Berlin 1961 (44 page)

Schlesinger was determined not to make the same mistake twice. He considered the Acheson plan for Berlin to be every bit as foolhardy as the Bay of Pigs blueprint. So Schlesinger asked two people who had significant influence with Kennedy to draft an alternative. One was State Department legal adviser Abram Chayes, a thirty-nine-year-old law scholar who had led the team that drafted Kennedy’s 1960 Democratic Convention platform. The other was thirty-eight-year-old White House consultant Henry Kissinger, a rising star who had shaped Kennedy’s thinking on nuclear issues with his book
The Necessity of Choice: Prospects of American Foreign Policy
. Kissinger had supported New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s effort to win the Republican nomination for president in 1960, but he was working through Harvard colleagues to gain influence in the Kennedy White House.

When Kennedy first drafted Acheson into service the previous February, Schlesinger had concluded that the president was merely trying to get a broader mixture of views. Now Schlesinger feared that Kennedy would adopt Acheson’s hard-line approach to Berlin as policy if no one provided him with an alternative. UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was equally troubled by Acheson’s growing influence. “Maybe Dean is right,” Stevenson told Schlesinger. “But his position should be the conclusion of a process of investigation, not the beginning.”

Schlesinger wanted to combat Acheson’s effort to convince the president that “West Berlin was not a problem but a pretext” for Khrushchev to test the general will of the U.S. and its new president to resist Soviet encroachment.

Schlesinger worried that “the thrust of Acheson’s rhetoric, and especially of his brilliant and imperious oral presentations,” would fix the debate around the idea that the Soviets had “unlimited objectives” in reigniting the Berlin Crisis. Yet those who knew Moscow best, Thompson and Averell Harriman, a former ambassador to Moscow, felt Khrushchev’s game might be limited to Berlin alone and thus should be played quite differently. Although the State Department was divided over Acheson’s tough approach, Schlesinger was distraught that no one was framing the other side of the debate because Rusk “was circumspect, and no one quite knew where he stood.”

The British government had leaked its softer line to the
Economist
magazine, which had reported, “Unless Mr. Kennedy takes a decisive grip on the wheel, the West is in danger of bypassing one possible line of compromise after another until it reaches a dead end, where neither it nor Russia has any choice except between ignominious retreat and nuclear devastation.”

Schlesinger felt he had to move fast or lose all influence, as “talk of war mobilization under the proclamation of national emergency contained the risk of pushing the crisis beyond the point of no return.” He worried about repeating the prelude to the Bay of Pigs crisis, where a bad plan had gained unstoppable momentum because no one had opposed it or presented an alternative choice.

He was determined to prompt a showdown on Berlin before it was too late.

On July 7, just after a lunch meeting with Kennedy on another issue, Schlesinger handed the president his Berlin memo and asked that he look it over en route to Hyannis Port that afternoon. The timing was good, as the president would meet with senior officials there the next day on Berlin. Kennedy said he preferred to read Schlesinger’s thoughts right away, because Berlin was his most urgent problem.

Schlesinger had calculated correctly that nothing would get Kennedy’s attention faster than a credible warning that the president was in danger of repeating his mistakes in Cuba. Kennedy had joked after the debacle that Schlesinger’s cautionary memo on Cuba would “look pretty good” when the historian got around to writing his book on the administration. He then added a word of warning: “Only he’d better not publish that memorandum while I’m still alive.” In his anti-Acheson memo, Schlesinger reminded Kennedy that the Cuban fiasco was a result of “excessive concentration on military and operational problems” in the preparatory stage while underestimating the political issues.

Though Schlesinger’s paper praised Acheson for “analyzing the issues of last resort,” he worried that the former secretary of state was defining the issue “to put it crudely as: are you chicken or not? When someone proposes something which seems tough, hard, put-up-or-shut-up, it is difficult to oppose it without seeming soft, idealistic, mushy….” He reminded the president that his Soviet expert Chip Bohlen believed that nothing could help discussion of the Soviets more than eliminating the adjectives “hard” and “soft” from the language of the debate.

“People who had doubts about Cuba,” said Schlesinger, in a clear reference to himself, “suppressed those doubts lest they seem ‘soft.’ It is obviously important such fears not constrain free discussion of Berlin.”

