During their third debate on October 13, Frank McGee of NBC News asked both candidates whether they would be willing to take military action to defend Berlin. Kennedy responded with his clearest statement of the campaign on Berlin: “Mr. McGee, we have a contractual right to be in Berlin coming out of the conversations at Potsdam and of World War II that has been reinforced by direct commitments of the President of the United States. It’s been reinforced by a number of other nations under NATO…. It is a commitment that we have to meet if we are going to protect the security of Western Europe, and therefore on this question I don’t think there is any doubt in the mind of any American. I hope there is not any doubt in the mind of any member of the community of West Berlin. I’m sure there isn’t any doubt in the mind of the Russians. We will meet our commitments to maintain the freedom and independence of West Berlin.”
For all Kennedy’s apparent conviction, Khrushchev sensed the makings of compromise. Kennedy talked of U.S. contractual rights in Berlin but not of moral responsibility. He wasn’t sounding the usual Republican clarion call to free captive nations. He wasn’t even suggesting that freedom should spread across the city’s border to East Berlin. He had spoken of West Berlin and of West Berlin alone. Kennedy was talking about Berlin as a technical and legal matter, points that could be negotiated.
Before Khrushchev could test Kennedy, however, he had to put his communist house in order and neutralize rising challenges on two fronts—China and East Germany.
MOSCOW
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1960
It was understandable that at first the West overlooked the importance of the world’s largest-ever meeting of communist leaders, given that it was characterized primarily by two weeks of mind-numbing and redundant speeches from eighty-one party delegations from around the world. Behind the scenes, however, Khrushchev was working to neutralize the challenge China’s Mao Tse-tung was mounting to his leadership of world communism—and to gain support within the party for a new diplomatic effort with President-elect Kennedy.
Soviet foreign policy strategists saw their two priorities as the Sino–Soviet alliance and peaceful coexistence with the West, very much in that order. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had argued it would be a mistake to lose Beijing without gaining anything reliable from the U.S., yet that was precisely what had happened during 1960. The Soviet embassy in Beijing reported to Khrushchev that the Chinese were using the aftermath of the U-2 incident and the Paris Summit failure to oppose Khrushchev’s foreign policy “for the first time directly and openly.”
Mao opposed Khrushchev’s foreign policy of peaceful coexistence with the West and sought a course of more intense confrontation both over Berlin and across the developing world. The Chinese delegation had come to Moscow determined to gain increased Kremlin support for national liberation movements and assorted leftists—from Asia and Africa to Latin America.
Now that relations had broken down with the U.S., a number of Soviet officials privately argued that Khrushchev should make a bolder strategic bet on the Chinese. What only a few of them knew, however, was that the personal animosity that had grown between Khrushchev and Mao would make that impossible.
By Khrushchev’s own account, he had disliked Mao since his first visit in 1954 for the fifth anniversary of the People’s Republic. Khrushchev had complained about everything from the endless rounds of green tea (“I can’t take that much liquid”) to what he regarded as his host’s ingratiating, insincere courtesy. Mao was so uncooperative during their talks that Khrushchev had concluded upon returning to Moscow, “Conflict with China is inevitable.”
When a year later West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer raised concerns with Khrushchev about an emerging Sino-Soviet alliance, Khrushchev dismissed that prospect and pointed to his own concerns about China. “Think of it,” he had said. “Already six hundred million of them and every year twelve million more…. We have to do something for our people’s standard of living, we have to arm like the Americans, [and] we have to give all the time to the Chinese who suck our blood like leeches.”
Mao had shocked Khrushchev with his readiness for war with the U.S., irrespective of the devastation it might bring. Because the Chinese and Soviets together had a vastly greater population, Mao had argued to Khrushchev that they would emerge victorious. “No matter what kind of war breaks out—conventional or thermonuclear—we’ll win,” he had told Khrushchev. “We may lose more than three hundred million people. So what? War is war.” Using what the Soviet leader considered the crudest possible term for sexual intercourse, Mao told Khrushchev the Chinese would simply produce more babies than ever before to replace the dead. Khrushchev came to consider Mao “a lunatic on a throne.”
Khrushchev’s 1956 repudiation of Stalin and of his personality cult had strained the relationship further. “They understood the implications for themselves,” Khrushchev said of the Chinese. “Stalin was exposed and condemned at the Congress for having had hundreds of thousands of people shot and for his abuse of power. Mao Tse-tung was following in Stalin’s footsteps.”
The downward spiral in relations accelerated in June 1959 when Khrushchev reneged on a pledge to give the Chinese a sample atomic bomb while at the same time moving to improve relations with the Americans. Mao told fellow party leaders that Khrushchev was abandoning communism to make pacts with the devil.
Khrushchev further strained ties when he returned to China shortly after his 1959 U.S. trip to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic. Instead of simply praising Mao’s revolution, Khrushchev used a state banquet as well to congratulate himself for reducing world tensions through the “Camp David spirit” that he had created with Eisenhower.
