Berlin 1961 (22 page)

Thompson returned by plane that evening to a snow-blanketed Vnukovo Airport in Moscow, and his driver whisked him over icy streets to the embassy, where Thompson cabled Washington his report. Although Thompson had been on the move for eighteen hours, adrenaline surged through him as he typed.

In Thompson’s experience, Khrushchev’s fixation on Berlin had never been so single-minded. The Soviet leader had convinced Thompson he would no longer delay action. “All my diplomatic colleagues who have discussed the matter consider that in the absence of negotiations, Khrushchev will…precipitate a Berlin crisis this year,” he wrote.

A week later, Thompson urged his superiors in another cable to accelerate their contingency planning for a Soviet move on Berlin. Relations between Khrushchev and the Kennedy administration were so bad, the ambassador argued, that the Soviet leader might feel he had much to gain and very little to lose over Berlin. Thompson added, however, that Khrushchev still wanted to avoid provoking a military confrontation with the West, and would instruct the East Germans not to interfere in any way with Allied military access to the city.

Thompson listed the sources of growing U.S.–Soviet tensions that had accumulated during the Kennedy administration’s first weeks: The Kremlin lacked interest in the U.S. proposal of a nuclear test ban agreement; it considered Kennedy more militant than Eisenhower with his increased arms budget; it worried about new U.S. preparations for guerrilla warfare in the developing world; and it was displeased with the Kennedy administration’s increased restrictions on selling the Soviets sensitive technologies. The Kremlin was particularly irked by Kennedy’s personal and public commitment to provide more support for Radio Free Europe, which was proving an effective tool in preventing communist regimes’ monopoly on information. In Africa and South America, wrote Thompson, proxy confrontations would continue and perhaps increase.

Laying out his thoughts for President Kennedy on what might be the focus of his likely meeting with Khrushchev, Thompson wrote: “Discussion of the German problem will be the main point of the exercise so far as [Khrushchev] is concerned. It would be at that meeting or shortly thereafter that the Soviet leader would set his course on Berlin.” Thompson thought the president’s challenge would be to convince a doubtful Khrushchev that the U.S. would fight rather than abandon West Berliners. On the other hand, a tough stance alone could not avoid confrontation. Khrushchev would force the issue ahead of his October Party Congress, Thompson predicted, and if he did so, “it could involve the real possibility of world war, and we would almost certainly be led back to an intensified Cold War relationship.”

Thompson repeated his conviction that the risks of dealing with Khrushchev must be weighed against the reality that the U.S. had no good alternative. For all his downsides, said Thompson, Khrushchev “is probably better from our point of view than anyone likely to succeed him.” It was thus in America’s interest to keep Khrushchev in power, though Thompson conceded that his embassy knew far too little about the Kremlin’s inner workings to provide any reliable advice on how Kennedy could influence Communist Party struggles.

With uncanny clairvoyance, Thompson then added: “If we expect the Soviets to leave the Berlin problem as is, then we must at least expect the East Germans to seal off sector boundary in order to stop what they must consider the intolerable continuation of the refugee flow through Berlin.”

With that thought, Thompson may have been the first U.S. diplomat to predict the Berlin Wall.

Thompson then proposed a negotiating position that he thought the Soviets might be willing to accept—and which would allow Washington to regain the initiative. He suggested that Kennedy propose to Khrushchev an interim deal on Berlin under which the two Germanys would have seven years to negotiate a longer-term solution. During that time, and in exchange for a Soviet guarantee of continued Allied access to West Berlin, the U.S. would give the Soviets assurances that West Germany would not try to recover eastern territories it had lost after World War II.

With that deal, Thompson said the East Germans could stop the refugee flow, which he argued would be in American as well as Soviet interests because the rising numbers threatened to destabilize the region. Fleshing out his plan, Thompson proposed as confidence-building measures the reduction of Western covert activities conducted from Berlin and the shutting down of RIAS, the U.S. radio station that beamed reports into the Soviet zone from West Berlin. Even if Khrushchev rejected such a U.S. offer, Thompson argued that the simple act of making it would allow Kennedy to win over public opinion and thus make it more unpalatable for Khrushchev to act unilaterally.

