Kennedy: The Classic Biography (109 page)

The Berlin Wall—sealing off the border between the two cities with a high, grim barrier of concrete and barbed wire, separating families and friends, keeping East Germans in, free Germans out and Western access to East Berlin on a more limited basis—shocked the free world. Kennedy promptly turned to his aides and allies for advice; but there was little useful they could say in such a situation.

All agreed that the East German regime had long had the power to halt border crossings, was bound to do it sooner or later and had at least done so before the West could be accused of provoking it. All agreed also that the Wall—built on East German territory, the latest and worst in a twenty-three-year-long series of such actions in the Soviet-administered zone—was illegal, immoral and inhumane, but not a cause for war. It ended West Berlin’s role as a showcase and escape route for the East, but it did not interfere with the three basic objectives the West had long stressed: our presence in West Berlin, our access to West Berlin and the freedom of West Berliners to choose their own system. Not one responsible official—in this country, in West Berlin, West Germany or Western Europe—suggested that Allied forces should march into East German territory and tear the Wall down. For the Communists, as General Lucius Clay later pointed out, could have built another, ten or twenty or five hundred yards back, and then another, unless the West was prepared to fight a war over extending its area of vital interest into East Berlin. Nor did any ally or adviser want an excited Western response that might trigger an uprising among the desperate East Berliners—that would only produce another Budapest massacre.

The President was nevertheless convinced that some response was required—not to threaten the Communists for their blatant admission of failure but to restore morale among the shocked and sickened West Berliners. Our contingency plans had been prepared for interference with our access to West Berlin, not emigration from the East. Our intelligence estimates, although recognizing that the Communists would have to control their loss of manpower, had offered no advance warning of this specific move. Kennedy thus had to improvise on his own; and meanwhile crucial time—too much time—went by.

Finally, to test Communist intentions and demonstrate our own, he dispatched an additional contingent of fifteen hundred American troops down the
Autobahn
, riding in armored trucks through the East German checkpoints to West Berlin. Obviously fifteen hundred more troops could not hold the city against a direct Soviet attack, he said, but “the West Berliners would benefit from a reminder of [our] commitment…at this time,” and the Soviets would recognize the troops as “our hostage to that intent.” It was his most anxious moment during the prolonged Berlin crisis, his first order of American military units into a potential confrontation with Soviet forces. Postponing his usual weekend change of scenery to the Hyannis Port White House, he kept his military aide in constant touch with the convoy’s commander. When the first group of sixty trucks turned unimpeded into West Berlin, he felt that a turning point in the crisis had been reached.

Simultaneously he dispatched Vice President Johnson to address the people of West Berlin, to rally their hope and their will, and to restate this nation’s commitment in the language (personally approved by the President) of our most solemn pledge: “our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.”

Accompanying Johnson—and returning to West Berlin shortly thereafter for a prolonged stay as Kennedy’s personal emissary—was retired General Lucius Clay, a hero to West Berliners. Clay had been in command in 1947 when a Soviet land blockade of West Berlin had required a massive Western airlift. A constant spur to Allied effort and a beloved symbol to West Berliners, Clay’s presence was highly valued by the President despite his tendency to be something of an alarmist in his private cables, sometimes hinting he might resign unless his requests were granted. “He’s a conservative Republican doing a good job on a thankless assignment and staying publicly loyal under a Democratic administration,” remarked the President. While he was not always happy with Clay’s failure to distinguish our “vital rights” in West Berlin from our grievances in East Berlin, he nevertheless fully understood the General’s tendency at times to act without waiting for unanimity in his instructions from Washington, General Norstad and Allied representatives in Berlin.

The basic objective of the military, the Johnson and the Clay missions was to rekindle hope in West Berlin. Its spirit had been damaged by the Wall, its role altered, its future as the ultimate capital of a reunited Germany darkened. Khrushchev predicted that it would soon be a dying, withering city. Many Westerners as well saw little prospects of inducing new industry and labor to locate there or even inducing its present residents to remain. Some urged its complete incorporation into West Germany; but Kennedy felt that that would close out all hope of ever reuniting the city, and merely provoke the Soviets into further acts with no real gain for the West. Instead, starting with these three missions, a major effort was made under Walt Rostow to maintain and increase the viability of West Berlin—to enhance its economic, educational and cultural roles—to attract young families, new investments and world understanding. That effort succeeded, and in the years that followed West Berlin not only survived but flourished.