On the same trip, Mao blew a cloud of cigarette smoke in Khrushchev’s face while he talked—though he knew the Soviet leader hated nothing more—and mocked him for what he called disorganized rambling. Mao’s efforts to humiliate Khrushchev reached their low point at an outdoor pool where he took him for further discussions. The champion swimmer Mao dived in the deep end and performed laps gracefully while Khrushchev floundered in the shallows with the help of a life ring tossed in by Chinese aides. On the drive home from the pool, Mao told his physician that he had so tormented Khrushchev it was like “sticking a needle up his ass.”
Khrushchev knew he had been set up: “The interpreter is translating, and I can’t answer as I should. It was Mao’s way of putting himself in an advantageous position. Well, I got sick of it. All the while I was swimming, I was thinking, ‘The hell with you.’”
The first sign of how much uglier matters would get between Mao and Khrushchev had come five months earlier, on June 20, 1960, in Bucharest, where the Romanians had hosted fifty-one national communist delegations for their 3rd Party Congress. Just two days before the gathering, Khrushchev had announced that he would attend after failing to bridge differences with a Chinese delegation that had visited Moscow en route to the Romanian capital. His participation turned an insignificant, provincial party meeting into the most open warfare yet between leaders of the two most powerful communist states. To prepare the ground, Boris Ponomarev, chief of the International Department of the Soviet Central Committee, had circulated Moscow’s case against Mao’s “misjudgment of the current global situation” in the form of an eighty-one-page “Letter of Information” for Congress delegates. In it, Khrushchev explained his intention to continue his disputed course of peaceful coexistence with the new U.S. president.
With Mao absent from Bucharest, his counterthrust was delivered by Peng Zhen, the head of the Chinese delegation and a legendary communist who had guided resistance to Japanese occupation and ultimately the communist capture of Beijing in 1948.* Peng stunned delegates with the fierceness of his unprecedented attack on Khrushchev, which he supported by circulating copies of a lengthy correspondence the Soviet leader had sent to Mao that year. The Soviet leader’s letter shocked delegates in two respects: the crude language with which Khrushchev spewed
venom at Mao, and the Chinese breach of confidentiality in sharing the private communication with others.
Khrushchev turned as vicious as veteran delegates had ever seen him in a final, closed session. He attacked the absent Mao as “a Buddha who gets his theory out of his nose” and for being “oblivious of any interests other than his own.”
Peng shot back that it was now clear Khrushchev had organized the Bucharest meeting only to attack China. He said the Soviet leader had no foreign policy except to “blow hot then cold toward the imperialist powers.”
Khrushchev was livid. In a furious, impulsive froth, he issued overnight orders that would undo Soviet economic, diplomatic, and intelligence-gathering interests in China that had taken years to establish. “Within the short span of a month,” he decreed, he would withdraw 1,390 Soviet technical advisers, scrapping 257 scientific and technical cooperation projects, and discontinuing work on 343 expert contracts and subcontracts. Dozens of Chinese research and construction projects came to a stop, as did factory and mining projects that had begun trial production.
Despite all that, the Bucharest communiqué had been crafted to carefully hide from the West the truth about the head-on collision of communism’s leaders. That would be harder to conceal at the November follow-on meeting in Moscow, which included many of the same delegates but was far larger and at a higher level.
Khrushchev’s intense lobbying before the meeting and cajoling during the conference kept the Chinese in check. Only a dozen country delegations among the eighty-one sided with China’s objections to Khrushchev’s course of liberalizing communism at home and peaceful coexistence abroad. Still, even that level of opposition to Soviet rule was unprecedented.
With Mao in Beijing, Khrushchev and Chinese General Party Secretary Deng Xiaoping locked horns behind closed doors at the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall. Khrushchev called Mao a “megalomaniac warmonger.” He said Mao wanted “someone you can piss on…. If you want Stalin that badly, you can have him—cadaver, coffin, and all!”
Deng attacked the Soviet leader’s speech, saying, “Khrushchev had evidently been talking without knowing what he was saying, as he did all too frequently.” It was an unprecedented personal insult to the communist movement’s acknowledged leader on his own turf. Mao’s new ally, the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha, made the most vicious of all the speeches, saying Khrushchev had blackmailed Albania and was trying to starve his country into submission for remaining true to Stalin.
In the end, the Soviets and the Chinese negotiated a ceasefire. The Chinese had been surprised by the support the Soviet leader could still muster and retreated, having seen the futility of splitting the communist movement at such a crucial moment. The Chinese reluctantly accepted Khrushchev’s notion of peaceful coexistence with the West in exchange for the Soviet leader’s agreement to increase support for capitalism’s opponents across the developing world.
The Soviets would resume assistance to China and thus keep construction work going on 66 of the 155 unfinished industrial projects they had begun. However, Mao didn’t get what he most wanted: high-end collaboration on military technology. Mao’s interpreter Yan Mingfu viewed the agreement as only “a temporary armistice. In the long run, events were already out of control.”
With the Chinese temporarily in check, however, Khrushchev moved to protect his East German flank.
THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1960
Ulbricht sat forward and erect in his chair, listening skeptically as Khrushchev briefed him on his strategy for handling Kennedy and Berlin in 1961. The East German leader had peppered Khrushchev with three letters since October, each increasingly critical of Khrushchev’s failure to counter his country’s growing economic difficulties and refugee bleed with a more determined response.
