Berlin 1961

by Frederick Kempe

  And he would have it at a time when Eisenhower feared that miscalculation over numerous U.S.–Soviet flashpoints around the world, the most sensitive of them all being Berlin, could trigger a nuclear exchange. So Eisenhower planned to take Kennedy aside for a private chat on how such a war would be conducted, a session he would close with a memorable bit of show-and-tell using the paraphernalia of the world’s most powerful individual.

  Eisenhower worried about Kennedy’s readiness for such responsibility. Among friends, he dismissed Kennedy as “Little Boy Blue” or “that young whippersnapper” when he wasn’t mocking him as “that young genius.” As Supreme Commander of all Allied forces in Europe during the last two years of World War II, Eisenhower had overseen the invasion and occupation of France and Germany. As a Navy lieutenant, Kennedy had piloted nothing more significant than a PT boat, a torpedo-bearing vessel so small that its squadrons were called “mosquito fleets.”

  It was true; Kennedy had been decorated as a war hero after saving the lives of eleven crew members, but only after he had inexplicably allowed his PT-109 to be rammed by a lumbering Japanese destroyer. Eisenhower’s military friends didn’t buy the “dark-of-night, fog-of-war” explanation, and instead suspected Kennedy of negligence, though he was spared an investigation.

  Eisenhower doubted young Kennedy ever would have achieved the presidency without his father Joe’s deep pockets and insatiable parental ambition. During the war, Joe Sr. had tasked his cousin Joe Kane, a Boston political insider, to game the electoral viability of both his eldest son Joe and Jack. It also was his father who placed the story of Jack’s bravery with author and family friend John Hersey. Its publication in Reader’s Digest and then the New Yorker helped launch Jack’s political career. A year after Jack’s anointment as a hero, Joe Jr. died in action while piloting an experimental, high-risk bombing mission. He was supposed to have ejected from an explosive-laden B-24 Liberator before the plane, now a guided missile, continued by remote control toward a German V-bomb base—but it detonated prematurely. Those who knew the family best wondered if his death hadn’t ultimately been the result of the sibling rivalry their father had nurtured over the years. A reckless gamble to outdo his younger brother may have cost Joe Jr. his life.

  On the cold, overcast morning, Kennedy pulled up to the White House at 8:57, after an eight-minute drive from his Georgetown home. It was a rare show of punctuality for the habitually tardy Kennedy. The morning newspapers were sprinkled with Kennedy family biographies and artists’ renderings of Cabinet wives’ elegant ball gowns. The dowdy Eisenhower era was over. On a more serious note, General Thomas S. Power, chief of the Strategic Air Command, announced that for the first time the U.S. would conduct round-the-clock nuclear-armed bomber flights to keep America in a constant state of readiness against surprise attack.

  Ahead of the meeting, Kennedy’s transition chief, legendary Washington lawyer Clark Clifford, had sent Eisenhower’s people a list of issues that Kennedy wished to discuss, since they might bite him during his first days in office: Laos; Algeria; the Congo; Cuba; the Dominican Republic; Berlin; disarmament and nuclear test talks; basic economic, fiscal, and monetary policies; and “an appraisal of war requirements versus capabilities.”

  That last point was Kennedy’s shorthand for an issue that had come to occupy him more the closer he got to occupying the Oval Office: “How would I fight a nuclear war, if it comes to that.” He wasn’t at all certain he or the American people—the voters required for his reelection—would be willing to deliver on solemn U.S. commitments to defend Berlin if those commitments required the risk of a nuclear war that could cost millions of American lives.

  After their first transition meeting on December 6, Eisenhower had revised some of his negative views of Kennedy. Eisenhower told Democratic political operative George E. Allen, a Clifford friend, that he had been “misinformed and mistaken about this young man. He’s one of the ablest, brightest minds I’ve ever come across.” Though still uneasy about Kennedy’s youth and lack of experience, Eisenhower had been comforted by Kennedy’s grasp of the issues he would be facing.

