Berlin 1961 (20 page)

The Soviet leader reported to Ulbricht that the Central Committee “has discussed your letter carefully” and that Moscow’s leaders agreed with much of it. The fact that Khrushchev had shared it with party bosses showed that he recognized the gravity of Ulbricht’s criticisms and the urgency of his requests. That said, Khrushchev again asked Ulbricht to contain his mounting impatience.

“Currently, we are beginning to initiate a detailed discussion of these questions with Kennedy,” he wrote. “The probe which we carried out shows that we need a little time until Kennedy stakes out his position on the German question more clearly and until it is clear whether the USA government wants to achieve a mutually acceptable resolution.”

The Soviet leader conceded that the extreme measures Ulbricht had suggested in his letter “under the circumstances” would prove necessary. “If we do not succeed in coming to an understanding with Kennedy, we will, as agreed, choose together with you the time for their implementation.”

Ulbricht had achieved less than he had sought, but more than he might have considered probable. Khrushchev again would ratchet up economic assistance. The Soviet leader would also convene a Warsaw Pact meeting on Berlin. Of all Ulbricht’s demands, Khrushchev refused to agree only to the East German–Soviet summit.

Khrushchev had accepted Ulbricht’s diagnosis of the problem, and he had not rejected the steps Ulbricht had suggested toward a cure. Ulbricht could be satisfied that he had penetrated and influenced Soviet Communist Party thinking on Berlin at the highest levels.

Khrushchev was still buying time to work the new American president. However, Ulbricht had put all the pieces in place to move forward decisively at the moment Khrushchev’s efforts to negotiate a Berlin deal with Kennedy failed. And the East German leader was certain they would.

In the meantime, Ulbricht would put his team to work on contingencies.

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY
17, 1961

The clouds were already gathering around the U.S.–West German relationship when Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano di Tremezzo walked into the Oval Office with his satchel full of Adenauer’s concerns.

For several years, Americans had been warming to the West Germans, impressed by their embrace of U.S.-style freedoms. Now, however, public opinion was turning more negative again, fed by media reports about the impending trial in Israel of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and publicity around William L. Shirer’s best-selling book,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
, with all its sordid new details about the not-so-distant German past.

The West German foreign office had warned Adenauer at the beginning of the year: “There are still some resentments and suspicions which lie dormant under the surface, but which are ready to break out under certain stimuli.” In exasperation at the shifting mood, West German ambassador Wilhelm Grewe told a group of U.S. journalists at a conference of the Atlantik-Brücke, an institution created to bring the two countries closer, that they had “to choose whether they consider us as allies or a hopeless nation of troublemakers.”

Kennedy’s briefing papers for the Brentano meeting warned the president that his visitor was coming to express Adenauer’s concern that his administration might sell out West German interests in Berlin in exchange for a deal with the Soviets. “The Germans are acutely aware that vital aspects of their destiny are in hands other than their own,” said the position paper, signed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk. It advised Kennedy to both reassure Brentano of continued U.S. commitment to West Berlin’s defense and share with him as much of the president’s thinking as possible about the possibility of Berlin negotiations with Moscow.

Given past experience, however, U.S. officials distrusted their West German partners’ ability to keep a secret. American intelligence services assumed that their West German counterparts were infiltrated and thus unreliable. “While frankness is desirable particularly in view of the chronic German sense of insecurity,” the Rusk memo said, “the German government does not have a good record for retaining confidences.”

Detractors said that Brentano—a fifty-seven-year-old bachelor whose life was his job and its trappings—was little more than the genteel, cultured instrument of the strong-willed Adenauer, and the foreign minister did little to alter this impression. Adenauer was determined to run his own foreign policy, and no independent actor could remain long in Brentano’s job. Where Brentano and Adenauer did differ was their attitude regarding Germany’s European calling. While Brentano was of a younger generation that considered Europe as Germany’s natural destiny, Adenauer regarded European integration more as a means of suppressing German nationalism.

