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Authors: Frederick Kempe

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Clay, who had commanded the 1948:
Andrei Cherny,
The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour
. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008, 253; U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1961–1963, vol. XIV, Berlin Crisis, 1961–1962, Doc. 186, Telegram from the Mission at Berlin to the Department of State, Berlin, October 23, 1961, 2:00 p.m.; Curtis Cate,
The Ides of August: The Berlin Wall Crisis—1961
. New York: M. Evans, 1978, 477.
Convinced from personal experience:
William R. Smyser, “Tanks at Checkpoint Charlie,”
The Atlantic Times
, October 2005: http://www.atlantic-times.com/archive_detail.php?recordID=319; NYT, 10/24/1961; Cate,
The Ides of August
, 479.
Since then, the communists had fortified:
Gelb,
The Berlin Wall
, 3. Winston Churchill, “‘Iron Curtain’ Speech,” Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946; as quoted in Katherine A. S. Sibley,
The Cold War
. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998, 136–137.
the tank showdown at Checkpoint Charlie:
RIAS radio reports, October 25–28, 1961; Raymond L. Garthoff, “Berlin 1961: The Record Corrected,”
Foreign Policy
, no. 84 (Fall 1991), 142–156.
Reuters correspondent Adam Kellett-Long:
Interview with Adam Kellett-Long, October 15–16, 2008.
From there they phoned:
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (JFKL),
Lucius D. Clay OH
.
“Mr. President,” responded Clay:
FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. XIV, Berlin Crisis, 1961–1962, Doc. 195, 196; Cate,
The Ides of August
, 485–486.
Between the establishment of the East German state:
Berlin Wall Statistics (Der Polizeipräsident von Berlin), chronik-der-mauer.de.

1.
KHRUSHCHEV: COMMUNIST IN A HURRY

“We have thirty nuclear”:
Michael R. Beschloss,
The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev 1960–1963
. New York: HarperCollins, 1991, 52; Taubman,
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
, 449.
“No matter how good”: Pravda
, no. 2 (15492), February 2, 1961.
At home, Khrushchev was suffering:
Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali,
Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary
. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006, 343–344.
Khrushchev was fond:
Dean Rusk,
As I Saw It: A Secretary of State’s Memoirs
. London: I. B. Tauris, 1991, 227.
Given Khrushchev’s increased capability:
Bryant Wedge, “Khrushchev at a Distance: A Study of Public Personality,”
Society (Social Science and Modern Society)
, 5, no. 10 (October 1968), 24–28.
Another top-secret personality:
CIA, Office of Current Intelligence (OCI), No. 2391-61, Copy No. 22.
During the campaign:
Arkady N. Shevchenko,
Breaking with Moscow.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985, 108–109.
As the countdown:
Taubman,
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
, 106–107.
Though still vigorously youthful:
Fursenko and Naftali,
Khrushchev’s Cold War
, 16; Beschloss,
The Crisis Years
