Berlin 1961 (61 page)

Beside these letters was one from Raymond Aron, the famous French philosopher, echoing French leader Charles de Gaulle’s warning in a television appearance that week. “What is at stake,” wrote Aron, “isn’t just the fate of two million Berliners. It is the capability of the United States to convince Khrushchev that it has the tenacity not to give in to horse trading.”

West Berliners were confused by their guarantor’s mixed messages. One day General Clay had landed in Steinstücken and flexed U.S. muscle through his patrols on their Autobahn. The next day Kennedy gave a speech that continued the American retreat. Kennedy had not even mentioned the Wall’s existence or the fact that East Germans were further fortifying it every day.

New York Times
columnist James “Scotty” Reston wrote that Kennedy “has talked like Churchill but acted like Chamberlain.” In the same column, Reston reported on a leaked Kennedy memo regarding Clay’s confrontational Berlin measures in which the president asked senior officials why his policy of seeking negotiations on Berlin was being misunderstood.

Reading the tea leaves and intelligence reports, Khrushchev was beginning to sense that Clay’s hard line in Berlin was nothing more than a retired general’s bold improvisation that lacked presidential blessing. There was sufficient sign of disagreement in U.S. policy circles that it was time to probe the differences.

So Marshal Konev dispatched a sharp note to General Watson demanding that Clay’s “illegal” Autobahn patrols end. His letter, he stressed, wasn’t a “protest but a warning.” The Kennedy administration ordered Clay’s Autobahn patrols to stop after a week of successful operations. General Konev’s allies had been Clay’s American enemies.

On September 27, General Clarke flew to Berlin to reprimand his commander again. After a ceremonial lunch with Clay for press purposes, General Clarke again advised General Watson, his Berlin commander, that U.S. forces could no longer be used to counteract Soviet or East German actions without his approval. The East German press got wind of Clay’s differences with the Kennedy administration and made much of it.

Clarke then got wind of another secret Clay operation.

Clay had ordered army engineers to construct barriers in a secluded forest on the outskirts of Berlin that would replicate the Wall as closely as possible. U.S. troops then mounted bulldozer attachments on their tanks, and Clay supervised as they crashed through the barriers, using different speeds and height placements for the shovels to achieve maximum efficiency. Clay’s purpose was to determine the best way to punch a hole through the barrier should the opportunity or necessity present itself.

“As soon as I learned of it,” General Clarke would later write in a private correspondence, “I stopped it and got rid of what had been done.”

Clarke didn’t report the Clay operation or his action against it to Washington, hoping the whole matter would simply disappear.

Kennedy would never know about it—but Khrushchev would. A Soviet agent hiding in the forest had snapped photos. Khrushchev had no way of knowing that General Clarke had shut down the exercise. He now had what he considered concrete evidence that the Americans might well be planning an operation in Berlin that would challenge or humiliate him during his Party Congress.

17

NUCLEAR POKER

In a certain sense there is an analogy here—I like this comparison—with Noah’s Ark, where both the “clean” and the “unclean” found sanctuary. But regardless of who lists himself with the “clean” and who is considered to be “unclean,” they are all equally interested in one thing, and that is that the Ark should successfully continue its cruise.

Premier Khrushchev to President Kennedy, in the first letter of their secret correspondence, September 29, 1961

Our confidence in our ability to deter Communist action, or resist Communist blackmail, is based upon a sober appreciation of the relative military power of the two sides. The fact is that this nation has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power than any enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of self-destruction on his part.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, Hot Springs, Virginia, October 21, 1961

CARLYLE HOTEL, NEW YORK
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER
30, 1961

C
arrying two folded newspapers under his arm, Georgi Bolshakov appeared as arranged at Pierre Salinger’s door at the Carlyle at 3:30 p.m., having been escorted up the back elevator by a Secret Service agent.

Concealed inside one of the papers was a thick manila envelope, from which Bolshakov removed a bundle of pages. With conspiratorial flamboyance, the Soviet spy announced that he held before him a personal twenty-six-page letter from Khrushchev to Kennedy, a manuscript he said he had spent the entire night translating. The bags under Bolshakov’s eyes were such a permanent fixture that Salinger could not know if that was true.