  Kennedy had been less taken with “Ike,” whom he referred to among friends as “that old asshole.” He told his younger brother Bobby, who was to become his new attorney general, that he had found the outgoing president to be intellectually ponderous and inadequately informed about issues he should have known intimately.

  Kennedy believed the Eisenhower administration had accomplished little of consequence, having treaded water in a dangerous riptide of history that could pull the U.S. under. The most obvious example was the festering problem of Berlin. He was designing his presidency for greater accomplishment, taking as his role models Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. In contrasting Eisenhower with Kennedy, French Ambassador Hervé Alphand saw the president-elect as a man who had “an enormous memory of facts, of figures, of history, he had complete knowledge of the problems he had to discuss…a will to achieve for his country and for the world a great design, to be, in other words, a great President.”

  There were two great obstacles to his quest for greatness: his lack of any clear mandate after the narrowest electoral victory since 1886, and the fact that Lincoln and Roosevelt had found their place in history through war, a horrifying prospect to be avoided, since these days that could mean a nuclear holocaust.

  Kennedy was perplexed that he had been elected with only a fraction less than 50 percent of the vote, over a man like Nixon, whom he considered so personally unappealing. “How did I manage to beat a guy like this by only a hundred thousand votes?” he complained to friend Kenneth O’Donnell, who would become a White House aide.

  And his coattails had been short. Though the Democrats had kept their commanding majorities in Congress, they had lost one Senate seat and twenty House seats. The Southern Democrats, who had gained the most, would form a caucus with the Republicans in favor of a hard line toward the Soviets and Berlin. Kennedy likely would not have won at all had he not in the campaign been more hawkish toward Moscow than Nixon. To further burnish his conservative anti-Soviet credentials, and perhaps to prevent release of damaging intelligence about his past, Kennedy had also made the unconventional decision to keep in office Eisenhower’s CIA and FBI directors, Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover. A curious similarity between Kennedy and Khrushchev was emerging: both were being coaxed by their domestic constituencies more toward confrontation than conciliation.

  His meager margin over Nixon made Kennedy all the more keen to observe Eisenhower that day, figuring he could learn a great deal from the calm and reassuring manner that had won the outgoing president two terms and such widespread public affection. Kennedy would have to build his personal popularity as quickly as possible to take on all the issues in front of him.

  During his transition briefings on nuclear strategy, nothing concerned Kennedy more than the fact that Eisenhower had left him such limited and inflexible war-fighting options. Should the Soviets overrun Berlin, Kennedy had no alternative to either a conventional conflict that the Soviets invariably would win or an all-out atomic exchange that he and America’s allies would be reluctant to fight. For that reason, it would have seemed natural for Berlin contingencies to have been at the top of Kennedy’s agenda that morning.

  Instead, the two teams focused far greater attention on the raging conflict in Laos and the growing danger that the Southeast Asian country could fall into communist hands as the first of multiple dominoes. Though the crisis in Berlin was of greater significance, Kennedy had been told time and again that that situation was a frozen conflict without a foreseeable solution, and thus his initial energies were best spent on other matters.

  A transition document prepared by the Eisenhower team for Kennedy warned the new president—a man who prided himself on big thinking—that it was the small issues he had to watch out for regarding Berlin, everything from detailed agreements ensuring unfettered travel to and from West Berlin to a host of arcane
practices under four-power agreements that protected West Berliners’ rights and Allied presence.

  “Current Soviet tactics,” the memo said, “are to seek to win Berlin by whittling away at the Western position to make it hard for us to demonstrate that the real issue in each minor incident is the survival of free Berlin. Our immediate problem is to counter these ‘salami tactics.’…We have tried in every way possible to convince the Soviets that as a last resort we would fight for Berlin.” The paper warned the president-elect that he would face an early effort by Khrushchev to revive Berlin talks, with the aim of gaining the withdrawal of Western troops from the city.

