Berlin 1961 (33 page)

In contrast to his predecessors, Kennedy had two advantages in dealing with the French leader: his willingness to play the role of de Gaulle’s junior and the impact of his wife’s Sorbonne education and her French-language fluency on the vain general. After she chatted amicably with de Gaulle over lunch about the Bourbons and Louis XVI, de Gaulle turned to Kennedy and enthused, “Your wife knows more French history than most French women.”

Safely back in his golden tub, Kennedy told his friends, “De Gaulle and I are hitting it off all right, probably because I have such a charming wife.”

KIEVSKY STATION, MOSCOW
SATURDAY, MAY
27, 1961

While Kennedy endured the Paris whirlwind, Khrushchev was making the 1,200-mile trip from Moscow to Vienna in a more leisurely fashion aboard a specially equipped six-car train. He would make barnstorming stops in Kiev, Prague, and Bratislava—and would be cheered at rural stations all along the train’s path.

Communist Party cells had gathered a crowd of thousands to see him off at Moscow’s Kievsky Station, where Khrushchev took Ambassador Thompson aside for a last exchange before departure. In a cable that would report on their brief chat, Thompson hit a strained note of optimism. “I believe Khrushchev will wish the meeting with the president to be a pleasant one,” he wrote, “and that he will desire if possible to make some proposal or take some position on some problems which have the effect of improving the atmosphere and relations. I find it extremely difficult, however, to imagine what this could be.”

As Khrushchev boarded the train, a young girl rushed forward to present him a huge bouquet of red roses. Ever impulsive, Khrushchev summoned the U.S. ambassador’s wife, Jane, and, with the crowd cheering, presented her the flowers.

Without confidence, Thompson told the press gathered there, “I hope everything will go well.” Privately, Thompson had begun to worry that Kennedy was heading for an ambush on Berlin issues. The latest clue was a stridently worded editorial in the official government newspaper
Izvestia
that had declared on the day of Khrushchev’s departure that the Soviet Union could not wait any longer for Western agreement before acting on Berlin.

Khrushchev swelled with pride as he waved to enthusiastic crowds gathered alongside the tracks of the countless stations the train passed, many of them decorated with welcoming flags, posters, and streamers. Khrushchev was particularly taken by a crimson banner that covered the entire front of the provincial station at Mukachevo in the Ukrainian region near his birthplace. It had been inscribed in Ukrainian:
MAY YOU LIVE WELL, DEAR NIKITA SERGEYEVICH!

In Kiev, thousands cheered him as he toured the city and laid a wreath on the grave of its beloved poet Taras Shevchenko. At
ierna, the first stop inside Czechoslovakia, the country’s party leader Antonín Novotný had seen to it that his giant portrait hung beside that of Khrushchev at every turn. A band played both national anthems to the crash of cymbals and blare of trumpets. Uniformed Young Pioneers, the party’s youth organization, filled Khrushchev’s arms with flowers while pretty girls with embroidered blouses offered the traditional welcome gift of bread and salt.

His hosts in Bratislava carefully choreographed his final stop before Vienna. Public buildings were draped in banners:
GLORY TO KHRUSHCHEV—UNSHAKABLE CHAMPION OF PEACE
. He and Novotný spoke to the crowds about finding a “final solution” to the Berlin problem, oblivious to whatever parallels there might be to Hitler’s “final solution” for the Jews. Locals celebrated the eve of the Vienna meetings with a fireworks display over the medieval castle in the ancient town of Tren
ín, where Soviet troops in April 1945 had captured the Gestapo headquarters.

In a final, precautionary touch, Khrushchev delayed his train’s departure to Vienna from Bratislava until two p.m., four hours later than had been planned. Having received reports of the throngs that celebrated Kennedy in Paris, Khrushchev’s people concluded they could only ensure a respectable reception in Vienna if communist worker unions could assemble their workers near the end of the workday.

PARIS
WEDNESDAY, MAY
31, 1961

Acting as a self-appointed tutor, de Gaulle recounted for Kennedy how he managed Khrushchev during his most irascible moments. He warned Kennedy that it was inevitable Khrushchev would threaten war at some point in their Vienna talks.

De Gaulle recalled how he had told the Soviet leader: You pretend that you seek détente. If such is the case, proceed with détente. If you want peace, start with general disarmament negotiations. Under the circumstances, the entire world situation may change little by little and then we will solve the question of Berlin and the entire Germany question. However, if you insist on raising the question of Berlin within the context of the Cold War, then no solution is possible. What do you want? Do you want war?

Khrushchev had then replied to de Gaulle that he did not want war.

In that case, the Frenchman had told him, do nothing that can bring it about.

Kennedy doubted dealing with Khrushchev would be that easy. Kennedy told the French leader, for example, that he knew de Gaulle wanted his own nuclear weapons capability because he doubted that the U.S. ever would risk New York for Paris—let alone for Berlin—in a nuclear exchange with Moscow. If the general himself so deeply doubted American resolve, why would Khrushchev feel otherwise? Kennedy wondered.

De Gaulle would not be drawn. This was a moment for a clear American message of resolve to Khrushchev, irrespective of whether the French leader believed it himself. “It is important to show that we do not intend to let this situation change,” de Gaulle said. “
Any
retreat from Berlin,
any
change of status,
any
withdrawal of troops,
any
new obstacles to transportation and communication, would mean defeat. It would result in an almost complete loss of Germany, and in very serious losses within France, Italy and elsewhere.” Beyond that, de Gaulle told Kennedy, “If [Khrushchev] wants war, we must make clear to him he will have it.” The French leader was confident that if Kennedy refused to retreat before Soviet dictates, Khrushchev would never risk a military confrontation.

