EXTRAORDINARY PRAISE FOR FREDERICK KEMPE’S
BERLIN 1961
“As time passes and the political geography of world power mutates, it is easy to forget the most fraught and dangerous crisis of the Cold War, which brought U.S. and Soviet tanks facing each other at close range. Berlin 1961 is a gripping, well-researched, and thought-provoking book with many lessons for today.”
—Dr. Henry Kissinger
“Frederick Kempe’s compelling narrative, astute analysis, and meticulous research bring fresh insight into a crucial and perilous episode of the Cold War, bringing Kennedy and Khrushchev to life as they square off at the brink of nuclear war. His masterly telling of a scary and cautionary tale from half a century ago has the immediacy of today’s headlines.”
—Strobe Talbott, president, Brookings Institution
“History at its best. Kempe’s book masterfully dissects the Cold War’s strategically most significant East–West confrontation, and in the process significantly enlightens our understanding of the complexity of the Cold War itself.”
—Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter
“What an amazing drama this is! The showdown over Berlin in 1961 was the pivotal episode of the Cold War, far more important and illuminating than the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a clash between two fascinating leaders, Kennedy and Khrushchev, whose misreading of each other holds lessons for today. Kempe’s compelling narrative is a triumph of great writing and research.”
—Walter Isaacson, president and CEO, The Aspen Institute, and author of Einstein: His Life and Universe and Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
“An engaging, richly researched, thought-provoking book that captures the drama of, and challenges the conventional wisdom regarding, one of the Cold War’s most decisive years. Frederick Kempe combines the ‘You are there’ storytelling skills of a journalist, the analytical skills of the political scientist, and the historian’s use of declassified U.S., Soviet, and German documents to provide unique insight into the forces and individuals behind these events.”
—General Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush
“Fred Kempe has masterfully captured the dramatic dimensions of a great story that shaped the world order for twenty-eight years. Berlin 1961 is an important achievement.”
—Chuck Hagel, distinguished professor, Georgetown University, and U.S. senator, 1997–2009
“Berlin 1961 takes us to Ground Zero of the Cold War. Reading these pages, you feel as if you are standing at Checkpoint Charlie, amid the brutal tension of a divided Berlin.”
—David Ignatius, columnist, The Washington Post
“Informed…His chronology of memos and meetings dramatizes events behind closed doors…. Kempe’s history reflects balanced discernment about the creation of the Berlin Wall.”
—Booklist
“Kempe…skillfully weaves oral histories and newly declassified documents into a sweeping, exhaustive narrative…. Likely the best, most richly detailed account of the subject, this will engross serious readers of Cold War history who enjoyed W. R. Smyser’s Kennedy and the Berlin Wall but appreciate the further detail.”
—Library Journal
“Good journalistic history in the tradition of William L. Shirer and Barbara Tuchman.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A significant contribution to our understanding of the Cold War. It also will enhance public appreciation of the role of diplomats and diplomacy, because Berlin 1961 is as eminently readable as any good ‘who done it.’”
—American Diplomacy
“An engaging study of the 1961 Khrushchev/Kennedy standoff over Berlin, presenting the drama in the journalistic, anecdotal, episode-by-episode mode…a readable narrative.”
—The Weekly Standard
BERLIN 1961
KENNEDY, KHRUSHCHEV, AND THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE ON EARTH
Frederick Kempe
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2011 by Frederick Kempe.
Interior map copyright © 2011 by Jeffrey L. Ward.
Front cover photograph copyright © by Jung-ullstein bild / The Granger Collection.
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BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the G. P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover as follows:
Kempe, Frederick.
Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the most dangerous place on earth / Frederick Kempe.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-101-51502-0
1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963. 2. Berlin (Germany)—Politics and government—1945–1990. 3. Berlin Wall, Berlin, Germany, 1961–1989. 4. United States—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. 5. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—United States. I. Title.