  However, Eisenhower’s team had no good advice for Kennedy about how he could more effectively deal with all this, aside from simply standing his ground. “No one has yet been able to devise an acceptable and negotiable formula to solve the Berlin problem separate from a solution for Germany as a whole,” the transition document said. For the moment, the U.S. position was that Germany should someday be unified through free elections across West and East Germany—and no one anticipated that happening at any point soon, if at all. Hence, the memo said, “the principal Western tactic has been to gain time and demonstrate determination to protect West Berlin, while seeking a basis for solution. The problem is increasingly one of convincing the USSR that the Western Powers have the will and the means to maintain their position.”

  Martin Hillenbrand, the director of the State Department’s Office of German Affairs, put it more sharply in his own transition memo. He led a Berlin task force established by Eisenhower after Khrushchev’s 1958 Berlin ultimatum, and it met almost daily on issues large and small. It included representatives of most agencies of the U.S. government, as well as the French, British, and German ambassadors.

  “We can live with the status quo in Berlin but can take no real initiative to change it for the better,” he wrote. “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…. However impelling the urge to find some new approach to the problem, the ineluctable facts of the situation strictly limit the practical courses of actions open to the West.”

  What Kennedy was hearing from multiple sources was that the stirring message of change that had gotten him elected didn’t apply to Berlin, where his advisers were asking him to defend an unsatisfying status quo. It went against all his instincts, and his promises to the electorate to bring creativity to the problems the Eisenhower administration had failed to address. After weighing his options, Kennedy elected to put Berlin on a back burner while he addressed issues where it seemed he could find quicker agreement.

  So Kennedy’s priority with Moscow would be the pursuit of nuclear test ban talks, which he saw as a confidence-building measure to warm up the chilly U.S.–Soviet relationship. Kennedy’s logic was that once he had improved the overall tone of relations through arms negotiations, he could then return to the more intractable matter of Berlin. That would give rise, however, to what would become the first and greatest point of disagreement between Kennedy and Khrushchev—the pace and priority of negotiating a Berlin solution.

  Even before he entered the White House, Kennedy was learning that the reality of dealing with Berlin as a sitting president was a world away from the hard-line rhetoric he had employed as a senator and presidential candidate. In February 1959, Kennedy had appealed to the Eisenhower administration to do more to prepare America for the “extremely serious” prospect of an armed showdown over West Berlin’s freedom.

  The following August, while putting pieces in place for his presidential run, Kennedy had declared himself prepared to use the atomic bomb to defend Berlin, and he accused the Soviets of trying to push the Americans out of Germany. “Our position in Europe is worth a nuclear war because if you are driven from Berlin, you are driven from Germany,” he said in a television interview in Milwaukee. “And if you are driven from Europe, you are driven from Asia and Africa, and then our time will come next…. You have to indicate your willingness to go to the ultimate weapon.”

  In an article published by the Hearst newspapers within hours of his victory at the Democratic National Convention in June 1960, Kennedy had written, “The next President must make it clear to Khrushchev that there will be no appeasement—no sacrifice of the freedom of the people of Berlin, no surrender of vital principle.”

  Yet “indicating willingness” in Milwaukee as a barnstorming senator and pledging “no appeasement” as a nominated candidate was a long way from nuclear weapons use as president. And Soviet nuclear capabilities were improving—while Moscow’s conventional superiority around Berlin remained overpowering.

  The president had only 5,000 troops in West Berlin, with 4,000 British and 2,000 French—so 11,000 Allied troops in all—arrayed against CIA estimates of some 350,000 Soviet troops either inside East Germany or within striking distance of Berlin.

  The last National Intelligence Estimate—the authoritative assessment from the U.S. intelligence community—that had been done on Soviet capabilities spoke with worry about shifting strategic trends that could undermine the U.S. position in Berlin by the end of Kennedy’s first term. It predicted a Soviet emergence from strategic inequality by 1965 primarily through the buildup of their intercontinental ballistic missile force and nuclear defense systems. It said the Soviets would then be emboldened to challenge the West in Berlin and elsewhere around the world.

