Berlin 1961 (25 page)

As he argued against the new strategy, what Adenauer didn’t realize was that Acheson was one of its leading proponents and architects. Adenauer was convinced the West could only contain Moscow if Khrushchev was certain a Soviet move on Berlin would prompt a devastating U.S. nuclear response. He feared that Moscow would regard any change in the U.S. approach as an invitation to test Washington’s resolve. Though he did not say so to Adenauer that day, Acheson disagreed because he doubted any U.S. president would ever risk millions of American lives for Berlin—and he reckoned Khrushchev knew that as well.

So Acheson instead focused his efforts on reassuring Adenauer that Kennedy was as determined as his predecessors had been to defend West German and West Berlin freedoms. Acheson briefed Adenauer in some detail on the Kennedy administration’s military contingency planning regarding Berlin and on Kennedy’s own skepticism about Russian intentions.

Adenauer sighed with satisfaction. “You have lifted a stone from my heart.”

But at the same time, Acheson had to disappoint the chancellor about one of his fondest dreams. For the moment, Kennedy had rejected the plan considered by Eisenhower to place a fleet of U.S. Polaris missile submarines under NATO control, thus making the alliance a fourth nuclear power. The U.S., Britain, and France would keep their monopoly. Instead, Kennedy would put five or more Polaris submarines at the disposal of NATO, but under U.S. fleet commanders, and with caveats on their use so restrictive and the process of using them so complicated that it would fail to satisfy Adenauer’s desire for a more easily accessible nuclear deterrent.

In short, Kennedy’s evolving view toward handling Berlin military contingencies—reflected in KGB reports at the time from Paris and elsewhere—was that he wanted to ensure that any Berlin conflict remained local in character and would not escalate into a world war. That required not only backing off American reliance on nuclear arms in any Berlin confrontation, but also opposing the notion of NATO possession of atomic weapons.

Adenauer closed the day in typical fashion, inviting his guest to the rose garden to play the Italian bowling game of bocce. Removing his jacket but leaving on his tie, with sleeves rolled down, Adenauer looked disarmingly formal as he began the precision throwing game by tossing the smaller “jack” ball forward, then following it with larger balls, the goal being to land closest to the initial throw.

When Acheson was near victory, the chancellor changed the rules and began to carom shots off the sideboards.

At Acheson’s protests, Adenauer smiled: “You are now in Germany—in Germany I make the rules.”

Acheson smiled, knowing his mission had achieved its aim. He had reduced Adenauer’s alarm over Kennedy, he had predelivered whatever disappointing news Adenauer would get in Washington in a more palatable manner, and he had set a more promising tone for the first Adenauer–Kennedy meeting.

What Acheson couldn’t control were two events that would overshadow Adenauer’s visit: a historic Soviet space shot and the U.S. debacle in Cuba.

PITSUNDA PENINSULA, SOVIET UNION
TUESDAY, APRIL
11, 1961

On the day of Adenauer’s flight to Washington, Khrushchev was in retreat at his villa in Sochi, on the Pitsunda Peninsula of the Black Sea’s eastern coast, where he was resting and receiving regular updates on the Soviet plans to put the first man in space the following morning. He had also begun preparations for the 22nd Communist Party Congress in October.

Khrushchev would later explain his frequent retreats from public to Pitsunda by saying, “A chicken has to sit quietly for a certain time if she expects to lay an egg.” Though the metaphor had a negative connotation in English, Khrushchev described its meaning in a positive manner: “If I have something to hatch, I have to take the time to do it right.” Pitsunda was where he caught his breath in the rush of history or wrote a few pages of it himself. It had been there, between his walks through the pine grove and past cabanas on the beach, that he had crafted his 1956 speech breaking with Stalin. He liked to introduce guests to his ancient trees, many of which he had given human names, and to show off his small indoor gym and private, glass-enclosed swimming pool.

It was a measure of how important Khrushchev considered relations with Kennedy that amid all his other demands that morning he had still been willing to receive Walter Lippmann, the legendary seventy-one-year-old American columnist, and his wife, Helen. It was not just Lippmann’s national influence and access to Kennedy that endeared him to Khrushchev, but also the fact that his columns had been consistently friendly to the Soviets.

