Berlin 1961 (65 page)

Kennedy decided to make public previously secret details about the size, power, and superiority of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Kennedy’s satellite intelligence was making increasingly clear the extent of American nuclear dominance, but he reckoned Khrushchev lacked similar intelligence on U.S. capabilities.

President Eisenhower had never revealed what he knew about Soviet military inferiority because he did not want to accelerate Soviet efforts to arm up. It was lack of that intelligence that led Kennedy to falsely charge that Eisenhower had allowed a “missile gap” to form in Moscow’s favor. Ironically, Kennedy now argued that showing America’s hand was necessary to keep America safe. Not coincidentally, it was also smart politics.

Kennedy feared that he was looking weak to Moscow, the Allies, and Americans, when in truth he was strong enough to defeat Moscow or any other country in any military conflict. The president thought it would be too belligerent for him to send that message personally, so he picked for the job the number-two official at the Defense Department, Roswell Gilpatric, who was already scheduled to speak on October 21 to the Business Council in Hot Springs, Virginia.

It was an unlikely audience for such a significant moment, but the spokesman Kennedy had chosen was ideal. Gilpatric had become a personal friend of Jacqueline Kennedy, who called him “the second most attractive man” at the Pentagon, after McNamara. Kennedy liked and trusted the smooth, Yale-educated Wall Street lawyer. A young Pentagon strategist named Daniel Ellsberg drafted the speech, but the president himself collaborated on it with Bundy, Rusk, and McNamara.

Knowing nothing of the Bolshakov back channel or the exchange of private letters with Khrushchev, Ellsberg asked Kaysen whether it wouldn’t be more effective for Kennedy to send a more private message to the Soviet leader about U.S. superiority? Why all the noise? Couldn’t Kennedy just send him the precise coordinates of Soviet ICBMs and perhaps enclose copies of satellite photos?

However, that overlooked Kennedy’s desire for a highly public response to reassure his domestic and West European audiences. White House spokesmen invited top national reporters to Hot Springs and briefed them beforehand so that the speech’s importance wouldn’t be missed. “Berlin is the emergency of the moment because the Soviets have chosen to make it so,” Gilpatric said.

We have responded immediately with our Western Allies by reinforcing our garrisons in that beleaguered city. We have called up some 150,000 reservists, increased our draft calls and extended the service of many who are in uniform….

But our real strength in Berlin—and at any other point in the perimeter of the free world’s defenses that might tempt the Communist probes—is much more broadly based. Our confidence in our ability to deter Communist action, or resist Communist blackmail, is based upon a sober appreciation of the relative military power of the two sides. The fact is that this nation has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power that any enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of self-destruction on his part.

Gilpatric then provided previously undisclosed details on hundreds of intercontinental bombers, including some six hundred heavy bombers, which could devastate the Soviet Union with the help of highly developed refueling techniques. He spoke of land-based and carrier-based strike forces that “could deliver additional hundreds of megatons.” Gilpatric said the U.S. had tens of thousands of tactical and strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, with more than one warhead for each of them.

“Our forces are so deployed and protected that a sneak attack could not effectively disarm us,” he said. Even after enduring a surprise attack, Gilpatric said that U.S. destructive power would be far greater than any enemy could muster, and that America’s retaliatory force would survive better than that of the Soviets because of its concealment, its mobility, and its hardened targets.

“The Soviets’ bluster and threats of rocket attacks against the free world—aimed particularly at the European members of the NATO alliance—must be evaluated against the hard facts of United States nuclear superiority,” said Gilpatric. “The United States does not seek to resolve disputes by violence. But if forceful interference with our rights and obligations should lead to violent conflict—
as it well might
—the United States does not intend to be defeated” (italics added).

Finally, Kennedy had called Khrushchev’s bluff.

PALACE OF CONGRESSES, MOSCOW
SUNDAY, OCTOBER
22, 1961

Given the drumbeat in Hot Springs, Virginia, Khrushchev, back in Moscow, began to worry that a Berlin conflict was coming.