Kennedy opened what would be a stiff meeting with Brentano by speaking from a script about “the appreciation of the U.S. government for the cooperation and friendship of the German government during the past years.” He very much wanted to arrange a meeting soon with Adenauer, he said, and hoped “that all mutual problems would be worked out satisfactorily.”

Adenauer’s political opponent Willy Brandt had already manipulated matters so that he would arrive in Washington ahead of Adenauer in March for a personal meeting with Kennedy, a breach of the usual protocol that put the head of an Allied government before any city mayor. Rusk had supported the Brandt visit to keep “freshly before the world our determination to support West Berlin at all costs.” He wanted the Adenauer meeting to follow as closely thereafter as possible to avoid giving the impression that Kennedy favored Brandt in upcoming German elections, which of course he did.

Kennedy reassured Brentano that his failure to mention Berlin by name in the inaugural address or in his State of the Union, a matter that had become such an issue in the German press, “did not by any means signify a lessening of United States interest in the Berlin question.” He said he had merely wanted to avoid provoking the Soviets at a time of relative calm in the city. Kennedy told the foreign minister that he expected Moscow to renew pressure on Berlin in the coming months, and he wanted Brentano’s suggestions about how one could best counter “the subtle pressures” Moscow was likely to exert.

Brentano said Berlin’s absence from Kennedy’s speeches was of such little concern that it had not even been in talking points Adenauer had given him. He agreed there was no reason yet to raise the Berlin question, but added, “We would have to deal with it sooner or later.” Brentano frowned, declaring, “The leaders of the Soviet Zone cannot tolerate the symbol of a free Berlin in the midst of their Red Zone.” He told Kennedy that East German leaders “will do all in their power to stimulate the Soviet Union to action with regard to Berlin.”

On the positive side, Brentano estimated that 90 percent of the East Berlin population opposed the East German regime, which he called the region’s second-harshest communist system after that of Czechoslovakia. His message was that the people in both Germanys heavily favored its Western version and therefore would over time support unification.

Kennedy probed deeper. He worried the Soviets would unilaterally sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and then cut short West Berlin’s freedom, maintaining the status quo for only a brief period in order to mollify the West.

Brentano agreed such a course was probable, so Kennedy asked what the NATO allies should do about it.

Brentano described to Kennedy his chancellor’s “policy of strength” approach, and said the Soviets would “hesitate to take drastic steps with regard to Berlin as long as they know that the Western Allies will not tolerate any such steps.” As long as Kennedy remained firm, he said, the Soviets “may continue to threaten but will not take any actual steps for some time to come.” However, Brentano agreed that recent U.S. setbacks in the Congo, Laos, and Latin America all increased the chance that the Soviets would test Kennedy over Berlin.

As if to prove Brentano’s point, Khrushchev simultaneously escalated pressures on Adenauer in Bonn.

FEDERAL CHANCELLERY, BONN
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY
17, 1961

Ambassador Andrei Smirnov’s urgent requests for meetings with Adenauer were seldom good news.

It was invariably Smirnov, Khrushchev’s envoy in Bonn, who was the vehicle for the Soviet leader’s bullying. So the West German chancellor was already apprehensive upon receiving Smirnov’s demand for an immediate meeting, considering that its timing coincided with his foreign minister’s visit to the White House.

More often than not, Smirnov was a charming and courteous diplomat who delivered the fiercest communication with a calm demeanor and outside the public spotlight. A rare exception had come the previous October, when he had exploded in rage at the comments of Adenauer’s number two, Ludwig Erhard, to a visiting delegation of two hundred African leaders from twenty-four countries, many of them newly independent. “Colonialism has been overcome,” Erhard had said, “but worse than colonialism is imperialism of the Communist totalitarian pattern.”

Before storming out of the hall, Smirnov rose from the audience and shouted, “You talk about freedom, but Germany killed twenty million people in our country!” It was a rare public display of the enduring Russian resentment toward Germans.