With the schedule for the space launch firmed up, however, Khrushchev passed word to Lippmann on the tarmac in Washington, in the first-class cabin of his plane to Rome, that their meeting would be postponed. “Impossible,” Lippmann boldly responded in a scrawled reply to Soviet Ambassador Menshikov.

By the time the Lippmanns landed, Khrushchev had decided he would see them, but he would not breathe a word concerning plans for his potentially historic space launch with the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the following morning.

Khrushchev had accelerated the original May Day launch date after a training accident on March 23 killed the flight’s intended cosmonaut, Lieutenant Valentin Bondarenko. Shortcuts taken by the Soviets to rush their first man into space ahead of the Americans had likely contributed to Bondarenko’s death, which came after flames engulfed his oxygen-rich training chamber. The Soviets did not disclose any of the details of the accident. They did not even announce the cosmonaut’s death, and airbrushed Bondarenko from all photographs of the Soviet space team.

Undaunted, Khrushchev grew all the more determined, and further accelerated the Soviet target launch date to April 12. The timing was chosen to keep Moscow ahead of the U.S. Project Mercury mission that was scheduled to launch astronaut Alan Shepard into space on May 5. If the flight succeeded, Khrushchev would not only make history but also get a badly needed political boost. If Gagarin’s mission failed, Khrushchev would bury all evidence of the launch.

Oblivious to that background drama, Lippmann and his wife arrived at Khrushchev’s sanctuary at 11:30 in the morning, and would remain for eight hours of walking, swimming, eating, drinking, and talking before spending the night.

Lippmann savored his access to U.S. and world leaders, and it didn’t get any better than meeting the communist world’s leader in his Black Sea lair. Before he had begun writing a column, Lippmann had been an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson and was a delegate to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles. Lippmann had coined the phrase “Cold War” and was the leading U.S. voice suggesting that Washington accept the new Soviet sphere of influence in Europe. Moscow’s interest in Lippmann was so great that a KGB spy ring in the U.S. was working through his secretary, Mary Price, to gather information on his sources and subjects of interest, an infiltration Lippmann had not yet discovered.

The tall, large-boned Lippmann towered over the short, squat Khrushchev as they walked the compound. In a lively afternoon game of badminton, however, the fiercely competitive Khrushchev teamed up with the Lippmanns’ portly female minder from the foreign ministry and thrashed the more athletic Lippmanns, who were surprised by his agility. Khrushchev viciously and repeatedly struck the shuttlecock only a few inches above the net, often aiming at his opponents’ heads.

During a lunch break, Khrushchev’s second-in-command, Anastas Mikoyan, joined the group for a three-and-a-half-hour conversation the focus of which was so exclusively on Berlin that Lippmann, like Ambassador Thompson before him, concluded that for the Soviet leader, nothing matched the importance of Berlin’s future.

White House, State Department, and CIA officials had briefed Lippmann before his departure, so he was able to float a trial balloon on their behalf. Lippmann questioned why Khrushchev considered the Berlin matter such an urgent affair. Why not negotiate a Berlin standstill of five to ten years, during which the U.S. and the Soviet Union could attend to their relationship’s other problems and create an atmosphere more conducive to a Berlin agreement?

When Khrushchev sharply dismissed the notion of further delay, Lippmann pressed him for reasons.

A German solution, said Khrushchev, must come before “Hitler’s generals with their twelve NATO divisions get atomic weapons from France and the United States.” Before that could happen, Khrushchev said he wanted a peace treaty setting in stone the current frontiers of Poland and Czechoslovakia and guaranteeing the permanent existence of East Germany. Otherwise, Khrushchev insisted, West Germany would drag NATO into a war aimed at unifying Germany and restoring its prewar eastern frontier.

Lippmann took mental notes while his wife scribbled down the conversation verbatim. Both tried to remain sober by pouring out the considerable amounts of vodka and Armenian wine that Mikoyan served them into a bowl the Soviet leader had provided them in an act of mercy.

Time and again, with Kennedy as his intended audience, Khrushchev told the Lippmanns he was determined to “bring the German question to a head” that year. Lippmann would later report to his readers that the Soviet leader was “firmly resolved, perhaps irretrievably committed, to a showdown” over Berlin to stop the gusher of refugees and to save the communist East German state.

