Berlin 1961 (62 page)

Kennedy considered reaching out to his allies to get their advice and buy-in on how to respond to Khrushchev, but experience had taught him that that would only produce muddle and press leaks. He would then lose Khrushchev’s trust. But what was that trust worth, anyway? Chip Bohlen, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, told Kennedy that his response to Khrushchev “may be the most important letter the President will ever write.”

In a letter dated October 16, more than two weeks after Khrushchev’s correspondence, Kennedy seized upon Khrushchev’s personal tone and wrote about the value of getting away from Washington and spending time on the shore with his children and their cousins. He embraced Khrushchev’s offer of confidential correspondence, and said he would not hint at it in public or disclose it to the press. However, Kennedy added to Khrushchev that he would share the letter with Rusk and a few other of his closest associates.

Kennedy embraced Khrushchev’s Noah’s Ark analogy. Due to the dangers of the nuclear age, he said, U.S.–Soviet collaboration to keep the peace now was even more important than their partnership during World War II. Kennedy could not have been clearer in his de facto acceptance of Berlin’s border closure. He called his attitude toward Berlin and Germany “one of reason, not belligerence. There is peace in that area now—and this government shall not initiate and shall oppose any action which upsets that peace.”

Although he had been willing to allow the construction of the Berlin Wall, he was now drawing the line he would not cross regarding Berlin. He rejected Khrushchev’s efforts to open negotiations to change Berlin’s status to a so-called “free city” where Soviet troops would join the other three Allies in ensuring the city’s freedom and the East Germans would control access. “We would be ‘buying the same horse’ twice,” he said, “conceding objectives which you seek, merely to retain what we already possess.” But Kennedy expressed willingness to begin exploratory talks through the American whom Khrushchev had suggested for the purpose, Ambassador Thompson.

Kennedy also wanted Khrushchev to give the U.S. more on Laos as a test case for Berlin. Said the president, “I do not see how we can expect to reach a settlement on so bitter and complex an issue as Berlin, where both of us have vital interests at stake, if we cannot come to a final agreement on Laos, which we have previously agreed should be neutral and independent after the fashion of Burma and Cambodia.” Now that it was clear that the neutralist Prince Souvanna Phouma would become prime minister, Kennedy said that he and Khrushchev should ensure that the prince “is assisted by the kind of men we believe necessary to meet the standard of neutrality.” He said the acceleration of communist attacks on South Vietnam, many from Laotian territory, were “a very grave threat to peace.”

However, more important to Khrushchev than the content of Kennedy’s letter was the fact that the president had taken his bait and replied at all. Now the Soviet leader could be relatively certain that Kennedy was ready to engage in new talks regarding Berlin, and thus would refrain from confrontational speeches or actions that might disrupt Khrushchev’s careful planning for his crucial, fast-approaching Party Congress. Only two months after closing the Berlin border, the Soviet was drawing Kennedy into new negotiations on the city’s status, without having suffered even the modest hand-slap of economic sanctions.

What Kennedy would get out of the exchange was less satisfying. Khrushchev’s next communication would come in the form of a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb.

PALACE OF CONGRESSES, MOSCOW
TUESDAY, OCTOBER
17, 1961

Sunlight glimmered through the morning mist off the golden domes of the Kremlin’s fifteenth- and sixteenth-century churches. The red flags of the fifteen Soviet republics fluttered in front of the modern, glass-walled red and gold Palace of Congresses, just finished for the 22nd Soviet Party Congress.

The massive auditorium was filled to capacity. Not one of its red seats was vacant. Never had so many communists met in one place at the same time. Some 4,394 voting delegates and 405 nonvoting delegates—nearly 5,000 in all—had gathered from eighty communist and noncommunist countries. That was three and a half times more delegates than in the preceding three congresses.

The numbers were a reflection of the party’s growth, now reaching the 10 million mark in membership, after having added nearly 1.5 million members since the 21st Party Congress in 1959. Khrushchev wanted a record crowd for his 1961 show, so he had entitled each party organization to send additional delegates.

