Berlin 1961 (70 page)

Yet it was clear Rusk was waving the white flag. The cable declared, “Further probes by U.S. personnel wearing civilian clothes and riding in official U.S. vehicles or privately owned vehicles bearing plates of U.S. Armed Forces and using armed guards or military escort will be deferred.”

Just in case his point was missed, Rusk’s next instruction made clear that the president wanted Clay to avoid any further confrontation with the East Germans or the Soviets. “U.S. civilian officials,” it said, “will for the time being refrain from going into East Berlin except that one civilian official will attempt daily to enter East Berlin in a privately owned vehicle without armed escort.”

Clay would stay for another several months, but his enemies had won. Rusk drove home that reality further, saying, “For the time being nothing further can be done on the spot since the matter has now moved to the highest government levels…. Instructions have been issued to defer any further civilian probes with armed escorts into East Berlin.”

Even as stubborn a man as Clay knew he had to stand down.

PALACE OF CONGRESSES, MOSCOW
SATURDAY MORNING, OCTOBER
28, 1961

After an evening of tension at the Berlin border, Marshal Konev met with Khrushchev in Moscow as his long Party Congress entered its final two days. Konev reported to Khrushchev that the situation at the border in Berlin was unchanged. No one was moving, he told the Soviet leader, “except when the tank operators on both sides would climb out and walk around to warm up.”

Khrushchev instructed Konev to withdraw Soviet tanks first. “I’m sure that within twenty minutes or however long it takes them to get their instructions, the American tanks will pull back, too,” he said, speaking with the confidence of a man who had made a deal.

“They can’t turn their tanks around and pull them back as long as our guns are pointing at them,” Khrushchev said. “They’ve gotten themselves into a difficult situation, and they don’t know how to get out of it…. So let’s give them one.”

Shortly after 10:30 on Saturday morning, the first Soviet tanks retreated from Checkpoint Charlie. Some of them were covered by flowers, garlands put on them that morning by members of the Freie Deutsche Jugend, the party’s youth organization.

After a half hour’s wait, the U.S. tanks pulled back as well.

With that, the Cold War’s most perilous moment ended with a whimper. However, the aftershocks of Berlin 1961 would be dramatic and long-lasting. They would shake the world a year later in Cuba—and they would shape the world for three decades to come.

Epilogue

AFTERSHOCKS

I recognize fully that Khrushchev’s main intention may be to increase his chances at Berlin, and we shall be ready to take a full role there as well as in the Caribbean. What is essential at this moment of highest test is that Khrushchev should discover that if he is counting on weakness or irresolution, he has miscalculated.

President Kennedy, in a secret cable informing British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of the photographic evidence of Cuban missiles, October 21, 1962

There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin….

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words
“Ich bin ein Berliner.”

President Kennedy, in a speech to Berliners, June 26, 1963

BERLIN AND HAVANA
MID-AUGUST
1962

A
year after President John F. Kennedy acquiesced to the communist construction of the Berlin Wall, two dramas occurring five thousand miles apart illustrated the high cost of one of the worst inaugural-year performances of any modern U.S. president.

The first scene unfolded on August 17 under the spotlight of a Berlin summer sun just minutes after two in the afternoon, when eighteen-year-old bricklayer Peter Fechter and his friend Helmut Kulbeik began their sprint toward freedom across the so-called death strip, the no-man’s-land that lay before the Wall. The first of thirty-five police shots came after the two had squirmed through an intermediary barrier of barbed wire. Two bullets pierced Fechter’s back and stomach as he watched his more agile friend leap to freedom over strands of barbed wire that adorned the barrier’s crown. Fechter collapsed at the base of the wall, where he lay in a quivering fetal position with his arms folded across his chest, his left shoe half off and the white of his ankle showing. For most of an hour, his failing voice cried out for help as his life bled out through multiple wounds.