Khrushchev laid out his Berlin thinking to Lippmann in three parts, offering greater detail than he had previously provided for public consumption. Lippmann’s three-part report on their talks would win him a second Pulitzer Prize—and appear in 450 newspapers.

First, Khrushchev told the columnist, he wanted the West to accept “there are in fact two Germanys” that would never be reunited. The U.S. and the Soviet Union therefore should codify through peace treaties the three elements of Germany: East Germany, West Germany, and West Berlin. This would fix by international statute West Berlin’s role as a “free city.” Thereafter its access and liberty could be guaranteed, he said, by symbolic contingents of French, British, American, and Russian troops and by neutral troops assigned by the United Nations. The four occupying powers would sign an agreement with both Germanys that would produce that outcome.

Because Khrushchev doubted Kennedy would accept this option, he sketched for Lippmann what he called his “fallback position.” He would accept a temporary agreement that provided the two German states perhaps two or three years during which they could negotiate a loose confederation or some other form of unification. If the two sides reached a deal during that period of time, it would be written into a treaty. If they failed, however, all occupation rights would end and foreign troops would leave.

If the U.S. refused to negotiate either of his first two options, Khrushchev told Lippmann, his “third position” was to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany that gave Ulbricht full control over all West Berlin access routes. If the Allies resisted this new East German role, Khrushchev said he would bring in the Soviet military to blockade the city entirely.

To cushion the blow of this threat, Khrushchev told Lippmann he would not precipitate a crisis before he had the chance to meet Kennedy face-to-face and discuss the matter. In other words, he was opening his negotiations with the president through the columnist.

Assuming his unassigned role of U.S. co-negotiator, Lippmann suggested to Khrushchev a five-year moratorium on Berlin talks during which the current situation would remain frozen, which he knew from his pre-trip briefings was Kennedy’s preference.

Khrushchev waved his hand dismissively. Thirty months had passed since his Berlin ultimatum, he said, and he would not agree to that long a delay, nor was he willing to let the Berlin matter go unsettled before his October Party Congress. His deadline for a Berlin solution was the fall or winter of 1961, he said.

Khrushchev told Lippmann that he didn’t believe Kennedy was making decisions anyway. He summed up the forces behind Kennedy in one word: Rockefeller. He thought it was big money that manipulated Kennedy. Despite “their imperialistic nature,” he felt these capitalists could be won over with common sense. If they were forced to choose between a mutually advantageous agreement or Soviet unilateral action or war, Khrushchev said that he thought the Rockefeller crowd would cut a deal.

Khrushchev said he was ready to call the Americans’ nuclear bluff. “In my opinion,” he said, “there are no such stupid statesmen in the West to unleash a war in which hundreds of millions would perish just because we would sign a peace treaty with the GDR that would stipulate a special status of ‘free city’ for West Berlin with its 2.5 million population. Such idiots have not yet been born.”

At the end of the day, it was the Lippmanns and not Khrushchev who flagged and retreated to bed. Khrushchev embraced each of them with overpowering hugs before they returned, tired and drunk, to their hotel room in nearby Garga. Lippmann noticed none of the weariness in Khrushchev that Ambassador Thompson had seen just a month earlier. Nothing, however, would energize the Soviet leader as much as the news he would hear the following morning.

PITSUNDA PENINSULA, SOVIET UNION
WEDNESDAY, APRIL
12, 1961

Khrushchev had only one question when Sergei Korolyov, the legendary rocket designer and head of the Soviet space program, phoned him with the good news: “Just tell me, is he alive?”

Yes, Korolyov declared, and even better than that, Yuri Gagarin had returned to Earth safely after becoming the first human in space and the first human to orbit the Earth. The Soviets had called his mission
Vostok
, or “East,” to drive home the point of their rise. And the project had achieved its purpose. To Khrushchev’s delight, during the 108-minute flight, Gagarin had whistled a patriotic tune composed by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1951: “The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows, where her son flies in the sky.” Over the protests of military leaders, the euphoric Soviet leader spontaneously promoted Gagarin two ranks to major.