E841.K34 2011 2010033163
943'.1550875—dc22
For Pam
Contents
Foreword by General Brent Scowcroft
Introduction: The World’s Most Dangerous Place
Berlin 1961 Map
PART I. THE PLAYERS
1. Khrushchev: Communist in a Hurry
Marta Hillers’s Story of Rape
2. Khrushchev: The Berlin Crisis Unfolds
3. Kennedy: A President’s Education
The “Sniper” Comes In from the Cold
4. Kennedy: A First Mistake
5. Ulbricht and Adenauer: Unruly Alliances
The Failed Flight of Friedrich Brandt
6. Ulbricht and Adenauer: The Tail Wags the Bear
PART II. THE GATHERING STORM
7. Springtime for Khrushchev
8. Amateur Hour
Jörn Donner Discovers the City
9. Perilous Diplomacy
10. Vienna: Little Boy Blue Meets Al Capone
11. Vienna: The Threat of War
12. Angry Summer
Marlene Schmidt, the Universe’s Most Beautiful Refugee
PART III. THE SHOWDOWN
13. “The Great Testing Place”
Ulbricht and Kurt Wismach Lock Horns
14. The Wall: Setting the Trap
15. The Wall: Desperate Days
Eberhard Bolle Lands in Prison
16. A Hero’s Homecoming
17. Nuclear Poke
r
18. Showdown at Checkpoint Charlie
Epilogue: Aftershocks
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
FOREWORD
by General Brent Scowcroft
Historians have scrutinized the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 far more deeply than they have the Berlin Crisis that preceded it by a year. For all the attention given Cuba, however, what happened in Berlin was even more decisive in shaping the era between the end of World War II in 1945 and German unification and Soviet dissolution in 1990 and 1991. It was the Berlin Wall’s rise in August 1961 that anchored the Cold War in the mutual hostility that would last for another three decades, locking us into habits, procedures, and suspicions that would fall only with that same wall on November 9, 1989.
Furthermore, there was a special intensity about that first crisis. In the words of William Kaufman, a Kennedy administration strategist who worked both Berlin and Cuba from the Pentagon, “Berlin was the worst moment of the Cold War. Although I was deeply involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis, I personally thought that the Berlin confrontation, especially after the wall went up, where you had Soviet and U.S. tanks literally facing one another with guns pointed, was a more dangerous situation. We had very clear indications mid-week of the Cuban Missile Crisis that the Russians were not really going to push us to the edge….
“You didn’t get that sense in Berlin.”
Fred Kempe’s contribution to our crucial understanding of that time is that he combines the “You are there” storytelling skills of a journalist, the analytical skills of the political scientist, and the historian’s use of declassified U.S., Soviet, and German documents to provide unique insight into the forces and individuals behind the construction of the Berlin Wall—the iconic barrier that came to symbolize the Cold War’s divisions.
History, sadly, does not reveal its alternatives. However, Kempe’s important book prompts the reader to reflect on crucial questions regarding the Berlin Crisis that raise larger issues about American presidential leadership.
Could we have ended the Cold War earlier if President John F. Kennedy had managed his relationship with Nikita Khrushchev differently? In the early hours of Kennedy’s administration, Khrushchev released captured U.S. airmen, published Kennedy’s unedited inaugural address in Soviet newspapers, and reduced state jamming of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty broadcasts. Could Kennedy have more fully tested the possibilities behind Khrushchev’s conciliatory gestures? If Kennedy had handled Khrushchev differently at the Vienna Summit in June 1961, would the Soviet leader have balked at the notion of closing Berlin’s border two months later?
Or, on the other hand, as some have suggested: Is it possible that we should regard Kennedy’s acquiescence to the communist construction of the Wall in August 1961 as the best of bad alternatives in a dangerous world? Kennedy famously said he preferred a wall to a war—and there was reason for him to believe that was the choice that confronted him.
These are not small matters.
Another question raised by Kempe’s compelling narrative is whether we, in the richness of time, will look at the Cold War in a more nuanced manner than we do now. The Cold War was not simply a standoff against a Soviet Union bent on world domination; it was also driven by a series of self-reinforcing misinterpretations of what the other side was up to. Berlin 1961’s account of the miscommunication and misunderstandings between the United States and the Soviet Union at that crucial time makes one wonder whether we might have produced better outcomes if we had more clearly understood the domestic, economic, political, and other forces compelling our rival’s behavior.
These are speculative questions no one can answer with any certainty. Yet raising them in the context of Berlin 1961 is as relevant to navigating the future as it is to understanding the past. In the pages that follow are clues and cautions that are particularly timely during the first term of another young and relatively inexperienced commander in chief, President Barack Obama, who, like Kennedy, came to the White House with a foreign policy agenda aimed at engaging our adversaries more skillfully and understanding more reliably what lurks beneath seemingly intractable conflicts in order that we can better solve them.
I know something of such issues and challenges myself from our days dealing with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev when I served as national security advisor in President George H. W. Bush’s White House.