At the same time and more than an ocean away, Soviet ships had begun landing secretly at eleven different Cuban ports with the makings of a Soviet nuclear missile force of sufficient range and potency to obliterate New York City or Washington, D.C. On July 26, the Soviet freighter
Maria Ulyanova
, named for Lenin’s mother, had docked in the port city of Cabañas as the first of eighty-five Soviet ships that would make 150 round-trips in the following ninety days. They were transporting combat forces and the components for some twenty-four medium-range and sixteen longer-range launchers, each of which would be equipped with a nuclear warhead and two ballistic missiles.

Back in West Berlin, police and news reporters—standing atop ladders to get a better view over the Wall—tracked and photographed Fechter’s bitter end. U.S. troops in battle dress stood by, following orders that they not assist would-be refugees unless they had already escaped communist territory. A gathering crowd of West Berliners screamed their protests, condemning the East Germans as murderers and the Americans as cowards. A U.S. military police lieutenant told one of the onlookers, “It’s not my problem,” an expression of resignation that would spread among outraged West Berliners through the next day’s newspapers.

For their part, East German border guards balked at hauling away the dying victim, needlessly fearful that they would be shot by American troops. Only after Fechter’s body went limp and the East Germans exploded smoke bombs to cover their work did a border patrol carry away the corpse. Still, a photographer captured a tableau oddly reminiscent of the removal of Jesus from the cross. Appearing the following day on the front page of the
Berliner Morgenpost
, it showed three helmeted police, two of them with tommy guns, holding Fechter aloft with his arms splayed and his wrists bloodstained.

Fechter’s murder snapped something inside West Berliners. The following day, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, protesting American impotence as angrily as they did communist inhumanity. Their accumulated feelings of anger and frustration produced what
New York Times
correspondent Sydney Gruson called an “almost unbelievable scene” of West Berlin police firing water cannons and tear gas to prevent their own people from storming the Wall. Wrote Gruson: “More than any single event since the wall was built, Peter Fechter’s lonely and brutal death has made the West Berliners feel a sense of helplessness in the face of the creeping encroachment being worked so subtly by the Communists.”

Meanwhile, over Cuba, CIA aerial photography by mid-August had captured the intensive Soviet maritime activity, given the volume of the deliveries and the sloppiness of execution. Soldiers unloaded vessels at night with streetlights doused and then forwarded shipments over dirt roads in camouflaged vehicles that were so long, troops had to knock down peasant homes to negotiate the turns. Frontline commanders—when not waging war on mosquitoes, heat, or monsoons—communicated their steady progress back to Moscow through couriers to avoid U.S. electronic intercepts.

On August 22, the CIA alerted the White House that as many as 5,000 Soviet personnel had arrived on more than twenty vessels with large quantities of transport, communication, and construction equipment. CIA analysts said the speed and magnitude of this influx of Soviet personnel and matériel to a non–Soviet bloc country was “unprecedented in Soviet military aid activities; clearly something new and different is taking place.” The missiles themselves would not arrive for another two months, however, and America’s spy services for the moment concluded that Moscow was likely augmenting Cuba’s air defense system.

U
pon first reflection, there would seem to be little to connect the public killing of a teenage bricklayer in East Berlin and the clandestine arrival of Soviet troops and missile launcher parts in Cuba. Yet, taken together, they dramatically symbolized the two most significant aftershocks of Kennedy’s mishandling of the events surrounding Berlin in 1961:

• The first would be longer-lasting: the freezing in place of the Cold War division of Europe for three more decades, with all of its human costs. The Wall’s construction not only stopped East Germany’s unraveling at a time when the country’s viability was in doubt; it also condemned another generation of tens of millions of East Europeans to authoritarian, Soviet-style rule with its limits on individual and national freedom.
  
• The second aftershock would be more immediate: the Cuban Missile Crisis in late 1962 with its threat of nuclear war. Though history would celebrate Kennedy for his management of the Cuban crisis, Khrushchev would not have risked putting nuclear weapons in Cuba at all if he had not concluded from Berlin in 1961 that Kennedy was weak and indecisive.
  