The Palace of Congresses was unique, if only because everything worked so much better than in most Soviet government buildings. It had escalators with nearly silent motors, the latest stereophonic sound, West German–made central air-conditioning, British-manufactured refrigerators, and hot and cold running water in marble lavatories. Western correspondents gathered for drinks and food on the seventh floor, which they called the “Top of the Marx.”

Time
magazine assessed the crowd: “comrades from small Russian villages, café-sophisticated Parisians, bamboo-tough agitators from Asia.” The stars included the Viet Minh’s Ho Chi Minh; Red China’s Chou En-lai; America’s seventy-one-year-old labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; the Spanish Civil War’s famed “Pasionaria,” Dolores Ibárruri; and János Kádár, the leader who had helped put down the 1956 rebellion in Hungary. They filed in beneath a giant silver bas-relief of Lenin on a purple background.

Western reporters habitually called Khrushchev the “absolute leader” of the Soviet Union, but the truth was more complicated. After only a year in power, Khrushchev had narrowly survived a coup in 1957. After the G-2 incident and the Paris Summit failure in May 1960, Stalinist remnants began to rally against Khrushchev. In particular, they seized upon what they considered his irresponsible reduction of Soviet armed forces, his alienation of communist China, and his embracing of the imperialist Americans. Through early votes on prefabricated resolutions, Khrushchev monitored potential rivalries that could be his undoing.

Kennedy’s three leading American political opponents—Republican Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and former Vice President Richard Nixon—were meek compared with Khrushchev’s less visible and more dangerous opponents, men bred in Stalin’s bloodiest times.

Though he owed his position to Khrushchev, Presidium member Frol Kozlov personified the sort of thug that had begun to plot against Khrushchev after the Paris Summit failure. He was ill-educated, short, boorish, Stalinist, and hostile to the West. American diplomat Richard Davies described him as a nasty drunk who ate like a pig and drank like a fish. Yet Khrushchev also faced a smoother and more ruthless kind of potential enemy in Mikhail Suslov, the party’s leading ideologist and intellectual.

Khrushchev had strengthened his hold on power during 1961 through favors, factional purges, and visits throughout the country with local party leaders. The Gagarin space shot, the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna Summit, and the Berlin border closure had also neutralized would-be opponents. It seemed to party colleague Pyotr Demichev that Khrushchev was enjoying a rare “time in the sun.”
Time
magazine put it this way: “In 44 years and 15 Party Congresses since the October 1917 Revolution, Communism’s inner hierarchy has never seemed more stable or more successful.”

Nevertheless, Khrushchev knew better than anyone how vulnerable his position could be. For all his work to advance communism in Africa and Asia, only Cuba had joined the Soviet camp under Khrushchev’s leadership, and by luck more than design. Some party leaders would never forgive Khrushchev for having denounced Stalin, which they saw not only as an attack on an individual but also on communist history and legitimacy. China remained poised against Khrushchev, and the head of Beijing’s delegation, Chou En-lai, would leave the Congress in a huff after laying a wreath at Stalin’s tomb.

Still, Khrushchev looked leaner and fitter than he had been for months, as if he had been training for the event. “I propose we begin to work,” he told the gathering, interpreted into twenty-nine languages. “The Twenty-second Congress is now in session.”

Even Stalin would have envied Khrushchev’s choreography. The Soviet leader monopolized the first two days with his two speeches, each some six hours in length. He navigated from one topic to another with inexhaustible energy, describing richly how the Soviet economy would surpass that of the United States by 1980—increasing its gross national product five times, expanding its industrial production six times, and providing every family a rent-free apartment. By 1965, he said, the Soviet Union would produce three pairs of shoes per person per year!

He renewed his attacks on the dead Stalin, and by the end of the Congress would remove the dictator from the Red Square mausoleum, where he rested beside Lenin, and rebury him in less prominent ground beside a lower rank of communist heroes near the Kremlin wall.

What most caught the attention of delegates and the world, however, were two bombshells related to Berlin. One was figurative and the other very real.

Disappointing East Germany’s Ulbricht, Khrushchev said he would drop his insistence on signing a peace treaty by year’s end. His explanation was that Gromyko’s recent talks with Kennedy showed that the Western powers “were disposed to seek a settlement” on Berlin.

