Berlin 1961 (72 page)

Kennedy’s words and actions during the thirteen days of the Cuban crisis, from October 16 to 29, underscored his conviction that Khrushchev’s Cuba and Berlin strategies were interlinked. From the beginning, he suspected that Khrushchev’s Cuban strategy was ultimately aimed at winning Berlin, the Soviet leader’s greater priority. Thus, Kennedy told the Joint Chiefs:

Let me just say a little, first, about what the problem is, from my point of view. First, in general, I think we ought to think of why the Russians did this. Well, actually, it was a rather dangerous but rather useful play of theirs. We do nothing and they have a missile base there with all the pressure that brings to bear on the United States and our prestige. If we attack Cuban missiles, or Cuba in any way, that gives them a clear line to take Berlin, as they were able to do in Hungary under the Anglo war in Egypt [the Suez Crisis]. We would be regarded as the trigger-happy Americans who lost Berlin. We would have no support among our allies. We would affect the West Germans’ attitude towards us. And [people would believe] that we let Berlin go because we didn’t have the guts to ensure a situation in Cuba. After all, Cuba is five or six thousand miles from them. They don’t give a damn about Cuba. But they do care about Berlin and about their own security.

Kennedy’s decision to take a harder line with the Soviets over Cuba in 1962 than he had done regarding Berlin in 1961 had at least three motivations. First, the perils were greater to the U.S., as the danger was closer to home. Second, the domestic politics of mishandling Cuba were more dangerous to Kennedy’s reelection chances than they had been regarding faraway Berlin. Finally, Kennedy had at long last learned that his demonstrations of weakness had only encouraged Khrushchev to test him further. The Soviet leader had brazenly misled him, saying that he was postponing Berlin talks in deference to U.S. elections when he was merely buying time to put his missiles in place.

Kennedy drove home the Berlin connection again when he informed British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of the photographic proof of the missiles in a secret teletype message that was received in London on October 21 at 10:00 p.m. He wrote:

I recognize fully that Khrushchev’s main intention may be to increase his chances at Berlin, and we shall be ready to take a full role there as well as in the Caribbean. What is essential at this moment of highest test is that Khrushchev should discover that if he is counting on weakness or irresolution, he has miscalculated.

Kennedy repeated his Berlin concern to Macmillan in a second message a day later, just a few hours before his historic television address informing Americans of the danger, demanding the Soviets remove the missiles, and introducing a naval quarantine of Cuba. “I need not point out to you the possible relation of this secret and dangerous move on the part of Khrushchev to Berlin,” he said.

In 1962, Kennedy also rejected the advice of the so-called SLOBs, the Soft-Liners on Berlin. Ambassador Thompson, who had returned from Moscow to the State Department, wanted Kennedy to stop military traffic to Berlin during the Cuban showdown so as not to provoke the Kremlin, a notion the president rejected. National Security Advisor Bundy wondered whether some deal was possible under which one could trade Berlin for the missiles. Kennedy refused that as well, not wanting to be the president who lost Berlin.

For all his newfound resolve, however, Kennedy opposed his military’s suggestion of an attack on the Cuban bases, in no small part due to concern about a Soviet tit-for-tat military retaliation in Berlin. At one point General Curtis E. LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, protested Kennedy’s unwillingness to strike by saying, “This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” LeMay’s argument: “If we don’t do anything to Cuba, they’re going to push on Berlin and push real hard because they’ve got us on the run.”

Kennedy told the Executive Committee, the body he had created from his National Security Council to handle the crisis, that he worried even a quarantine could prompt a corresponding Soviet blockade of Berlin. The president appointed a subcommittee of that group, chaired by Paul Nitze, to wrestle with Berlin-related issues. He even lined up General Lucius Clay to return to Berlin if needed to coordinate U.S. actions.

In his October 22 speech to the nation, Kennedy publicly warned Khrushchev on Berlin: “Any hostile move anywhere in the world against the safety and freedom of peoples to whom we are committed—including in particular the brave people of West Berlin—will be met by whatever action is needed.”

