Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (29 page)

The
Newsweek
article, however, did not appease Acheson. On July 12, at a meeting of an interdepartmental group on Germany and Berlin, he pushed hard for a military buildup. Kennedy must decide “at the earliest possible moment” whether he would implement Acheson’s advice or follow Walter Lippmann’s conciliatory approach to the Berlin challenge, which Acheson described “as doing it with mirrors.” Acheson warned that “there would be a revolt in Congress if it was not given strong leadership soon on the Berlin question.” He wanted the president to declare a national emergency, which would then allow the needed strengthening of our military posture. The absence of such a declaration would limit the sort of buildup that could discourage the Russians from intemperate actions. Kennedy held Acheson off by insisting on the need for additional study and discussion before crucial decisions were made. Speaking for the president at a July 19 NSC meeting, McNamara persuaded the group to postpone a national emergency declaration and a call-up of reserve forces until it seemed necessary.

Although in Kennedy’s presence Acheson diplomatically went along with the president’s decision to defer any action, he doubted the wisdom of further deliberations. In conversations outside Kennedy’s earshot, Acheson made no secret of his doubts about Kennedy’s understanding of what he needed to do. “Gentlemen, you might as well face it,” he told a working group on Berlin. “This nation is without leadership.” It was clear to Bundy that Acheson held Kennedy in contempt. He saw him as weak: Kennedy “is not the sort of man that is worth
my
while to be advising,” Bundy thought Acheson believed.

On July 25, distressed by the shift of authority from the secretary of state and Foreign Service professionals to the president’s national security team, Acheson attacked Kennedy’s administration in a public address: He decried the State Department’s decline, warning that it was playing havoc with the country’s foreign policy. Acheson ended his talk by facetiously declaring that despite his “treasonous” speech he hoped the audience would be willing to hear from him again sometime.

To counter Acheson’s assault on his authority and put Moscow and critics at home on notice that he was a resolute leader with a plan to preserve Western rights in Berlin, Kennedy held a press conference on July 19 and gave a nationally televised address from the Oval Office on July 25. At the press briefing, he forcefully declared that any Soviet attempt unilaterally to deny their former allies access to Berlin and deprive the people of West Berlin the freedoms they currently enjoyed would jeopardize the peace. Asked if he intended to declare a national emergency in order to call up reserve units, Kennedy promised to address these questions in his coming speech. When asked by a reporter whether he agreed with a statement by the Soviet ambassador to the United States that Americans were not prepared to go to war over Berlin, Kennedy replied “that we intend to honor our commitments.”

The questions to Kennedy suggested the crisis of confidence in his leadership after the Bay of Pigs failure revealed his reluctance to use American forces to topple Castro. How he intended to defend the Western presence in Berlin without a war and how he would overcome the evident divisions in his administration were the implied questions behind the reporters’ questions. It was no secret that Acheson doubted Kennedy’s foreign policy competence. It was clear to Washington insiders how on edge Kennedy was about finding his way through these dilemmas.

The questions about his leadership were more than Washington gossip. He was full of anguish about the possibility of a nuclear war, especially since several national security advisers and the Kremlin didn’t seem to share his fears. Acheson, Alsop, McCone, and the Joint Chiefs, like Khrushchev, impressed Kennedy as equally oblivious to the costs of such a conflict. After a meeting with the Chiefs, Kennedy remarked that “only fools could cling to the idea of victory in a nuclear war.” After Vienna, he thought that convincing Khrushchev was as big a problem: “That son of a bitch won’t pay any attention to words,” Kennedy said. “He has to see you move”—meaning the United States might have to go to the brink of war before the Soviets would back down and agree to productive talks about Berlin. Schlesinger recalled: “While Kennedy wanted to make this resolve absolutely clear to Moscow, he wanted to make it equally clear that we were not, as he put it to me, ‘war-mad.’”