The two U.S. presidents who dealt with Gorbachev, Bush and Ronald Reagan, were very different men. However, both understood that nothing was more important in trying to end the Cold War than the ways in which they engaged their Soviet counterpart.
Despite labeling the Soviets “the evil empire,” President Reagan engaged in five summit meetings with Gorbachev and worked on countless concrete agreements that helped build confidence between the two countries. As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and we worked to bring about German unification, President Bush resisted all temptations to gloat or breast-beat. He consistently sent the message that both sides were winning if the Cold War was ending. Through exercising such moderation in his public statements, he also avoided giving Gorbachev’s enemies in the Soviet Politburo any excuse to reverse his policies or remove him from office.
One can do no more than speculate on how either a tougher or a more conciliatory Kennedy might have altered history in the Berlin of 1961. What is indisputable is that the events of that year put the Cold War back into a deep freeze at a time when Khrushchev’s break with Stalinism might have presented us with the first possibilities of a thaw.
Berlin 1961 walks us through those events in striking new ways, exploring the fundamental natures of the two primary countries, the U.S. and the Soviet Union; the domestic political environments of each; and the crucial roles played by the personal characters of their leaders; and then weaving it all into the equally important stories of how those factors played out in the countries of East Germany and West Germany themselves.
It is an engaging, richly researched, thought-provoking book that captures the drama of the time in its colorful Berlin setting, and challenges the conventional wisdom regarding one of the Cold War’s most decisive years.
INTRODUCTION:
THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS PLACE
Who possesses Berlin possesses Germany, and whoever controls Germany controls Europe.
Vladimir Lenin, quoting Karl Marx
Berlin is the most dangerous place in the world. The USSR wants to perform an operation on this soft spot to eliminate this thorn, this ulcer.
Premier Nikita Khrushchev to President John F. Kennedy at their Vienna Summit, June 1961
CHECKPOINT CHARLIE, BERLIN
9:00 P.M., FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1961
There had not been a more perilous moment in the Cold War.
Undaunted by the damp, dangerous night, Berliners gathered on the narrow side streets opening up onto Checkpoint Charlie. The next morning’s newspapers would estimate their numbers at about five hundred, a considerable crowd considering that they might have been witnesses to the first shots of a thermonuclear war. After six days of escalating tensions, American M48 Patton and Soviet T-54 tanks were facing off just a stone’s throw from one another—ten on each side, with roughly two dozen more in nearby reserve.
Armed with only umbrellas and hooded jackets against the drizzle, the crowd pushed forward to find the best vantage points toward the front of Friedrichstrasse, Mauerstrasse, and Zimmerstrasse, the three streets whose junction was Berlin’s primary East–West crossing point for Allied military and civilian vehicles and pedestrians. Some of them stood on rooftops. Others, including a gaggle of news photographers and reporters, leaned out of windows from low-rise buildings still shell-pocked from wartime bombings.
Reporting from the scene, CBS News reporter Daniel Schorr, with all the drama of his authoritative baritone, declared to his radio listeners, “The Cold War took on a new dimension tonight when American and Russ
ian fighting men stood arrayed against each other for the first time in history. Until now, the East–West conflict had been waged through proxies—German and other. But tonight, the superpowers confronted each other in the form of ten low-slung Russian tanks facing American Patton tanks, less than a hundred yards apart….”
The situation was sufficiently tense that when an American army helicopter flew low overhead to survey the battleground, an East German policeman barked in panic, “Get down!” and an obedient crowd dived facedown on the ground. At other moments an odd calm reigned. “The scene is weird, almost incredible,” said Schorr. “The American GIs stand by their tanks, eating from mess kits, while West Berliners gape from behind a rope barrier and buy pretzel sticks, the scene lit by floodlights from the eastern side while the Soviet tanks are almost invisible in the dark of the East.”
Rumors swirled through the crowd that war was upon Berlin. Es geht los um drei Uhr (“It will begin at three in the morning”). A West Berlin radio station reported that retired General Lucius Clay, President Kennedy’s new special representative in Berlin, was swaggering toward the border Hollywood-style to direct the first shots personally. Another story spread that the U.S. military police commander at Checkpoint Charlie had slugged an East German counterpart, and that both sides were aching for a gunfight. Still another account had it that entire Soviet companies were marching toward Berlin to end the city’s freedom once and for all. Berliners as a breed were drawn to gossip even in the worst of times. Given that most of those in the crowd had experienced one if not two world wars, they reckoned just about anything could happen.
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