This time Smirnov’s task was a more familiar one. He was presenting Adenauer with a nine-point, 2,862-word aide-mémoire from Khrushchev that would provide the most compelling evidence yet during the Kennedy administration that Khrushchev had again turned confrontational on Berlin. Soviet intelligence reports tracked Adenauer’s doubts regarding Kennedy’s reliability, and Khrushchev was wagering that Adenauer might be more susceptible to Soviet entreaties than he had been under the more dependable Truman or Eisenhower.

“An entirely abnormal situation has emerged in West Berlin, which is being abused for subversive activities against the German Democratic Republic, the USSR and other socialist states,” the Khrushchev document said in clear, undiplomatic language. “This cannot be allowed to go on. Either one continues down the path of an increasingly dangerous worsening of relations between countries and military conflict, or one concludes a peace treaty.”

The aide-mémoire, written in the tone of a personal letter from Khrushchev to Adenauer, called Berlin the most important issue in Soviet–German relations. It criticized what it called ever louder and more emphatic popular support in West Germany for revising postwar agreements that had ceded a third of the Third Reich’s territory to the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. “If Germany now has different borders than it had before the war, it has only itself to blame,” the letter said, reminding Adenauer that his country had invaded its neighbors and killed “millions upon millions.”

Though the aide-mémoire had been delivered by the Soviet ambassador to Adenauer, its tough message was intended just as much for Kennedy. In unmistakable fashion, the Soviet leader was declaring that he had lost all patience with Western dithering. First, he complained, the U.S. had asked the Soviets to wait for Berlin talks until after its elections, then Moscow was told to wait until Kennedy could settle into his job, and now Moscow was being asked to wait again until after West German elections.

“If one gives in to these tendencies,” Khrushchev wrote, “it could go on forever.”

The letter closed with Khrushchev’s characteristic cocktail of seduction and threats. He appealed to Adenauer to use “all his personal influence and his great experience as a statesman” to secure European peace and security. If matters turned more confrontational, however, the letter reminded Adenauer that the current correlation of military forces provided the Soviet Union and its friends with all the force they required to defend themselves.

The letter scoffed at West Germany’s appeal for disarmament at a time when Adenauer was quickly building up his military forces and seeking nuclear weapons while trying to transform NATO into the fourth nuclear power. It scolded Adenauer over talk that his party’s coming election campaign would focus on anticommunism. “If that is really the case,” the letter said, “you…must be aware of the consequences.”

The Kennedy administration was not yet a month old, but Khrushchev had already shifted course on Berlin. If Kennedy was unwilling to negotiate an acceptable deal with him, Khrushchev was determined to find other ways to get what he wanted.

PART II

THE GATHERING STORM

7

SPRINGTIME FOR KHRUSHCHEV

West Berlin is a bone in the throat of Soviet–American relations…. If Adenauer wants to fight, West Berlin would be a good place to begin conflict.

Premier Khrushchev to U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson Jr., March 9, 1961

It seems more likely than not that the USSR will move toward a crisis on Berlin this year. All sources of action are dangerous and unpromising. Inaction is even worse. We are faced with a Hobson’s choice. If a crisis is provoked, a bold and dangerous course may be the safest.

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, memo on Berlin for President Kennedy, April 3, 1961

NOVOSIBIRSK, SIBERIA
SUNDAY, MARCH
9, 1961

N
ikita Khrushchev was in poor condition and foul temper.

The Soviet leader’s face was ashen, his body slumped, and his eyes lifeless—an appearance in such contrast to his usual brash buoyancy that it shocked U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson and his two travel companions, the young U.S. political counselor Boris Klosson and Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet foreign ministry’s top America hand.

It had taken Thompson ten days of pleading before he’d succeeded in winning an audience with Khrushchev to deliver the president’s first private letter to the Soviet leader, which included a long-awaited invitation to meet. Even then, Thompson had to fly 1,800 miles to catch up with Khrushchev in Akademgorodok, the vast science city Khrushchev had ordered to be built outside Novosibirsk on the West Siberian plain.