Berlin 1961 (66 page)

“Look,” Lightner said to the policeman by his window, “I’m sorry, but I’m going to assert my Allied right for us to enter any sector of Berlin.”

He gunned his engine.

“Get out of the way! We’re coming through!”

Lightner jerked his car forward, forcing a couple of Vopos to leap aside. However, the vehicle could negotiate the tight, concrete maze only in slow motion. So an expanded group of Vopos on foot caught up to the car and stopped him again. This time they surrounded his vehicle.

One shouted angrily: “You can wait here until morning for a Russian to show up! If he shows up even then!”

In the background, Clay had begun moving the military pieces. He had ordered forward a platoon from the 2nd Battle Group to make its way the ten miles to Checkpoint Charlie from McNair Barracks in Lichterfelde with two armored personnel carriers, closely trailed by four M48 tanks mounted with bulldozers. To direct the operation, Clay and the Berlin military commander, General Watson, had retreated to the emergency operations center, known as “the bunker,” established for just such an event in the basement of the U.S. consulate on the Clayallee. Though built initially in 1936 as a subheadquarters for the Third Reich’s Luftwaffe, the building had served as Clay’s nerve center during the Berlin Airlift and it would do so again now.

As the drama unfolded, U.S. provost marshal Lieutenant Colonel Robert Sabolyk monitored the scene at Checkpoint Charlie through binoculars from his white wooden military police shack a hundred yards away from the confrontation. With orders to keep matters under control until reinforcements arrived, the former collegiate boxer jumped into his staff car and sped forward around the first barrier, then steered wide around the second, screeching to a halt directly in front of Lightner’s Volkswagen. He nearly amputated the black-booted legs of several Vopos, who jumped back and screamed in protest.

About then, four American tanks rumbled up to the thick white-painted borderline that designated the West Berlin limits. Another MP ran from the command shack to Dorothy Lightner’s door and politely suggested she leave the immobilized VW. She refused to budge from her husband’s side.

So the MP retreated to the shack, only to return several minutes later. “I’m sorry, but General Clay
orders
Mrs. Lightner to get out,” he said.

He added in a whisper to her husband, so as not to be overheard by the Vopos: “We have a project in which we don’t want Mrs. Lightner to be involved.”

Once the MP had cleared her from the scene, two infantry squads of four men each unsheathed the bayonets of their M14 rifles and took up positions on either side of Friedrichstrasse. With the gun barrels of four U.S. tanks pointing directly at them, the Vopos pulled back. Lightner shifted into first gear and drove his VW slowly forward, flanked by the two U.S. Army squads. Having passed the last barrier and thus successfully penetrated communist territory, the platoon leader asked Lightner whether they should stop there.

“No,” the diplomat said.

It was the first time in postwar Berlin that a fully armed infantry unit from U.S. occupying forces had marched into the Soviet sector. To further establish the continued right of Allied free passage, Lightner drove two blocks into East Berlin to the next intersection, then turned the car around and started back—all the time escorted by his armed guard. With U.S. cannons trained on them, East German police held their positions.

Safely back on American ground, Lightner prepared to drive through a second time to make his point. By this time, word of the confrontation had spread across Berlin. Reporters and photographers had gathered to track each move. With his heart beating through his chest, Albert Hemsing jumped into Lightner’s passenger seat. The German-born forty-year-old public information officer had worked for the Marshall Plan’s film unit in Paris after the war, making movies to support the European reconstruction effort. But he’d never been in this sort of action adventure. Vopos would later insist his breath smelled of alcohol.

When East German police blocked Lightner’s path again, he waved out his window for the armed units to rejoin him. They escorted him through once more, and the East Germans again stood aside. In the meantime, the U.S. Mission’s political adviser, Howard Trivers, had telephoned Soviet headquarters to request that a Russian officer come to Checkpoint Charlie and set matters straight.

