Berlin 1961 (26 page)

Khrushchev exploded with joy and pride. As had been the case with the Sputnik mission in 1957, he had again beaten the Americans in the space race. At the same time, he had demonstrated a missile technology with unmistakable military significance, given Soviet advances in nuclear capability. Most important,
Vostok
provided him with the political booster rocket he badly needed ahead of his October party conference—effectively neutralizing his enemies.

A banner headline in the official newspaper
Izvestia
, whose entire issue was devoted to the flight, read:
GREAT VICTORY, OUR COUNTRY, OUR SCIENCE, OUR TECHNIQUE, OUR MEN.

Khrushchev exulted to his son Sergei that he would stage a grand event that would allow the Soviet people to celebrate a real hero. Sergei tried to talk his father out of an immediate return to Moscow, given the toll the stressful year already had taken on his health, but Khrushchev would not be dissuaded. The KGB hated the idea of crowds they could not completely control, but Khrushchev would not heed their warnings either.

The Soviet leader ordered the biggest parade and national celebration since World War II’s end on May 9, 1945. His sense of triumph was so great that he spontaneously jumped into the open limousine that drove Gagarin and his wife down Leninsky Prospekt to Red Square. On sunlit streets, they together waved to cheering crowds who climbed trees and hung out of windows for better views. Roadside balconies so groaned with people that Khrushchev feared they would collapse.

From atop the Lenin Mausoleum, Khrushchev used his cosmonaut’s nickname as he declared, “Let everyone who’s sharpening their claws against us know…that Yurka was in space, that he saw and knows everything.” He scorned those who had belittled the Soviet Union and thought Russians went “barefoot and without clothes.” Gagarin’s flight seemed as much a personal confirmation for Khrushchev of his leadership as it was a message to the world about his country’s technological capability. The peasant boy who had been illiterate and shoeless had outdone Kennedy and his far more advanced country.

More than three weeks later, Project Mercury would make Alan Shepard the second human and first American in space. History would always record that Khrushchev and Yurka got there first.

WASHINGTON, D.C.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL
12, 1961

Adenauer’s timing could not have been worse.

The West German chancellor landed in Washington just a few hours after Yuri Gagarin had parachuted to safety in Kazakhstan. He sat in the Oval Office with a president who was eager to get him out of town and get on with the invasion of Cuba.

All the more awkward, Adenauer had arrived in Washington roughly a month after the visit of Willy Brandt, the Berlin mayor, with the speaker of the Berlin Senate Egon Bahr. It was almost unprecedented that a newly elected U.S. president would schedule a meeting with key opposition representatives of an Allied country before he had met with the national leader, but such was the nature of the strained Kennedy–Adenauer relationship.

Kennedy had told Brandt that “of all the legacies of World War II which the West had inherited, Berlin was the most difficult.” Yet the president said he could think of no good solution to the problem, and neither could Brandt. “We will just have to live with the situation,” Kennedy had said.

Brandt joined the list of those who were telling Kennedy that Khrushchev would be likely to act to change Berlin’s status before his October Party Congress. To test Western resolve, Brandt said the East Germans and Soviets were increasing their harassment of civilian and military movement between the two sides of Berlin. If the Soviets again blockaded West Berlin, he said the city had built up stockpiles of fuel and food that would last for six months. This would give Kennedy time to negotiate his way out of any Berlin difficulty.

Brandt had used his forty minutes in the Oval Office to try to instill in Kennedy a greater passion for the cause of Berlin’s freedom. He called West Berlin a window to the free world that had kept alive East German hopes for eventual liberation. “Without West Berlin this hope would die,” he said, and American presence was the “essential guarantee” for the city’s continued existence. Brandt was relieved to hear Kennedy for the first time reject the Soviet proposal of a UN–protected “free city” status for West Berlin, an outcome Kennedy had been rumored to support. For his part, Brandt assured Kennedy that his Social Democrats’ earlier flirtations with the Soviets over neutrality were a thing of the past.

