To Move the World (4 page)

By itself, the CIA operation was foolish, naïve, and incompetently designed and managed. This was par for the course for the CIA, which had bungled one operation after another in many parts of the world. The Bay of Pigs fiasco also confirmed Kennedy’s deep mistrust of the military, which had begun with his experience in World War II. Kennedy told reporter and friend Ben Bradlee, “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”
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It also contributed to a cascading set of errors. Forced to appear tough and decisive after the very public failure, Kennedy quickly called for increased military spending and harsher measures to destabilize the Castro regime.
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These included a series of harebrained attempts to assassinate Castro, part of the larger anti-Castro strategy the CIA dubbed “Operation Mongoose.”
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As a result, both Castro and Khrushchev came to believe that Kennedy’s next gambit would be a full-fledged invasion of Cuba. That expectation contributed to the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year.

The Kennedy-Khrushchev private letters offer a remarkable interchange regarding the Bay of Pigs. The letters before the Bay of Pigs are highly congenial, the opening moves of confidence building under the tit-for-tat strategy. Khrushchev writes on November 9, 1960, that he hopes Kennedy’s election will mean that “our countries would again follow the line along which they were developing in Franklin Roosevelt’s time,” when the two countries were allies.
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He holds out the prospect of important agreements: “we are ready, for our part, to continue efforts to solve such a pressing problem as disarmament, to settle the German issue through the earliest conclusion of a peace treaty and to reach agreement on other questions.”
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Kennedy responds that “a just and lasting peace will remain a fundamental goal of this nation and a major task of its President.”
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They begin to arrange an early summit meeting.

Yet the tone cracks in Khrushchev’s letter of April 18, two days after the Cuban invasion:

“I approach you, Mr. President,” Khrushchev writes, “with an urgent call to put an end to aggression against the Republic of Cuba.”

Kennedy’s answer the same day is dreadfully maladroit. “You are under a serious misapprehension in regard to the events in Cuba,” he replies. “I have previously stated, and I repeat now, that the United States intends no military intervention in Cuba.”
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This patently false denial brings a powerful rebuke from Khrushchev four days later:

Kennedy’s denial marked the second notable U.S. presidential lie to Khrushchev in less than a year. The previous summer, the CIA had pressed Eisenhower to permit another round of U-2 spy flights over the Soviet Union. He reluctantly agreed.
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When a U-2 plane was shot down, the CIA and Eisenhower assumed that the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had been killed and the plane destroyed in the crash. They therefore publicly lied about the mission, claiming that a U.S. weather-research plane had lost its way and crashed in Soviet airspace. Khrushchev then revealed Eisenhower’s lie by producing not only the U-2 wreckage, but the live pilot as well. U.S. perfidy was exposed, and Eisenhower was forced to take responsibility. Yet this was not a simple public relations victory for Khrushchev. It was a bitter setback for Khrushchev’s concept of peaceful coexistence. It also undercut his domestic credibility, as he had initially defended Eisenhower as not responsible for the U-2 flight, and the exposure of Eisenhower’s lie seemed to give credence to the Soviet hardliners who argued that the United States could not be trusted. Khrushchev soon enough would demonstrate his capacity to lie about weighty matters as well; the Cold War was not a game played by saints. Yet the back-to-back prevarications by Eisenhower and Kennedy surely emboldened Khrushchev in his own future dissembling regarding nuclear testing and Cuba.

In a follow-up letter to Kennedy (May 16), Khrushchev acknowledges that “a certain open falling out has taken place in the relations between our countries.”
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Yet he set the ground for an upcoming June meeting with Kennedy in Vienna by emphasizing the key point he sees: the importance of a U.S.-Soviet settlement on Germany. The fate of postwar Germany had proved a constant source of tension between the two superpowers since the dawn of the Cold War, and never more so than when Kennedy took office. It is therefore crucial to revisit some of this history.

At the July 1945 Potsdam conference at the end of World War II, it was agreed that a council of the four major Allied powers (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union) would administer postwar Germany, but the “how” was left unspecified.
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In the short term, the four powers accepted that Germany would be divided into four occupation zones and that each occupying power would manage its own zone until longer-term arrangements for a unified Germany could be agreed upon. The capital city of Berlin, though falling within the Soviet zone, was also divided among the four powers. But the longer-term arrangements for Germany were never agreed upon, and relations between the West and the Soviet Union quickly deteriorated once there was no common enemy of Hitler to unite them.
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The United States, France, and the United Kingdom soon amalgamated their occupation zones into a single entity, which in 1949 became the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). The Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The failure to agree on the fate of a unified Germany sowed the seeds for many of the Cold War conflicts that followed.

