Berlin 1961 (37 page)

Kennedy began his response by thanking Khrushchev for “setting forth his views in such a frank manner.” Shot up with painkillers and amphetamines and snug in his corset, Kennedy realized Khrushchev had just delivered what amounted to a new ultimatum on Berlin. That required a clear and sharp response. It was a moment Kennedy had prepared for, and he measured each word carefully.

He stressed that the two men were talking no longer about lesser issues such as Laos but rather about the far more crucial topic of Berlin. This place was “of greatest interest to the U.S. We are in Berlin not because of someone’s sufferance. We fought our way there.” And though the U.S. casualties in World War II had not been as high as those of the Soviet Union, Kennedy said, “we are in Berlin not by agreement of East Germans but by contractual rights….

“This is an area,” said Kennedy, “where every President of the U.S. since World War II has been committed by treaty and other contractual rights and where every President has reaffirmed his faithfulness to those obligations. If we were expelled from that area, and if we accepted the loss of our rights, no one would have any confidence in U.S. commitments and pledges. U.S. national security is involved in this matter, because if we were to accept the Soviet proposal, U.S. commitments would be regarded as a mere scrap of paper.”

At the Vienna Summit until that point, words had tumbled over each other without consequence. Yet now note-takers sat forward, precisely scribbling their leaders’ verbatim comments. The world’s two most powerful men were facing off over their most intractable and explosive issue.

It was the stuff of history.

“West Europe is vital to our national security and we have supported it in two wars,” Kennedy said. “If we were to leave West Berlin, Europe would be abandoned as well. So when we are talking about West Berlin, we are also talking about West Europe.”

What was new for the Soviets was Kennedy’s repeated emphasis on the qualifying word of “West” in front of Berlin. No U.S. president had previously differentiated so clearly between his commitment to all of Berlin and to
West
Berlin. In perhaps the most important manhood moment of his presidency, Kennedy had made a unilateral concession. He reminded Khrushchev that the Soviet leader in their first day’s talks had agreed that “the ratios of [military] power today are equal.” So he thought it “difficult to understand” why a country like the Soviet Union, with such considerable achievements in space and economy, should suggest that the U.S. leave a place of such vital interest where it was already established. He said the U.S. would never be willing to agree to give up rights it had “won by war.”

Khrushchev’s face reddened, as if it were a thermometer measuring a rise in his internal temperature. He interrupted to say that he understood Kennedy’s words to mean the president did not want a peace treaty. He spat derisively that Kennedy’s statement on U.S. national security sounded like “the U.S. might wish to go to Moscow [with its troops] because that too would, of course, improve its position.”

“The U.S. is not asking to go anywhere,” Kennedy responded. “We are not talking about the U.S. going to Moscow or of the USSR going to New York. What we are talking about is that we are in Berlin and have been there for fifteen years. We suggest that we stay there.”

Returning to a course he had tried a day earlier without success, Kennedy explored a more conciliatory path. He said that he knew the situation in Berlin “is not a satisfactory one.” That said, added Kennedy, “conditions in many parts of the world are not satisfactory,” and it was not the right time to change the balance in Berlin or in the world more generally. “If this balance should change, the situation in West Europe as a whole would change, and this would be a most serious blow to the U.S.,” he said. “Mr. Khrushchev would not accept similar loss and we cannot accept it either.”

Until that point, Khrushchev had largely held his usual bombast in check. Yet now his arms were waving, his face turned crimson, and his voice rose to a truculent pitch as his words tumbled out in staccato spurts like angry machine-gun fire. “The U.S. is unwilling to normalize the situation in the most dangerous spot in the world,” he said. “The USSR wants to perform an operation on this sore spot—to eliminate this thorn, this ulcer—without prejudicing the interests of any side, but rather to the satisfaction of all peoples of the world.”

The Soviet Union was not going to change Berlin by “intrigue or threat” but by “solemnly signing a peace treaty. Now the President says that this action is directed against the interests of the U.S. Such a statement is difficult to understand indeed.” The Soviets did not want to change existing boundaries, he argued, but were only trying to formalize them so as to “impede those people who want a new war.”