A month later, Kennedy’s conversations with Adenauer would be less congenial. Kennedy asked Adenauer many of the same questions he had posed to Brandt, but with less satisfying a result. When asked what the Soviets might do during 1961 in Berlin, Adenauer told Kennedy, “Anything or nothing could happen,” noting that he was not a prophet. Adenauer said that when Khrushchev issued his six-month ultimatum in November 1958, no one had expected him to be so patient, and still he had not delivered on his threats.

Kennedy wanted to know what Adenauer believed the U.S. reaction ought to be if the Soviet Union did sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, assuming Khrushchev did so without interfering with access to Berlin.

Adenauer delivered an elderly man’s lecture to the young president about how complicated the legal situation was regarding Germany. Was the president aware, he asked, that there still had been no peace treaty signed by the four powers with Germany as a whole? Was the president aware, he inquired further, of “the little-known fact” that the Soviet Union still maintained military missions in parts of West Germany? The three Allies had asked Adenauer not to say much about this, the chancellor said, as they also kept such outposts in East Germany, which enabled them to gather intelligence.

Since his boss had failed to answer Kennedy’s direct question, Foreign Minister Brentano assessed Soviet alternatives. The first possibility was that of another Berlin blockade, which he thought unlikely. The second was the Soviet transfer of control over Berlin to the East German leadership, followed by harassing tactics impeding access to the city, an outcome Brentano considered more probable. So Brentano suggested contingency planning for that possibility.

Given such a case, Adenauer said West Germany would stand by its military commitments under NATO and intervene to defend Western forces against Soviet attack. “If Berlin fell, it would mean the death sentence for Europe and the Western World,” said Brentano.

What followed then was a complex discussion about which parties had what legal rights under what contingencies in a Berlin crisis. What rights did West Germany have in international law over Berlin? What rights did it want? What rights did the four powers have to supply and defend Berliners? What was the essence of the NATO guarantee for Berlin? When might it be exercised, and by whom? At what point did the West go nuclear in a Berlin conflict?

All those questions required work, Adenauer said.

Kennedy fidgeted as he listened impatiently to the translation.

For Adenauer, the solution to the Berlin Crisis was to reinforce the division of the city into East and West to match that of Germany as a whole. In his mind, West Germany’s integration into the West was a prerequisite for eventual unification, as it would provide a better chance to negotiate from strength. He told Kennedy that West Germany had no interest in entering bilateral talks with the Soviets. “In the great game of the world,” he said, West Germany was “after all only a very small figure.” He needed a fully committed America, however, in order for his approach of refusing direct talks with Moscow on Berlin to work.

Kennedy said he was concerned about the $350 million “gold drain” each year caused by keeping U.S. troops in Germany, a situation not helped by the appreciation of the deutsche mark. He called it “one of the major factors in our balance of payments accounts.” He wanted the chancellor to help him reduce U.S. costs in Germany and to increase German procurements of military and other goods in the United States. The president wasn’t seeking direct budgetary relief from Adenauer, as had been rumored the previous December after the visit of Eisenhower Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson. But he did want a richer West Germany to provide more support for lesser-developed countries, in part to reduce this global burden for the U.S. Adenauer agreed to that and other economic measures that would lighten the U.S. load.

The discussion over the budget impact of the U.S. security guarantee for West Germany marked an important shift. Kennedy was less personally committed to Germany than his predecessors, and beyond that he believed a more prosperous Germany should also be more capable of offsetting U.S. costs.

The communiqué at the end of the Kennedy–Adenauer sessions was limp. It was vague concerning their points of agreement and left out entirely the issues where the sides differed. The correspondent of the German magazine
Der Spiegel
reported that Adenauer had been bitterly disappointed by a visit that did nothing to address Bonn’s major concerns. He said the three long meetings between Adenauer and Kennedy over two days “had eaten up the bodily strength of the West German chancellor, and had annihilated his political plans.” Adenauer, he said, walked down the White House steps following their talks “visibly exhausted, his suntanned face seemingly ashen-yellow against his sunken torso.”

