Berlin 1961 (31 page)

Within minutes of Ambassador Thompson’s arrival with his wife in Khrushchev’s box at a guest performance of the American Ice Capades, the Soviet leader complained that he had seen enough ice shows to last a lifetime. So he escorted the Thompsons to a private room for dinner, explaining that his invitation to them had all along been an excuse to discuss Vienna.

Thompson did not take notes, but he would have no trouble afterward recalling the conversation in a cable to Washington. Against the background sound of American music, skates scraping on ice, and the crowd’s applause, Khrushchev delivered an unmistakable message. Without a new agreement on Berlin, he told Thompson, he would take unilateral action by fall or winter to give control of the city to the East Germans and end all Allied occupation rights.

Khrushchev dismissed Kennedy’s focus on nuclear disarmament, which he said would be impossible as long as the Berlin problem existed. If the U.S. used force to interfere with Soviet aims in Berlin, he said, then it would be met with force. If the U.S. wanted war, it would get war. Thompson had seen this saber-rattling side of Khrushchev before, but coming just days ahead of the Vienna meeting it was more unsettling.

Khrushchev shrugged, however, saying that he did not expect conflict. “Only a madman would want war and Western leaders were not mad, although Hitler had been,” he said. Khrushchev pounded the table and talked of the horrors of war, which he knew so well. He could not believe Kennedy would bring on such a catastrophe because of Berlin.

Thompson countered that it was Khrushchev, not Kennedy, who was creating the danger by threatening to alter the Berlin situation.

Though that might be true, Khrushchev said, if hostilities were to break out, it would be the Americans and not the Soviets who would have to cross the frontier of Eastern Germany to defend Berlin and thus begin the war.

Time and again during their dinner, Khrushchev said that it had been sixteen years since the Great War had been won, and that it was time to put an end to Berlin’s occupation. Khrushchev reminded Thompson that in his original 1958 Berlin ultimatum he had demanded satisfaction within six months. “Thirty months have now passed,” he said, fuming at Thompson’s suggestion that matters could be left as they currently stood in Berlin. The U.S. was trying to damage Soviet prestige, and this could not be allowed to continue, Khrushchev said.

Thompson conceded that the U.S. could not stop Khrushchev from signing a peace treaty with East Germany, but the important question was whether the Soviet leader would use that moment to interfere with the U.S. right-of-access to Berlin. While Khrushchev was floating a trial balloon for the Vienna Summit of a tougher approach on Berlin, Thompson as well was testing what was likely to be Kennedy’s response.

Thompson also said U.S. prestige everywhere in the world was at stake in its commitments to Berliners. Moreover, Washington feared that if it gave in to Soviet pressure and sacrificed Berlin, West Germany and Western Europe would be the next to fall. “The psychological effect would be disastrous to our position,” he told Khrushchev.

Khrushchev scoffed at Thompson’s words, repeating what had become his frequent refrain: Berlin was really of little importance to either America or the Soviet Union, so why should they get so worked up about changing the city’s status?

If Berlin were of such little significance, retorted Thompson, he doubted that Khrushchev would take such an enormous risk to gain the upper hand in the city.

Khrushchev then put forward the proposal that he planned to present in Vienna: Nothing would prevent the U.S. from continuing to have troops in the “free city” of West Berlin. All that would change was that Washington in the future would have to negotiate those rights with East Germany, he said.

Thompson probed, asking what elements of the problem troubled Khrushchev most, suggesting it might be the refugee problem. Khrushchev brushed aside that notion and said simply, “Berlin is a festering sore which has to be eliminated.”

Khrushchev told Thompson that German reunification was impossible and that in fact no one really wanted it, including de Gaulle, Macmillan, and Adenauer. He said de Gaulle had told him not only that Germany should remain divided, but that it would be even better if it were divided into three parts.

The soft-spoken Thompson saw no option but to return Khrushchev’s threat or be misinterpreted as giving him the green light on Berlin. “Well, if you use force,” said Thompson, “if you want to cut off our access and connections by force, then we will use force against force.”

