The Atlantic and Its Enemies (30 page)

Something needed to be done. The Western zones had become an open sore. The problem could be solved if a great wall were put up around West Berlin, thus preventing escapes into it. But it might also be solved if there were a deal with Germany; it might even be solved through a grand deal with the Americans, who (with the British and French) might be prepared just to abandon the place in return for some bargain over arms limitations or whatever. The East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, was cunning and repellent, a product of Comintern weasellings in thirties Moscow, and he understood that Khrushchev would dump him and his state if that were the price of a neutral Germany, detached from NATO, and ‘Finlandized’ on an enormous scale. Khrushchev himself well knew that walling in West Berlin would be wonderful propaganda for his enemies, in fact the crowning piece in the showcase that the West had built up. He strictly told Ulbricht not to take that step, but at the end of 1958 he threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, and offered to let Berlin be a Free City inside it. But he wanted a Western military evacuation; and the West would have to recognize East Germany if it wanted to continue dealings with West Berlin. In January 1959 a draft peace treaty for two disarmed and neutral German states was sent off, and an emissary in Washington suggested that negotiations might go over Adenauer’s head.

All of this had military overtones, to do with German rearmament, and Eisenhower himself had had considerable, often very unpleasant, experience of what that might mean. In fact the old general was now quite seriously minded to enter history as the man who had done most to stop nuclear destruction. True, Eisenhower played the golfing old buffer, and his wife was plain cooking. But he saw well enough what was going on, and produced a line, ‘the military-industrial complex’, that summed up the realities of warfare and militarized economics better than ever Norman Mailer did. Might he not decide that Berlin was not worth a fight? Oddly enough, it was the French who were most firmly in favour of defending Germany, their new associate in Europe. To exploit the differences, in May 1959 Khrushchev agreed to drop his ultimatum in return for a general conference at Geneva, scene of the earlier and quite satisfactory conference that had settled the French war in Indo-China. The new conference might lead to realization of Molotov’s old scheme, a conference on European security, from which the Americans could be excluded by definition, and which the USSR would then dominate (the phrase ‘our common European home’ comes from this period, and not the 1980s).

In September 1959 Khrushchev went to the USA and talked with Eisenhower, drawing the conclusion that here was weakness to be exploited; the two agreed on a ‘summit’, as these gatherings were irritatingly called, for May 1960, in Paris. The clowning but at least not block-like Khrushchev even had a certain success as regards public relations, holding his own quite well in a roomful of Rockefellers and Harrimans. A string of Western concessions followed - East German control was accepted over the access routes, rather than Soviet; even a promise not to spy. Khrushchev waved these things aside, for they only convinced him that with another show of Soviet power the Western powers would fall apart in disarray. He always was brutal in his ways - on one occasion, at the United Nations, taking off his shoe and banging it on the table in rage - and now he was accidentally presented with an excuse for more temper. The Americans used special planes, the U2s, to spy on the Soviet Union, and one of these was shot down. The pilot survived and talked. Eisenhower at first clumsily denied that U2s were flown, because he had expected the pilot to swallow the poison pill supplied to him. This denial caused a gleeful Khrushchev to present his evidence; Eisenhower was duly humiliated; the Paris conference was cancelled. Eisenhower missed his chance to be the man who had saved the world.

He was succeeded by an altogether different figure, Kennedy, a considerably younger man who took time to find his feet. They were found for him. The US budget for ICBMs and Polaris went up to almost $10bn, and such missiles, hidden in submarines, enabled a crippling ‘first strike’ to be made. In other words, provided that there were no warning at all, the Soviet capacity to strike back significantly would be destroyed, and the USSR would be helpless. At the same time the military advisers (Maxwell Taylor in particular, but also two up-and-coming academics, Henry Kissinger and Albert Wohlstetter) were adamant that there should be a powerful non-nuclear force as well,
i.e.
a strong army in western Europe. It was therefore in a very tense atmosphere that the Berlin crisis went ahead. Kennedy and his advisers would probably have settled for some agreement with Moscow over their allies’ heads, and Walt Rostow, one of Kennedy’s academics, went to Moscow and explained Kennedy’s interest in disarmament. This was not the best background for negotiation over Berlin - it was in fact a considerable mistake, given Khrushchev’s peasant megalomania. In June 1961 Kennedy and Khrushchev met in Vienna, and Khrushchev posed as the wiser, older man - he despised Kennedy’s youthfulness, enhanced all the more because the new President did not even look his age. Besides, just then, Kennedy had been involved in an absurd humiliation. In Cuba, which was in effect an American colony, there had been a revolution bringing a native radical, Fidel Castro, to power at the turn of 1958-9. He had attacked American interests and the Americans had mounted a coup against him, by exiles based in Central America. The coup fell to pieces at the Bay of Pigs, in April 1961, and Khrushchev, conqueror of Hungary, could shake his head patronizingly, and instruct Kennedy as to how the USSR was far better for the ‘Third World’ than was American capitalism. The Vienna meeting therefore turned out badly.