With that, Kennedy’s Berlin Crisis had moved to Cuba.

In his meeting with U.S. Ambassador to London David Bruce on the evening of Kennedy’s speech, Prime Minister Macmillan worried: “Was it not likely that Khrushchev’s real purpose was to trade Cuba for Berlin? If he were stopped, with great loss of face, in Cuba, would he not be tempted to recover himself in Berlin? Indeed, might not this be the whole purpose of the exercise—to move forward one pawn in order to exchange it for another?” For his part, Kennedy worried to Macmillan that Khrushchev might preemptively take military action in Berlin that would require a proportionate U.S. response against Cuba. “That’s really the choice we now have,” he wrote. “If [Khrushchev] takes Berlin, then we will take Cuba.”

Instead, Khrushchev backed down in Cuba once challenged by a decisive Kennedy, exactly as General Clay had predicted he would a year earlier in regard to Berlin. When Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vasili Kuznetsov suggested a diversionary strike on Berlin to Khrushchev, the Soviet leader warned him, “Keep that sort of talk to yourself. We don’t know how to get out of one predicament, and you [want to] drag us into another?” Khrushchev also rejected Ambassador Dobrynin’s idea of responding to Cuba through the “first step” of closing ground routes to Berlin. “Father considered any action in Berlin to be unduly dangerous,” Khrushchev’s son Sergei would recall later, insisting that “not for a moment” did he consider a nuclear strike on the U.S. After Kennedy’s speech, Khrushchev began to withdraw Soviet troops from the West German border so that it would be clear he had no intention of escalating the conflict.

All that said, Kennedy was never as uncompromising in Cuba as it appeared to the U.S. public. On October 27, the president’s brother Bobby and Dobrynin reached an agreement that the U.S. would withdraw its Jupiter nuclear missiles from Turkey. When Khrushchev mentioned the concession the following day in a letter to Kennedy, Bobby returned the letter to the Soviets and denied that such a trade had been made. But Khrushchev considered the Turkey retreat crucial to his agreement.

Nevertheless, Kennedy had even won over his biggest Allied critics. De Gaulle famously told Kennedy’s emissary Dean Acheson, who had been sent to brief him during the crisis, that he did not need to see the proof of spy photographs from “a great nation” in order to support Kennedy. Adenauer said he would throw his lot behind Kennedy even if the U.S. found it must bomb or invade Cuba. “Absolutely, the missiles must go,” he said, thereafter bracing his country for a Berlin blockade or even a nuclear exchange. Tellingly, Kennedy rejected the dovish Macmillan’s offer to mediate with Moscow and call a summit on Cuba, which he felt would be disastrous for Berlin. “I don’t know quite what we will discuss at the meeting,” Kennedy said, “because he’ll be back with the same old position on Berlin, probably offering to dismantle the missiles if we’ll neutralize Berlin.”

Most surprised of all by Kennedy’s demonstration of strength was Khrushchev himself, who had bet so much against it. General Clay suggested to diplomat William Smyser that the Cuban Missile Crisis never would have occurred had it not been for Khrushchev’s perception of Kennedy’s weakness, and Clay believed as well that the threat to Berlin only receded once Kennedy made it clear he would no longer tolerate Moscow’s bullying.

West Berliners celebrated the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis more enthusiastically than any others. They concluded that the Soviet threat to them had passed.

RATHAUS SCHÖNEBERG, CITY HALL OF WEST BERLIN
WEDNESDAY, JUNE
26, 1963

Kennedy would make his first and last presidential trip to Berlin eight months after the Cuban crisis, on June 26, 1963. After visiting Checkpoint Charlie and walking along the Wall, he came to speak before City Hall, where some 300,000 Berliners had gathered. Most would remember the moment the rest of their lives.

Perhaps another million Berliners had also lined the thirty-five-mile route from Tegel. For most of the ride, Kennedy stood up on the far right side in the backseat of his open Lincoln convertible beside Mayor Willy Brandt and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. To catch a glimpse of their American hero, Berliners were hanging from trees and lampposts and standing on rooftops and balconies. The Red Cross, which had mobilized to handle casualties in the crowd, would report that more than a thousand people fainted.

