Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (24 page)

Kennedy’s speech also came against the backdrop of grave concerns about Soviet threats to West Berlin. Since 1945 the city had been divided into eastern and western zones, with West Berlin 110 miles inside the Soviets’ East German area of occupation. In 1948, Moscow had responded to a western plan to rebuild West Germany by blockading access to West Berlin, which the Allies overcame through a fifteen-month airlift bringing supplies into the isolated city. The rescue of the city from communist control made West Berlin a symbol of the East-West struggle between freedom and authoritarian rule.

In a January 1961 speech, Khrushchev warned of his intention to sign a peace treaty with the East Germans, who would then control the 110-mile route from West Germany to West Berlin and would insist on integrating the western part of the city into the eastern zone. Leaving it to the East Germans to block access to West Berlin would give Khrushchev some means to avoid a direct confrontation with the United States. But it was a thinly veiled ploy that represented a renewed assault on the independence of a free community at odds with communist Russia. Kennedy had considered addressing the issue in his State of the Union speech at the end of January, but his advisers had persuaded him to mute the threat. Existing conditions in Berlin, however, threatened to destabilize East Germany and other communist satellites: The flow of talented migrants escaping the East through Berlin and West Berlin’s relative prosperity and freedom formed a painful contrast with the austerity and repression in Eastern Europe’s communist regimes.

Kennedy was keen to avoid a crisis with Moscow over Berlin, but the Konrad Adenauer government in Bonn was pressing for private and public reassurances of the new administration’s intentions to defend West Berlin. On March 10, when Kennedy met at the White House with Ambassador Wilhelm Grewe, he assured Grewe that the United States was determined to defend West Germany and West Berlin. But he rejected public pronouncements as seeming to challenge Moscow. Fearful that the coming assault on the Bay of Pigs would raise concerns that he might be recklessly aggressive toward the communists, Kennedy wanted any Soviet-American crisis to be triggered by Moscow, not the United States.

In a meeting a few days later with West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt, Kennedy complained that the West’s most difficult post–World War II legacy was Berlin and that they would just have to live with the situation for the time being. By meeting with Brandt, a Social Democrat who was planning to run against Adenauer for the chancellorship, Kennedy was projecting himself into West Germany’s political divide and creating tensions with the existing government. It carried serious risks: The eighty-five-year-old Adenauer, the
Alte
, or “Old One,” who had become a symbol of Western resistance to Soviet expansion, enjoyed considerable standing across Western Europe. But by openly conferring with the younger, forty-eight-year-old Brandt, who had fled the Nazis, lived in Norway during World War II, and established himself in postwar Germany as a progressive proponent of European reconciliation, Kennedy was hoping to get fresh suggestions of how to resolve or at least mute difficulties over Berlin. He had little expectation that Adenauer, with whom he was to meet later in the spring, would offer anything but familiar hard-line anticommunist rhetoric.

Brandt, however, had little to suggest beyond asking Khrushchev for assurances that if he signed a peace treaty with East Germany, the German communists would not precipitate a crisis by trying to seize the city’s western zone. Kennedy pressed him for some more proactive way to resolve the Berlin problem with Moscow and East Germany. Kennedy asked him what he thought of George Kennan’s 1957 proposal to neutralize Central Europe by ending Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe, demilitarizing Germany, and ending Cold War tensions over this contested ground. Brandt saw no realistic possibility that the Soviets would relax their grip on their East European satellites.

Brandt’s pessimism about finding a way out of a potential clash with Moscow over Berlin frustrated Kennedy, who feared the situation could escalate into a crisis. As Llewellyn Thompson, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, told him in a dispatch from Moscow, without some kind of negotiation and settlement with Khrushchev beyond telling him that “we would fight rather than abandon people of West Berlin . . . it could involve real possibility of world war.” At a minimum, heightened tensions over Berlin would almost certainly intensify Cold War differences.

