Berlin 1961 (36 page)

I
t was only the halftime break at the Vienna Summit, but it was already clear that Team USA was losing.

Kennedy had reinforced Khrushchev’s impression of his weakness. “This man is very inexperienced, even immature,” Khrushchev told his interpreter Oleg Troyanovsky. “Compared to him, Eisenhower is a man of intelligence and vision.”

In the years that followed, then Vienna-based U.S. diplomat William Lloyd Stearman would teach students about the summit’s lessons in a lecture he called “Little Boy Blue Meets Al Capone.” He thought that title captured the naive, almost apologetic approach Kennedy had followed in the face of Khrushchev’s brutal assaults. He believed the Bay of Pigs had cut into the president’s confidence at the summit and had made Khrushchev feel that “Kennedy was now his pigeon.”

Stearman’s insights were better informed than most observers’ because he was regularly briefed in Vienna by his friend Martin Hillenbrand, who was the note-taker at the Kennedy–Khrushchev meeting. Stearman’s view was that the talks had gone astray partly because Kennedy had been so ill served by his key advisers.

Stearman dismissed Secretary of State Rusk as an Asia expert who lacked sufficient judgment on Soviet issues. National Security Advisor Bundy was more cerebral than decisive, Stearman believed. Missing at the heart of the administration were advisers who could bring Kennedy the sense of historic moment and accompanying strategic direction that Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles had supplied Truman and Eisenhower.

By Stearman’s account, Kennedy had also hurt his chances of success during the pre-summit planning by going around his national security staff and doing much of the planning secretly between Bolshakov and his brother Bobby. When the talks began to head in the wrong direction, Kennedy lacked backup staff with adequate knowledge of the preparations to help him change direction.

M
ercifully, the U.S. embassy residence where Kennedy was staying also had a bathtub, though it was more modest than the gilded basin of Paris. As Kennedy soaked, O’Donnell asked the president about the awkward moment at the beginning of the day when he was sizing up the Soviet leader on the residence steps.

“After all the studying and talking I’ve done on him in the last few weeks, you can’t blame me for being interested in getting a look at him,” he said.

Was he different than forecast? asked O’Donnell.

“Not really,” said Kennedy, but then he corrected himself. “Maybe [he was] a little more unreasonable [than expected]…. From what I read and from what people told me, I expected him to be smart and tough. He would have to be smart and tough to work his way to the top in a government like that one.”

Dave Powers told the president that he and O’Donnell had watched from the second-floor window as the Soviet leader went after him during their walk in the garden. “You seemed pretty calm while he was giving you a hard time out there.”

Kennedy shrugged. “What did you expect me to do?” he asked. “Take off one of my shoes and hit him over the head with it?” He said Khrushchev had been battering him on Berlin in an effort to wear him down over the issue. Khrushchev had questioned how the U.S. could support the notion of German unification. The Soviet leader had said he lacked all sympathy for Germans, who had killed his son in the war.

Kennedy had reminded Khrushchev that he had lost his brother as well, but the U.S. would not turn its back on West Germany nor pull out of Berlin. “And that’s that,” Kennedy had told Khrushchev.

Kennedy told his friends about Khrushchev’s tough response to his concerns about the possibility of
miscalculation
on either side leading to war. “Khrushchev went berserk,” he said. He told O’Donnell that he would make a mental note to stay away from the word during the rest of their talks.

A
ustrian President Adolf Schärf had a protocol problem to solve before his grand gala dinner that evening at Schönbrunn Palace. Which of the two leaders’ wives should sit at his right? he wondered.

On the one hand, Khrushchev had freed Vienna from the possible fate of a divided Berlin by allowing it to embrace independence and neutrality through the Austrian state treaty of May 15, 1955. Because of that, Khrushchev’s wife, Nina, had earned pride of place. Yet the Viennese loved the Kennedys, and Austrians, despite their neutrality, felt that where they belonged was the West.

In a diplomatic compromise, Schärf would seat Madame Khrushchev to his right at the dinner, and Mrs. Kennedy would have the honored position for the second half of the evening, during performances in the music room.

