Berlin 1961 (40 page)

Alsop had considered the Bay of Pigs to be the moment that had “cured any illusions that Kennedy had about the certainty of success” after a life in which he had experienced very few failures. Alsop considered Vienna a more serious moment because of the difference between Cuba’s lesson that one can fail at a very big thing and the prospect of another failure that could lead to nuclear war.

Kennedy had been in office four months and sixteen days, but Alsop believed it was in Vienna that he truly became the American commander in chief. He had confronted there the brutal nature of his enemy and the reality that Berlin would be their battleground.

“After that was when he really began to be president in the full sense of the word,” Alsop believed.

EAST BERLIN
WEDNESDAY, JUNE
7, 1961

East German leader Walter Ulbricht could hardly believe his good fortune as he was briefed on the Vienna talks by Mikhail Pervukhin, the Soviet ambassador to East Germany. He grew all the more satisfied as he received further details from leading officers of the Soviet High Commission in Karlshorst, with whom he spoke at the end of almost every day.

The previous three days and nights of military exercises—bringing together his National People’s Army with their Soviet counterparts—had demonstrated that Ulbricht was ready militarily for whatever the West might throw at him when Khrushchev finally acted on Berlin. Ulbricht’s soldiers had impressed Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky and Andrei Grechko, commander of all Warsaw Pact forces, who considered the exercise sufficiently important to oversee it themselves. East German soldiers had proved themselves to be far more disciplined in the field than Soviet officers had anticipated.

As Ulbricht ended one of his routine twelve-hour days, he was satisfied as his chauffeur drove him to his new home at Wandlitz, some twenty miles northeast of Berlin on the edge of a thick forest. Ulbricht had not felt so optimistic in months, perhaps years, as his chauffeur drove him past the neat gardens and stuccoed villas of the Pankow district.

Pervukhin had delivered to him a copy of the Soviet aide-mémoire that Khrushchev had passed to Kennedy in Vienna. Many of Ulbricht’s ideas regarding Berlin’s future, stubbornly repeated in numerous letters over many months, had made it into Khrushchev’s official language. Pervukhin told Ulbricht that Moscow would go public with the document in two days.

Ulbricht was confident this time that Khrushchev would not be able to walk away from his Berlin ultimatum. Khrushchev was also getting tougher on Germany in other respects. Foreign Minister Gromyko had lodged an angry protest with the British, French, and U.S. embassies in Moscow about Chancellor Adenauer’s decision for the first time to schedule a plenary meeting in West Berlin of the Bundesrat, the upper house of the West Berlin parliament, on June 16. He called the move a “major new provocation” against all socialist states.

After badgering Khrushchev for so long, Ulbricht wrote a letter that day to the Soviet leader that dripped with ingratiating sentiment. “We warmly thank the [Communist Party] Presidium and you, dear friend,” he said, “for the great efforts which you are undertaking for the achievement of a peace treaty and the resolution of the West Berlin issue.”

Ulbricht wrote that he not only fully agreed with the wording of the ultimatum, but that he also embraced Khrushchev’s summit performance and his representation of the Communist Party, the Soviet government, and the socialist camp.

“This was a great political accomplishment,” he wrote.

Yet Ulbricht also realized much of what had been accomplished had come due to his pressure, and he was not about to let up now. He spent much of the letter complaining about growing West German “revanchism” that threatened them both. The West German Economics Ministry had threatened to repeal its trade treaty with East Germany should a peace treaty be concluded. The cost to the East German economy would be great, as it would then be treated “as a foreign state, which would have to pay for its daily purchases in West Germany in foreign currency” it did not have.

Ulbricht told Khrushchev that Adenauer and other West German officials were lobbying neutral countries to reduce the rights of East German consulates and trade offices. Adenauer was also trying to prevent East German participation in the next Olympic Games.

Ulbricht was most concerned with preventing any further procrastination now that Khrushchev seemed fully focused on Berlin. “Comrade Pervukhin informed us here that you would find it useful if a consultation of the first secretaries [of Communist Parties of the Soviet bloc] would take place as soon as possible.” Ulbricht said he thus had taken the liberty of appealing to leaders of Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to gather on July 20 and 21 to “discuss preparations for a peace treaty.”