The president read the memo carefully. He then looked at his friend with concern. He agreed that Acheson’s paper was too narrow and that “Berlin planning had to be brought back into balance.” He tasked Schlesinger to expand on his memorandum immediately for use the following day in Hyannis Port.

Schlesinger worked against the clock, since Kennedy’s helicopter would lift off from the White House lawn at five p.m. With only two hours remaining before the president’s departure, Chayes and Kissinger, the lawyer and the political scientist, dictated as Schlesinger edited while typing furiously. By the time Schlesinger ripped the final version from his typewriter, he had something that raised a series of questions about the Acheson paper and suggested new approaches. It said:

The Acheson premise is substantially as follows: Khrushchev’s principal purpose in forcing the Berlin question is to humiliate the U.S. on a basic issue by making us back down on a sacred commitment and thus shatter our world power and influence. The Berlin crisis, in this view, has nothing to do with Berlin, Germany, or Europe. From this premise flows the conclusion that we are in a fateful test of wills…and that Khrushchev will be deterred only by a demonstrated U.S. readiness to go to nuclear war rather than to abandon the status quo. On this theory, negotiation is harmful until the crisis is well developed; then it is useful only for propaganda purposes; and in the end its essential purpose is to provide a formula to cover Khrushchev’s defeat. The test of will becomes an end in itself rather than a means to a political end.

The three men then listed the issues that they believed Acheson had overlooked.

• “What political moves do we make until the crisis develops?”
  The memo argued, “If we sit silent or confine ourselves to rebutting Soviet contentions,” Khrushchev would keep the initiative and put Kennedy on the defensive, making him look rigid and unreasonable.
  
• “The [Acheson] paper indicates no relationship between the proposed military action and larger political objectives.”
  The memo argued, in language intended to shock, that Acheson “does not state any political objective other than [preserving] present access procedures for which we are prepared to incinerate the world.” It thus argued, “It is essential to elaborate the cause for which we are prepared to go to nuclear war.”
  
• “The paper covers only one eventuality…the Communist interruption of military access to West Berlin.”
  Yet, the memo argues, “actually, there is a whole spectrum of harassments, of which a full-scale blockade may well be one of the least likely.”
  
• “The paper hinges on our willingness to face nuclear war. But this option is undefined.”
  The three men counsel Kennedy, whom they already knew was troubled by his war options: “Before you are asked to make the decision to go to nuclear war, you are entitled to know what concretely nuclear war is likely to mean. The Pentagon should be required to make an analysis of the possible levels and implications of nuclear warfare and the possible gradations of our own nuclear response.”
  
• The memo attacked Acheson for addressing himself “almost exclusively to the problem of military access” to Berlin.
  However, military traffic was only 5 percent of the whole, while 95 percent consisted of supplies for the civilian population. It noted that East Germany was already in full control of this civilian traffic, which it “has gone to surprising lengths to facilitate.” It noted that civilian traffic was most essential to the U.S. objective of preserving West Berlin’s freedom.
  
• The memo argued that Acheson ignored sensitivities inside NATO.
  “What happens if our allies decline to go along?” It was unlikely the Allies would support Acheson’s idea of sending troops up the Autobahn to break a blockade through a ground probe, which de Gaulle had already opposed. “What about the United Nations? Whatever happens, this issue will go into the UN. For better or for worse, we have to have a convincing UN position.”
  

Seldom had such an important document been composed so rapidly. Schlesinger typed quickly to keep up with the unfolding thoughts of his brilliant co-conspirators. With an eye on the clock, he created a section called “Random thoughts about unexplored alternatives.” It listed in rat-a-tat fashion what questions the president should be exploring beyond those Acheson had provided.

Most of all, the men wanted to ensure that all questions and alternatives were “systematically brought to the surface and canvassed” before rushing forward with the Acheson plan. The unsigned Schlesinger paper suggested that the president consider withdrawing the Acheson paper from circulation altogether. The danger of Acheson’s thoughts leaking, the memo argued, was greater than the danger to full discussion from a more limited distribution.

Oblivious to the fact that Khrushchev had already decided his course on Berlin, U.S. officials in Washington were engaged in a behind-the-scenes bureaucratic war against Dean Acheson. Although written quickly, the Schlesinger-inspired memo was thorough, even including ideas about which new individuals should be brought into the process to dilute the power of Acheson. It suggested, among others, Averell Harriman and Adlai Stevenson.

