Berlin 1961 (2 page)

I know something of such issues and challenges myself from our days dealing with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev when I served as national security advisor in President George H. W. Bush’s White House.

The two U.S. presidents who dealt with Gorbachev, Bush and Ronald Reagan, were very different men. However, both understood that nothing was more important in trying to end the Cold War than the ways in which they engaged their Soviet counterpart.

Despite labeling the Soviets “the evil empire,” President Reagan engaged in five summit meetings with Gorbachev and worked on countless concrete agreements that helped build confidence between the two countries. As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and we worked to bring about German unification, President Bush resisted all temptations to gloat or breast-beat. He consistently sent the message that both sides were winning if the Cold War was ending. Through exercising such moderation in his public statements, he also avoided giving Gorbachev’s enemies in the Soviet Politburo any excuse to reverse his policies or remove him from office.

One can do no more than speculate on how either a tougher or a more conciliatory Kennedy might have altered history in the Berlin of 1961. What is indisputable is that the events of that year put the Cold War back into a deep freeze at a time when Khrushchev’s break with Stalinism might have presented us with the first possibilities of a thaw.

Berlin 1961
walks us through those events in striking new ways, exploring the fundamental natures of the two primary countries, the U.S. and the Soviet Union; the domestic political environments of each; and the crucial roles played by the personal characters of their leaders; and then weaving it all into the equally important stories of how those factors played out in the countries of East Germany and West Germany themselves.

It is an engaging, richly researched, thought-provoking book that captures the drama of the time in its colorful Berlin setting, and challenges the conventional wisdom regarding one of the Cold War’s most decisive years.

INTRODUCTION:
THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS PLACE

Who possesses Berlin possesses Germany, and whoever controls Germany controls Europe.

Vladimir Lenin, quoting Karl Marx

Berlin is the most dangerous place in the world. The USSR wants to perform an operation on this soft spot to eliminate this thorn, this ulcer.

Premier Nikita Khrushchev to President John F. Kennedy at their Vienna Summit, June 1961

CHECKPOINT CHARLIE, BERLIN
9:00 P.M., FRIDAY, OCTOBER
27, 1961

T
here had not been a more perilous moment in the Cold War.

Undaunted by the damp, dangerous night, Berliners gathered on the narrow side streets opening up onto Checkpoint Charlie. The next morning’s newspapers would estimate their numbers at about five hundred, a considerable crowd considering that they might have been witnesses to the first shots of a thermonuclear war. After six days of escalating tensions, American M48 Patton and Soviet T-54 tanks were facing off just a stone’s throw from one another—ten on each side, with roughly two dozen more in nearby reserve.

Armed with only umbrellas and hooded jackets against the drizzle, the crowd pushed forward to find the best vantage points toward the front of Friedrichstrasse, Mauerstrasse, and Zimmerstrasse, the three streets whose junction was Berlin’s primary East–West crossing point for Allied military and civilian vehicles and pedestrians. Some of them stood on rooftops. Others, including a gaggle of news photographers and reporters, leaned out of windows from low-rise buildings still shell-pocked from wartime bombings.

Reporting from the scene, CBS News reporter Daniel Schorr, with all the drama of his authoritative baritone, declared to his radio listeners, “The Cold War took on a new dimension tonight when American and Russian fighting men stood arrayed against each other for the first time in history. Until now, the East–West conflict had been waged through proxies—German and other. But tonight, the superpowers confronted each other in the form of ten low-slung Russian tanks facing American Patton tanks, less than a hundred yards apart….”

The situation was sufficiently tense that when an American army helicopter flew low overhead to survey the battleground, an East German policeman barked in panic, “Get down!” and an obedient crowd dived facedown on the ground. At other moments an odd calm reigned. “The scene is weird, almost incredible,” said Schorr. “The American GIs stand by their tanks, eating from mess kits, while West Berliners gape from behind a rope barrier and buy pretzel sticks, the scene lit by floodlights from the eastern side while the Soviet tanks are almost invisible in the dark of the East.”

