Kennedy (106 page)

Khrushchev will be deterred, argued Acheson, only if he believes the United States is sufficiently serious about Berlin to fight a nuclear war—and he does not believe that now. While a conventional force build-up would, however paradoxically, contribute to that impression, we could not risk Khrushchev’s believing that we were limiting ourselves to a conventional war. A declaration of national emergency would enable the President to call up one million Reserves, extend terms of service, bring back dependents from Europe, and impress our allies, our citizens and, above all, Mr. K., with the gravity with which we regarded the situation. Increasing draft calls alone, added General Lemnitzer, could not produce enough trained men before the end of the year.

But to rebuild Allied confidence in his leadership after the Bay of Pigs, said Kennedy, he could not afford to overreact. A national emergency declaration was an ultimate weapon of national alarm and commitment. Such declarations, he reasoned, could not be frequently declared or easily rescinded; and without underestimating the seriousness of the Berlin threat, it might be better to await an actual Soviet treaty or move against access. Khrushchev’s ability to turn the pressure off and on in Berlin and a half-dozen other spots required the United States to prepare a long-haul global effort, not constant “crash” programs for what might be, he said, “a false climax.” The foreign aid, space and domestic measures required for that long haul would be endangered by the extensive new budget and tax requests envisioned in the national emergency declaration.

He liked, moreover, the advice cabled from our embassy in Moscow that the Soviet mind was more likely to be impressed by substantial but quiet moves that did not panic our allies. Other Soviet experts also counseled that dramatic gestures would impress the Soviets less than a long-range build-up in our readiness. This was in keeping with Kennedy’s own philosophy: a decision to go all the way can afford to be low-key because it is genuine, while those who loudly flail about are less likely to frighten anyone. Fanfare at an early stage, added his intelligence advisers, would make the Soviets feel compelled to respond with a strong public posture and military measures of their own, and make their negotiating position more rigid.

Gradually the President brought McNamara, Rusk and others around to his view. The Defense Secretary agreed that a more gradual and orderly build-up could be achieved through a quick but quieter Congressional Resolution. On the afternoon of Wednesday, July 19, meeting at 3
P.M.
with a small group of us in his living quarters on the second floor of the Mansion, the President put the finishing touches on his plan. After six weeks of intensive meetings, he stated each decision in firm, precise tones. The additional military budget requests would total $3.2 billion rather than $4.3 billion. The Congress would be asked to provide stand-by authority to call up the Reserves, rather than an immediate mobilization. Draft calls would be more than tripled, West Berlin would be readied, Allied agreement on economic sanctions would be sought, a temporary tax increase would be requested (this decision, as previously noted, was later reversed) and no declaration of national emergency would be proclaimed.

The same advisers and the President then met at 4
P.M.
in the Cabinet Room with a larger group in a formal National Security Council session. The decisions just concluded were “decided” for the record. Acheson questioned caustically the changes in his recommendations; and to the delight of the President—who enjoyed an articulate clash—Secretary McNamara, who had been finally converted to these changes only the previous day, undertook their defense with equal fervor.

The President also decided, contrary to Acheson’s paper and the initially prevailing view among his advisers, that the West should “lean forward” on negotiations. Here again some of the Kremlinologists had been influential, suggesting that the Soviets would be impressed by firmness in our negotiating position, not by our staying away from all talks. Acheson counseled that Khrushchev would accept nothing reasonable and would interpret all offers as weakness. The United States, replied the President, cannot leave the diplomatic initiative to a Soviet-sponsored peace conference. “We do not intend to leave it to others,” he said later, “to choose and monopolize the forum and the framework of discussion.” His hopes for a world-wide propaganda campaign—on “self-determination” for West Berlin and on the contrast between the two Germanys—would surely fail if only the Soviets had a “peaceful” solution. He had no intentions of lulling the West into believing that a meeting at the negotiating table reduced all danger. But he did have hopes of persuading Khrushchev to postpone his treaty as long as alternatives were being actively explored.