Kennedy, however, disagreed with his ambassador’s sense of urgency. He and his brother Bobby were beginning to suspect that Thompson was falling victim to the State Department’s malady of “clientitis” and was associating himself too readily with Soviet positions. The president conceded to friends that he still didn’t “get” Khrushchev. After all, Eisenhower had ignored the Soviet leader’s Berlin ultimatum of 1958 without paying any real price. Kennedy didn’t see why the urgency should be any greater now.

The best minds in the U.S. intelligence community reinforced that view. The United States Intelligence Board’s Special Subcommittee on the Berlin Situation, the spy world’s authoritative group on the issue, said Khrushchev was “unlikely to increase tensions over Berlin at this time.” They said Moscow would increase its pressures only if Khrushchev thought by doing so he could force Kennedy into high-level talks. Their bottom line: if Kennedy demonstrated that increased Soviet threats wouldn’t impress him, Khrushchev would not escalate in Berlin.

So once again the president decided Berlin was an issue that could wait. Two other matters had also begun to shape his thinking. First, Dean Acheson was about to deliver to the president his first report on Berlin policy, and it would provide the hawkish antidote to Thompson’s softer line.

Kennedy was also growing increasingly distracted by a matter closer to home. His top spies were putting the final pieces in place for an invasion of Cuba by exiles trained and equipped by the CIA.

WASHINGTON, D.C.
MONDAY, APRIL
3, 1961

Acheson’s paper, the first major Kennedy administration reflection on Berlin policy, landed on Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s desk the day before British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan arrived in Washington. Characteristically, President Truman’s secretary of state had timed its delivery for maximum impact, laying down a hard line at the front end of a parade of Allied visitors.

Acheson’s central argument was that Kennedy had to show a willingness to fight for Berlin if he wished to avoid Soviet domination of Europe and, after that, Asia and Africa. Wielding words like weapons, Acheson wrote that if the U.S. “accepted a Communist takeover of Berlin—under whatever face-saving and delaying device—the power status in Europe would be starkly revealed and Germany, and probably France, Italy and Benelux would make the indicated adjustments. The United Kingdom would hope that something would turn up. It wouldn’t.”

Acheson knew Kennedy well enough to be confident that the president both trusted his judgment and shared his suspicions of the Soviets. While searching for a secretary of state during the transition, Kennedy had sought the advice of his Georgetown neighbor Acheson. With a gaggle of photographers outside his home, the president-elect told Acheson he “had spent so much time in the past few years knowing people who could help him
become
president that he found he knew very few people who could help him
be
president.”

Acheson then helped dissuade Kennedy from considering Senator William Fulbright, who he said “was not as solid and serious a man as you need for this position. I’ve always thought that he had some of the qualities of a dilettante.” He instead steered Kennedy to the man eventually chosen, Dean Rusk, who during the Truman years had capably helped Acheson fight appeasement and resist communism in Asia as his assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs. Concerning other Cabinet and ambassadorial roles, Acheson blessed some names and torpedoed others, playing the Washington blood sport he so savored. He also turned down Kennedy’s offer to become ambassador to NATO, saying he preferred maintaining his free agency and lawyerly income without “all these statutes operating on me.”

That said, Acheson was pleased to be reestablishing his influence in government through a leading role in thinking through two of America’s highest priorities: NATO’s future and the related matters of nuclear weapons use and Berlin’s defense. Acheson’s place in history was already sealed because of his leading role in creating the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Marshall Plan. He had been the primary designer of NATO—altering America’s aversion to entangling alliances—and with George Marshall had conceived the Truman Doctrine of 1947 that set America’s course as “leader of the free world,” whose mission globally would be to fight communism and support democracy. Still, being invited back into the mix by Kennedy was a pleasing confirmation for Acheson that his capabilities remained both relevant and required.