, 47; Taubman,
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
, 39, 191; Marshall MacDuffie,
The Red Carpet: 10,000 Miles Through Russia on a Visa from Khrushchev
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1955, 202; Michael R. Beschloss,
Mayday: The U-2 Affair: The Untold Story of the Greatest US–USSR Spy Scandal
. New York: Harper & Row, 1986, 163–164, 199.
He recognized many faces:
MacDuffie,
Red Carpet
, 198.
Given his purpose:
Beschloss,
Crisis Years
, 50–52.
“We consider the socialist”: Pravda
, no. 2 (15492), February 2, 1961.
World War II’s battles:
Sidney Pollard,
The International Economy Since 1945
. New York: Routledge, 1997, 2; Leon Clarck,
The Beginnings of the Cold War—Civilizations Past and Present the Bipolar “North,” 1945–1991
, accessed at http://history-world.org/beginnings_of_the_cold_war.htm:
“The Elusive Peace—Soviet And American Spheres,”
Introduction.
That didn’t count the millions:
William H. Chamberlin, “Khrushchev’s War with Stalin’s Ghosts,”
Russian Review
, 21, no. 1 (January 1962), 3–10.
Khrushchev blamed Stalin:
Taubman,
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
, 332; Nikita S. Khrushchev, “Memuary Nikity Sergeevicha Khrushcheva,”
Voprosy Istorii
, no. 2 (1995), 76.
Kroll had been born:
Hans Kroll,
Lebenserinnerungen eines Botschafters
. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1967, 15–17; Fursenko and Naftali,
Khrushchev’s Cold War
, 205–206.
“Ulbricht lobby”:
Eberhard Schulz, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Gert Leptin, and Ulrich Scheuner,
GDR Foreign Policy
. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982, 197.
Marta Hillers’s only consolation:
Anonymous,
A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary
. Translation of
Eine Frau in Berlin
by Philip Boehm. New York: Picador, 2006; Jens Bisky, “Kleine Fussnote zum Untergang des Abendlandes.”
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, 06/10/2003, 10.
Published for the first time:
Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk and Stefan Wolle,
Roter Stern über Deutschland: Sowjetische Truppen in der DDR
. Berlin: Christoph Links, 2010, 38.
One such review:
Maria Sack, “Schlechter Dienst an der Berlinerin / Bestseller im Ausland—Ein Verfälschender Sonderfall,”
Tagesspiegel
, 12/06/1959, 35.
The East German relationship:
Kowalczuk and Wolle,
Roter Stern über Deutschland
, 105.
The East German pity:
Silke Satjukow,
Besatzer: “Die Russen” in Deutschland 1945–1994
. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008, 41, 43.
The latest escape:
“Vopo feuert auf Sowjet-Soldaten—Sie wollten in den Westen,”
Bild-Zeitung
, 01/04/1958; “Sowjets jagen Deserteure,”
Abendzeitung
(Munich), 01/03/1958.
That dread had grown:
Jan Foitzik,
Berichte des Hohen Kommissars der UdSSR in Deutschland aus den Jahren 1953/1954
, in
Machtstrukturen und Entscheidungsmechanismen im SED Staat und die Frage der Verantwortung
(Materialien der Enquete-Kommission “Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland,” Band II, 2), Baden-Baden, 1995, 1361; http://www.ddr-wissen.de/wiki/ddr.pl?17._Juni_1953.