Kennedy saw the speech to the nation as a crucial test of his capacity to prove himself an effective leader. Speaking from the Oval Office crowded with cameras and klieg lights that added to the heat of the July evening, Kennedy strained to keep his poise, recalling how a perspiring Nixon undermined his election chances in September 1960. A larger dose of steroids than he normally relied on to control his Addison’s disease helped provide the adrenaline boost Kennedy needed to combat the strain of speaking to the hundreds of millions around the world who hoped he could fend off a disastrous war and defend two and a half million Germans from a communist takeover.

The speech aimed to leave no doubt either in Moscow or anywhere in the West that the president understood the fullness of the Soviet threat and was determined to meet it head-on. Khrushchev’s “grim warnings [in Vienna] about the future of the world . . . his subsequent speeches and threats . . . have all prompted a series of decisions by the Administration,” Kennedy said. The Soviet leader’s intention to end Western rights in Berlin and bring the city under his control would not be permitted. But the danger wasn’t simply to the people of that embattled city—it was to free peoples everywhere. The most immediate crisis, however, was in the center of Europe, where the United States intended to stand its ground against aggression. “We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin.” The United States was ready to talk, “if talk will help. But we must also be ready to resist with force, if force is used upon us.” Kennedy then described a defense buildup, which would provide “a wider choice than humiliation or all-out nuclear action.” But he had no intention of abandoning “our duty to mankind to seek a peaceful solution. . . . To sum it all up: we seek peace—but we shall not surrender.” Kennedy ended with a plea for public understanding and support. “We must look to long days ahead.”

Kennedy’s speech had its desired effect at home and in Russia. It put Acheson, Alsop, and the Chiefs on notice that he was in command and that while he was determined to avoid a war with Russia, he was also committed to saving Berlin from any act of communist aggression. His speech made clear to domestic critics and advisers that they could not browbeat him into anything he thought too militant or too passive.

Khrushchev initially responded to Kennedy’s speech with “rough war-like language,” telling John J. McCloy, Kennedy’s chief arms control representative, who was in Moscow for talks and was summoned to Khrushchev’s Black Sea summer retreat, that Kennedy was declaring war on the Soviet Union. He warned, “If Kennedy started a war, he would be the ‘last president of the United States.’” But it was no more than saber-rattling. Khrushchev’s military chiefs wanted no part of a confrontation with the West that could lead to an all-out war. “With respect to ICBMs,” Marshal Sergei Varentsov, the top commander, said privately, “we still don’t have a damn thing. Everything is only on paper, and there is nothing in actual existence.”

After so many threats, the pressure on Khrushchev to do something about Berlin was compelling. The exchanges over a showdown had accelerated the flood of immigrants from East Germany to the West. Since the beginning of 1961, more than twenty thousand a month had fled communist control. Khrushchev had initially vetoed suggestions of constructing a barrier between the two Berlins to stem the outflow as too provocative. But indications from Washington, including a statement from Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright, that the United States would not physically oppose Soviet efforts to restrict movement out of the communist zone, persuaded Khrushchev to build a wall. To bar against a U.S. reaction, however, Khrushchev preceded the start of construction on August 13 with a speech decrying “a war psychosis” and reminding everyone that “we have common needs and interests since we have to live on the same planet.” He directed the East Germans to build the wall in stages to ensure that the initial construction did not trigger an armed response.

The Wall touched off a new round of debate among Kennedy’s national security advisers. Acheson was more adamant than ever about the need for military action. He thought that “the Wall would have come down in a day if Harry Truman had been President.” General Lauris Norstad, the head of U.S. forces in Europe, who had no orders to respond, said, “If I had been commander I would have taken a wire and flung a hook over and tied it to a tank and pulled it down.” Lemnitzer complained that a passive reaction made everyone in the West appear to be “hopeless, helpless, and harmless.” The U.S. diplomatic mission in Berlin reported that Mayor Willy Brandt and newspaper, news service, radio, and television editors felt that accepting the Wall was creating a crisis of confidence that endangered America’s position in Europe. The mission also warned that if the Soviets were “able to ‘get away’ with this fait accompli, other similar actions may be undertaken. . . . Having taken such a big slice of salami and successfully digested it, with no hindrance, they may be expected to snatch further pieces greedily.”