Having offered Kennedy that carrot, Khrushchev then swung the nuclear stick. He departed from his prepared text to talk about Soviet military prowess, particularly when it came to missile development. He laughed that the Soviets had come so far that American spy ships were tracking and confirming the remarkable accuracy of their rockets.

Still in a jocular tone and speaking impromptu, Khrushchev then jolted his listeners with a revelation: “Since I have already wandered from my written text, I want to say that our tests of new nuclear weapons are also coming along very well. We shall shortly complete these tests—presumably at the end of October. We shall probably wind them up by detonating a hydrogen bomb with a yield of fifty million tons of TNT.”

The delegates stood and broke into stormy applause. No one to that date had ever tested such a powerful weapon. Reporters scribbled furiously.

“We have said that we have a hundred-megaton bomb,” he added, encouraged by the crowd reaction. “This is true. But we are not going to explode it, because even if we did so at the most remote site, we might knock out all of the windows.”

Delegates roared and applauded wildly.

The atheist leader then turned his words to the Almighty. “But may God grant, as they used to say, that we are never called upon to explode these bombs over anybody’s territory. This is the greatest wish of our lives.”

It was classic Khrushchev. He had taken some pressure off Kennedy by lifting the deadline on negotiating a Berlin treaty even as he smacked him over the head with news of a coming nuclear test. On the final day of the Congress, the Soviet Union would detonate the most powerful nuclear weapon ever to be constructed. The “Tsar Bomba,” as it would later be nicknamed in the West, had the equivalent of a thousand times the explosives used in the World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Again caught flat-footed, Kennedy knew that he had to respond.

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER
18, 1961

During an otherwise genial White House luncheon for Texas news executives the next day, the conservative publisher of the
Dallas Morning News
, E. M. “Ted” Dealey, challenged the president. “We can annihilate Russia,” he said, “and should make that clear to the Soviet government.”

Reading from a five-hundred-word statement that he had extracted from his pocket, Dealey declared, “The general opinion of the grassroots thinking of this country is that you and your administration are weak sisters.” He said that what was needed was “a man on horseback,” but that “many people in Texas and the Southwest think you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”

On edge from Khrushchev’s announcement and weeks of unrelenting pressure over Berlin, Kennedy responded with irritation. “The difference between you and me, Mr. Dealey, is that I was elected president of this country and you were not. I have the responsibility for the lives of a hundred eighty million Americans, which you have not…. Wars are easier to talk about than they are to fight. I’m just as tough as you are—and I didn’t get elected President by arriving at soft judgments.”

Kennedy was facing the hardest judgment call of his life over how he would conduct a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev was making the exercise more than academic. The plan he was reviewing after weeks of intensive, highly classified meetings had as its goal the preemptive destruction of the Soviet nuclear arsenal so as not to leave a single weapon for reprisal. In rich detail, it spelled out U.S. bombers’ flight paths, altitudes they must maintain to avoid detection, and which targets they would hit with what kind of nuclear weapons.

By the time the plan had percolated through the bureaucracy, dozens of drafts had been debated and the Berlin Wall had already been up for three weeks. Blandly titled “Strategic Air Planning and Berlin,” the thirty-three-page memo reached General Maxwell Taylor, the president’s military representative, on September 5. Author Carl Kaysen, one of the administration’s young geniuses, concluded, “We have a fair probability of achieving a substantial measure of success” at a cost of “only” half a million to a million Soviet casualties. It included charts, however, showing that if surviving Soviet missiles hit the U.S., the fatalities could range between five and ten million, because of the population concentration in places like New York and Chicago. “In thermonuclear warfare,” Kaysen dryly observed, “people are easy to kill.”

For the previous month, Kaysen had been working as deputy special assistant to National Security Advisor Bundy after gaining influence inside the administration on a number of widely differing projects, ranging from international trade to the cost factors of airborne alert systems. The forty-one-year-old Harvard economics professor had served in London during World War II, picking out European bomb targets for the Office of Strategic Services, the then-new U.S. spy service.