2.
KHRUSHCHEV: THE BERLIN CRISIS UNFOLDS

“West Berlin has turned”: The Current Digest of the Soviet Press
, 10, nos. 40–52 (1958), 17.
“The next President in his first year”:
Freedom of Communications: Final Report of the Committee on Commerce, United States Senate, Part III:
The Joint Appearances of Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Other 1960 Campaign Presentations.
87th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Report No. 994, Part 3. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961.
Standing at the center:
Taubman,
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
, 396; Nikita S. Khrushchev,
For Victory in Peaceful Competition with Capitalism
. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1960, 38.
“The time has obviously arrived”:
U.S. Department of State, Documents on Germany 1944–1985, Office of the Historian,
Khrushchev Address, November 10, 1958
. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1985, 542–546.
The Poles weren’t the only surprised:
Fursenko and Naftali,
Khrushchev’s Cold War
, 195–211; Taubman,
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
, 396–403.
Khrushchev explained to Gomulka:
“New Evidence on the Berlin Crisis 1958–1962,” “Minutes from the Discussion between the Delegation of the People’s Republic of Poland and the Government of the USSR” (October 25–November 10, 1958),
Cold War International History Project Bulletin
(CWIHP-B), Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, No. 11 (1998); retrieved from Douglas Selvage,
Khrushchev’s November 1958 Berlin Ultimatum: New Evidence from the Polish Archives
, 200–203, www.wilsoncenter.org; Fursenko and Naftali,
Khrushchev’s Cold War
, 207–209.
“Now the balance of forces”:
CWIHP-B, No. 11 (1998), in Selvage,
Khrushchev’s November 1958 Berlin Ultimatum
, 202; Matthias Uhl and Vladimir I. Ivkin, “‘Operation Atom’: The Soviet Union’s Stationing of Nuclear Missiles in the German Democratic Republic, 1959,” CWIHP-B, No. 12/13 (2001), 299–307.
What he told his Polish:
CWIHP-B, No. 11 (1998), in Selvage,
Khrushchev’s November 1958 Berlin Ultimatum
, 200–201; Nikita S. Khrushchev,
For Victory in Peaceful Competition with Capitalism
, 738.
He had also:
Matthew Evangelista, “‘Why Keep Such an Army?’ Khrushchev’s Troop Reductions,” CWIHP Working Paper No. 19, Washington, D.C.: December 1997, 4–5; Taubman,
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
, 379.
The second source of Khrushchev’s:
Robert Service,
Comrades! A History of World
Communism
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, 314; Fursenko and Naftali,
Khrushchev’s Cold War
, 148.
The third source of Khrushchev’s:
Service,
Comrades!
, 310; Nikita S. Khrushchev, “Khrushchev Remembers, Part III: The Death of Stalin, the Menace of Beria,”
Life
, December 11, 1970, 54–72.
At the time, Khrushchev:
Hope M. Harrison,
Driving the Soviets up the Wall—Soviet–East German Relations. 1953–1961.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, 27; Mark Kramer, “The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal-External Linkages in Soviet Policy Making (Part1),”
Journal of Cold War Studies
, 1, nos. 1–3 (1999), 12–28.
The March 1953 figure of 56,605:
Bundesministerium für Gesamtdeutsche Fragen (BMG), ed.,
Die Flucht aus der Sowjetzone und die Sperrmassnahmen des Kommunistischen Regimes vom 13. August 1961 in Berlin
, 1961; Helge Heidemeyer,
Flucht und Zuwanderung aus der SBZ/DDR 1945/1949–1961, Die Flüchtlingspolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland bis zum Bau der Berliner Mauer
. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1994, 338.
“All we need is a peaceful”:
Feliks Chuev,
Sto sorok besed s Molotovym.
Moscow: Terra, 1991, 332–334;
Izvestia
, 12/23/2003.
Beria wanted to negotiate:
Vladislav M. Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov,
Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, 159–160; Andrei Gromyko,
Memories
. London: Hutchinson, 1989, 316.
The post-Stalin collective leadership:
Harrison,
Driving the Soviets up the Wall
, 24; “Memorandum, V. Chuikov, P. Iudin, L. Il’ichev to G. M. Malenkov, 18 May 1953, Secret,” retrieved from Christian F. Ostermann, “‘This Is Not a Politburo, but a Madhouse’—The Post-Stalin Succession Struggle, Soviet
Deutschlandpolitik
and the SED: New Evidence from Russian, German, and Hungarian Archives,” CWIHP-B, No. 10 (1998), 74–78.
At the party plenary:
“Postanovlenie plenuma TsK KPSS o prestupnykh antipartiinykh i antigosudarstvennykh deistviiakh Beriia,” in “Delo Beriia,” Plenum TsK KPSS Iiuli 1953 goda, Stenograficheskii Otchet, 203, 304.
In the first days following Khrushchev’s:
FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. VIII, Berlin Crisis, 1958–1959, Thompson cables to Washington on November 11 and 14, 1958, 47–48, 62; and Eisenhower—Herter phone conversation of November 28, 1958, p. 114.
“West Berlin has turned”:
Oleg Grinevskii, “Berlinskkii krizis 1958–1959.”
Zvezda
, no. 2 (1996), 127.
Khrushchev’s son Sergei:
Sergei N. Khrushchev,
Nikita S. Khrushchev: Krizisy i Rakety. Vzgliad Iznutri.
Moscow: Novosti, vol. 1, 1994, 416.
In answer to similar doubts:
Oleg Troyanovsky,
Cherez godi i rasstoiania: Istoriia Odnoi Semyi
. Moscow: Vagrius, 1997, 211–213.
Giving him only a half hour’s:
Hubert Horatio Humphrey Papers. Trip Files, Russian, in Senatorial Files, 1949–1964, Box 703, Minnesota Historical Society, Minneapolis, MN; FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. VIII, Berlin Crisis, 1958–1959, 149–153; JFKL, Memorandum of conversation (Memcon) between Sen. Humphrey and Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter, December 8, 1958, Box 126; Hubert H. Humphrey, “Eight Hours with Khrushchev,”
Life
, January 12, 1959, 80–91.

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