Kennedy and his White House advisers were actually relieved by Khrushchev’s action. Kennedy saw the Wall as a demonstration of Khrushchev’s decision not to force a crisis. “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” Kennedy asked rhetorically. “There wouldn’t be any need of a wall if he occupied the whole city. This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war,” Kennedy told Kenny O’Donnell. Bundy reported that there was “unanimity in your immediate staff” for negotiation rather than military action. After all, the Wall was “something they [the Soviets] have always had the power to do; it was something they were bound to do sooner or later.” Kennedy’s answer was not a military response but the chance to score propaganda points or use this “very good propaganda stick” against the communists for having confined people unhappy living under Soviet control. “This seems to me to show how hollow is the phrase ‘free city,’” which Khrushchev had promised a West Berlin under East German rule,” he told Rusk. The Wall also showed “how despised is the East German government.”

The pressure on Kennedy to act more decisively or give some indication that he would use force against the Soviets if they overreached on Berlin persuaded him to satisfy a Brandt request that U.S. troops make a visible show of crossing the Autobahn from West Germany to the city. After the Vienna summit, Kennedy had told O’Donnell, “It seems particularly stupid to risk killing a million Americans over an argument about access rights on an Autobahn. . . . If I’m going to threaten Russia with a nuclear war it will have to be for much bigger and more important reasons than that.” But the insistence of the Germans that he provide some demonstration of U.S. opposition to the Wall moved Kennedy to order an armored brigade of fifteen hundred U.S. troops to show the flag by traveling the 110 miles from West Germany to West Berlin. To underscore the importance he put on the gesture, Kennedy directed Lyndon Johnson and General Lucius Clay, the former U.S. military governor of Germany and architect of the 1948 Berlin airlift, to fly to Bonn and then West Berlin to give a message of hope that America was “determined to fulfill all our obligations, all our commitments” and “dare to the end to do our duty.”

Johnson was reluctant to take on the assignment. He saw it as more of a symbolic than substantive expression of America’s opposition to the Wall and feared that the trip would do more to undermine faith in U.S. commitments than reinforce it. But his presence on the ground, which put him in harm’s way if the Soviets challenged the brigade’s movement, boosted German convictions that Kennedy meant to hold the line against any communist aggression. After all, it was assumed that Kennedy would have to respond if his vice president came under attack in Berlin. Fortunately, Khrushchev was content to close off the exodus from the East without trying to fulfill threats against West Berlin. And when Johnson, borrowing from U.S. history, spoke passionately about the commitment of “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” to the preservation of German freedoms and issued a plea to have “faith in your allies,” it bolstered German belief in Kennedy’s leadership.

But uncertainties remained. And Kennedy, with the support of Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, Stevenson, and Kennan, wanted to enter into negotiations that could at least reduce the chances of an immediate crisis over Berlin. Kennedy instructed Rusk to “examine all of Khrushchev’s statements for pegs on which to hang our position. He has thrown out quite a few assurances and hints here and there and I believe they should be exploited.” Kennan reinforced Kennedy’s interest in talks: “Unless the West shows
some
disposition to negotiate,” he advised, “the hard line is going to be pursued in Moscow not only to the very brink but to the full point of a world catastrophe.”

Acheson, the military, and de Gaulle disagreed. They admonished Kennedy against being taken advantage of in any negotiations with Khrushchev. Taylor was invited now to divide his attention between Cuba and Berlin. Kennedy hoped he would be more restrained than the Joint Chiefs about using military power. But Taylor disappointed him, urging a hard line against Khrushchev: He saw “clear evidence that Khrushchev intends using military force, or the threat thereof, to gain his ends in Berlin.” He urged Kennedy “to shift into higher gear” on making military preparations to combat Soviet plans. Acheson counseled against appearing too eager to negotiate. Instead, he wanted Kennedy to make clear that he was willing to use nuclear weapons to meet any Soviet aggression. De Gaulle predicted that entering into negotiations would encourage Moscow to increase their pressure on Berlin and “would be considered immediately as a prelude to the abandonment, at least gradually, of Berlin and as a sort of notice of our surrender.” It “would be a very grave blow to the Atlantic Alliance.”