Der Spiegel
reported that the Kennedy administration had not satisfied Adenauer’s request to spend the weekend after his White House meetings with his friend President Eisenhower in Pennsylvania. Instead, the magazine said, Kennedy’s people “banned” Adenauer to Texas and “Vice President Johnson’s out-of-the-way cattle farm.”

For all the rising economic success of his country, Adenauer was suffering from the declining currency of his own leadership in Washington. The U.S. allies with whom he had executed the Marshall Plan, had rebuilt his country, had joined NATO, and had stood down the Soviets were mostly out of power. His closest co-conspirator, John Foster Dulles, had died two years earlier. A couple of German reporters had swallowed the White House spin that Adenauer and Kennedy had formed a deeper personal bond, but there was no evidence to support it.

At the end of the visit, Kennedy stepped out onto the White House lawn in the raw cold of Washington’s April dampness to praise the Adenauer to whom he had given so little. “History will deal most generously with him,” Kennedy said. “His accomplishments have been extraordinary in binding the nations of Western Europe together, in strengthening the ties which link the United States and the Federal Republic.”

Adenauer returned Kennedy’s favor, calling the man he so deeply doubted a “great leader” who carried “huge responsibility for the fate of the free world.”

Little noticed was Adenauer’s later response to a reporter’s question at the National Press Club about a rumored concrete wall that might be built along the Iron Curtain. “In the missile age,” Adenauer said after a short pause, “concrete walls don’t mean very much.”

STONEWALL, TEXAS
SUNDAY, APRIL
16, 1961

At high noon on a sunny Sunday, Adenauer rode off by plane from Washington with his daughter Libet and Foreign Minister Brentano to Austin, Texas. From there he would helicopter some sixty miles to Stone wall, population about five hundred, Vice President Johnson’s birthplace and home of his LBJ ranch. Adenauer was trading a world of real problems for one of almost mythical attraction to Germans—the open spaces of America and the Old West made popular by the best-selling novels written by German author Karl May (who, by the way, had never visited America).

Johnson’s central Texas of ranches and wooded hills had been settled by German pioneers a century earlier, and their ancestors warmly welcomed the
Bundeskanzler
with signs bearing messages such as
WILLKOMMEN ADENAUER
and
HOWDY PODNUR.
Father Wunibald Schneider staged a special afternoon Mass in German for Adenauer at Stonewall’s St. Francis Xavier Church.

When Adenauer visited nearby Fredericksburg, where German was still widely spoken, he said in his native tongue that he had “learned two things in his life. A man can become a Texan, but a Texan can never stop being one. And second, there is only one thing larger than Texas in the world, and that is the Pacific Ocean.” The crowd loved it, as did Johnson. With star German reporters in tow, Adenauer was using Texas as an antidote for his Washington disappointments and a campaign stop for his forthcoming elections. Though never happy being Kennedy’s errand boy for lower-profile missions, Johnson nevertheless followed Kennedy’s instructions that he “butter up” Adenauer, even though the vice president would have preferred being in Washington to push for his harder line on Cuba.

Adenauer was savoring some sausage at a Texas barbecue in two giant tents down by the Pedernales River that ran through the LBJ ranch at about the same time the CIA-supported Brigade 2506, loaded with arms and supplies, converged on its rendezvous point forty miles south of Cuba. Johnson put a ten-gallon hat on the chancellor’s head, which Adenauer cocked for a memorable photo that would appear in all the major German newspapers. Johnson gave him a saddle and spurs and praised how bravely Adenauer had been riding the horse of freedom through the Cold War. Adenauer enthused about how much he felt at home in Texas.

On their drive to the airport for Adenauer’s Monday, April 17, departure, Johnson took a phone call from Kennedy. He passed the president’s greetings to the chancellor and the fact that Kennedy regarded West Germany as a “great power.” Johnson then whispered to Adenauer that an uprising had begun in Cuba, triggered by an invasion of exiles, information just provided by Kennedy.

One would have to wait for developments, Johnson told Adenauer.

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
TUESDAY EVENING, APRIL
18, 1961