Herein lay the basic dilemma. The Soviet Union—which had lost more than twenty million soldiers and civilians in World War II—feared a German resurgence, and thereby asserted harsh control over the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Not only
that, but Joseph Stalin, the brutal leader of the Soviet Union since the mid-1920s, ruthlessly created satellite states in Eastern Europe (in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere) under single-party communist rule, thereby establishing a controlling corridor from Russia all the way to the heart of Germany. To the Western powers, these actions seemed to suggest a Soviet plan to dominate all of Europe, if not the world. While U.S. leaders had initially favored deindustrializing Germany at the end of the war to prevent it from again becoming an economic and military power,
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they quickly changed their minds in the face of the perceived Soviet aggression. They instead decided to reindustrialize the western part of Germany as rapidly as possible as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and to strengthen Western Europe generally.
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The Soviet Union viewed the hardening of U.S. positions as a violation of agreements intended to prevent a long-term resurgence of German power.

It’s not hard to see where this led. As West Germany got stronger, Soviet anxieties rose. As the Soviet Union’s anxieties rose, it became more belligerent in response, and the West then became even more determined to rebuild West Germany to resist Soviet domination. This explosive dynamic continued after Kennedy’s assumption of office.

Making things even more difficult for Kennedy was the fact that Eisenhower had proved neither very attentive nor interested in the Soviet concerns vis-à-vis Germany. Eisenhower stood strongly in favor of Germany’s economic and military recovery, in part because he wanted Western Europe to defend itself so that U.S. troops could return home.
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Eisenhower liked neither the cost of stationing U.S. troops in Europe nor the long-term political commitment. Eisenhower believed that U.S. commitments should be tapered down as soon as Europe could take up the burdens of its own defense.
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And if that even meant a Western Europe with nuclear weapons, he was generally for it.

In the final years of the Eisenhower administration, in response
to the European desire for nuclear weapons, the United States and NATO—the military alliance of Western powers, formed in 1955—began floating the idea of “nuclear sharing” among the NATO countries, perhaps through a nuclear Multilateral Force (MLF). The United States saw the MLF as a way to share nuclear weapons with allies and give Europe its own deterrent without having to give any one nation full control and the power to launch a nuclear weapon unilaterally.
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This prospect, particularly of West German nuclear access, was a crucial factor in the dramatic heating up of U.S.-Soviet tensions in the lead-up to Kennedy’s presidency. This point is made forcefully by the historian Marc Trachtenberg in
A Constructed Peace
(1999), one of the most incisive and important historical analyses of this phase of the Cold War.

Kennedy did not yet have a strategy for Germany, and indeed was pressed hard by the West German leader Konrad Adenauer
not
to have one. From Adenauer’s point of view, any thaw in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union would likely come at West Germany’s expense. But Kennedy would listen to and learn from Khrushchev’s repeated and heated concerns over Germany, especially concerning Germany’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Kennedy would eventually break with Adenauer on that question, thereby paving the way to closer cooperation with the Soviet Union. But that breakthrough was still two years in the future, and dire risks were strewn on the path to success.

Berlin Redux
 

Following the Bay of Pigs debacle, it was now Khrushchev’s turn to misstep badly. With Kennedy on his back foot, Khrushchev believed that he was now in a position to pressure Kennedy into an agreement on Germany, which was Khrushchev’s primary foreign policy concern. Kennedy’s primary interest was in discussing a nuclear test ban treaty, which he felt was essential to slowing the arms race and nuclear proliferation, one of Kennedy’s most pressing concerns. The idea of a test ban treaty had been discussed for several years, but the two sides were never able to get past their disagreements on how such an agreement would be enforced.

Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev with President Kennedy at the start of the Vienna Summit (June 3, 1961).

At the Vienna Summit of June 1961, Khrushchev ensured that Germany and Berlin, rather than a test ban treaty, dominated the discussion. Khrushchev told Kennedy that the Soviet Union would recognize the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and end Western access rights to West Berlin by the end of 1961. America and its allies viewed access to West Berlin as a vital interest of the Western alliance, and so Khrushchev’s threat was an enormous provocation. If war came from this, it would come, said Khrushchev. He said that Berlin was a “running sore,” and that disarmament was “impossible as long as the Berlin problem existed.”
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Kennedy responded, “Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be a war. It will be a cold, long winter.”
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In fact, the difficult interchange brought the two leaders a little closer to a solution, though they certainly could not see it at the time. There were actually three German issues on the table, all intricately intertwined. The first was the Soviet desire for a peace treaty with Germany that would somehow protect the Soviet Union from future German aggression. The second was West Berlin, which Khrushchev considered to be “this thorn, this ulcer” within East Germany.
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Khrushchev viewed West Berlin as a staging post for Western spying and aggression against the Soviet Union, “a NATO beachhead and military base against us inside the GDR.”
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He wanted the Western troops out. The third issue involved the question of German rearmament, and especially German access to U.S. nuclear weapons. The implicit progress made in Vienna was a start in teasing apart these three issues. Kennedy would hold his ground on West Berlin, but would also recognize Khrushchev’s valid concerns about German rearmament. Kennedy made clear to Khrushchev in Vienna that he opposed “a buildup in West Germany that would constitute a threat to the Soviet Union.”
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