Authors: Frederick Taylor
The cold numbers cited in the official reports fail to express the angry, desperate reality of human beings forced from homes they had occupied for years, perhaps even for their whole lives. These were famously close Berlin neighbourhoods. All the worse for their inhabitants to be torn from everything that was familiar and dumped into the company of strangers, often in the soulless new high-rise concrete-slab housing developments that the regime was busily building on the eastern edge of the city.
This happened in many streets close to the border. Some of the inhabitants had to be ejected by force. One resident whose home lay on the border with West Berlin at Spandau, having initially left peacefully enough, later ‘returned to his flat and, being in a drunken condition, smashed to pieces several window panes and a stove’. Another family tried to ignore the
Vopos
knocking on their door and calling out at six a.m, ‘so that the apartment had to be opened up by force’. Another young woman was arrested for protesting—‘acting in a provocative manner’ as the official description had it.
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Eventually, the buildings on the Bernauer Strasse, as elsewhere on the East Berlin/West Berlin border, were entirely demolished. No more dramatic escapes from windows. No more abseiling from the roof. No more desperate fugitives plummeting to their deaths on the cobbled street below.
Nothing was to get in the way of the new, impregnable Wall. It would keep the state’s citizens trapped inside the GDR until, like the detainees, in the interrogation prison, they resigned themselves to their fate and simply stopped resisting.
WHEN JOE ALSOP DROPPED
by that high-octane Georgetown dinner party late on the evening of Saturday 12 August 1961, and told young Berlin journalist Lothar Löwe of the dramatic events in his native city, the veteran Washington communicator had taken his information from the American broadcast media. News was trickling out about the new Communist challenge in Berlin, even though, in the untidy way of information-gathering, few people, even on the spot, were sure exactly what that challenge consisted of.
A little later that same Saturday night, John C. Ausland, duty officer for the Berlin Task Force at the State Department, was woken by his bedside phone at his home in Washington. On the line was the night officer from the department’s recently established operations centre. The man informed Ausland that garbled news about some kind of Communist move in Berlin was starting to come over the wire services’ teletype network. There was talk of sector border crossings’ being ‘blocked’, but it was not clear what this entailed. Temporary restrictions by the East of cross-sector traffic within Greater Berlin had happened before, of course. Ausland told his caller to stay in touch and went back to sleep.
Around four a.m. Washington time on Sunday—already ten in the morning in West Berlin—the night-duty man called Ausland back. Military channels had confirmed that this was a total blockade between East and West Berlin. So, astonishingly, a full ten hours after ‘Operation Rose’ had begun, Washington started to get the message. Ausland called several different people, including Frank Cash, a former senior official at the embassy in Bonn, who was running the Berlin Task Force while German expert Martin Hillebrand was on summer leave. Cash said he
had to take his family to the airport in a couple of hours, but promised he would be in later.
Ausland was soon joined by Colonel Showalter, the Pentagon’s liaison officer at the State Department, and more calls to Europe were made. However, the one thing they really wanted to do, they could not: call the American Mission in Berlin. This was because the phone line in question went right through East German territory. Any conversation would have been totally
en clair
and would assuredly have been tapped by East German intelligence. At six, with dawn breaking over Washington, Ausland picked up the telephone and found the White House duty officer on the line. Word had finally got through about events in Berlin, but the man expressed reluctance to wake the President, who was staying out at Cape Cod for the weekend. The White House official assured Ausland that he would start taking steps to alert Kennedy at the more civilised hour of eight a.m. EST.
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It was by now noon on Sunday in Berlin. ‘Operation Rose’ was twelve hours old, and still the American President knew nothing of it.
This hesitance to bother Kennedy may not have represented just the traditional reluctance of servants to displease their master. The President was in poor shape. As became known after his death, Kennedy’s public image as a young paragon of masculine power, glowing with health, was largely a sham. He had suffered since young adulthood from Addison’s Disease, a debilitating affliction of the auto-immune system, which among other unpleasant symptoms caused stomach problems, exhaustion and depression, and severe joint and back pain. For more than a quarter of a century, Kennedy had been on constant medication. In the summer of 1961, his health problems were especially severe. At that time, his personal physician was injecting him with procaine, a serious narcotic, two to three times a day to allay the pain. Cortisone shots were, moreover, a routine treatment for Addison’s, and the President was also regularly on drugs for colitis, weight loss (testosterone), and insomnia (Ritalin). On 9 August 1961 Kennedy had complained of ‘gut problems’, ‘cramps’, and ‘loose stool’; he had woken at five on the morning of Friday 11 August with severe abdominal discomfort. JFK was, as a doctor who later reviewed his medical records commented, ‘tired because he was being doped up’.
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That fateful Sunday, as the wires hummed with the news from Berlin, America’s most powerful elected official was indeed fast asleep. He was staying at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, where he and a small staff had joined the extended first family for the weekend, as the President liked to do in the dog days of summer. It was beautiful weather. A family trip on the Kennedys’ cabin cruiser, the
Marlin
, was planned for later that morning.
At this time of the year, the President usually left for the Cape on a Friday afternoon, travelling by helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base and from there to Cape Cod by plane. As usual, on that last morning in Washington he would have been presented by his senior military aide, Major-General Chester Clifton, with a folder containing CIA reports on developments in various parts of the world that day. The folder was known as the President’s ‘check-list’. Looking through this was part of Kennedy’s daily routine. Update folders would be flown to Hyannis Port on Saturday and then again on Sunday, along with any other material thought significant, so that the President could continue to keep up with current events. Urgent messages could be routed via a telex loop from the White House to the basement of the Yachtsman’s Motel in Hyannis Port, where a unit of the US Signal Corps was installed for the summer.