At the airport and as they rolled through Berlin in their motorcade, some in the Kennedy delegation sneered that Hitler had drawn delirious German crowds as well. Berliners’ enthusiasm for Kennedy was so extreme that it unsettled Adenauer, who whispered to Rusk, “Does this mean Germany can one day have another Hitler?” At one point Kennedy was so dismayed that he told his military aide, General Godfrey T. McHugh, “If I told them to go tear down the Berlin Wall, they would do it.”

Yet the more time Kennedy and his entourage spent on the ground in West Berlin, the more they were smitten by its subjects. Kennedy was both stirred by West Berliners’ courage and shocked by the sight of the Wall, whose construction he had done so little to prevent. “He looks like a man who just glimpsed Hell,” observed
Time
correspondent Hugh Sidey. As Kennedy drove through the city, he redrafted the most important of the three speeches he would deliver, tossing out the wishy-washy language that had been crafted back in Washington so as not to provoke the Soviets. His speech outside West Berlin’s city hall would be the most emotional and powerful he would ever deliver abroad.

There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that Communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress.

At that point, Kennedy threw in a German line that had not appeared in his original text, but one that he had practiced before the event with Robert Lochner, the head of Radio in the American Sector of Berlin, or RIAS, and Adenauer’s interpreter Heinz Weber. He had written out what he wished to say phonetically on index cards. “Let them come to Berlin…
Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen,
” he said. “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘
Ich bin ein Berliner.
’”

Or as Kennedy had written on his cards:
“Ish bin ine Bear-LEAN-er.”

Years later, amateur linguists would argue that Kennedy had misspoken and by using the article
ein
in front of
Berliner
, which was the name of a German pastry, he had actually told the crowd, “I am a jelly doughnut.” Yet the president had debated just that point with his two tutors, who had rightly concluded that by leaving out the article he would be suggesting he was born in Berlin and perhaps confuse the crowd, and thus lose the emphasis of his symbolic point. In any case, no one in the delirious crowd had any doubt about Kennedy’s meaning.

Expressing all the outrage he had not shown in August 1961, Kennedy renounced communism. He conceded that democracy was imperfect, “but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.” Much to the delight of Adenauer, for the first time during his presidency he also talked of the right to reunification that Germans had earned through their eighteen years of good behavior. He spoke of his faith that Berlin, the German nation, and the European continent would someday be unified.

It was a new Kennedy.

The president summoned General Clay, who had traveled with him to Berlin, to stand beside him at the podium. Together they basked in the crowd’s roars—the man who had privately condemned Kennedy for lacking the will to stand up to the Soviets, and the commander in chief who now was acting so Clay-like, much to the consternation of his advisers. After the speech, Bundy told the president, “I think you went a little too far.”

With one speech Kennedy had shifted U.S. policy regarding Germany and Berlin to one that conformed to the new resolve he had shown in Cuba. For the first time in his presidency, Kennedy was treating Berlin as a place to be defended, a place where he would build his legacy, and no longer as an inherited inconvenience inhabited by a people for whom he had little sympathy. From that point forward, neither Kennedy nor any other U.S. president could retreat in Berlin.

As Kennedy told Ted Sorensen on their flight to Ireland from Berlin, “We’ll never have another day like this as long as we live.”

Less than five months later, on November 22, 1963, an assassin shot President John F. Kennedy dead in Dallas, Texas. Less than a year after that, on October 14, 1964, fellow communists ousted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. He died of heart disease in 1971 after smuggling his memoirs to the West.

In October 1963, Adenauer stepped down from office as part of the coalition deal he had reached to remain in power following the September 1961 elections. He died of natural causes in 1967, at age ninety-one, leaving as his legacy a democratic, economically buoyant West Germany and a dream—which, though it seemed unrealistic, remained U.S. policy—that it someday would be reunified. His final words to his daughter: “There is nothing to weep about.”