It was the revenge of the so-called SLOBs—the Soft-Liners on Berlin.

The Schlesinger memo concluded by suggesting that one of its authors drive the process. “In particular, Henry Kissinger should be brought into the center of Berlin planning,” it said. It would be one of the opening acts for a man who would over time become one of the most effective foreign policy infighters in U.S. history.

At the same time, Kennedy was also hearing doubts about existing nuclear war planning regarding Berlin from Defense Secretary McNamara and National Security Advisor Bundy. In his own memo ahead of the Hyannis Port meeting, Bundy complained about the “dangerous rigidity” of the strategic war plan. It had left the president little choice between an all-out attack on the Soviet Union or no response at all. Bundy suggested that McNamara review and revise it.

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
FRIDAY, JULY
7, 1961

Henry Kissinger spent only a day or two each week in Washington working as a White House consultant, commuting from his post at Harvard University, but that had proved sufficient to put him at the center of the struggle to shape Kennedy’s thinking on Berlin. The ambitious young professor would happily have worked full-time for the president; that, however, had been blocked by his former dean and now D.C. boss, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.

Though Kissinger had mastered the art of flattering his superiors, Bundy was more immune to it than most. Along with the president, Bundy regarded Kissinger as brilliant but also tiresome. Bundy imitated Kissinger’s long, German-accented discourses and the rolling of the president’s eyes that accompanied them. For his part, Kissinger would complain that Bundy had put his considerable intellectual talents to “the service of ideas that were more fashionable than substantial.” Kissinger biographer Walter Isaacson concluded that their differences were a matter of class and style: the tactful, upper-class Bostonian condescending to the brash German Jew.

Still, being so near the center of American power was a new and heady experience for Kissinger, and an early introduction to the White House infighting that would be such a part of his extraordinary life. Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Bavaria, in 1923, he had fled Nazi persecution with his family, arriving in New York when he was fifteen. Now he was advising America’s commander in chief. While Bundy had labored to keep him at arm’s length from Kennedy, Kissinger was now reaching him through another Harvard professor, Arthur Schlesinger, who was deploying him against Acheson.

Kissinger had none of Acheson’s historic place or access to the Oval Office—and at age thirty-eight was thirty years Acheson’s junior—but his thirty-two-page “Memorandum for the President” on Berlin was an audacious attempt to one-up the former secretary of state. It landed on Kennedy’s desk just before he departed for Hyannis Port to work on developing his approach to Berlin. Though Kissinger was much more hard-line on Moscow than Schlesinger, he felt it would be foolhardy for Kennedy to embrace Acheson’s complete dismissal of diplomacy as one available avenue.

Kissinger worried that Kennedy’s aides, and perhaps the president himself, might be naive enough to be tempted by Khrushchev’s “free city” idea, under which West Berlin would fall under United Nations control. Kissinger was also concerned about Kennedy’s distaste for the great Adenauer, and the president’s belief that the West’s long-standing commitment to eventual German unification, through free elections, was fanciful, and should be negotiable. Kennedy, Kissinger feared, didn’t sufficiently realize that inattention to Berlin could breed a crisis for the Atlantic Alliance that would hurt U.S. security interests far more than any deal with Moscow could justify.

So Kissinger put his warning to Kennedy in unmistakable terms:

The first task is to clarify what is at stake. The fate of Berlin is the touch stone for the future of the North Atlantic Community. A defeat over Berlin, that is a deterioration of Berlin’s possibility to live in freedom, would inevitably demoralize the Federal Republic. Its scrupulously followed Western-oriented policy would be seen as a fiasco. All other NATO nations would be bound to draw the indicated conclusions from such a demonstration of the West’s impotence. For other parts of the world, the irresistible nature of the Communist movement would be underlined. Coming on top of the Communist gains of the past five years, it would teach a clear lesson even to neutralists. Western guarantees, already degraded in significance, would mean little in the future. The realization of the Communist proposal that Berlin become a “free city” could well be the decisive turn in the struggle of freedom against tyranny. Any consideration of policy must start from the premise that the West simply cannot afford a defeat in Berlin.