Khrushchev spoke derisively of Adenauer’s desire to revise Germany’s borders and regain territory it had lost after World War II. “Hitler spoke of Germany’s need for
Lebensraum
to the Urals,” he said. “Hitler’s generals, who had helped him in his designs to execute his plans, are [now] high commanders in NATO.”

He said the logic of the U.S. needing to protect its interests in Berlin “cannot be understood and the USSR cannot accept it.” He told the president he was sorry, but that “no force in the world” would stop Moscow from moving forward on its peace treaty.

He repeated again that sixteen years had passed since the war. How much longer did Kennedy want Moscow to wait? Another sixteen years? Perhaps thirty years?

Khrushchev looked around the room at his colleagues and then said with a wave of his arm that he had lost a son in the last war, that Gromyko had lost two brothers, and that Mikoyan had also lost a son. “There is not a single family in the USSR or the leadership of the USSR that did not lose at least one of its members in the war.” He conceded that American mothers mourn their sons just as deeply as do Soviet mothers, but that while the U.S. had lost thousands, the USSR had lost millions.

He then declared: “The USSR will sign a peace treaty and the sovereignty of the GDR will be observed. Any violation of that sovereignty will be regarded by the USSR as an act of open aggression” with all its attendant consequences.

Khrushchev was threatening war, just as de Gaulle had predicted. The American delegation sat in stunned silence as they awaited Kennedy’s response.

The president calmly asked whether access routes to Berlin would remain open after the Soviets had agreed to such a peace treaty. Kennedy had already decided he could accept an outcome under which the Soviets concluded a treaty with the East Germans but did nothing to impede Western rights in West Berlin or Allied access to the city.

Khrushchev, however, said the new treaty
would
alter freedom of access.

That crossed Kennedy’s red line.

“This presents us with a most serious challenge and no one can foresee how serious the consequences might be,” said Kennedy. He said it was not his wish to come to Vienna only to “be denied our position in West Berlin and our access to that city.” He said he had hoped relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could be improved through the Vienna Summit, but instead they were worsening. Kennedy said it was Moscow’s business if it wanted to transfer its rights in Berlin to the East Germans, but the president could not allow Moscow to give away American rights.

Khrushchev began to probe the U.S. position. He wanted to know if an interim arrangement still might be possible along the lines that Eisenhower had discussed with him—something that protected the prestige of both countries. All sides could set a time limit of six months for the two Germanys to negotiate a unification arrangement. If they failed during that time—and Khrushchev was convinced they would—“anyone would be free to conclude a peace treaty.”

Khrushchev said that even if the U.S. disagreed with the Soviet proposal, it should understand “the USSR can no longer delay” and would take action by year’s end that would make all access to West Berlin subject to East German control. He based his right to act on a statistical analysis of the difference in the price the two sides had paid to defeat the Germans—the 20 million–plus people the Soviets had lost in World War II, compared to only 143,000 U.S. military dead.

Kennedy said it was those losses that motivated him to avoid a new war.

Repeating the word that he so hated, the Soviet leader reminded Kennedy of his worry that the Soviets might “miscalculate.” It seemed to Khrushchev it was the Americans who were in danger of miscalculation. “If the U.S. should start a war over Berlin, let it be so,” he said. “That is what the Pentagon has been wanting. However, Adenauer and Macmillan know very well what war means. If there is any madman who wants war, he should be put in a straitjacket!”

Kennedy’s team was stunned again. Now Khrushchev had used the word “war,” and he had done so three times. That was unheard-of in diplomatic discussions at every level.

As if to close the matter, Khrushchev flatly stated that the USSR would sign a peace treaty by the end of the year, altering Western rights in Berlin for all time, but that he was confident common sense and peace would prevail.

The Soviet leader had not yet responded to what amounted to a Kennedy proposal, so the president probed again. Kennedy stressed that he would not regard a peace treaty in itself as a belligerent act if Khrushchev left West Berlin untouched. “However, a peace treaty denying us our contractual rights
is
a belligerent act,” he said. “What
is
belligerent is transfer of our rights to East Germany.”