There was now no apparent solution to the Berlin problem, and Ulbricht had been pressing: if the flight of people, especially the skilled people, went on, then East Germany would implode (in which sentiments he was a generation later to be triumphantly confirmed right). For a time, Khrushchev demurred, hoping for some outright division among the Western powers; had he played the game more subtly, that might even have occurred. He told Ulbricht to wait, not to take any such step as building a wall. Ulbricht then announced publicly that he would not take it, and his subjects, used to such things, left in greater numbers than before - 2,000 every day in the spring of 1961, adding to the 3 million who had already gone. Khrushchev now gave way, thinking that, at the very least, there would be no opposition if a wall went up, and on 13 August 1961 it did go up. Barbed-wire entanglements appeared, and behind them came a whole defensive system complete with searchlights, swept fire-zones, Alsatians and minefields. In the shortest of short terms, Khrushchev was proved right, in that the West confined itself to verbal protests, and the Americans, later, in March 1962, even sent proposals that amounted to a Soviet-American condominium in Europe. But Khrushchev was after bigger game. He exploded a monstrous 50-megaton bomb on 30 October, expecting to browbeat West Germany into neutrality, and at the same time show the adolescent Kennedy who was the master. He would place missiles on Cuba, a few dozen miles from Florida.

‘Third World’ was a concept that made sense in the sixties, when there were economies of various sorts that appeared to need modernization. Even then, it only had meaning for the United Nations or the World Bank. Japan had already shown the emptiness of the idea, in that as early as 1905 she had Westernized far enough to defeat the Russians and take over a good part of the east-Asian trade. Now, countries as disparate as Korea and Haiti were included. Latin America was in an odd position. In places, the ‘First World’ was present, for in Mexico City or Buenos Aires you could think that you were in Europe, but if you travelled four stops down the tramway you were in a different world altogether, where ex-peasants huddled in boxes, and the obvious problem was that the progress of medicine meant that they could produce children who survived. In the suburbs of any city, the poor pullulated, as in a Dickens slum. Some fought their way out, but others gave up, went on making children for want of any alternative. The Soviet Union offered a path to modernity that had been quite successfully applied, and a good part of the intelligentsia of Latin America was sympathetic.

What, after all, could be done with a country like Haiti? To Europeans of the Left in the nineteenth century, Haiti was what Cuba was to become in the middle of the twentieth. She had become independent in 1804 as the outcome of a vast slave revolt against the French. After several years of murderous struggle, the former slaves had managed to set up their own state. It was called ‘Haiti’ after the old Carib name, and the chief figure in its making was Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black leader. It was one the many Haitian tragedies that he was not present when the country began: the French had hoodwinked him and imprisoned him in the frozen Jura, where he soon died. Toussaint had been a good man, and it was to him that Wordsworth addressed his lines on ‘man’s unconquerable mind’.