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On Sunday 13 August, the President finally awoke to blue skies and sunshine, a glorious Cape Cod morning. Despite the White House official’s promise, it seems that no clear message had arrived about the situation in Berlin. There was still no word when Kennedy set off to attend mass with the rest of the family at St François Xavier Church in Hyannis Port. The Kennedys returned a little less than an hour later and almost immediately embarked on the
Marlin
. They were heading for Great Island, where they had been invited to lunch with the director of Washington’s National Gallery of Art and his wife.
A short while later, a radio message came from General Clifton, who had remained behind at the Kennedy compound. A cable had been delivered from Washington. Berlin was being sealed off. Clifton recommended that the President return to shore.
The
Marlin
turned back. Kennedy was dropped off at the compound’s jetty, where Clifton met him in a motorised golf cart. At the President’s insistence, the first family continued with their cruise and their lunch.
Clifton immediately showed Kennedy the cable, then drove him back across the dunes to the family’s holiday cottage. There the President put in a call to the State Department. Within a few minutes he was discussing the Berlin situation with Secretary Rusk.
The Secretary of State, in the calm, inscrutable tones that had earned him the nickname of ‘Buddha’, explained that he thought it was important to negotiatate, to ‘talk the fever out of this thing’. The President wanted to know what the Russians were up to. Rusk said it appeared they were taking military measures all right, but only defensive ones. Nothing indicated that Khrushchev was out to gobble up West Berlin.
That was the main thing. Now, a world war over access to and from East Berlin? Forget it.
The instinctive impulse of Rusk and his aides, and of everyone around the President was to play down the news—at least for public consumption. Phone calls from Kennedy to McNamara, Bundy and Attorney-General Robert Kennedy confirmed that this low-key approach reflected a general consensus. No one wanted to appear weak or unresponsive; on the other hand, they didn’t want to make it look as if the Soviet/East German measures were a
casus belli
or, anything like it.
None the less, some kind of official reaction had to occur. Walt Rostow, who was in Washington and had helped set up a ‘Situation Room’, joined Ausland in drafting a press release. This was cabled through to the President’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, at Hyannis Port, so that Salinger could field the media’s enquires and make whatever statements were considered necessary.
There was no talk of a ‘Wall’ or anything similar in the press release, only of ‘measures designed to halt the flow of refugees to West Berlin’. The East German moves were seen as a continuation of intimidatory actions undertaken earlier that weekend against travellers from Potsdam and East Berlin, thought to be aimed at ‘border-crossers’. The main tack would be to deny that the West had done anything to ‘induce’ the flood of refugees, which was due to ‘economic conditions in East Germany and the Soviet campaign against West Berlin’. From there Salinger went on to the offensive, pointing out that the restrictions were in ‘direct contravention’ of the four-power agreement and represented a ‘damning
admission by the Soviets of the inability of communist society to compete with a free society’.
4
The official State Department response—discussed and approved by the President—eschewed even such anodyne rhetoric. It declared merely that the action did not affect the ‘Allied position in West Berlin or access thereto’, though it violated existing agreements and would be subject to ‘vigorous protests through appropriate channels’.
5
Soviet tanks might lurk on the outskirts of Berlin; machine-gun-wielding Communist goons might defy humanity and the world; Western crowds might come close to rioting at the sector border; the malevolent agents of the
Stasi
might be busy forcibly crushing resistance among recalcitrant East Berliners; but in Washington the State Department reacted with polite bromides.
Kennedy was not alone in confronting the undoubted ugliness of ‘Operation Rose’ with extreme caution. Other major Western leaders were even less eager to confront the Communist machinations in Berlin head-on.
The crisis found Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister of Great Britain since 1957, hundreds of miles north of London, at Bolton Abbey, in Yorkshire. There he was celebrating, as he did every summer, the opening of the grouse-shooting season. Macmillan spent Saturday 12 August in the company of his nephew, the Duke of Devonshire—owner of Bolton Abbey and of much else besides—engaged in appropriate use of firearms against indigenous bird life. Even after hearing the news from Berlin, the Premier saw no reason why he should not continue to do so on 13 August also.
Meanwhile, 71-year-old General Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle, last active Allied leader of the Second World War and since 1958 once more President of France, was resting at his country home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, south-east (in fact, rather a long way south-east) of Paris. So relaxed did de Gaulle seem about the Berlin affair that he failed to return to Paris until the following Thursday, 17 August.
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This caution was not due to mere indifference on the part of either leader. Each had problems of his own quite independent of Khrushchev’s and Ulbricht’s ploys.
Britain’s military and economic decline had lately accelerated to a point where even the traditionally imperialistic Conservatives realised they had to cut their cloth to suit new circumstances. A certain testy obsession with cost had crept into discussions about Britain’s military commitments. Even before this latest twist in the Berlin Crisis, plans had been put in motion by Defence Minister Harold Watkinson, not to increase Britain’s military presence in West Germany and Berlin, but to drastically reduce it.
Conscription for the British armed services was due to be abandoned in the early part of 1962. The strength of the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) would accordingly fall from 52,000 to 44,000 by the end of that year. It seemed likely that even the 3,500 troops London maintained in the British sector of Berlin might be subjected to a quiet culling operation. Despite occasional sabre-rattling from America and the USSR, and the manifest failure of the Vienna summit in June, until 13 August the attitude in London was pretty low-key. Macmillan, in his wry way, expressed the general feeling among London’s élite in June 1961: ‘I still think we are more likely to be bankrupted than blown up’.
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