Over the next two months, Kennedy cast a broad net in search of some answer to the Berlin question. The State Department, Harvard national security expert Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state Dean Acheson, several U.S. ambassadors, and Germany’s Chancellor and foreign minister weighed in. It was a demoralizing exercise. The State Department, for which Kennedy already had little regard, had no good ideas about what to do. The best it could offer was “the possibility of developing and strengthening deterrents other than the pure threat of ultimate thermonuclear war.” Kissinger, who struck Kennedy as “pompous and long-winded,” urged Kennedy to consider visiting Berlin during a European trip in June. “The Soviets may construe such an action as a provocation,” but Kissinger believed that worrying about that would be excessively timid. The Soviets were not going to let the issue rest: Kissinger’s answer was to confront them head-on, which was exactly what Kennedy didn’t want to do.

Acheson shared Kissinger’s call for firmness. He saw Berlin as of the greatest importance and pressed Kennedy to adopt some sort of military response. He suggested that two divisions of ground forces be deployed to ensure continued access to West Berlin. Foy Kohler, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, echoed the State Department–Acheson–Kissinger view that offering to negotiate wouldn’t serve any good purpose. A display of toughness was the best idea. David Bruce and Charles Bohlen, both with decades of experience as U.S. diplomats in Europe, agreed that negotiations with Moscow over Berlin offered no satisfactory outcome. The pessimism of these experts and seasoned diplomats exasperated Kennedy. He diplomatically put them off by saying that he had not yet decided what to do.

Kennedy was not happy with the sterile approach to so volatile a problem. Schlesinger recalled Kennedy sitting “poker-faced, confining himself to questions about the adequacy of existing military plans.” Schlesinger later remembered him as more than frustrated by “the apparent impossibility of developing a negotiating position on Berlin.” It “left Kennedy with little doubt that the State Department was not yet an instrumentality fully and promptly responsive to presidential purpose.” He could have said the same about Acheson and Kissinger, who seemed to have less aversion to a military confrontation with Moscow than Kennedy. By contrast with them, however, Kennedy would have to bear the burden of risking the many lives that could be consumed in a war.

Schlesinger could have told him that nothing had changed since Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. “You should go through the experience of trying to get any changes in the thinking, policy and action of the career diplomats and then you’d know what a real problem was,” FDR told a friend. He dismissed the Foreign Service professionals as the “boys in striped pants,” “old maids,” and “stuffed shirts.” Echoing FDR, Kennedy complained about the State Department that “they never have any ideas over there, never come up with anything new.” Kennedy toyed with the possibility of having “a secret office of thirty people or so to run foreign policy while maintaining the State Department as a façade in which people might contentedly carry papers from bureau to bureau.”

Conversations with Adenauer and German foreign minister Heinrich von Brentano in mid-April yielded little more than platitudes. Kennedy explained that the United States and Britain were still considering what to do about Moscow’s threat to Berlin. When he asked Adenauer what he thought might happen in Berlin this summer, “the Chancellor smilingly replied that he was no prophet.” But he and Brentano left no doubt that they saw the very future of Germany at stake. “If Berlin fell, . . . it would mean the death sentence for Europe and the Western World.”

In 1961, in the immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs failure, no issue troubled Kennedy and his advisers more than Berlin. It was the international trouble spot most likely to trigger a Soviet-American confrontation and a disastrous war. At the beginning of May, when McNamara sketched out military plans to counter a threatened communist takeover of Berlin, he reminded Kennedy that Eisenhower was prepared to fight a full-scale war to defend the city. But McNamara thought that massive retaliation should be preceded by a reliance on conventional forces. Nonetheless, the possibility of a nuclear exchange remained a serious contingency that frightened Kennedy and made him eager to meet with Khrushchev to persuade him to back away from a confrontation over Berlin.

A conversation between Llewellyn Thompson and Khrushchev on May 24 underscored the need for an early summit discussion that could emphasize the dangers to both sides in any Soviet effort to alter the status of West Berlin. Khrushchev declared his intention to sign a peace treaty with East Germany in the fall or winter. But it hardly signaled the end of communist dominance. A Germany under Moscow’s control remained a vital part of Soviet national security. A treaty would give the East Germans ostensible control of access to West Berlin. Khrushchev said “he realized this would bring a period of great tension but was convinced would not lead to war.” He also declared that “German reunification was impossible and in fact no one really wanted it.” When Thompson warned him that the West would respond to any threat to West Berlin with force, Khrushchev waved aside the warning, saying “if we wanted war we would get it but he was convinced only madmen would want war.”