By the time Lightner’s VW returned from its second round-trip, a Soviet representative had arrived. Following talks with the Vopos and the Americans, the Soviet apologized that the East Germans had failed to recognize Lightner’s seniority. So Lightner drove through a third time, on this occasion trailed by a second civilian car. The Vopos stood aside again, and it seemed that the U.S. victory was complete.

The two U.S. vehicles then engaged in something of a victory lap, driving up Friedrichstrasse to Unter den Linden, East Berlin’s broad central boulevard, then turning left at the Brandenburg Gate, and then turning left again back to Friedrichstrasse. At about 10:00 p.m., a more senior Soviet official arrived, the deputy political adviser Colonel Lazarev. He apologized for the East German behavior, blaming it on the lack of facsimiles of Allied license plates from which they could judge which vehicles were to be checked. However, at the same time he angrily protested the U.S. “armed incursion” into the Soviet zone.

Lightner and his wife had missed their theater date, but Clay congratulated them on their performance. The next morning Clay crowed to the press that the “fiction is now destroyed” that it was the East Germans who were responsible for preventing Allied access to East Berlin.

His victory, however, would be a brief one. The same morning, the East German government published an official decree that it would henceforth require
all
foreigners—except Allied military men in uniform—to show ID before entering “democratic” Berlin. The East German news agency ADN condemned the Sunday-evening incident as a “border provocation” prompted, it said, by an unknown civilian (Lightner) with an unknown woman (Dorothy), later to be joined by a drunk (Hemsing).

Once East German radio had the names of the Americans involved, it beamed a broadcast in English aimed at U.S. soldiers: “It will be a long time before Minister Lightner takes his girlfriend out and tries to shack up with her in East Berlin over the weekend.”

Back in Washington, Kennedy was annoyed. The president was trying to launch negotiations with the Soviets, not provoke a new confrontation. “We didn’t send [Lightner] there to go to the opera in East Berlin,” he said, getting the event wrong and overlooking the fact that Lightner had acted according to the guidelines of his own personal representative.

At the same time, Kennedy was dealing with another problem. Just four days earlier Clay had tabled an offer to resign if he wasn’t allowed to be more effective. The president could prevent a political earthquake only by providing Clay more freedom to maneuver.

U.S. MILITARY HEADQUARTERS, WEST BERLIN
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER
18, 1961

Mounting frustration had prompted General Clay to include an offer to resign in the first personal letter he had written to President Kennedy since his return to Berlin.

National Security Advisor Bundy had warned Kennedy when he chose Clay that he was risking “another MacArthur–Truman affair,” recalling the politically damaging decision by President Truman to fire General MacArthur after the general had publicly disagreed with the president’s Korean War policy. MacArthur had wanted to bomb China at the time, and Bundy reckoned there was every chance Clay would want to be more aggressive in Berlin than Kennedy, at a time when his administration was considering making major Berlin concessions to Khrushchev.

Though in his letter Clay offered to step down more quietly than MacArthur had done, he must have known that the reasons for his departure from Berlin would almost certainly leak and then only further inflame Kennedy’s critics and more deeply dishearten Berliners.

Clay began by apologizing to the president for his letter’s length, 1,791 words, and for the fact that he hadn’t written earlier. He explained to Kennedy that he considered the many other incidents he had confronted since his arrival in Berlin not to have been worthy of presidential attention.

Above all, he wrote the president, “we must retain the confidence of West Berliners. Otherwise, the flight of capital and responsible citizens could destroy our position here, and the indicated loss of confidence in us would spread throughout the world.” While the Berliner cared little about French or British behavior, Clay argued, “if we fail, he is dismayed.”

Clay held no punches. He indirectly criticized the president’s handling of the August 13 border closure, which he believed could have been contested with little risk. “I do not believe we should have gone to war to stop the creation of the Wall,” he said, but he added, “At a minimum, we could have moved back and forth across selected places on the border with unarmed military trucks and this limited action might well have prevented the Wall.”