Before Khrushchev could be presented with any agreed-upon new ideas, however, the West had to produce some new ideas and agree upon them—and neither had happened by mid-July. Indeed, the difficulty of finding any new ideas which could be sold to all concerned would remain throughout Kennedy’s term. The French were against all negotiations;
the British were against risking war without negotiations; and the Germans, as their autumn elections drew nearer, were against both of these positions and seemingly everything else. The necessarily generalized passages dealing with diplomatic approaches were thus the weakest parts of the President’s July 25 TV address. Nevertheless, by underlining our willingness to talk “with any and all nations that are willing to talk, and listen, with reason”—our willingness “to remove any actual irritants in West Berlin [though] the freedom of that city is not negotiable”—and our willingness to submit the legality of our rights to “international adjudication” and our presence in West Berlin to a free vote among its people, he at least struck in a few moments more positive notes than he had been able to obtain in seven weeks from the American and Allied diplomats. Nevertheless, these were comparatively weak initiatives.

It was not, however, a weak speech. Its delivery was hampered by an overcrowded, overheated office. Its domestic economic references were out of place. Its civil defense references were out of perspective. But its basic message was firm and urgent without resort to threats or fear. I had completed the first draft over the weekend. All day Monday and Tuesday successive drafts were reviewed and revised by the President and his aides. General Taylor suggested the paragraph:

Murrow suggested the phrase: “We cannot negotiate with those who say, ‘What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.’” Bundy suggested passages recognizing “the Soviet Union’s historical concerns about their security in Central and Eastern Europe” and the “enormous losses…bravely suffered [by] the Russian people…in the Second World War.” Journalist Max Freedman suggested the basis for an eloquent peroration. I added a sentence used by the President in his July 19 meeting: “We do not want military considerations to dominate the thinking of either East or West.” The State Department added a reminder to our NATO Allies: “The solemn vow each of us gave to West Berlin in time of peace will not be broken in time of danger. If we do not meet our commitments to Berlin, where will we later stand?”

Finally, with all changes and clearances completed and coordinated along the lines of the President’s instructions, I took his reading copy for the 10
P.M.
talk over to the Mansion around eight o’ clock. I found the President sitting up in bed, a hot pad behind his back, scribbling out a personal note with which to close.

It was a somber close for a somber speech—a speech more somber, in fact, than the American people were accustomed to accept, more somber than any previous Presidential speech in the age of mutual nuclear capabilities. “West Berlin has now become,” he said,

Khrushchev, as he later wrote Kennedy, regarded the speech as belligerent. He had previously increased the Soviet military budget and put on his old uniform to talk loudly about destroying the aggressors. Yet he professed—to John McCloy in a private talk and to Kennedy in their later correspondence—to be angry at the increases in the American military budget and the reinforcements sent to West Berlin. He called these moves military hysteria. Inwardly he may well have been angry that Kennedy was not backing down, and that the West had failed, as he had also failed, to come forward with any new negotiating proposals. His own prestige had been heavily engaged—by pressures from the East German and other Eastern European regimes to stabilize German
frontiers and remove the Berlin “splinter,” and by pressures from the more militant voices within the Communist camp to make good on his vow to “rebuff” those violating East German sovereignty.

Seeking to exploit disunity in the West, Khrushchev that summer had alternated between reasonable and intimidating postures, talking menacingly one day about the “shambles” in which a nuclear war over Berlin would leave Western Europe, suggesting sweetly the next day that token American and Russian troops could stay in West Berlin under a UN solution, then warning on another day that Italian orange groves, Greek olive orchards and the Acropolis would be destroyed if the West forced a war.

In mid-August a crisis within the crisis came dangerously close to the flash point. The Communists had for some years, over Western protest, gradually increased the legal—and in some cases physical—barriers between West and East Berlin, including temporary closings of most crossing points, special traffic and entry permits and a prohibition against West Berliners working in East Berlin. Sensing that they were gradually becoming imprisoned, East Germans and East Berliners poured increasingly across the dividing line between East and West Berlin, the principal hole in the Iron Curtain. By the summer of 1961 some 3.5 million had left their homes and jobs for the refugee centers and airports of West Berlin, draining the already depressed East German economy of its lifeblood and dramatizing to all the world their choice of freedom over Communism. In August, as the fear of war or more repression increased, the daily flow of refugees rose from the hundreds to the thousands. Khrushchev’s response on August 13—due possibly in part to Kennedy’s speech and to De Gaulle’s veto of four-power negotiations, but certainly due primarily to the hemorrhage of East German manpower—was the Wall.

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.