It was Austria’s coming-out party. More than six thousand Viennese crowded around the floodlit gates of the 265-year-old palace to watch Kennedy and Khrushchev arrive. The palace staff had waxed the parquet floor to a perfect sheen and scrubbed the windows until they sparkled. The most valuable of the antiques were removed from the museum’s display rooms and positioned for use. Staff collected flowers from the palace gardens and arranged them so generously on the tables that they perfumed the entire hall. The tables were set with the “Gold Eagle Service,” a priceless porcelain collection with the Austrian double-headed eagle embossed on a white background that had been used by Emperor Franz Joseph.

Aside from the fact that the meals were served cold, the Austrians patted themselves on the back on an evening well done. The evening’s guests noticed how Jackie and Nina had hit it off. Jackie wore a floor-length pink sheath dress. Designed by Oleg Cassini, the gown was sleeveless and low-waisted. Nina dressed in a dark silk dress laced with a faint golden thread—a more proletariat choice.

Their husbands struck the same contrast. Kennedy was in black tie and Khrushchev in a plain dark suit and checkered gray tie. Waiters in white gloves, knee breeches, and gold braid moved through the corridors and across the spacious rooms bearing silver trays laden with drinks.

“Mr. Khrushchev,” a photographer asked, “won’t you shake hands with Mr. Kennedy for us?”

“I’d like to shake
her
hand first.” Khrushchev grinned and nodded to the president’s wife.

Associated Press reporter Eddy Gilmore scribbled that beside Jackie “the tough and often belligerent Communist leader looked like a smitten schoolboy when the ice thaws along the Volga in springtime.” Khrushchev went out of his way to sit beside Jackie while the chamber ensemble of the Vienna Philharmonic played Mozart and then the Vienna State Opera’s dance company performed the “Blue Danube” waltz.

Kennedy’s performance was not nearly as graceful. Just before the music began, he lowered himself onto a chair, only to find that it already held Khrushchev’s wife. He stopped just short of landing in her lap.

He smiled an apology. The Vienna Summit wasn’t going well at all.

11

VIENNA: THE THREAT OF WAR

The U.S. is unwilling to normalize the situation in the most dangerous spot in the world. The USSR wants to perform an operation on this sore spot—to eliminate this thorn, this ulcer….

Premier Khrushchev to President Kennedy, Vienna, June 4, 1961

I never met a man like this. I talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes and he just looked at me as if to say, “So what?” My impression was he just didn’t give a damn if it came to that.

President Kennedy to reporter Hugh Sidey,
Time,
June 1961

SOVIET EMBASSY, VIENNA
10:15 A.M., SUNDAY, JUNE
4, 1961

S
tanding before the Soviet embassy, Nikita Khrushchev shifted from side to side like a boxer eager to come back out of his corner after having won the opening rounds. A wide grin revealed the gap in his front teeth as he thrust out his small, plump hand to greet Kennedy.

For all the Soviet state’s working-class pretensions, Moscow’s embassy was unashamedly imperial. Acquired by Tsarist Russia in the late nineteenth century, its neo-Renaissance facade opened up to a grand entry hall of natural granite and marble. “I greet you on a small piece of Soviet territory,” said Khrushchev to Kennedy. He then threw out a Russian proverb whose meaning escaped Kennedy: “Sometimes we drink out of a small glass but we speak with great feelings.”

After some nine minutes of small talk, none of it memorable, Khrushchev took his American guests through a pillared corridor to a wide staircase that led to the second floor. There they sat on sofas in a twenty-foot-square conference room with red damask walls.

The manner in which the two men had spent the morning ahead of their second day’s meeting spoke to their differences. The Catholic Kennedys had listened to the Vienna Boys’ Choir and had taken Mass from Cardinal Franz König in the Gothic magnificence of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The First Lady’s eyes had welled up as she fell to her knees to pray. When the Kennedys emerged from worship, a throng cheered on the cobblestoned square outside. At about the same time, a far smaller and less enthusiastic crowd watched with curiosity as the leader of the atheist Soviet Union laid a wreath at the Soviet war memorial at the Schwarzenbergplatz. Locals knew it bitterly as the “monument to the unknown rapist.”