It was increasingly clear what Kennedy was saying: Do what you want to with what is yours, but do not touch what is ours. If the U.S. ceded anything on
West
Berlin, the world “would not regard [the U.S.] as a serious country.” But as East Berlin was Soviet territory, he was suggesting that the USSR would be free to do as it pleased there.

Khrushchev did not acknowledge at the time what would later look like the makings of a deal that had been offered by Kennedy. Instead, the Soviet leader replied that the USSR “would never, under any conditions, accept U.S. rights in West Berlin after a peace treaty had been signed.”

He then lashed out at what he considered U.S. mistreatment of the Soviet Union after the war. Khrushchev said the U.S. had deprived the USSR of reparations, rights, and interests in West Germany. Beyond that, he said the U.S. practiced a double standard by refusing to negotiate a war-ending peace treaty with East Germany although it had signed just such an agreement with the Japanese in 1951—without consulting with Moscow in preparing the document. Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had led the Soviet delegation at the conference, where it had tried to stall the treaty and then refused to sign while complaining that the U.S. had not invited the Chinese and was creating an anti-Soviet, militaristic Japan.

Kennedy countered that Khrushchev had publicly declared he would have signed the Japan treaty if he had been in power at the time.

For Khrushchev, however, the point wasn’t what he
might
have done but rather that the U.S. had not even sought Soviet agreement. Khrushchev called Kennedy’s approach regarding Berlin a similar one of “I do what I want.”

Khrushchev said he had seen enough of that sort of U.S. behavior. Moscow would sign its treaty with East Germany, he said, and the price would be great if the U.S. thereafter violated East German sovereignty over access to Berlin.

What he wanted, Kennedy countered, was not a conflict over Berlin but an overall mending of East–West German relations and of U.S.–Soviet relations, so as to permit over time a solution to the whole German problem. He said he did not wish “to act in a way that would deprive the Soviet Union of its ties in Eastern Europe,” again reassuring Khrushchev, as he had done the first day, that he would do nothing to upset the balance of power in Europe.

Kennedy noted that the Soviet leader had called him a young man, and the president suggested that Khrushchev was trying to take advantage of his relative inexperience. However, Kennedy said, he had “not assumed office to accept arrangements totally inimical to U.S. interests.” Khrushchev repeated that the only alternative to unilateral action would be an interim agreement under which the two Germanys could negotiate and after which all Allied rights would disappear. That would “give the semblance of responsibility for the problem having been turned over to the Germans themselves.” But as they would not agree to unification, Khrushchev was certain the outcome would be the same.

With an actor’s sense of dramatic timing, Khrushchev then presented Kennedy a document, an aide-mémoire on the Berlin question, whose purpose was to give his ultimatum official force. No one on Kennedy’s team had prepared the president for such a written Kremlin initiative. Bolshakov had not even hinted at such a move. Khrushchev said the Soviet side had prepared it so that the U.S. could study the Soviet position and “perhaps return to this question at a later date, if it wished to do so.”

With that bold move, Khrushchev had put himself on a collision course with Kennedy over Berlin. He had acted in part because Kennedy, in clinging to the status quo, had not shown even Eisenhower’s willingness to negotiate the issue. That was difficult enough for Khrushchev to accept under Eisenhower, and before the U-2 incident. But now it was impossible.

The morning had passed quickly.

W
hile Khrushchev and Kennedy retreated to a tense lunch, their wives were out doing the town. In front of the Pallavicini Palace on the sun-bathed Josefsplatz, a crowd of a thousand had gathered to get a glimpse of the two women heading for lunch. A slight murmur greeted the Soviet, followed by an outburst of cheers for Jackie. Two American reporters felt sorry for the crowd’s inattention to Nina, so as the Viennese shouted, “Ja-kee! Ja-kee!” they countered with their own chant of “Nina!” But it gained no following.

Reuters correspondent Adam Kellett-Long, who had been sent from Berlin to cover the summit, was horrified as he heard photographers shout at Jackie to stick out her breasts for more alluring shots. “And she did!” he recalled later. “She behaved like Marilyn Monroe or a film star. She was lapping it up.”