Ulbricht wanted the entire socialist bloc to circle around him. “The goal of this meeting,” he said by way of instruction to Khrushchev, “should be an agreement on the political, diplomatic, economic and organizational preparation, and also measures for the coordination of radio and press agitation.”

MOSCOW
WEDNESDAY, JUNE
7, 1961

Upon Khrushchev’s return to Moscow from Vienna, he ordered multiple copies of the summit minutes to be produced and distributed among friends and allies. He wanted his proficient handling of Kennedy to be known far and wide—particularly among his critics at home and abroad. He had the papers marked “Top Secret,” but he circulated them to a broader audience than was usual for such documents. One copy went to Castro in Cuba, though he was not yet considered a member of the socialist camp. Among the eighteen nations for distribution were also the noncommunist countries of Egypt, Iraq, India, Brazil, Cambodia, and Mexico. A senior Soviet would brief Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito.

Khrushchev was acting like the victor, wanting everyone to relive the championship match with him. He followed his tough line in Vienna with a harder and more dictatorial line at home, blaming rising Soviet civil discontent, vagrancy, crime, and unemployment on too much liberalization, sounding increasingly like his own neo-Stalinist critics. He also reversed reforms of the judicial system associated with his de-Stalinization.

“What liberals you’ve become!” he shot at Roman Rudenko, chief public prosecutor, as he criticized laws that were too soft on thieves, whom he thought should be shot.

“No matter how you scold me,” said Rudenko, “if the law does not provide for the death penalty, we can’t apply it.”

“The peasants have a saying: ‘Get rid of the bad seeds,’” Khrushchev responded. “Stalin had the correct position on these issues. He went too far, but we never had any mercy on criminals. Our fight with enemies should be merciless and well directed.”

Khrushchev pushed through changes that increased the use of the death penalty, grew the size of police units in the KGB, and reversed many of the liberalizing trends he himself had introduced.

While Kennedy headed home, worrying about what to tell America, Khrushchev was at the Indonesian embassy celebrating the sixtieth birthday of the country’s visiting leader, Sukarno.

The band struck up dance tunes out on the embassy’s lawn as various party leaders, including President Leonid Brezhnev and First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, at Khrushchev’s urging, got up to join a folk dance. Diplomats and prominent Russians kept time with rhythmic hand-clapping. Among the dancers was Prince Souvanna Phouma of Laos.

Sukarno himself took Khrushchev’s wife, Nina, onto the dance floor. Khrushchev’s post-Vienna high was infecting everyone. The Soviet leader took a baton at one point to lead the orchestra and told jokes throughout the evening. When Sukarno said he would want new Soviet loans in exchange for letting Khrushchev direct the band, the Soviet leader opened his coat, pulled out his pockets, and showed they were empty.

“Look, he robs me of everything,” he said to the crowd’s laughter.

Watching Mikoyan sway expertly, Khrushchev joked that his number two only kept his job because the party Central Committee had ruled that he was such a fine dancer. No one had seen Khrushchev so carefree since before the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the 1957 coup attempt against him.

When Sukarno said he wanted to kiss a pretty girl, Khrushchev’s wife searched the crowd before settling on a reluctant partner, whose husband was at first unwilling to make her available.

“Oh, please come,” said Nina. “You only have to kiss him once, not twice.”

So the girl gave the Indonesian leader his kiss.

Yet the enduring memory of the evening was when Sukarno drew Khrushchev to the dance floor for an awkward pas de deux. They danced a bit hand in hand before the euphoric Khrushchev performed solo. Khrushchev described his dance style as that of “a cow on ice,” heavy, uncertain, and with unsteady feet.

But on this occasion Khrushchev bent down and kicked his legs out, Cossack style. The heavyset Soviet leader looked unusually light on his feet.

12

ANGRY SUMMER

The construction workers of our capital are for the most part busy building apartment houses, and their working capacities are fully employed to that end. Nobody intends to put up a wall.