Khrushchev responded calmly and with a smile. Thompson had misunderstood him, he said. The mercurial Soviet said he didn’t plan to use force. He would simply sign the treaty and put an end to the rights the United States had won as “the conditions of capitulation.”

Thompson’s later cable to Washington on his ice rink face-off reflected little of the importance of what he had just heard. For Khrushchev, it had been a dress rehearsal for what would follow. Thompson, however, played down Khrushchev’s bluster. He wrote that the Soviet leader was outlining in detail for the first time how a permanent division of the city might take place without violating American rights. Thompson repeated his conviction that Khrushchev would not force the Berlin issue until after his October Party Congress. In Vienna, Thompson reckoned, Khrushchev would “slide over the Berlin problem in a sweetness-and-light atmosphere.”

Thompson nevertheless suggested that Kennedy in Vienna offer Khrushchev a Berlin formula that would enable both sides to save face, as the problem would likely come to a head later in the year. Otherwise, he wrote, “war would hang in the balance.”

On the same day, Kennedy was getting a different reading from Berlin. The head of the U.S. Mission there, diplomat E. Allan Lightner Jr., said Moscow could “live with Berlin status quo for some time,” and that Khrushchev had no timetable for action. Thus, argued Lightner, Kennedy could deter Khrushchev in Vienna by sending a sharp message that the U.S. was determined to defend the city’s freedom, and that “the Soviets should keep their hands off Berlin.”

Lightner wanted to ensure that Kennedy knew the consequences of showing weakness in Vienna. “Any indication the President is willing to discuss interim solutions, compromises, or a
modus vivendi
,” he said, “would reduce the impact of warning Khrushchev of the dire consequences of his miscalculating our resolve.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.
THURSDAY, MAY
25, 1961

Like an author seeing the first unsatisfying drafts of his presidency, Kennedy opted to deliver a second State of the Union speech on May 25—“a Special Address to the Nation on Urgent National Needs”—just twelve weeks after the first. It reflected his recognition that before Vienna and after the Bay of Pigs, he needed to set the stage by sending Khrushchev an unmistakable message of resolve.

Bobby Kennedy had used one of his Bolshakov meetings to forewarn Khrushchev that although the president’s rhetoric in the speech would be harsh, this didn’t lessen his brother’s desire to cooperate. However, the Bolshakov channel was not a sufficient means to convey a message of strength that was intended as much for a domestic audience as for Khrushchev.

Standing before a joint session of Congress and a national television audience, Kennedy explained that American presidents had on occasion during “extraordinary times” provided a second State of the Union during a single year. These were such times, he said. As the United States was responsible for freedom’s cause in the world, he declared that he was going to unveil “a freedom doctrine.”

The president’s forty-eight-minute midday speech was interrupted by applause seventeen times. He stressed the need to maintain a healthy American economy, and he celebrated the end of the recession and beginning of recovery. He spoke of the world’s southern hemisphere as the “lands of the rising peoples”—Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Mideast—where the adversaries of freedom had to be countered on “the world’s great battleground.”

Kennedy called for a defense spending increase of some $700 million to expand and modernize the military, to overtake the Soviets in the arms race, and to reorganize civil defense with a threefold increase in money for fallout shelters. He wanted to enlist 15,000 more Marines and put a greater focus on fighting guerrilla wars in the Third World by expanding the supply of howitzers, helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and battle-ready reserve units. Most important, he declared that the United States by the end of the decade would put a man on the moon and return him to Earth. It was a race he was determined to win against the Soviets, who had put the first satellite and man into space.

With the Vienna Summit just nine days off, his message to the American people was that the world was growing more dangerous by the hour, that America had a global responsibility as freedom’s champion, and that it thus must accept the sacrifices required. He set the bar low for what could be achieved with so difficult an adversary, saving just one paragraph for discussion of the Vienna meeting.

“No formal agenda is planned and no negotiations will be undertaken,” he said.

MOSCOW
FRIDAY, MAY
26, 1961

Directly responding to what he perceived as Kennedy’s shot across his bow, Khrushchev called together his most critical constituency, the Communist Party’s ruling Presidium. As usual, his decision to bring the stenographer to the meeting was a sign to its attendees that he intended to say something significant.

