Berlin 1961 (71 page)

After Khrushchev’s threat in Vienna to unilaterally change Berlin’s status by year’s end, Kennedy countered with escalated rhetoric, increased defense spending, greater troop readiness, and a review of military contingencies, including the U.S. nuclear response plan. Yet he was always a step behind the Soviets. When East German forces with Soviet backing closed the Berlin border on August 13 with such remarkable speed and efficiency, the U.S. and its allies seemed to have been caught flat-footed.

Accounts from the period suggest Kennedy was caught entirely by surprise. However, upon closer scrutiny, it is clear not only that Kennedy anticipated some Soviet action similar to what followed, but also that he helped write the script for it. Kennedy privately responded with relief rather than outrage, opting neither to disrupt the border closure when he had the chance nor punish his communist rivals with sanctions. He famously told aides, “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

The consistent message he had sent Khrushchev—directly in Vienna and indirectly thereafter through public speeches and back-channel messages—was that the Soviet leader could do whatever he wished on the territory he controlled as long as he didn’t touch West Berlin or Allied access to the city.

As Kennedy told White House economic adviser Walter Rostow several days before the border closure, “Khrushchev is losing East Germany. He cannot let that happen. If East Germany goes, so will Poland and all of Eastern Europe. He will have to do something to slow the flow of refugees. Perhaps a wall. And we won’t be able to prevent it. I can hold the Alliance together to defend West Berlin, but I cannot act to keep East Berlin open.”

On August 13, 1961, Khrushchev and Ulbricht could act with relative confidence that Kennedy would not respond as long as they remained within the guardrails he himself had established. Probably for that reason they constructed the Wall in its entirety not directly on the border but safely a few paces back in East Berlin. Disdainful of German unification aspirations and willing to accept the existing European balance of power, Kennedy was driven by the mistaken hope that by making the Soviets feel more secure in Berlin, he would increase the chances for fruitful negotiations on a wider range of issues. Instead, as the Cuban crisis would later show, Kennedy’s inaction in Berlin only encouraged greater Soviet misbehavior.

Scholars have long wondered whether Kennedy provided even more explicit approval in advance for the Berlin Wall’s construction. If such communication occurred, it likely would have come during the regular meetings of the president’s brother Robert and Soviet intermediary Georgi Bolshakov, the Soviet military intelligence agent who had established himself as the secret conduit between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Bobby would later apologize for failing to keep a record of those conversations. Bolshakov’s own available account sheds no light on his talks with Bobby just before or after the border closure, and Kremlin and Soviet intelligence archives that could provide clues remain closed.

In spite of that, however, the resemblance is so striking between the course Kennedy had endorsed and what the Soviets and East Germans executed as to be more than coincidental. Kennedy provided Khrushchev greater latitude for action in Berlin than any of his predecessors had done. The declassified transcripts of their Vienna Summit detail the de facto deal Kennedy was willing to strike: He would give Khrushchev a free hand to seal Berlin’s border in exchange for a guarantee that the Soviets would not disrupt West Berlin’s continued freedom or Allied access to the city. Senior U.S. officials who would read the Vienna transcripts later would be shocked by Kennedy’s unprecedented willingness to recognize the postwar division of Europe as permanent in the interest of achieving stability. As Kennedy told Khrushchev on the first day of their Vienna talks, “It was crucial to have the changes occurring in the world and affecting the balance of power take place in a way that would not involve the prestige of the treaty commitments of our two countries.”

The next day Kennedy would extend this line of argument more explicitly to Berlin, repetitively restricting America’s commitment to “
West
Berlin” and not to all of Berlin as his predecessors had. Kennedy drove home that distinction publicly on July 25 in a live, televised speech whose message of retreat to Khrushchev over Berlin was so clear that it unsettled U.S. policy-makers who had so carefully crafted the language of diplomacy since World War II.