The Wall, however, remained—and it was an ugly source of tension. At one stage Western and Soviet tanks and troops faced each other across the barricade until the Soviets drew back. American tests of our rights to enter East Berlin—and to ignore Red warnings about keeping Westerners one hundred meters away from the Wall in West Berlin—were all successful. But no one knew when either side, convinced that the other would back down, might precipitate a situation from which neither could back down. The Soviet resumption of nuclear testing in September added to the atmosphere of belligerence.

Rapidly building Western ground troop strength (although never to the level desired, because of the failure of our allies to increase their forces proportionately), drastically revising the Berlin contingency plans to permit a wider choice of response, the President speculated as to when the great confrontation would come, when a Soviet-German peace treaty would be signed and when a move would be made to cut off access. But the confrontation never came. The December, 1961, deadline passed without any treaty. Slowly, imperceptibly, the tides of crisis receded. From time to time they would rise suddenly again, with an incident at the Wall or on the access routes. The most serious was a deliberate Soviet test in the early months of 1962 on the air corridors from West Germany to West Berlin. Chaff was dropped to upset our radar, Soviet planes buzzed our own, and the Soviets seemed to be trying in every way possible to harass the Alliance into disunity and defeat. But under the revised contingency plans and the cool leadership of General Norstad, all flights proceeded, fighter aircraft were added, and Communist bloc nations were warned that stoppage would bar their planes from NATO countries. In time the intereference ended, and the tides of crisis once more receded.

They receded in part, we must assume, because Khrushchev recognized more clearly that turning access over to the East Germans was a highly dangerous venture—and in part because the ending of East German emigration eased the pressure on him for immediate action. But they also receded because Kennedy finally succeeded in getting his side ready to talk as well as fight, in changing the East-West confrontation to one of words instead of weapons. “Winston Churchill,” observed the President, “said it is better to jaw, jaw than war, war, and we shall continue to jaw, jaw and see if we can produce a useful result…. That [is] the purpose…in calling up 160,000 men [and] adding billions of dollars to our defense budget…not to fight a nuclear war.”

To jaw, jaw, however, Kennedy had to overcome stout resistance within his own administration and within the Western Alliance; and it must be said that he never fully succeeded with either. Our diplomatic posture improved far more slowly than our military posture. The “old German hands” in the State Department were not—as some charged—loyal only to the old Dulles-Adenauer line. But in contrast to those experts on Soviet affairs who thought that at least one of Khrushchev’s chief aims was security in Eastern Europe and that new Western proposals should be put forward, they basically believed that the real Soviet aim in this situation was to destroy the Western Alliance; that any willingness to negotiate on anything other than obviously unattainable proposals was a sign of weakness; that there was nothing to negotiate about since the Soviets had no legitimate interests in Central Europe that we could concede and the West wanted no changes that the Soviets could accept; and that any revision in the old, oft-rejected “Western Peace Plan” would be regarded by the West Germans as a sellout. Thus the department was slow to respond to the President’s request for new proposals and slow to reflect his views in talking with its Allied counterparts.

In West Germany two fears prevailed: fear that the Allies would not stand firm and fear that they would. Welcoming concessions when war threatened, said our embassy in Bonn, the West Germans would later grumble that the West could have done better. The Adenauer government —described as “deeply neurotic” by one of its American admirers, and suspicious that the new contingency plans were a weakening of nuclear resolve—had not brought the German people face to face with the realistic choices. It was a hotbed of rumors, none of them true, that the West knew of the Wall in advance, for example, or had concluded a secret pact at German expense.