Eventually, Haiti was taken over by the Americans, for twenty years. They did not make very good imperialists, unlike the British, who were more used to taking over other people’s countries. Their chief, Admiral William B. Caperton, was a wooden and leathery Virginian, who could see no virtues in the place and who, when besought to co-operate with the Haitian elite, asked whether these were the ones who wore shoes. Still, there was justice, and some roads and schools went up; a black lower-middle class did emerge. Then when the bottom dropped out of tropical agriculture in the Slump, the Americans withdrew (in 1934) leaving a thin crust of collaborationist mulattos in charge, in the wedding-cake presidential palace. In 1946 they were challenged by a black who talked leftist language, whereupon the mulatto elite found their own black army officer to manipulate, one Paul Magloire, who was overthrown by a junta in 1956. At this point, the Americans insisted on an election. By now, the results of their earlier occupation were coming through: roads, and even a form of national transport, multicoloured vans called
tap-taps
, connected town and country more than before; and there was also a tremendous demographic explosion which began to fill Port-au-Prince, as was to happen with so many other cities in both hemispheres. A left-wing candidate, Daniel Fignolé, endeavoured to speak for them. A Belgian-educated mulatto, Louis Dejoie, spoke for the old French-oriented Haiti. The Americans found a convenient third force, as they thought: a little black doctor, François Duvalier, a product of the provincial lower-middle class (his father was alleged to be a schoolteacher from Martinique) whom the Americans had brought into existence. He knew the villages, where he was known as ‘Papa Doc’, and had spent a year at Michigan; he seemed quiet and manageable, and received support from the Syrian business element that had been cold-shouldered by the mulatto establishment. His private secretary, and link with the Americans, was a Therese Jones, daughter of a Welsh missionary (she had spent a year getting chilblains at an ecclesiastical establishment in forties London), and an American Anglican bishop also gave Duvalier his blessing: ‘Papa Doc’ would be pro-American but vaguely progressive and would not be a tool of the French (who still exercised influence). Duvalier was triumphantly elected in 1957.

Duvalier’s regime then turned out to be a legendary worst in the history of Central America. In fourteen years, he wrecked the country. Waves of ignorant blacks, with a thin layer of mulatto collaborators, swept into power, and stole. Roads turned into potholed tracks, impassable when it rained. The
tap-taps
took seven hours to travel the thirty or so miles from Port-au-Prince to Saint-Marc, and Jacmel in the south was cut off except by sea. The telephones mainly stopped because the copper wire was stolen, and rats gnawed at the rest (as happened with the national archives). The educated classes fled abroad or made their peace by bribery or gaining the ear of Therese Jones (whose husband, Franck Thébaud, ran the customs as the only honest man in the regime; his brother Fritz was finance minister, built a hotel, failed to bribe in the right quarters and found himself in the terrible prison of Fort-Dimanche periodically, later to resurface as development minister). Duvalier and his men in the provinces used voodoo for legitimacy; and from time to time there would be a burst of social energy - the Simone O. Duvalier Hospital and the like; there was even a miniature Brasilia, a huddle of concrete in the (originally Polish) village of Cabaret which was mainly given over to cockfighting. Haiti was in its way a gigantic dwarf, and it attracted the attention of Graham Greene. One of the characters in his
The Comedians
, set in Haiti, remarks that the government has claimed that illiteracy has declined in the north; he concludes that there must have been a hurricane. The country was run by a paramilitary outfit known to the peasants as
Tontons Macoutes
, ‘bagmen’ from the villages or the urban rabble, who dressed in blue denim (homage to Franco’s fake-proletarian
Falange
, though blue was also a good-luck colour in voodoo) and, sign of sinister sophistication, dark glasses. Fort-Dimanche and the other prisons filled up with their victims; in 1963, when the Americans attempted to get rid of their creation, a man was shot in a chair outside the airport, and was left there to greet arriving tourists.

Duvalier was aware of his growing unpopularity, and turned for inspiration to any or every dictatorship, however horrible. There was Mao (‘mon petit livre vert’); there was Hitler (‘un chef, un peuple, un pays’); there was Mussolini (‘le chef a toujours raison’). Slogans such as the emperor Dessalines’s ‘Je suis le drapeau haïtien’ would be put up in neon on the port-side, some of the sections then failing to light up, thus leaving some bits of incomprehensible tubing flickering dimly when the electricity was working. All of this was orchestrated by a strange figure named Gérard de Catalogne, a Guadeloupian
quarteron
who had picked up his knowledge of Fascism at first-hand, since he had served in the secretariat-general of the youth movement of Vichy France. A sense of survival had caused him to find an appointment in Tahiti. There he met a lady, the daughter of the Norwegian consul in St Petersburg and his Russian wife (who had gone into a camp). She was interpreting for General MacArthur. The two married, looking for a sympathetic refuge. Santo Domingo turned out to be overcrowded; across the border in Haiti, Duvalier offered a more promising outlet. They founded a newspaper,
Le Nouvelliste
, and advised Duvalier as to ideology. Curiously enough, the official name of the
Tontons
, ‘Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale’, came from Mussolini’s ‘Volontari per la Sicurezza Nazionale’, who had also confused national security with the operation of protection rackets on small grocers.