Rumors swirled through the crowd that war was upon Berlin.
Es geht los um drei Uhr
(“It will begin at three in the morning”). A West Berlin radio station reported that retired General Lucius Clay, President Kennedy’s new special representative in Berlin, was swaggering toward the border Hollywood-style to direct the first shots personally. Another story spread that the U.S. military police commander at Checkpoint Charlie had slugged an East German counterpart, and that both sides were aching for a gunfight. Still another account had it that entire Soviet companies were marching toward Berlin to end the city’s freedom once and for all. Berliners as a breed were drawn to gossip even in the worst of times. Given that most of those in the crowd had experienced one if not two world wars, they reckoned just about anything could happen.

Clay, who had commanded the 1948 airlift that had rescued West Berlin from a three-hundred-day Soviet blockade, had set the current confrontation in motion himself a week earlier over an issue most of his superiors in Washington did not consider a war-fighting matter. Breaking with established four-power procedures, East German border police had begun to demand that Allied civilians present their identity cards before driving into the Soviet zone of Berlin. Previously, their vehicles’ distinctive license plates had been sufficient.

Convinced from personal experience that the Soviets would whittle away at the West’s rights like soft salami unless they were confronted on the smallest of matters, Clay had refused, and ordered armed escorts to muscle the civilian vehicles through. Soldiers carrying bayoneted rifles and backed by American tanks had flanked the vehicles as they wound their way through the checkpoint’s low, zigzag, red-and-white-striped concrete barriers.

At first, Clay’s tough approach was vindicated: the East German border guards backed down. Swiftly, however, Khrushchev ordered his troops to match U.S. firepower tank for tank and to be prepared to escalate further if necessary. In a curious and ultimately unsuccessful effort to preserve deniability, Khrushchev ordered that the Soviet tanks’ national markings be obscured and that their drivers wear unmarked black uniforms.

When the Soviet tanks rolled up to Checkpoint Charlie that afternoon to halt Clay’s operation, they transformed a low-level border contest with the East Germans into a war of nerves between the world’s two most powerful countries. U.S. and Soviet commanders operating out of emergency operation centers on opposite sides of Berlin weighed their next moves as they anxiously awaited orders from President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

While leaders deliberated in Washington and Moscow, the American tank crews, commanded by Major Thomas Tyree, nervously sized up their opponents across the world’s most famous East–West divide. In a dramatic nighttime operation on August 13, 1961, just two and a half months earlier, East German troops and police with Soviet backing had thrown up the first, temporary barriers of barbed wire and guard posts around West Berlin’s 110-mile circumference in order to contain an exodus of refugees whose flight had threatened the continued existence of the communist state.

Since then, the communists had fortified the borderline with concrete blocks, mortar, tank traps, guard towers, and attack dogs. What the world was coming to know as “the Berlin Wall” was described by Mutual Broadcasting Network’s Berlin correspondent Norman Gelb as “the most remarkable, the most presumptuous urban redevelopment scheme of all time…that snaked through the city like the backdrop to a nightmare.” Journalists, news photographers, political leaders, spy chiefs, generals, and tourists alike swarmed to Berlin to watch Winston Churchill’s figurative Iron Curtain assume a physical form.

What was clear to them all was that the tank showdown at Checkpoint Charlie was no exercise. Tyree had seen to it that his men had loaded their tanks’ cannon racks that morning with live ammunition. Their machine guns were at half-load. Beyond that, Tyree’s men had mounted several of their tanks with bulldozer shovels. During exercises in preparation for just such a moment, he had trained his men to execute a plan to drive into East Berlin peacefully through Checkpoint Charlie, which was permitted under four-power rights, then crash through the rising Berlin Wall upon their return—daring the communists to respond.