In the conference room where the two delegations gathered, the matching red curtains were pulled shut. They concealed the embassy’s tall and broad windows and created an atmosphere of gloom, keeping out the day’s bright sun. Kennedy began with the same sort of small talk he had employed the first day, asking the Soviet premier about his childhood. Khrushchev had no interest in discussing his peasant origins with this child of privilege. So he was curt, saying only that he was born in a Russian village near Kursk, less than ten kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

Shifting quickly to the present, he said the Soviet Union had recently found very large deposits of iron ore near Kursk, estimated at 30 billion tons. He said total reserves were likely to be ten times greater than that. By comparison, he reminded Kennedy, total iron ore deposits of the U.S. were only a fraction of that, at 5 billion tons. “Soviet deposits will be sufficient to cover the needs of the entire world for a long time to come,” he said.

In the first minutes of Day Two in Vienna, Khrushchev had turned what might have been a personal exchange about family matters into a boast about his country’s superior resource base. He did not ask about the president’s upbringing, about which he knew quite enough. Impatiently, he suggested they move on to the day’s purpose: discussing Berlin and its future.

In its edition of that morning, the London
Times
had quoted a British diplomat on his concerns about the Vienna Summit. “We hope the lad will be able to get out of the bear cage without being too badly mauled,” he had said. And Khrushchev had come out at the beginning of the second day with his claws bared. Despite progress their delegations had made overnight on Laos, he was unwilling to seize upon the issue as an example of how the two sides could reduce tensions.

U.S. and Soviet foreign secretaries and their staffs had reached agreement that they would accept a neutral Laos. It was a concession that could be politically costly to Khrushchev, as it would be opposed by the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and the Pathet Lao, the Laotian communist movement. Instead of embracing Kennedy over the accord, however, Khrushchev accused him of “megalomania and delusions of grandeur” for insisting that the U.S. would continue to safeguard its commitments in Asia.

Beyond that, Khrushchev resisted all of Kennedy’s efforts to steer talks toward nuclear test ban issues. He rejected the president’s logic that only an overall improvement of relations could open the way to an eventual Berlin settlement. For Khrushchev, Berlin had to come first.

Pushing for the test ban, Kennedy drew upon a Chinese proverb: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

“You seem to know the Chinese very well,” Khrushchev said.

“We may both get to know them better,” responded Kennedy.

Khrushchev smiled. “I know them well enough now,” he said. It was an unusual slip for the Soviet, a brief glimpse into his frustration with Mao.

However, the Soviets would doctor the final transcript, which would be provided to Beijing, adding another sentence that Khrushchev actually had never said to Kennedy: “China is our neighbor, our friend, and our ally.”

The most important exchange of the summit began with a Khrushchev warning. The Soviet leader prefaced his statement by saying Moscow had waited as long as it could for a Berlin solution. He said the position he was about to outline regarding Berlin would “affect the relations between our two countries to a great extent and even more so if the U.S. were to misunderstand the Soviet position.”

At that point, both men’s advisers sat forward, knowing that everything else had been foreplay for this moment. “Sixteen years have passed since World War II,” said Khrushchev. “The USSR lost twenty million people in that war and much of its territory was devastated. Now Germany, the country which unleashed World War II, has again acquired military power and has assumed a predominant position in NATO. Its generals hold high offices in that organization. This constitutes a threat of World War III, which would be even more devastating than World War II.”

For that reason, he told Kennedy, Moscow refused to tolerate any further delay regarding Berlin, because only West German militarists would gain from it. He said German unification was not a practical possibility and that even Germans didn’t want it. So the Soviets would begin to act from the “actual state of affairs, namely, that two German States exist.”

Khrushchev told Kennedy that it was his preference to reach agreement personally with
him
on a war-ending treaty that would alter Berlin’s status. If that wasn’t possible, however, he would act alone and end all postwar commitments made by the Soviets. He said thereafter West Berlin would be a “free city” where U.S. troops could remain, but only coexisting with Soviet troops. The Soviets would then join the U.S. in ensuring “what the West
calls
West Berlin’s freedom.” Moscow would also be “agreeable” to the presence of neutral troops or UN guarantees.