Still, unless one side or the other backed away from its existing position, the prospect of a conflict seemed all too real. Yet Thompson did not think that Khrushchev would do anything that would risk a war. The issue between the two sides, Thompson said, had become national prestige, and the need was for a formula that would allow both sides to save face. He suggested that Kennedy explore this in private with Khrushchev. By contrast, the State Department, which prepared a “Talking Points Paper on Berlin and Germany” as a prelude to meetings with French president Charles de Gaulle in Paris and Khrushchev in Vienna between May 31 and June 4, offered Kennedy no fresh ideas for resolving differences, only suggested preparations for war to prevent further communist expansion in Europe.

The recommendations left Kennedy perplexed. He saw two possibilities: He could tell Khrushchev that negotiations on Berlin were out of the question—the Anglo-French-American access to Berlin was inviolable—or he could say that the future status of Berlin could be discussed, and though nothing would come of these talks, it would paste over differences and delay a crisis in hopes that improved relations with Moscow in time could quiet tensions over Berlin.

On May 30, Kennedy, accompanied by his glamorous wife, who spoke French and had a reputation as a Francophile, flew to Paris for meetings with de Gaulle. A summit in Vienna with Khrushchev and a brief stop in Britain for discussions with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan were to follow. The trip, like the speech to the joint congressional session, aimed to boost Kennedy’s standing after the Cuban fiasco and the uncertainties over Vietnam.

At an initial May 31 meeting with de Gaulle at the ornate Elysée Palace, an event marked by high-visibility pomp and ceremony, Kennedy gained instant standing as a world leader. The consultation with the seventy-year-old de Gaulle, who had become president of the Fifth Republic in 1959, served a larger purpose than providing wise counsel on international dilemmas. With Franklin Roosevelt and Stalin deceased, Winston Churchill out of office since 1955 and sidelined by age, at eighty-six, and the seventy-three-year-old Chiang Kai-shek eclipsed by communist control of mainland China since 1949, a meeting on equal standing with de Gaulle, the last storied leader from World War II, “a great captain of the Western World,” Kennedy called him, gave the young president heightened prestige and cachet.

De Gaulle’s advice on Berlin was largely predictable. Like other close observers of Soviet affairs, de Gaulle saw small likelihood that Khrushchev was prepared to fight a war over Berlin. For almost two years, de Gaulle told Kennedy, Khrushchev has been threatening to move against the city. But if he were going to risk a war, he would have acted already. De Gaulle reported that he had told Khrushchev, “If you want peace, start with general disarmament negotiations.” This could lead to changes in “the entire world situation . . . and then we will solve the question of Berlin and the entire German question.” De Gaulle warned against any sort of retreat in response to Soviet threats and the importance of making clear to Khrushchev that he would endanger his country’s survival if he tried to alter the status quo in Berlin. Kennedy worried that after his failure at the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev would not believe in his firmness of purpose. De Gaulle urged Kennedy not to mince words with Khrushchev but to make unmistakably clear that any aggression against Berlin would mean an all-out war. Strengthening the Berlin garrisons and airlift capability would put Khrushchev on notice about Western intentions.

Kennedy was not especially impressed by de Gaulle’s advice. It was nothing he had not heard before, and as he told an English friend later, de Gaulle’s only concern was with the selfish interests of his country. On a question about governing, however, de Gaulle’s comment echoed Kennedy’s brief experience in office. Charles Bohlen recalled “at one point the President telling me . . . that de Gaulle had said to him, ‘you can listen to your advisers before you make up your mind, but once you have made up your mind then do not listen to anyone.’ I think the President was somewhat impressed with this as a technique of government and it certainly makes a good deal of sense and is certainly one de Gaulle followed to the extremes.”