Berlin 1961 (58 page)

Bolle was an apolitical, conservative student who lacked any natural taste for danger, and on the day after the border closure he had refused to help another classmate escape. What had changed his mind since then was Willy Brandt’s speech before City Hall on August 16, which had so impressed him that he had written its call to action in his diary. “We now have to stand tall,” Brandt had said, “so that the enemy does not celebrate while our countrymen sink into despair. We have to show ourselves worthy of the ideals that are symbolized in the Freedom Bell that hangs above our heads.”

Two days later, Kastner’s mother had been in tears as she appealed to Bolle to help her son during a visit he had made to their apartment in the East Berlin district of Köpenick. Rumors were flying that the border controls would grow gradually tougher, she said, and so anyone who wanted to leave East Berlin had to do so immediately. Though she and her husband did not want to be separated from their son, she said they had to think first about how to best satisfy his dream of becoming a history professor, which he would never fulfill in the East.

Bolle had suggested that his friend swim across one of the canals, but Kastner protested that he was too poor a swimmer for that. Kastner insisted the safest way of escape was by getting access to a West Berlin ID, so he provided Bolle a photo of himself and the name and contact details of a Catholic priest who was said to be producing such documents.

After the priest refused Bolle, the philosophy student turned to a friend who looked like Kastner. He was happy to part with his ID, which he would replace after reporting it lost. However, he refused to make the delivery to East Berlin himself, since it would be too risky to try to return west without it. Speaking with false confidence, Bolle declared he would transport the ID himself. “They don’t hang people they can’t catch,” he boasted.

On the evening before his risky mission, Bolle had asked his mother if she would help someone escape if she were in his position. Only if it were a family member or a close friend, she had replied. His father admired his son’s good intentions, but he worried that his boy Eberhard had too panicky a nature to succeed.

“Now eat something,” said his father. “Who knows when your next meal will be?” Bolle forced down a few bites while his father tested him on how he would respond if East German police discovered the second ID. His responses were unconvincing, so they both hoped it would not come to that.

Bolle got out of the commuter train at Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, where all travelers heading for East Berlin disembarked. Perspiring and trembling, he sighed with relief as border guards waved him through. He was on the last couple of stairs out of the station when a border guard appeared from his right and took him firmly by the arm.

Several years later, after interrogation, trial, conviction, and imprisonment, Bolle would still wonder why the guard had been able to pick him from the crowd for arrest. Sadly, he knew the answer.

Fear had given him away.

It would take the return of a retired U.S. general to help restore West Berliners’ courage.

16

A HERO’S HOMECOMING

We have lost Czechoslovakia. Norway is threatened…. When Berlin falls, western Germany will be next. If we mean…to hold Europe against Communism, we must not budge…. If America does not understand this now, does not know that the issue is cast, then it never will and Communism will run rampant. I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay.

General Lucius Clay, making his case to superiors on why the U.S. must stay in Berlin, April 10, 1948

Why would anyone write a book about an administration that has nothing to show for itself but a string of disasters?

President Kennedy to journalist Elie Abel, in response to a request to write a book on his presidency, September 22, 1961

TEMPELHOF AIRPORT, WEST BERLIN
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER
19, 1961

G
eneral Lucius D. Clay’s triumphal return to Berlin came on an unseasonably warm and sunny September afternoon.

Berlin’s myriad outdoor cafés, often closed by late September, overflowed their sidewalks. The Berlin Zoo reported record business. A gentle breeze blew a flotilla of sailboats across the Wannsee, Berlin’s broad city lake, and the several waterways to which it was connected. The war years, the city’s division, and now the Wall had only heightened Berliners’ penchant for savoring pleasurable moments.

That said, it was more General Clay’s arrival than the weather that buoyed West Berlin spirits that day. Locals regarded President Kennedy’s decision to appoint Clay as his “personal representative” to their city as the most convincing proof yet that America remained determined to defend West Berlin’s freedoms. Certainly, Berliners concluded, a man of Clay’s pedigree would never have accepted the job unless he was convinced that Kennedy was finally ready to stand up to the Soviets.

In 1948, as Military Governor for the U.S. Zone in Germany, Clay became a German folk hero for ordering and executing, with the British, the airlift that ultimately rescued West Berlin’s two million residents from the choice between starvation and communist domination. His 324-day operation was all the more remarkable because it came only three years after the U.S. and its allies had defeated Nazi Germany. At the time, it was still uncertain if Americans would risk their lives and treasure for European security, let alone for the western half of Hitler’s former capital, floating as it did as an indefensible island inside communist territory.

Berliners still spoke with astonishment about Clay’s “bonbon bombers”—the American pilots who had parachuted sweets to the city’s children while breaking the Soviet blockade. Seldom had history seen such a risky and successful humanitarian action on behalf of a vanquished foe. City fathers named one of their broadest and longest boulevards, the Clayallee of the Dahlem district, for the man who had made it happen.

Clay’s determination to keep West Berlin free grew out of a conviction that had only grown over time, relayed to superiors as early as April 1948, that no location on the planet was more important to America’s standing in the world. “We have lost Czechoslovakia. Norway is threatened,” he said. “If we mean…to hold Europe against Communism, we must not budge.” His view was that if America did not grasp the importance of West Berlin, then communism would run rampant. “I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay….”

There was only one flaw in Clay’s inspiring sense of mission: His motivations for accepting the new job were nobler than Kennedy’s reasons for offering it to him.

For Clay, it was a chance to return to the Cold War’s central battleground at another historic moment when his actions could again be decisive. For Kennedy, dispatching Clay had more to do with domestic politics and public relations.