“You may read this,” Bolshakov told Salinger. “Then it is for the eyes of the president only.” It had been only a week since Bolshakov and Salinger had last met in the same room ahead of Kennedy’s United Nations speech. Khrushchev was impatient to test Kennedy’s conciliatory words and his expressed willingness to open new talks on Berlin, despite French and West German opposition. Bolshakov handed Salinger both the English and Russian versions of the letter so that U.S. government translators could compare them for accuracy.

Thus began what National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy would dub the “pen pal letters,” uniquely direct and private correspondence between the two leading adversaries of their time. Over the next two years, Khrushchev would continue to use the cloak-and-dagger means of having Bolshakov and others slip his letters to Salinger, to Robert Kennedy, or to Ted Sorensen on street corners, in a bar, or elsewhere, often in unmarked envelopes slipped out from folded newspapers.

Khrushchev considered the matter of such urgency that Bolshakov had phoned Salinger a day earlier with an offer to charter a plane to deliver the letter to Newport, Rhode Island, where Kennedy had been on a week’s autumn vacation at the home of Jacqueline’s mother, Janet Lee Bouvier, and stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss. However, Kennedy and Rusk wanted to avoid a potential “media sensation” in the event that one of two dozen reporters with the president spotted the Russian agent. So they dispatched Salinger to New York the next day.

“If you knew the importance of what I have, you wouldn’t keep me waiting that long,” Bolshakov had replied.

Salinger would later paraphrase the message in Khrushchev’s 6,000-word letter:
You and I, Mr. President, are leaders of two nations that are on a collision course…. We have no choice but to put our heads together and find ways to live in peace.

The man who had so battered Kennedy in Vienna opened on a warm and personal note, explaining that he was resting with his family at his Black Sea retreat in Pitsunda. In the secretive Soviet Union, not even his own citizens knew where he was. “As a former Naval officer,” Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy, “you would surely appreciate the merits of these surroundings, the beauty of the sea and the grandeur of the Caucasian mountains.” Khrushchev said it was difficult in such a setting to think that problems lacking solutions “cast a sinister shadow on peaceful life, on the future of millions of people.”

But because that was the case, Khrushchev was suggesting a confidential exchange between the two men whose actions would determine the future of the planet. If Kennedy was uninterested, the Soviet leader said the president could ignore the letter and Khrushchev would never mention it again.

Salinger was struck by the peasant simplicity of Khrushchev’s language, “in contrast to the sterile gobbledygook that passes for this level of diplomatic correspondence.” The letter had none of Khrushchev’s usual threats and instead solicited Kennedy’s alternative proposals should he differ with Khrushchev’s suggestions.

Khrushchev’s initiative had several possible motivations. Most important, his Party Congress would begin in a little more than two weeks, and engaging Kennedy in such an exchange would give him greater assurance that the U.S. would do nothing to disrupt his painstaking choreography. Second, he hoped to calm the rising tensions that had produced a much larger expansion of U.S. defense spending than he had anticipated.

Khrushchev knew the Soviet Union lacked the economic depth to match a sustained arms race with the far wealthier United States. For the first time, he had to worry that the West might challenge his conventional military dominance around Berlin. Kennedy’s defense buildup was also inflaming Soviet hard-liners’ arguments that Khrushchev was doing too little to combat the West and should have gone further to neutralize West Berlin. In his letter, Khrushchev warned Kennedy that the tit-for-tat military spending, spurred by Berlin, was further reason why Moscow was “attaching such exclusive significance to the German question.”

The Soviet leader said he was willing to reexamine positions frozen through fifteen years of cold war. Writing to the Catholic Kennedy, the atheist Soviet compared the postwar world to Noah’s Ark, aboard which all parties wanted to continue their voyage, whether they were clean or unclean. “And we have no other alternative: either we should live in peace and cooperation so that the Ark maintains its buoyancy, or else it sinks.”