What worried de Gaulle more was the Soviet and East German approach of slowly eroding the Western position in Berlin so that “we would have lost without seeming to have lost but in a way which would be understood by the entire world. In particular, the population of Berlin is not made up exclusively of heroes. In the face of something which they would interpret as our weakness, they might begin to leave Berlin and make it into an empty shell to be picked up by the East.”

It struck Kennedy that de Gaulle was free to speak so bravely about Berlin because France did not have to shoulder America’s security burden there. De Gaulle was being so vague about possible remedies that Kennedy tried to provoke a more detailed response. Kennedy said he was a practical man who wanted de Gaulle to be specific about the point at which the French leader would go to war over Berlin.

De Gaulle said he wouldn’t go to war over either of the issues currently in question: if the Soviets unilaterally signed a peace treaty with East Germany or changed four-power procedures in the city to give East Germans greater sovereignty over East Berlin—for example, by handing them the right to stamp travel documents at border crossings. “This is in itself no reason for a military retaliation on our part,” he said.

So Kennedy pressed the great Frenchman further: “In what way, therefore, at what moment, shall we bring pressure to bear?” The president complained that the Soviets and East Germans had a multitude of ways to complicate the Berlin situation, perhaps even causing West Berlin’s ruin, but using methods that would not trigger a Western response. “How do we answer that?” he wondered.

De Gaulle said the West should only respond militarily if the Soviets or East Germans acted militarily. “If either [Khrushchev] or his lackeys use force to cut our communications with Berlin, then we must use force,” he said.

Kennedy agreed, but he did not believe as de Gaulle did that any weakening of the Western position in Berlin would be a disaster. He said it would be a blow “which would not be mortal but would be serious” to Western Germany and all of Europe.

Kennedy sought de Gaulle’s advice on how he in Vienna could best convince Khrushchev of Western firmness, given that the Soviet leader so doubted U.S. resolve following the Bay of Pigs. He wanted to know what the French leader thought of U.S. and Allied contingency plans to respond to any new Berlin blockade with a demonstration of approximate company strength, and, if that failed, then of brigade strength.

Given Soviet conventional superiority around Berlin, de Gaulle told Kennedy he could deter the Soviets only with a willingness to use nuclear weapons, which was precisely what the president wanted to avoid.

“What we must make clear is that if there is any fighting around Berlin, this means general war,” de Gaulle said.

B
y the time of their grand Élysée Palace banquet that evening, Jack and Jackie, as the French press called them, had taken the country by storm. They sat down that evening with three hundred other guests in the mirrored, tapestried dining hall around an immense table covered by a single tablecloth of white organza and gold embroidery, giving rise to the Kennedys’ wonder over how one could create such an object. The Republican Guard symphony orchestra played everything from Gershwin to Ravel, each number embodying some deeper U.S.–French meaning.

In his comments, Kennedy joked about how much French influence he had in his life. “I sleep in a French bed. In the morning my breakfast is served by a French chef, I go to my office, and the bad news of the day is brought to me by my press secretary Pierre Salinger, not in his native [French] language, and I am married to a daughter of France.”

The view through long French windows was to a rainy evening outside where palace lawns and grand fountains turned emerald green in spotlights. The after-dinner reception expanded to a thousand guests, whom the
Washington Post
report portrayed as “indescribably elegant.” The French men were peacocking with bright sashes across shirtfronts, giant stars and crosses pinned to their tailcoats, and rows of miniature medals pinned on lapels. The women wore long gloves and jewels, and a few dowagers were richly tiaraed.

Yet the star that evening was Jackie, wearing a Directoire-styled gown of pale pink and white straw lace. Alexandre, hairdresser to the Parisian elite, whispered to the
New York Times
that he had cut an inch from the First Lady’s hair and trimmed her bangs for that evening, creating the look of “a Gothic Madonna.” For the next evening’s dinner at Versailles, Alexandre promised something more evocative of Louis XIV, with diamond flame clips sticking through her hair to “give her a fairy-like air.”

Kennedy’s mother, Rose, “slim as the proverbial wand,” wore a floor-length Balenciaga gown of white silk appliquéd with pink flowers that had real diamonds in their centers. Paris publications gushed at how refreshingly European all the Kennedys were.

D
uring their “tub talk” the following day, Kennedy reflected with his friends on de Gaulle’s observation that the West could never keep West Berlin free without a willingness to use the nuclear bomb.

“So we’re stuck in a ridiculous situation,” Kennedy said through the steam. “It seems silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty preserving Berlin as the future capital of a reunified Germany when all of us know that Germany will probably never be reunified. But we’re committed to that agreement, and so are the Russians, so we can’t let them back out of it.”

VIENNA
SATURDAY, JUNE
3, 1961

Kennedy’s advance team had choreographed the president’s arrival in Vienna in a manner calculated to unsettle Khrushchev, who had expressed jealousy to his team about Kennedy’s ever-rising global popularity. The more the Soviets opposed a grand Kennedy airport arrival and motorcade, the more O’Donnell had insisted upon it. After each Soviet objection, he had added more limousines and flags.