Having given up hope that Khrushchev would act on Berlin at any point soon, Ulbricht had begun to act unilaterally to tighten his control over Berlin. For the first time, East Germany was requiring that diplomats accredited to West Germany seek permission from East German authorities to enter East Berlin or East Germany—and in one high-profile incident had turned back Walter “Red” Dowling, the U.S. ambassador to West Germany. The East German moves directly contradicted Soviet efforts to expand diplomatic and economic contacts with West Berlin and West Germany. So on October 24, Khrushchev had angrily ordered Ulbricht to reverse the new border regime. Ulbricht had reluctantly complied, but tensions between the two men continued to grow.
The Soviet ambassador in East Berlin, Mikhail Pervukhin, complained to Khrushchev and Foreign Minister Gromyko that Ulbricht was disregarding Kremlin directives with ever greater frequency. A second secretary in the Soviet embassy, A. P. Kazennov, cabled his bosses in Moscow a warning that the East Germans might shut down travel across the border altogether to stop the increased refugee flow. Pervukhin reported to Moscow that a host of Ulbricht measures limiting movement and economic interaction between the two parts of the city had demonstrated the East German leader’s “inflexibility.”
Ulbricht had created a new National Defense Council to better defend his country’s security, and he had named himself to chair it. On October 19, the new council discussed potential measures to seal the Berlin border through which so many refugees were flowing. Though the West considered Ulbricht a Soviet puppet, it was increasingly the East German leader who was trying to pull Moscow’s strings.
In his most recent letter on November 22, Ulbricht had complained to Khrushchev that the Soviets were sitting on their hands while his economy was crumbling, refugees were fleeing, West Berlin freedom was becoming an international cause célèbre, and West Berlin factories were supplying the West German defense industry. He told Khrushchev that Moscow must change course “after years of tolerating an unclear situation.” Waiting to act on Berlin until after Khrushchev could organize a summit with Kennedy, Ulbricht argued, simply played into American hands.
Khrushchev assured a skeptical Ulbricht that he would force the Berlin issue early in the Kennedy administration. What he wanted was not another four-power summit, he said, but a one-on-one meeting with Kennedy where he could more effectively achieve his ends. He told Ulbricht he would resort to another ultimatum at an early stage if Kennedy showed no willingness to negotiate a reasonable agreement in the first months of his administration.
Though Ulbricht remained distrustful, he was heartened by Khrushchev’s declaration of determination to force the Berlin issue so early. At the same time, the East German leader warned Khrushchev that his repeated promises of action on Berlin were losing credibility. “Among our population,” he told Khrushchev, “there is already a mood taking shape where they say, ‘You [Khrushchev] only talk about a peace treaty, but don’t do anything about it.’ We have to be careful.” The East German client was lecturing his Soviet master.
Ulbricht wanted Khrushchev to know that time was running out. “The situation in Berlin has become complicated, not in our favor,” he said. He told Khrushchev that West Berlin’s economy was rapidly growing stronger, illustrated by the fact that some 50,000 East Berliners crossed the border each day to work for the West’s higher wages. The tension in the city was growing in rough proportion to the widening gap in living standards between East and West.
“We still have not taken corresponding countermeasures,” Ulbricht complained. He said he was also losing the battle for the minds of the intelligentsia, a great number of whom were leaving as refugees. Ulbricht told Khrushchev he couldn’t compete because West Berlin teachers earned some 200 to 300 marks more a month than teachers in the East, and doctors earned twice the Eastern salaries. He didn’t have the means to match such salaries, and lacked the ability to produce sufficient consumer goods—even if he could provide East Germans with the money to buy them.
Khrushchev promised Ulbricht further economic assistance.
The Soviet leader shrugged. Perhaps he would have to put Soviet rockets on military alert as he maneuvered to alter
Berlin’s status, but he was confident the West would not start a war over the city’s freedom. “Luckily, our adversaries still haven’t gone crazy; they still think and their nerves still aren’t bad.” If Kennedy would not negotiate, Khrushchev told Ulbricht, he would move forward unilaterally, “and let them see their defeat.”
With an exasperated sigh, Khrushchev told Ulbricht, “We must be finished with this situation sometime.”
3
KENNEDY: A PRESIDENT’S EDUCATION
We can live with the status quo in Berlin but can take no real initiative to change it for the better. To a greater or lesser degree, the Soviets and East Germans can, whenever they are willing to assume the political consequences, change it for the worse.
Martin Hillenbrand, State Department chief of German affairs, transition memo to President Kennedy, January 1961
So let us begin anew, remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof.
President Kennedy, inaugural address, January 20, 1961
OVAL OFFICE, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
THURSDAY MORNING, JANUARY 19, 1961
The oldest president in U.S. history reckoned it was time to introduce the youngest man ever elected to the office to the most fearsome part of the job. It was Inauguration Eve, and in less than twenty-four hours, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, age seventy, would hand off America’s nuclear football to Senator John F. Kennedy, age forty-three, transferring to him the most destructive capability any single country had ever possessed.
Berlin 1961 Page 7