To produce warmth and steady their nerves, the U.S. tank drivers gunned their engines to a terrifying roar. However, the small Allied contingent of 12,000 troops, only 6,500 of whom were Americans, would stand no chance in a conventional conflict against the 350,000 or so Soviet soldiers who were within striking distance of Berlin. Tyree’s men knew they were little more than a trip wire for an all-out war that could go nuclear faster than you could say
Auf Wiedersehen
.

Reuters correspondent Adam Kellett-Long, who had rushed to Checkpoint Charlie to file the first report on the showdown, worried as he monitored an anxious African American soldier manning the machine gun atop one of the tanks. “If his hand shook any harder, I feared his gun would go off and he would have started World War III,” Kellett-Long thought to himself.

At about midnight in Berlin, or 6:00 p.m. in Washington, Kennedy’s top national security advisers were meeting in emergency session in the White House Cabinet Room. The president was growing increasingly nervous that matters were getting out of control. Just that week, Kennedy’s nuclear strategists had finalized detailed contingency plans to execute a nuclear first-strike on the Soviet Union, if necessary, which would leave America’s adversary devastated and its military unable to respond. The president still had not signed off on the plans and had been peppering his experts with skeptical questions. But the doomsday scenarios colored the president’s mood as he sat with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lyman Lemnitzer, and other key U.S. officials.

From there they phoned General Clay over a secure line in his map room in West Berlin. Clay had been told Bundy was on the line and wished to speak with him, so he was taken aback when he heard the voice of Kennedy himself.

“Hello, Mr. President,” Clay said loudly, abruptly ending the buzz behind him in the command center.

“How are things up there?” Kennedy asked in a voice designed to be cool and relaxed.

Everything was under control, Clay told him. “We have ten tanks at Checkpoint Charlie,” he said. “The Russians have ten tanks there, too, so now we’re equal.”

An aide then handed General Clay a note.

“Mr. President, I’ve got to change my figures. I’ve just been told that the Russians have twenty more tanks coming up, which would give them exactly the total number of tanks that we have in Berlin. So we’ll bring up our remaining twenty. Don’t worry about it, Mr. President. They’ve matched us tank for tank. This is further evidence to me that they don’t intend to do anything,” he said.

The president could do the math as well. Should the Soviets escalate their numbers further, Clay lacked the conventional capability to respond. Kennedy scanned the anxious faces of his men in the room. He propped his feet up on the table, attempting to send a message of composure to men who feared matters were spinning out of control.

“Well, that’s all right,” said the president to Clay. “Don’t lose your nerve.”

“Mr. President,” responded Clay with characteristic candor, “we’re not worried about our nerves. We’re worrying about those of you people in Washington.”

A
half-century has passed since the Berlin Wall rose, midway through the first year of the Kennedy administration, yet it is only now that we have sufficient distance and access to personal accounts, oral histories, and newly declassified documents in the U.S., Germany, and Russia to more confidently tell the story of the forces that shaped the historic events of 1961. Like most epic dramas, it is a story best told through time (the course of a calendar year), place (Berlin and the world capitals that shaped its fortune), and particularly people.

And few relationships between the two leading figures of their day have been as psychologically fraught or involved characters of such sharp contrasts and colliding ambitions as John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.

Kennedy walked onto the world stage in January 1961 after winning the closest U.S. election since 1916 on a platform of “getting America moving again” following two terms of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he had accused of allowing Soviet communists to gain a dangerous edge both economically and militarily. He was the youngest president in American history, a forty-three-year-old American son of privilege, raised by a multimillionaire father of boundless ambition whose favored son, Joseph Jr., had died at war. Though handsome, charismatic, and a brilliant orator, the new president suffered afflictions that ranged from the adrenal insufficiency of Addison’s disease to often crippling back pain exacerbated by a war injury. Though outwardly confident, he would be wracked by uncertainty about how best to engage the Soviets. He was determined to be a great president of the caliber of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, yet he worried they had only found their place in history through war. In the 1960s he knew that would mean nuclear devastation.