Authors: Frederick Taylor
The Russians suspected Adenauer’s West Germany of biding its time, waiting for the GDR to fall apart, and furthering this in various subtle and not so subtle ways. Khrushchev could justifiably worry that reunification would become inevitable simply because the GDR was no longer viable. This was why he tried to force the West’s hand from 1958 onwards, in the hope that the capitalists would decide to buy peace by making an acceptable deal. The Soviet leader did not want war. In fact, he wanted (and needed)
détente
so that the Soviet Union could tackle its own economic problems.
Khrushchev faced a dilemma. If he was not aggressive enough, the West would sit tight and wait for the GDR (and possibly the East Bloc in general) to fall apart. If he pushed too hard, however, he might provoke a counter-reaction, in the shape of Western military and economic sanctions against the East. Such sanctions would seriously harm the economies of the Warsaw Pact countries in general and East Germany in particular. Khrushchev was on a tightrope. This highly intelligent but naturally aggressive man was not really built for such a delicate operation—especially when he had Ulbricht constantly shaking the rope from below…
In the end, the much-heralded meeting with Kennedy from 3 to 4 June in Vienna was a clear disappointment. The US embassy hosted the leaders for the first day’s talks. They met in its spacious music room, elegantly decorated in grey and red. Later they attended a big dinner on neutral ground, at the Austrian government’s Schönbrunn Palace. On the second day, they moved to the Soviet embassy.
The summit turned into a tense, scrappy affair. It was not quite as bad for Soviet-American relations as the abandoned Paris summit the previous year, but it did not lead to anything like the hoped-for improvements, or get either Khrushchev or Kennedy far in their immediate aims.
Personal diplomacy in the age of the ICBM proved altogether problematical. Kennedy seemed somewhat dazed by Khrushchev’s sheer animal energy. However, if Khrushchev hoped to bully the younger, less experienced man into concessions, he was proved wrong. His attempts to browbeat the American backfired.
By the same token, if Kennedy hoped to use his famously potent charm, that too failed. For Khrushchev, hardened in the triumph-or-die Stalinist school, an opponent’s reliance on emollient personality traits indicated just one thing: weakness.
It must be said in mitigation that the President made no concessions worth mentioning, either on Berlin or on the idea of an immediate German peace treaty. Khrushchev blustered and threatened as usual. He would end all occupation rights in Berlin, he kept reminding Kennedy, including Western access to the city, and sign a peace treaty with Ulbricht alone.
’Khrushchev repeated this pledge no fewer than ten times that day,’ the Soviet leader’s biographer tells us, ‘as if trying to convince himself as well as Kennedy.’
The last time Khrushchev did this, just as they were about to part after the second and final day of the summit, Kennedy made his famously cool reply: ‘If that’s true,’ he said, ‘it’s going to be a cold winter.’
28
In an
aide-mémoire
that was handed to the Americans at the summit—a kind of slow-release poisoned pellet in text form—Moscow restored its six-month ultimarum on the signing of a German peace treaty. Deadlines had come and gone, starting in November 1958, but now Khrushchev
insisted his ultimatum was final. If no agreement was made by the end of 1961, he would sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany. Yes, he would.
’Roughest thing in my life,’ Kennedy confessed to an American journalist after the Vienna summit:
I think he did it because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought that anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken…I’ve got a terrible problem. If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.
29
Prime Minister Macmillan of Britain saw Kennedy in London after the summit, and commented on how exhausted he seemed. The President told Macmillan that he had been ‘concerned and even surprised by the almost brutal frankness and confidence’ of the Russian leader. The summit, Kennedy admitted, had led to ‘no progress on any issue’.
30
At Vienna, Khrushchev, most commentators agreed, had ‘won’ the actual encounter between the two men. Khrushchev also thought this, and believed that he could run rings around Kennedy in future too. This belief in his own superiority would dictate an aggressive foreign policy over the next year and a half or so.
The misunderstandings that marked and then followed the Vienna meeting brought great danger for the world. It was not until the Cuban Crisis of October 1962 that the leaders really got each other’s measure, and when that happened it was Khrushchev who came out the loser.
On the ground in Berlin everything was moving in Ulbricht’s direction. The East German leader had successfully parlayed his weakness into strength. He had the superpowers at each other’s throats, which was just where he wanted them.
The day after the Vienna summit, Ulbricht’s Interior Minister, Karl Maron, ordered a so-called ‘special security unit’ of 1,500
Vopos
to be established in Berlin. In addition, the strength of East Berlin’s specialised ‘Readiness Police Brigade’ (responsible for crowd and riot control) was to be increased to almost 4,000. This was to be done by transferring one
company per battalion from throughout the GDR to Berlin, stripping the élite security police in the provincial GDR of around 30 per cent of its total strength. These reinforcement operations were to be carried out before 30 June 1961. Such radical and expensive measures could only point to an imminent major security operation in Berlin.
31
Walter Ulbricht’s great hour was finally approaching. The hour of the Wall.
ON
25
JULY
1961, President John Kennedy appeared on television to address the nation.
Six weeks earlier, immediately following his return from Vienna, the President had given a sober appraisal of the progress (or lack of it) towards understanding with the Soviets, but had made few suggestions about how this might be remedied. The reaction from both press and public was less than favourable. The President had not performed as he should have in his big encounter with the Communist enemy.
Kennedy was in many ways a particularly self-aware individual, especially for a politician, and not one normally swayed by short-term praise or blame. All the same, he was rattled by growing public impatience with his presidency. ‘There are limits to the number of defeats I can defend in one twelve-month period,’ he told the economist J.K. Galbraith. ‘I’ve had the Bay of Pigs, and pulling out of Laos, and I can’t accept a third.’
1
The most likely arena for a third defeat was, of course, Berlin.