During a break in the ongoing Moscow Party Congress, General Konev presented Khrushchev with evidence that the Americans were preparing for war. Though Konev remained by title the Soviet commander in Germany, Khrushchev considered much of his job to be as liaison, and the general was in Moscow as a party delegate.

Khrushchev would later recall that Konev brought him intelligence on exactly what day and hour the West would begin hostilities in Berlin. “They were preparing bulldozers to break down our border installations. The bulldozers would be followed by tanks and wave after wave of jeeps with infantry men.” Khrushchev believed that the action had been timed to coincide with the first days of his Party Congress.

Though there is no reason to doubt that Khrushchev got word of Clay’s unauthorized tank maneuvers, he could blame the timing of what followed more on his bothersome ally, Walter Ulbricht. Upset by Khrushchev’s decision in Moscow to abandon the East German peace treaty, Ulbricht decided again to take matters into his own hands in East Berlin. This time, however, he would face an America willing to push back.

The stage was set for the first and last direct U.S.–Soviet military confrontation.

18

SHOWDOWN AT CHECKPOINT CHARLIE

I do not believe that you sent me here to live in a vacuum and I know that I can be of no real service if it is deemed wise to be extremely cautious in Berlin. I may add, too, that I did not come here to add to your problems and that I am gladly expendable.

General Lucius Clay to President Kennedy, October 18, 1961

In the nature of things, we had long since decided that entry into Berlin is not a vital interest which would warrant determined recourse to force to protect and sustain. Having for this reason acquiesced in the building of the wall we must recognize frankly among ourselves that we thus went a long way in accepting the fact that the Soviets could, in the case of East Berlin, as they have done previously in other areas under their effective physical control, isolate their unwilling subjects.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk to General Clay, October 26, 1961

DAHLEM DISTRICT, WEST BERLIN
SUNDAY, OCTOBER
22, 1961

T
he evening that would trigger the year’s decisive crisis began innocently.

E. Allan Lightner Jr., America’s top diplomat in West Berlin, hurried his wife, Dorothy, so that they would not be late for a performance of an experimental Czech theater company across town in East Berlin. She had read about the show in a local paper, and it seemed an inviting diversion after two months and nine days of unrelenting pressure after the Berlin border closure.

It was crisp autumn weather in West Berlin’s smart Dahlem district, where the Lightners lived in a spacious villa that had been confiscated from a ranking Nazi after the war. Their neighbors were preparing for winter. Some had used the day to rake their lawns clean of brown and yellow leaves shed from beech and oak trees. Others were removing their heavy down comforters from storage to air them out across clotheslines and on balconies.

Though Lightner had failed to anticipate the Wall, it had done his career no harm. No posting had a higher profile than one on the Cold War’s fault line. Like many State Department wives of the time, Dorothy embraced her husband’s career and its privileges; staff considered her pushy and overly demanding of their services. The Lightners had always savored their outings in the Soviet zone, where the socialist world’s top artists performed. However, since August 13, their visits had taken on greater symbolic value. East Berliners who recognized Lightner would often thank him just for showing up.

Lightner knew there was a slim chance their journey across town would be more eventful than usual. That week, the so-called East German People’s Police, the Volkspolizei, or Vopos for short, had begun spot checking documents of Allied civilians. The move was not only in violation of the four-power procedures but it also contradicted Soviet instructions, most recently from Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, that the East Germans should change nothing at the border without Soviet sanction.

Ulbricht had apparently approved the move from his position in Moscow, where he was fuming over the content of Khrushchev’s speech to the Party Congress. Though Kennedy had considered the Soviet leader’s address to be belligerent, Ulbricht had focused instead on Khrushchev’s decision to extend his year-end deadline for a war-ending peace treaty. In Ulbricht’s view, Khrushchev was back to his old habit of dithering over Berlin at East German expense. Ulbricht’s own speech three days later had called the treaty a “task of the utmost urgency.” Ulbricht needed the treaty to consolidate his August triumph by further expanding his control of East Berlin while isolating and demoralizing West Berlin.