Walter Ulbricht, at a press conference, June 15, 1961

Somehow he does succeed in being a President, but only in the appearance of one.

Dean Acheson, writing to President Truman about his work on Berlin for President Kennedy, June 24, 1961

The issue over Berlin, which Khrushchev is now moving toward a crisis…is far more than an issue over that city. It is broader and deeper than even the German question as a whole. It has become an issue of resolution between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., the outcome of which will go far to determine the confidence of Europe—indeed, of the world—in the United States.

Dean Acheson, in a report on Berlin for President Kennedy, June 29, 1961

HOUSE OF MINISTRIES, EAST BERLIN
THURSDAY, JUNE
15, 1961

W
alter Ulbricht’s decision to summon West Berlin–based correspondents to a press conference on his communist side of the border was so unprecedented that his propagandists did not even know how to go about inviting the reporters.

The problem was that Ulbricht had cut off all telephone trunk lines between the city’s two parts in 1952. So Ulbricht’s people had to dispatch a special operations team across the border, armed with rolls of West German ten-pfennig coins and a West Berlin press association membership list. Working from public telephone booths, they called Western correspondents one by one with a terse message: “Press conference. Chairman of the State Council of the German Democratic Republic Ulbricht. House of Ministries. Thursday. Eleven o’clock. You are invited.”

Three days later, some three hundred correspondents—roughly half of them representing each side of the city—crowded into a huge banquet hall where Hermann Göring had once entertained officers of the Third Reich’s Air Ministry. A huge hammer and compass, the East German national symbol, rose triumphantly behind the stage where the Nazi eagle and swastika had once stood.

By the time Ulbricht marched in, the room was already uncomfortably warm and stuffy from the combination of reporters’ body warmth, the hot day outside, and the lack of air-conditioning. Beside him was Gerhard Eisler, the legendary communist who ran East Germany’s broadcasting operations. Known to correspondents as East Germany’s Goebbels, he looked out at the crowd through small eyes magnified by thick bifocals. Though convicted as a Soviet spy in the U.S., he had jumped bail in 1950 and dramatically escaped New York aboard a Polish steamer before making his way to the newly created East Germany. Western reporters whispered to each other what they knew about Eisler.

Mutual Broadcasting Network correspondent Norman Gelb soaked in the atmosphere. He had never seen Ulbricht so close up, and he wondered how this short, unassuming, tight-lipped gray man with the shrill voice and rimless glasses had survived so many Soviet and East German power struggles. Though his neatly trimmed goatee gave him an intended resemblance to Lenin, Gelb thought Ulbricht looked more like an aging office manager than a dictator.

Timed to coincide with Khrushchev’s first public report on the Vienna Summit in Moscow, Ulbricht’s long opening statement disappointed correspondents who had come expecting something of historic consequence. Ulbricht’s purpose in organizing the extraordinary meeting only grew clearer after he began taking questions, two or three at a time, which he answered with long lectures that made follow-ups impossible.

Correspondents scribbled furiously as Ulbricht declared that West Berlin’s character would change dramatically after East Germany signed its peace treaty with the Soviets, with or without Western agreement. As a “free city,” he said, it was “self-evident that so-called refugee camps in West Berlin will be closed and persons who occupy themselves with traffic in mankind will leave Berlin.” He said that would also mean the shuttering of U.S., British, French, and West German “espionage centers” operating in West Berlin. Ulbricht said East German travel thereafter would be more strictly regulated and that only those who obtained permission from the Interior Ministry would be able to leave the country.

Annamarie Doherr, a correspondent for the left-leaning
Frankfurter Rundschau
, pressed Ulbricht for more details. She wondered how Ulbricht would achieve control over travel, given the open East Berlin border. “Mr. Chairman,” she said, “does the creation of a ‘free city,’ as you term it, mean the state boundaries of the German Democratic Republic will be erected at the Brandenburg Gate?” She wanted to know whether he was committed to carrying through his plan “with all of its consequences,” which included a potential war.