The question ultimately being begged was, what would constitute a ‘defeat’ for America in Berlin? One of the things the President tried to do, in his broadcast on 25 July, was to define the Berlin problem in the way he wanted Americans to understand it. In the past month, East and West had been leaking information to show their last-ditch readiness for war. One wrong move, and the world could face the most serious threat to peace since the Korean crisis.
Kennedy was acutely aware of this danger. He wanted to avoid the risks inherent both in hardline nuclear missile-rattling on the one hand and a weak-seeming negotiations-at-all-costs stance on the other. This opened him up to criticism from all sides. Former Truman-era Secretary
of State and the administration’s unofficial foreign-policy
éminence grise
, Dean Acheson, who was more of the missile-rattling party, had tried to push Kennedy in a more aggressive direction. While Kennedy indulged in seemingly endless consultations and discussions, Acheson grumbled privately that ‘the nation is without leadership’
2
.
In the end, Kennedy’s television speech on 25 July was a skilled example of the President’s ability to give something to both parties. He spoke from the Oval Office. The mass of klieg lights and cameras crowding the room on what was already an uncomfortably hot summer night, and Kennedy’s knowledge that the whole world was anxiously watching, lent the occasion an air of tension and unease.
Like Khrushchev, though for different reasons, the President was walking a tightrope. And he also had someone disturbing him while he was trying to do so. Kennedy had his own German protégé in the shape of Adenauer’s West Germany.
Unlike the GDR, the Federal Republic was by no means a basket case. It was prosperous, socially stable and a growing military power. However, it aggressively resented both the Polish and Soviet absorption of Germany territory at the end of the Second World War, and the creation of an East German state. Maps in West German offices, atlases and school classrooms showed Germany ‘within the borders of 1937’, and vocal refugee organisations representing the millions of Germans expelled from their ancestral homes in the post-war period ensured that no West German government (especially of the Right) could afford to relax this policy. The strongly anti-Communist bent of the West Germans, further intensified by a natural sympathy with the sufferings of their seventeen million compatriots east of the Elbe, led to a militant attitude towards the GDR and the Berlin problem. This militancy did not always match the Washington administration’s sense of world priorities.
Therefore, in his speech President Kennedy was talking not just to his own people, or to the Soviet Union and its allies, but also to West Germany and its government. He promised America to strengthen its armed forces, with a $3.25 billion increase in the military budget and an increase in total army strength from 825,000 to one million men. He promised, in the case of West Berlin, to ‘make good on our commitment to the two million free people of that city’. Illustrating the situation with
a map, just to be on the safe side, he showed Americans the facts of Berlin’s geography but also warned the Communists against thinking that the West would not risk a fight to protect it. Berlin had
now become—as never before—the great testing place of Western courage and will, a focal point where our solemn commitments stretching back over the years since 1945, and Soviet ambitions now meet in basic confrontation.
It would be a mistake for others to look upon Berlin, because of its location, as a tempting target. The United States is there; the United Kingdom and France are there; the pledge of NATO is there—and the people of Berlin are there. It is as secure, in that sense, as the rest of us—for we cannot separate its safety from our own.
But at the same time he became very specific about the nature of that commitment. The President added:
So long as the Communists insist that they are preparing to end by themselves unilaterally our rights in West Berlin and our commitments to its people, we must be prepared to defend those rights and those commitments. We will at all times be ready to talk, if talk will help. But we must also be ready to resist with force, if force is used upon us. Either alone would fail. Together, they can serve the cause of freedom and peace.
The words ‘West Berlin’ in this part of the speech were crucial. They meant that America was not committing itself to preserving the status of the whole of Berlin as four-power territory. The message to the East was: try to restrict access to West Berlin, or to take over the Western sectors, and we shall fight. About the rest of Berlin—the part the East Germans now claimed as their own—Kennedy said not a word.
It was not the first time Kennedy had made this distinction, but it came at a defining moment. To German-born State Department analyst Karl Mautner, this was the ‘“Oh, my God” feeling of a government undercutting its own position’.
3
But Mautner, along with his wife, Martha—also a State Department
adviser—was one of the group known as the ‘Berlin Mafia’. This was the name given to CIA officials, State Department hands and journalists who either lived in or had served in Berlin. They tended to feel strongly about Berlin’s freedom, and to emphasise firmness in the face of Communist aggression. Members of this group were respected in Washington for their knowledge of the city and the intricacies of its position, but the administration tended to take their opinions with a pinch of salt. They were perceived to have ‘gone native’—than which there can be no greater put-down of any diplomat, foreign correspondent or spy.
Khrushchev’s reaction to Kennedy’s television address concentrated almost exclusively on the stick part of the business and ignored the (admittedly disguised) carrot. The President had come up with a tougher response to his ultimatum than the Soviet leader had expected.
Khrushchev responded with his habitual bluster. The British prima ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn was performing with the Bolshoi. On the night that Khrushchev went to see her, British ambassador Sir Frank Roberts was in the audience. In the interval, Khrushchev summoned Roberts to his box and subjected him to a lengthy harangue. Soviet forces outnumbered Western forces ‘hundredfold’ he told the normally unflappable diplomat, and reminded him that ‘six hydrogen bombs would do for Britain, and nine for France’.
4
A few days later, Khrushchev retreated to his vacation
dacha
at Pitsunda on the Black Sea. There he was visited, at his request, by John J. McCloy, the US administration’s chief disarmament negotiator. A former Assistant Secretary of Defense and military governor of the American Zone of Germany, McCloy was a doyen of the East Coast establishment. He had also served as chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and was still chairman of the Ford Foundation. To Khrushchev and his advisers, who saw the American government and its president as puppets of Wall Street, McCloy represented the puppet masters.