He told his Presidium colleagues that Kennedy was “a son of a bitch.” Despite that, he attached great significance to the Vienna Summit because he would use it to bring to a head what he referred to as “the German question.” He outlined the solution that he would propose, using much the same description that he had employed with Ambassador Thompson.

Could the steps he was proposing to change Berlin’s status prompt nuclear war? he asked his fellow Soviet leaders. Yes, he answered, and then he outlined why he considered such a conflict to be 95 percent unlikely.

Only Anastas Mikoyan among his party chieftains dared differ with the Soviet leader. He argued that Khrushchev underestimated the American willingness and ability to engage in conventional war over Berlin. Shifting from previous attacks that focused more on West Germany and Adenauer as the threat, Khrushchev told those gathered that the United States was the most dangerous of all countries to the Soviets. In his love-hate relationship with America, he had turned the needle back to loathing in preparation for the Vienna Summit, a clear indication to his leadership of what outcome he expected.

Khrushchev repeated his increasingly obsessive view that although he was meeting with Kennedy, it was the Pentagon and the CIA that ran the United States, something he said that he had already experienced during his dealings with Eisenhower. He said it was for this reason one could not trust that American leaders could make decisions based on logical principles. “That’s why certain forces could emerge and find a pretext to go to war against us,” he said.

Khrushchev told his comrades that he was prepared to risk war and that he also knew how best to avoid it. He said America’s European allies and world public opinion would restrain Kennedy from responding with nuclear weapons to any change in Berlin’s status. He said de Gaulle and Macmillan would never support an American lurch toward war because they understood that the Soviets’ primary nuclear targets, given the range of Moscow’s missiles, would be in Europe.

“They are intelligent people, and they understand this,” he said.

Khrushchev then laid out exactly how the Berlin situation would unfold after the six-month ultimatum he would issue in Vienna. He would sign a peace treaty unilaterally with the East German government, and then he would turn over to it all the access routes to West Berlin. “We do not encroach on West Berlin, we do not declare a blockade,” he said, thus providing no pretext for military action. “We show that we are ready to permit air traffic but on the condition that Western planes land at airports in the GDR [not West Berlin]. We do not demand a withdrawal of troops. However, we consider them illegal, though we won’t use any strong-arm methods for their removal. We will not cut off delivery of foodstuffs and will not sever any other lifelines. We will adhere to a policy of noninfringement and noninvolvement in the affairs of West Berlin. Therefore, I don’t believe that because the state of war and the occupational regime are coming to an end it would unleash a war.”

Mikoyan was alone in warning Khrushchev that the probability of war was higher than the Soviet leader estimated. Out of respect for Khrushchev, however, he put it at only a slightly greater 10 percent rather than Khrushchev’s 5 percent. “In my opinion, they could initiate military action without atomic weapons,” he said.

Khrushchev shot back that Kennedy so feared war that he would not react militarily. He told the Presidium they perhaps would have to compromise in Laos, Cuba, or the Congo, where the conventional balance was less clear, but around Berlin the Kremlin’s superiority was unquestionable.

To ensure this became even more so, Khrushchev ordered Defense Secretary Rodion Malinovsky, Soviet Army Chief of Staff Matvei Zakharov, and Warsaw Pact Commander Andrei Grechko—who sat before him—“to thoroughly examine the correlation of forces in Germany and to see what is needed.” He was willing to spend the rubles required, he told them. Their first move had to be increasing artillery and basic weapons, and then they had to be ready to reposition more weaponry if the Soviet Union was provoked further. He wanted a report from his commanders in two weeks’ time about how they would plan to execute a Berlin operation, and he expected within six months to be able to match his tough words in Vienna with an improved military capability.

Mikoyan countered that Khrushchev was backing Kennedy into a dangerous position where he would have no option but to respond militarily. Mikoyan suggested that Khrushchev continue to allow air traffic to arrive in West Berlin, which might make his Berlin solution more palatable to Kennedy.