Two weeks before the Berlin border closure, on July 30, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman William Fulbright said of the Berlin border on national television: “The truth of the matter is, I think, the Russians have the power to close it in any case…. Next week, if they chose to close their borders, they could, without violating any treaty. I don’t understand why the East Germans don’t close their border, because I think they have a right to close it.”

With that, the Arkansas senator had said publicly what Kennedy was thinking privately. The president did nothing to repudiate him, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy privately told Kennedy that he considered Fulbright’s words “helpful.” Without any countervailing presidential statement, Khrushchev concluded that Fulbright had delivered a deliberate signal, and he said as much both to East German leader Walter Ulbricht and visiting Italian President Amintore Fanfani. “When the border is closed,” Khrushchev told Ulbricht, “the Americans and West Germans will be happy. [U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Llewellyn] Thompson told me that this [refugee] flight is causing the West Germans a lot of trouble. So when we institute these controls, everyone will be satisfied. And beyond that, they will feel your power.”

“Yes,” replied Ulbricht, “and we will have achieved stability.” It was the one thing that unified Ulbricht, Khrushchev, and Kennedy: the desire for East German stability.

Throughout 1961, Berlin was an unwanted, inherited problem for Kennedy, and never a cause that he wished to champion. Speaking from the steaming waters of his giant golden bathtub in Paris during a break in his talks with de Gaulle, Kennedy complained to aides Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, “It seems silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty preserving Berlin as the future capital of a unified Germany when all of us know that Germany will probably never be reunified.” On the plane to London after the Vienna Summit, Kennedy again complained to O’Donnell, “We didn’t cause the disunity in Germany. We aren’t really responsible for the four-power occupation of Berlin, a mistake neither we nor the Russians should have agreed to in the first place.”

I
f establishing the Cold War’s terms for another three decades was the powerful long-term outcome of Berlin 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the most significant short-term aftershock. In the minds of Kennedy and Khrushchev, the Cuban and Berlin situations were inextricably linked.

Critics called Khrushchev’s scheme to put nuclear missiles in Cuba a reckless gamble, but from the Soviet leader’s perspective it was a calculated risk based on what he knew of Kennedy. At the end of 1961, he told a group of Soviet officials that he had learned Kennedy would do almost anything to avoid nuclear war. “I know for certain,” he had said, “that Kennedy doesn’t have a strong background, nor, generally speaking, does he have the courage to stand up to a serious challenge.” Regarding Cuba, he told his son Sergei that Kennedy “would make a fuss, make more of a fuss, and then agree.”

Despite all his first-year setbacks, Kennedy remained so willing to provide Khrushchev concessions to reach a Berlin deal that a proposal he made in April 1962 triggered a significant clash with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. What Kennedy called a “Principles Paper” proposed an “International Access Authority” that would transfer control of access to Berlin from the four powers to a newly created body through which the Soviets and East Germans could block entry by anyone they wished. All Kennedy sought in return was Kremlin acceptance of continued Allied military presence and rights in West Berlin.

The document so directly lifted Soviet language that in a copy passed by Washington to Moscow, the drafters had underscored sections to show what they had borrowed. Beyond that, the paper dropped any mention of German reunification as an eventual goal to be achieved through free elections, which had previously been a nonnegotiable point with Moscow. Never had U.S. proposals so closely resembled Soviet positions or strayed so far from those of Adenauer. At first, Kennedy provided Adenauer only one day for response to a draft. He extended that to forty-eight hours only after angry West German protests.

Adenauer no longer could conceal his disgust with Kennedy. He protested to Paul Nitze, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense who visited him in Bonn, that if Kennedy’s principles went forward, West Berlin would not have sufficient moving vans for all those who wished to flee the city. He then shot off a brusque note to Kennedy that said, “I have considerable objections against some of these proposals. I ask you most urgently, my dear Mr. President, to call an immediate pause to these proceedings….”