Clay’s appointment would help neutralize Kennedy’s conservative critics, for the retired general was not just a Berlin hero but also an American and Republican one. He had been instrumental in persuading Eisenhower to run for president and then had helped manage his campaign. Getting Clay under the Kennedy administration tent would also minimize the damage he could do sniping at the president from the outside.

That said, Kennedy’s indecision about just how much power he should give Clay in Berlin underscored his ambivalence about how best to counter Khrushchev. Although Kennedy had made Clay the only American in Berlin with a direct reporting line to the president, he had at the same time failed to give the general formal command over anyone or anything.

Kennedy had even rewritten his original letter of instruction for Clay to water down the broad authority he had initially offered him, to be “fully and completely responsible for all decisions on Berlin.” The president apologized to Clay for the change: “I’m sorry this letter is not the way I wanted it, the way I originally wrote it, but this is the way the State Department feels it will have to be without cutting across all kinds of channels.”

Clay had little choice but to accept the downgraded terms, as he had already left his well-paying job as chief executive of the Continental Can Company. Ever the loyal soldier, he had told the president, “As the situation exists in Berlin it is going to be very difficult no matter how it is done…. If it is easier for you for the letter to be written this way, it is all right with me.” The two men agreed Clay would phone the president on any matter of significance.

The manner of Clay’s appointment spoke again to Kennedy’s greater comfort at appearing tough than at actually being so. Kennedy increasingly feared Khrushchev might push him to the precipice of unleashing atomic weapons to defend Berlin, but he had not yet determined under what circumstances and in what manner he might be willing to do so. He had no idea what role, if any, Clay would play in the decision-making process.

Whatever his dilemmas, Kennedy’s popularity remained impregnable. A Gallup poll showed most Americans considered the string of Kennedy setbacks in 1961 to have been bad breaks rather than poor leadership. Kennedy’s approval rating would rise to 77 percent in October after hovering above 70 percent all year, having hit a high of 83 percent as the public circled its wagons around him following the Bay of Pigs. In the quarter century since Gallup had begun polling, only Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor and Harry Truman after Roosevelt’s death had enjoyed comparable popularity—and they had not sustained it nearly as long.

Kennedy was a keen reader of public opinion polls, which showed that a remarkable 64 percent of Americans would approve U.S. military intervention should the Soviets or the East Germans block access to West Berlin, while only 19 percent would be opposed. And more than 60 percent of Americans accepted that there would be war if the Soviets were determined to control Berlin.

With such a hawkish American electorate, Kennedy’s choice of Clay was a popular one. It was even more so for Berliners, who celebrated Clay’s arrival like that of a homecoming gladiator. From the tarmac of Tempelhof Airport, the site of his 1948 heroics, American tanks greeted him with a nineteen-gun salute. The West Berlin elite gathered to receive him in a hangar beneath a giant American flag flanked by two Berlin city banners. Unlike Kennedy, Clay spoke to all Berliners and not just to those of the West. He spoke of “our determination that
Berlin
and its people will always be free…. I came here with complete faith in our cause and with confidence in the courage and steadfastness of the people of
Berlin.
”

Licking the wounds from his election defeat two days earlier, West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt met Clay in Frankfurt and escorted him to Berlin on a Pan American Airlines flight. His defeat by Chancellor Adenauer was a bitter disappointment after an ugly campaign, during which his opponent had so sullied his character. However, Brandt had inflicted considerable damage on Adenauer as well, whom voters had punished due to worries about his age and his tepid response to the Berlin border closure. Adenauer’s Christian Democrats had remained the country’s largest political party, but the chancellor had lost his absolute majority and was left to bargain for his political survival with new coalition partners, the Free Democrats.

The Christian Democrats and their Bavarian partners, the Christian Social Union, had lost 5 percent of the vote from the previous election, for a total of just 45.3 percent. Brandt’s Social Democrats had gained 4.5 percent to achieve 36.2 percent of the vote. The liberal Free Democrats had become the third force in German politics, expanding their share of the vote by 4 percent to some 12.8 percent. The Berlin border closure had realigned German politics, and Adenauer would never fully recover.
^*

Brandt had appealed publicly to Berliners to provide Clay with a warm homecoming, but they had required little encouragement. Hundreds of thousands of Berliners stood two to three deep along Clay’s ten-mile motor route. Children waved small U.S. flags while sitting atop the shoulders of parents who had lived through the airlift. So many well-wishers showered bouquets on Clay that he was soon bathing in flowers in the back of his black Mercedes sedan.

Clay’s limited job description was to “report, recommend and advise.” Yet his intention from the beginning was to define his mandate more broadly and take full charge of American policy in the city in the manner of a military governor. That would put him on a collision course with men who had strongly opposed his appointment and whose authority was threatened by his arrival: General Lauris Norstad, NATO Supreme Commander, in Paris; General Bruce Clarke, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, in Heidelberg; and the U.S. ambassador to Germany, Walter Dowling, in Bonn.

Clay trumpeted that his new role would be to “demonstrate United States strength and determination” and to force the Soviets to acknowledge responsibility for their sector. He was determined to make clear that the four powers still ran Berlin and not East Germany, which he would expose as the puppet state that it was. Clay was distraught that the U.S. and its allies had allowed so many of their rights in Berlin to erode since his earlier days there, and he was determined to reverse that trend by the force of his will.

The State Department’s Martin Hillenbrand worried that Clay didn’t realize how much less freedom to maneuver he would have in Berlin now that the U.S. had lost its nuclear monopoly. Yet it was just that sort of defeatist thinking that Clay had rejected his entire career. Clay had launched the 1948 airlift on his own authority after President Truman had turned down his initial plan to send a full brigade storming up the Autobahn to reopen Berlin access. At the airlift’s peak operations, one cargo plane was landing every three minutes—shiny new C-54s and war-battered C-47s—filled with food and supplies.