Sniper had planned his defection well. First, he had deposited perhaps three hundred photographed documents—including the names of several hundred Polish agents and organizational tables—in Warsaw at a dead drop inside a hollowed-out tree trunk near his home. The CIA had already recovered the treasure trove.

Now it was the early afternoon of January 4, and a senior CIA official who had flown in from Washington was waiting with other operatives at the American consulate in Berlin, where they had arranged that Sniper would come in from the cold. The consulate, which was open to civilians, rested conveniently beside the military section of a U.S. compound on West Berlin’s Clayallee. Murphy had already arranged for an impressive office, wired with microphones and recorders, where Sniper would have his first debriefing.