The world now knows what President Kennedy did not envision at the time: that the Berlin Wall would fall in November 1989, that Germany and Berlin would be unified a year later in October 1990, and that the Soviet Union itself would collapse a year after that, at the end of 1991. Given the Cold War’s happy ending, it has been tempting for historians to give Kennedy more credit than he deserves for that outcome. By avoiding undue risk to stop the Berlin Wall’s construction, their argument goes, Kennedy prevented war and set the stage for Germany’s eventual unification, for the liberation of the Soviet bloc’s captive nations, and for the enlargement of a free and democratic Europe.

However, the record—informed by new evidence and a closer examination of existing accounts and documents—demands a less generous judgment. Two-time National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft correctly notes in this book’s foreword, “History, sadly, does not reveal its alternatives.” But it does provide unmistakable clues. We will never know whether a more resolute Kennedy could have brought an earlier end to the Cold War. What’s beyond dispute, however, is that Kennedy’s actions allowed East German leaders to stop just the sort of refugee flow that would be the country’s undoing twenty-eight years later. The facts also make clear that Kennedy’s actions in 1961 were never motivated primarily by a desire to keep West Berlin free.

During his first year in office, Kennedy was not focused on rolling back communism in Europe, but instead was trying to stop its spread to the developing world. Regarding Berlin, he was most concerned about avoiding instability and miscalculations that would lead to nuclear war. Unlike his predecessors, Presidents Eisenhower and Truman, he was dismissive both of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his dreams of German unification.

Perhaps the best judge of Kennedy’s poor showing in 1961 was the president himself. He was privately candid about his mishandling of the Bay of Pigs crisis and the Vienna Summit. When, on September 22—more than a month after the border closure—
Detroit News
journalist Elie Abel sought Kennedy’s cooperation for a book he wished to write on Kennedy’s first year in office, the president responded, “Why would anyone want to write a book about an administration that has nothing to show for itself but a string of disasters?”

It was a refreshing expression of self-awareness about a year that had been marked by Kennedy’s inconsistency, indecision, and policy failure.

T
hough Kennedy’s election campaign had focused on fresh ideas and the urgent need for change, when it came to Berlin, he was more focused on maintaining the fragile status quo. He believed that one should only address the more intractable Berlin situation after a confidence-building process of negotiations on a nuclear test ban agreement and other arms control matters.

Then, in the first days of his administration, Kennedy failed to seize the best opportunity that would be available to him for a breakthrough in relations due to an amateur’s misreading of Khrushchev’s signals. The Soviet leader had demonstrated a new willingness to cooperate with the U.S. through a series of unilateral gestures that included the release of captured U.S. airmen on the morning after Kennedy’s inauguration. Instead, Kennedy decided that Khrushchev was escalating the Cold War to test him, a conclusion he had reached largely by overinterpreting the harsh rhetoric of a routine speech delivered to rally party propagandists.

What followed was Kennedy’s alarmist State of the Union speech. With considerable hyperbole, Kennedy told the nation what he had learned in less than two weeks in office that had prompted him to alter the far more cautious tone of his inaugural speech:

Each day, the crises multiply. Each day, their solution grows more difficult. Each day, we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger. I feel I must inform the Congress that our analyses over the last ten days make it clear that, in each of the principal areas of the crisis, the tide of events has been running out—and time has not been our friend.

The iconic moment for Kennedy’s first-year indecisiveness came with the Bay of Pigs debacle in April, when the president neither canceled an operation that had been spawned in the Eisenhower administration nor gave it the resources required for success. From that point forward, Kennedy rightly worried that Khrushchev had concluded he was weak, particularly given the Soviet leader’s more resolute response to the Hungarian uprising of 1956. As Kennedy told columnist James Reston after the Soviet leader had mauled him at the Vienna Summit, Khrushchev “thought anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken. And anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts. He just beat the hell out of me,” he told Reston. “I’ve got a terrible problem.”