Even at almost age sixty-eight, Acheson still cut a captivating figure. As impeccably dressed as he was informed, he liked to tell friends that he lacked the self-doubt that so afflicted his opponents. With his bowler hat, wicked grin, steel-blue eyes, and upturned mustache, he would have been noticeable enough. However, he stood out all the more due to his long-legged, slender, six-foot frame. Quick-witted and intolerant of fools, Acheson had brought to his new Berlin study the determination to outmaneuver and outmatch the Soviets that had so distinguished his career. It was that hard line that had formed such a curious bond between Acheson and President Truman—the Yale-educated, martini-drinking son of an Episcopal rector and the plain-speaking Midwestern politician without a college degree.

Shortly after Kennedy’s election, Acheson had scolded Truman playfully in a letter that addressed the former president’s concerns about Kennedy’s Catholicism. “Do you really care about Jack’s being Catholic?” he had asked Truman, who dismissively called Kennedy “the young man.” Acheson told Truman he had never cared that de Gaulle and Adenauer were Catholic. “Furthermore,” Acheson said with knowing understatement, “I don’t think he’s a very good Catholic.”

Since Kennedy had hired him in February, Acheson had intensively reviewed all the options for Berlin contingencies. He agreed with Thompson that a showdown was likely during the calendar year, but that’s where their agreement ended. He counseled the president to show greater strength and abandon any hope of a negotiated solution that could improve upon the status quo. “All sources of action are dangerous and unpromising,” Acheson said. “Inaction is even worse. We are faced with a Hobson’s choice. If a crisis is provoked, a bold and dangerous course may be the safest.”

Eisenhower had rejected Acheson’s advice, which at the time had been offered from outside government, that he respond more robustly to Moscow’s repetitive tests of America’s commitment to Europe and Berlin with a conspicuous military buildup. Acheson hoped to get more traction with Kennedy. He had already won over Rusk and Bundy, and he could count as allies the two other most influential administration officials on Berlin matters, the Pentagon’s Paul Nitze and the State Department’s Foy Kohler.

Most controversially, Acheson argued in his memo that the threat of general nuclear war might no longer be sufficient to deter Khrushchev in Berlin—if it ever had been. Acheson argued that Khrushchev’s reluctance to act thus far had been based more on his desire to avoid a breakdown in relations with the West than on a conviction that the U.S. would risk atomic war to defend Berlin. Thus Acheson was prescribing for Kennedy a significant conventional buildup in Europe while at the same time counseling him to persuade the Allies, and in particular the West Germans, “to agree in advance to fight for Berlin.”

Acheson listed for Kennedy what he had concluded were Khrushchev’s five primary objectives regarding Berlin:

1. To stabilize the East German regime and prepare for its eventual international recognition.
   
2. To legalize Germany’s eastern frontiers.
   
3. To neutralize West Berlin as a first step and prepare for its eventual takeover by the German Democratic Republic.
   
4. To weaken if not break up the NATO Alliance.
   
5. To discredit the United States or at least seriously damage its prestige.
   

Agreeing with Adenauer, Acheson was convinced the Berlin problem had no solution short of unification, and that unification could not be achieved until far into the future and through a consistent demonstration of Western strength. Therefore, no agreement with Moscow on Berlin was currently available to Kennedy that would not make the West more vulnerable, so talks had no purpose.

Berlin was “the key to power status in Europe,” Acheson argued, and thus a willingness to defend it was central to keeping the Kremlin in check elsewhere. Whatever course Kennedy took, Acheson counseled the president to “choose quickly what constitutes grounds for fighting on Berlin” and get America’s allies to agree to those criteria.

Acheson’s bottom line for Kennedy: “We must content ourselves for the time being with maintaining the status quo in Berlin. We could not expect Khrushchev to accept less—we ourselves should not accept less.”

His groundbreaking paper then concentrated on the most appropriate military means—within U.S. capability—to deter Khrushchev. The threat of nuclear attack had long been the U.S.’s ace in the hole, but Acheson’s heresy was to argue that it was not a real capability because it was “perfectly obvious” to the Russians that Washington would not risk the lives of millions of Americans over Berlin. Acheson noted that some military leaders advocated as an alternative the “limited use of nuclear means—that is, to drop one bomb somewhere.”