Yet words had never been enough with Khrushchev, so Ulbricht would unilaterally expand border inspections, figuring the West would complain but not resist after having accepted the far greater indignity of the border closure. In doing so, however, the East German leader was underestimating the determination of the newest U.S. factor on the ground: General Lucius Clay.

Together, Ulbricht and Clay would initiate a superpower confrontation that their masters in Moscow and Washington had neither wanted nor anticipated—though both adversaries would suspect the showdown was by the other side’s design.

Encouraged by Clay, that week Lightner had instructed his U.S. Mission to resist the new East German procedures. He had prohibited his staff from submitting to the checks, and his own secretary had turned back her car just a day earlier rather than show her papers. Lightner and Clay were livid that British Prime Minister Macmillan had accepted the new controls without a peep of protest, which they considered another dose of British appeasement. London’s orders to local commanders were clear: after ceding the wall, this wasn’t a battle worth fighting.

Clay disagreed. If Washington permitted the East Germans to interfere further with what had been Allied rights since 1945, Clay was convinced the U.S. would undermine already fragile West Berlin morale and erode what remained of Allied legal standing. Given his preparatory conversations in Washington, he also remained confident that Kennedy was more determined than his advisers to hold the line in Berlin. For the moment, however, his enemies had been pushing back because they sensed Clay lacked the influence with Kennedy that he had won with Truman.

So for Clay, the situation presented a triple opportunity. First, he could demonstrate renewed U.S. resolve in Berlin. Second, he could restore the self-confidence of both U.S. troops and West Berliners. Finally, he could demonstrate to his opponents in Moscow and Washington that he had President Kennedy’s backing.

There was only one problem: Clay himself was uncertain where his wavering president stood.

Unlike Clay, Lightner did not consider himself a Cold Warrior, but that’s what he was. The fifty-three-year-old Princetonian derided as “parlor pinks” his fellow Ivy League intellectuals who wrote and spoke naively about “the great Russian experiment” of communism. He grumbled to Dorothy that a couple of months in the Soviet Union would change their tune fast enough. Experience had shaped those views. Lightner had been posted as a young man to Stalin’s Russia, until 1941, when he’d evacuated wartime Moscow with the embassy’s documents. After that, he had worked with anticommunist exiles in Scandinavia, shared bomb shelters in London with intrepid Brits, and had a hand in sculpting the postwar agreements that he was sorry had ceded so much of Europe to Soviet control.

Lightner told friends that if Clay had been present on August 13, the U.S. military would have broken through the earlier barriers, and the East Germans would not have risked war to replace them. He bought into Clay’s argument that the U.S could not afford to retreat further, but he worried that Clay would not be able to overcome a far more bureaucratic U.S. structure in Berlin than the one he had faced in 1948. Lightner bridled at his own confusing, double reporting line—as the number two to both General Watson in Berlin and Ambassador Dowling in Bonn.

As that night’s script would have it, East German police stopped Lightner’s Volkswagen sedan as it snaked through the first of the checkpoint’s three low red-and-white zigzag concrete barriers—two jutting out from the curbside to the left and another reaching in from the right. Following procedure, Lightner refused to show his papers to the East Germans and insisted on seeing a Soviet representative. Most often, the East German police would then wave American diplomats through. Under the new orders, however, the East German officer refused to let Lightner pass. Given it was Sunday, he said he could not reach a Soviet representative and then repeated his demand that Lightner show his papers or turn back.

Again Lightner refused, and was now egged on by Dorothy, who lectured the East German on four-power rights from the passenger side of their car. For the next forty-five minutes, tempers flared, voices rose, and arguments raged, but still no Soviet official appeared. So Lightner concluded it was time to escalate. After sending an alert through to Clay from his special car phone, Lightner prepared to muscle through. Though he knew the Vopos had shoot-to-kill orders for countrymen trying to escape, he thought it was a safe risk that they would not shoot an American diplomat trying to enter. That would be an act of war.