However, Clay was quick to blame not Kennedy but rather his Berlin underlings. “I was amazed to find that no specific action to this end was recommended here,” he said. He criticized what he considered a risk-averse culture that had evolved among his Berlin ranks. “It takes only a few disapprovals to discourage independent thinking and positive recommendations,” he said. He worried that Kennedy lacked access to more independent viewpoints like his own because even “as able a Commander as [NATO Supreme Commander Lauris] Norstad” was influenced by Allied reluctance.

Clay then came to the point: the “urgent need to stop the trespassing on our rights” by East German forces “while Soviet forces have been far in the background.” He did not like the fact that the European Command was “tossing aside lightly” his recommendations that the U.S. must answer minor incidents. He wanted the president to give him more personal authority to address such tests of American will as the East German border checks, because their sum total was more serious than Kennedy’s foreign policy advisers realized.

The general wrote with the self-assurance of a man who knew he had shaped history through the same sort of direct communication with a previous president. “If we are to react properly and promptly,” he said, “the local commander must have the authority in an emergency to act immediately with my advice and consent within the full range of the authority you have delegated to our Military Command in Europe.”

Clay wanted the president to free General Watson, the local Berlin commander, of the constraints being placed upon him by General Clarke in Heidelberg and General Norstad in Paris. While he acknowledged that the U.S. could not alter the Berlin situation militarily, he said, “We can lose Berlin if we are unwilling to take some risk in using force…. We could easily be backed into war by failing to make it clearly evident on the ground that we have reached the danger point.”

Clay defended the actions he had taken thus far, which he knew Kennedy’s advisers had opposed, particularly in freeing the Steinstücken refugees and running military patrols on the Autobahn. He insisted, “These few simple actions on our part have eased tension here and restored confidence in West Berlin.” He told the president it had to be a priority of the U.S. to defend its right of free passage across Checkpoint Charlie, not for its own sake but because West Berliners were watching. For that reason, Clay said, he was “pushing as many vehicles as possible through each day.”

Though the president had not asked him to do so, Clay then laid out a military contingency plan for Kennedy should the Soviets push back, much as he had done for Truman after the Soviet embargo: “If we are stopped on the highway [to Berlin], we must probe quickly and, I would think, from Berlin with light military strength to find out the depth of the intent [of the enemy]. If our probe is stopped by superior force and compelled to withdraw, we should resort to an immediate airlift concurrently and publicly apply economic sanction and blockade in an attempt to force Soviet action. If these steps are taken concurrently there will be no panic in West Berlin and we will gain the time for you to make the
ultimate decision
with calm and objective judgment.”

When Clay mentioned “the ultimate decision,” Kennedy would know he was speaking of nuclear conflict. Clay wrote coolly, “If our probe results in the destruction and capture of the force involved, it is of course evident that the Soviet government wants war.”

Clay closed by promising to write shorter correspondence in the future. He wrote of how honored he was to serve as Kennedy’s point man in Berlin, but added, “I realize no one knows quite what this means.” He warned Kennedy that “any failure to act positively and determinedly with me here in this capacity will be assumed to have your direct approval…. I do not believe that you sent me here to live in a vacuum and
I know that I can be of no real service if it is deemed wise to be extremely cautious in Berlin
” (italics added).

What followed was the general’s resignation offer. In his military career, Clay had gained something of a reputation for his occasional threats to step down, and in almost all of those cases it had achieved his purpose. Clay had found that a resignation offer was sometimes the only way to get his superiors’ attention.

Clay weighed each word carefully, expressing the loyalty of a soldier to his commander in chief, but questioning how he could continue to serve effectively under the existing circumstances. “I may add, too, that I did not come here to add to your problems and that I am gladly expendable. I do want you to know that I would never permit myself to be made into a controversial figure in these critical times and that if you decide, or if I find that I must report to you, that I serve no useful purpose here, I would withdraw only in a manner which would meet with your approval and would not add to the problem here.”

With that, he signed off:

With high respect,