In France, General De Gaulle supported Adenauer with variations on the same theme. Unlike the German Chancellor, he saw no practical purpose in talking about reunifying the two Germanys or recovering from Poland the disputed territory east of the Oder-Neisse line. But he was convinced that Khrushchev was bluffing, that there was no real crisis, that an early showdown would prove it, that conventional forces were unnecessary and that political overtures would be harmful. Inasmuch as West Berlin was a three-power responsibility, Kennedy had proposed four-power ministerial talks when Gromyko came to New York for the UN session in September, 1961. De Gaulle objected to any such talks until the West had a new position—and he objected to any new position. The British, on the other hand, who were as uncooperative as the French on military preparations (but for different reasons), let it be known that they were only too eager to make major negotiating concessions—and this simply encouraged Khrushchev to be tougher, in Kennedy’s view.

The President decided, therefore, that the United States would jaw, jaw on its own as a self-appointed agent for the Alliance. Theoretically we were to engage, not in “negotiations,” but in “exploratory talks to see whether serious negotiations could be undertaken.” De Gaulle opposed even this approval, and caused the first split (14 to 1) NATO communiqué in history. Adenauer was persuaded by Kennedy to give it his grudging approval, but the German Foreign Office continued to leak and then disparage each new suggestion that was put forward. Yet neither the West German nor any other ally’s response to the crisis had incurred an added military and financial burden proportionate to our own, the President often pointed out, and he had to restrain his public comments about those nations “who speak with [such] vigor now. It is not difficult to…say ‘Oh, well, you shouldn’t do this or that’…but
we
carry the major military burden.” Adenauer had expressed concern about the dangers of “undue optimism,” he added, but that was
one
danger unlikely to arise.

Kennedy recognized that he would only encourage Khrushchev’s ambitions if the Alliance were badly split, and that he could not conclude any settlement which the West Germans were convinced was a sellout. But he was equally persuaded that failure on the diplomatic front meant a return to the military front. Between this Scylla and Charybdis he proceeded somewhat unsteadily for more than a year. “It’s not easy,” he candidly told his news conference.

The United States is attempting to carry on negotiations for several powers. All of them have different ideas how it ought to be done, and we have to…present a position which has some hope of working out…. There is daily consultation…but…it takes a long time…. [The] necessity to debate these matters publicly…even before they become our official position…makes it very difficult to carry on any negotiations with the Soviet Union.

Yet the talks were carried on—in New York, Moscow, Geneva and Washington, in meetings between Rusk and Gromyko, Thompson and Gromyko, Rusk and Dobrynin, and Kennedy and Gromyko. Proposals were discussed in the Kennedy-Khrushchev letters and in Kennedy’s meetings with Adzhubei. But no real progress was made. With all the overlapping U.S. and Allied machinery bogged down in disagreement and detail, few initiatives were forthcoming. Many of those came from the White House or from outside advisers such as Acheson; and even these, the President thought, were dissipated or discounted by the time they had gone through the bureaucratic and inter-Allied mills. Objections, amendments, delays and referrals to one group or another seemed to block every proposed plan and nearly every Soviet-American meeting. If the White House and State Department agreed, one or more Allies disagreed; and if all were agreed, the Soviets disagreed. Indeed, one of the most useful lessons to Kennedy in the entire episode was the folly of pressing upon the Germans and other Allies solutions which were not really negotiable anyway.

The talks nevertheless served the purpose of defining the U.S. position more precisely, making clear what we would and would not fight for or talk about. By stressing that his essential objectives were carefully limited, Kennedy thereby stressed that his commitment to defend them was unlimited. Our real concern, he indicated to the annoyance of Adenauer and the “hard-line” diplomats, was the continuation of our access and other rights—not whether the Soviets signed a treaty with a regime of their own creation, not whether Russian or East German sentries stamped Western papers on the
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, and not even whether East Germans were represented at the conference table or in an International Access Authority. Nor would he close his eyes to the facts of life that would keep Germany divided for some years to come, the Ulbricht regime in control in the East, its present Eastern boundaries permanent, and Eastern Europe in fear of German military might, particularly nuclear weapons. He was willing to curtail certain of the American “irritant” activities within West Berlin which were in fact nonessential. He was willing to recognize the historic and legitimate interests of the nations of Eastern Europe in preventing future German aggressions. Could an accommodation within this framework obtain a detailed written guarantee of freedom in and access to West Berlin, thus improving our position? he asked. “We are committed to no rigid formula…. We see no perfect solution.”