A leak of the paper, almost certainly blessed by Adenauer, created such an uproar that commentators on both sides of the Atlantic attacked Kennedy for engaging in retreat while his adversaries continued to gun down would-be refugees, harass Allied soldiers, and further reinforce their Wall. Kennedy was forced to withdraw his proposal. Most humiliating of all, an emboldened Khrushchev was in the process of rejecting Kennedy’s principles anyway because they did not include a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Khrushchev was playing for larger stakes.

Even as he put in place his Cuban operation, on July 5, 1962, he countered with his most detailed proposal yet to Kennedy to end what he labeled the “West Berlin occupation regime.” Under his plan, United Nations police forces would replace Allied troops. They would be drawn from the existing three Western powers but also from neutral states and two Warsaw Pact countries. Through gradual cuts to this contingent of 25 percent per year, after four years West Berlin would have no remaining foreign forces of any kind. Kennedy rejected that proposal two weeks later, on July 17, but every step of the way Khrushchev continued to move his Berlin strategy forward even as he secretly finalized his Cuban plans.

The Soviet military’s high-seas operation to Cuba was so large in scale that Khrushchev had to have assumed that Kennedy and his intelligence services would discover it, but that the president would lack the will to stop the missile deployments.

On September 4, Kennedy told select members of Congress that the CIA had determined the Soviets were helping Castro build up his defense capabilities. That evening, Kennedy issued a press statement that said much the same, and warned Khrushchev “the gravest issues would arise” if the U.S. found evidence of Soviet combat troops or offensive capability. The tone and commitment to respond was far more resolute than Khrushchev had anticipated.

Two days later, on September 6, Khrushchev flew a surprised Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, who had been in Russia visiting electrical plants, to meet with him at his Black Sea retreat at Pitsunda. He explored with Udall what shift in domestic politics might be providing Kennedy a new backbone even while he repeated his conviction that Kennedy was fundamentally weak. “As a president he has understanding,” Khrushchev told Udall, “but what he does not have is courage—courage to solve the German question.” With his Cuban operation far advanced, Khrushchev told Udall, “So we will help him solve the problem. We will put him in a situation where it is necessary to solve it…. We will not allow your troops to be in Berlin.”

Khrushchev told Udall that to avoid damaging Kennedy in the November elections, he would not press the issue until afterward. Without any reference to Cuba, he told Udall that the Soviets’ enhanced position of strength had already changed the balance of power: “It’s been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy—now we can swat your ass.” War over Berlin, Khrushchev said, would mean that with “the space of an hour” there would be “no Paris and no France.”

On October 16, 1962, with most of the Cuban launchers already in place, Khrushchev told Foy Kohler, who was Thompson’s successor as ambassador to the USSR, that he wanted to meet with the president at the UN General Assembly session in New York during the second half of November to talk about Berlin and other issues. By then, the Soviet leader would have significantly shifted the strategic balance, giving Moscow for the first time a capability of reliably hitting the U.S. with nuclear weapons. That, in turn, would leave him in a better position either to negotiate or impose the Berlin solution he wanted. Khrushchev told his new ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, that Berlin remained “the primary issue in Soviet–American relations.”

As Khrushchev would recall later:

My thinking went like this: If we installed the missiles secretly, and then the United States discovered the missiles after they were poised and ready to strike, the Americans would think twice before trying to liquidate our installations by military means. I knew that the United States could knock out some of our installations, but not all of them. If a quarter or even a tenth of our missiles survived—even if only one or two big ones were left—we could still hit New York, and there wouldn’t be much of New York left. I don’t mean to say everyone in New York would be killed—not everyone, of course, but an awful lot of people would be wiped out…. And it was high time that America learned what it feels like to have her own land and her own people threatened.

Of all Khrushchev’s moves linking Cuba and Berlin during this period, perhaps none was as telling as the Soviet construction of an aboveground oil pipeline across East Germany to fuel Soviet troop deployments to the West German border. The pipelines would send an unmistakable message to Kennedy that Khrushchev would be willing to go to war in Berlin over any Cuban pushback. Said Khrushchev: “The Americans knew that if Russian blood were shed in Cuba, American blood would surely be shed in Germany.”