  The CIA document warned Kennedy about the mercurial nature of Khrushchev, who would use “alteration of pressure and accommodation as the regular pattern of Soviet behavior.” It predicted that Khrushchev would play the role of suitor in the early days of the Kennedy administration, but that if that failed, he would “resort to intensified pressure and threats in an attempt to force the West into high-level negotiations under more favorable conditions.”

  So, with Berlin on hold, Eisenhower briefed Kennedy more deeply on Laos. A three-way civil war between Pathet Lao communists, pro-Western royalists, and neutralists had raised the possibility of communist takeover. The danger was clear: Kennedy’s first weeks in office could be spent on a military engagement in a landlocked, tiny, impoverished country about which he cared little. The last thing Kennedy wanted was to send troops to Laos as his first foreign policy initiative. He would have preferred it if the Eisenhower administration had dealt with the issue before it left office. But as it had not done so, Kennedy wanted to know Eisenhower’s thinking and preparations for military response.

  Eisenhower portrayed Laos as “the cork in the bottle,” a place where he felt the U.S. should intervene, even unilaterally, rather than accept a communist victory that could spread a contagion across Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. “This is one of the problems I’m leaving you that I’m not happy about,” Eisenhower apologized. “We may have to fight.”

  Kennedy was struck by Eisenhower’s relaxed manner as he discussed war scenarios. Nothing brought that home more than Eisenhower’s fifty-minute private tutorial for the incoming president on nuclear weapons use. Eisenhower’s personal effects had mostly been removed from the Oval Office into which he brought Kennedy. Some boxes lay stacked in corners, and the carpet had golf cleat damage from Eisenhower’s putting sessions.

  Eisenhower briefed Kennedy on issues ranging from running covert operations to the kind of emergency procedures that were the commander in chief’s personal domain: how to respond to immediate attack and authorize atomic weapons use. Eisenhower showed Kennedy how to work the code-book and manipulate the computer device in its satchel that would launch a nuclear attack—the so-called football that was always near the president.

  It was the most intimate exchange possible between an outgoing and incoming president in the nuclear age.

  Eisenhower made no reference to Kennedy’s mistaken statements during the campaign that the outgoing president had allowed a dangerous “missile gap” to emerge in favor of the Soviets. Eisenhower hadn’t
corrected Kennedy at the time, much to candidate Nixon’s consternation, instead preferring to protect national security secrets and avoid giving the Kremlin an excuse to arm up even faster.

  Now, however, Eisenhower calmly assured Kennedy that the U.S. still enjoyed an overwhelming military advantage, particularly due to submarines armed with nuclear-tipped missiles. “You have an invaluable asset in Polaris,” he said. “It is invulnerable.”

  The Polaris could reach the Soviet Union from undetectable positions in various oceans, he said. Because of this, Eisenhower thought the Soviets would have to be mad to risk nuclear war. The downside, Eisenhower said, was they just might be mad. If you judged Soviet leaders by the brutality they had used against their own people and enemies during and after World War II, Eisenhower reckoned that nuclear inferiority might not stop fanatical communists from attacking under the right circumstances. Eisenhower spoke of the Russians more as animals to be tamed than as partners with whom one could negotiate.

  Like a child showing off a favorite toy to a new friend, Eisenhower then ended his Kennedy tutorial with a demonstration of how quickly the president could be whisked from Washington by helicopter in case of emergency.

  “Watch this,” he said.

  Eisenhower picked up a special phone, dialed a number, and said simply, “Opal Drill Three.” He put down the phone and smiled, asking his visitor to consult his watch.

  In less than five minutes, a Marine Corps chopper landed on the White House lawn. It whirred on the ground just a short stroll from where they sat. As Eisenhower took Kennedy back into the Cabinet Room, where their top people remained assembled, he joked, “I’ve shown my friend here how to get out in a hurry.”

  In the presence of their staffs, Eisenhower warned Kennedy that presidential authority would not always be such a magic wand.

  Kennedy smiled. Eisenhower’s press secretary later said that Kennedy showed considerable interest in the “dry run.” Although his responsibilities were sobering, the powers Kennedy would soon have were intoxicating. As he drove off, he looked back with satisfaction at the building that would soon be his home.