Khrushchev also said he was willing to expand on the quiet contacts between Secretary of State Rusk and Foreign Minister Gromyko, whose first meeting had been in New York on September 21. In addition, he was willing to take up Kennedy’s suggestion of preparatory talks between the U.S. and Soviet ambassadors to Yugoslavia, America’s legendary diplomat George Kennan and General Alexei Yepishev, a Khrushchev confidant.

Just a day after the border closure on August 14, the State Department had authorized Kennan to open that channel, but at the time Moscow had shown no interest. Now Khrushchev was eager, though he worried that without clear instructions the ambassadors would “indulge in tea-drinking” and “mooing at each other when they should talk on the substance.” Khrushchev suggested instead the use of U.S. Ambassador Thompson, since he was a trusted and proven interlocutor, though he immediately apologized, saying he understood that this would be Kennedy’s choice.

Khrushchev protested at length about Western suspicions that Moscow still intended to seize West Berlin. “It is ridiculous to even think of that,” he said, arguing that the city was of no geopolitical importance. To show his good intentions, he suggested moving the United Nations headquarters to West Berlin, an idea he had floated earlier that month in separate meetings with Belgian Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak and former French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud.

Apart from opening his new channel to Kennedy, Khrushchev was taking other measures to avoid further escalation of tensions with the U.S. Khrushchev’s party Presidium had put on ice a far-advanced plan to provide Cuba with more advanced weaponry, including missiles that could reach the U.S. Khrushchev had also warned Ulbricht against a series of measures he was implementing to expand his hold on East Berlin, lecturing his troublesome client that he should be satisfied with his 1961 gains.

In his most important gesture, Khrushchev responded to Kennedy’s appeal of the previous week for progress on Laos. He confirmed their agreement of Vienna that Laos would become a neutral, independent state like Burma and Cambodia. However, he disagreed with Kennedy’s concern about specifically who should take which leadership positions in Laos, saying that should not be a matter for Moscow and Washington to decide.

With that, Khrushchev closed with best wishes to Kennedy’s wife and for his and his family’s health.

HYANNIS PORT, MASSACHUSETTS
SATURDAY, OCTOBER
14, 1961

It would take two weeks before Kennedy was ready to respond.

Working over the weekend on Cape Cod, Kennedy wrote and rewrote a draft that would balance his heightened distrust for Khrushchev with his desire to use all means to avoid war through miscalculation. A negative reply could hasten another Kremlin move on Berlin, but too positive a reply would look naive to his domestic and Allied critics. Both Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer worried that any Kennedy–Khrushchev talks were simply a recipe for new concessions on West Berlin.

Adenauer’s concerns would have been even greater if he had known the instructions Kennedy had given Rusk to dramatically reconstruct U.S. positions for a new round of Berlin talks, with a peace conference as their goal. Kennedy had ruled out as a negotiator U.S. Ambassador to West Germany Walter Dowling, because “he reflects Bonn’s opinion too much.” He also wanted Rusk to leave on the table only issues acceptable to Moscow and remove Adenauer’s insistence on talks aimed at German and Berlin reunification through free elections. “These are not negotiable proposals,” he said. “Their emptiness in this sense is generally recognized; and we should have to fall back from them promptly.” What he was willing to consider were many of Moscow’s previously unacceptable ideas, including making West Berlin an internationalized “free city” as long as it was NATO that guaranteed its future and not a foreign troop contingent including the Soviets.

Considering how much he was willing to compromise, Kennedy was disappointed by the Soviet response. Soviet aircraft increasingly buzzed U.S. planes traveling to Berlin, Khrushchev had resumed nuclear testing, and the Soviet leader again was threatening to sign an East German peace treaty. On the other hand, Khrushchev had abandoned earlier threats of war and was promising to preserve West Berlin’s independence.

One matter was certain: after having tried to put the Berlin issue on the back burner at the beginning of his presidency, Kennedy was now overwhelmed by it. Unable to get the president to focus any attention on his land conservation agenda, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall complained, “He’s imprisoned by Berlin. That’s all he thinks about. He has a restless mind, and he likes to roam over all subjects, but ever since August, Berlin has occupied him totally.”