OVAL OFFICE, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5, 1961
British Prime Minister Macmillan was taken aback when Kennedy nodded toward Acheson and asked him to explain why, regarding the Soviets and Berlin, he believed a confrontation was likelier than reaching an acceptable compromise solution. The president was surrounded by his top national security team as well as U.S. Ambassador to London David Bruce. Among others, Macmillan had brought along Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Yet they all turned toward Acheson, and one of the world’s most colorful diplomatic showmen launched a performance that unsettled the British.
Kennedy did not say whether he shared Acheson’s hard-line views, although Macmillan had to presume that he did. Acheson prefaced the discussion with the disclaimer that he had not reached final conclusions in his Berlin study, but he then vigorously laid out precisely what he had decided. Kennedy listened without comment.
Macmillan and Acheson were almost the same age, and Acheson’s attire, upper-class mannerisms, and Anglo-Canadian background would have suggested a cultural compatibility in any other setting. But the two men could not have differed more in their diagnosis of how to deal with the Soviets. Macmillan had lost none of his enthusiasm for just the sort of high-level Moscow talks that Acheson had consistently said would have little value, all the way back to an executive session of the Foreign Relations Committee in 1947 when Acheson said, “I think it is a mistake to believe that you can, at any time, sit down with the Russians and solve questions.”
Acheson listed what he called his “semi-premises”:
There was no satisfactory solution to the Berlin problem aside from a resolution more broadly of Germany’s division. And it did not seem such a solution was anywhere near.
It was likely the Soviets would force the Berlin issue within the calendar year.
There was no negotiable solution Acheson could imagine that could put the West in a more favorable position regarding Berlin than it had at the moment.
Thus, he said, “we must face the issue and prepare now for eventualities. Berlin is of the greatest importance. That is why the Soviets press the issue. If the West flunks, Germany will become unhooked from the alliance.”
The president did not interrupt Acheson’s presentation, and because of that neither did anyone else. Acheson said negotiations and other nonmilitary remedies, which everyone in the room knew were the British preference, were insufficient. There must be a military response, Acheson said, but what should it be, and under what circumstances?
Macmillan and Lord Home contained their dismay. They had just been in Paris, where they’d heard de Gaulle—who was already trying to lure Adenauer into a Gaullist view of Europe that permanently excluded the British—also vehemently oppose Berlin talks with the Soviets. The British didn’t want Kennedy on the same page.
At age sixty-seven, Macmillan had grown increasingly convinced that most of London’s aspirations in the world depended on its ability to influence Washington. That in turn relied on how he would interact with America’s new president. A keen student of history, Macmillan had come to realize that Americans represented “the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them now to make it go…. We can at most aspire to civilize and occasionally to influence them.” But how did he get Kennedy’s consent to play Rome to Macmillan’s Greece?
After Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s political collapse following the Suez Crisis, his successor Macmillan had wagered much on rebuilding a “special relationship” with the U.S. through his friendship with President Eisenhower, first forged during World War II. Macmillan had played a crucial role as an “honest broker” in convincing President Eisenhower to engage with Khrushchev on Berlin’s future through summitry, and he had considered the Paris Summit’s collapse to be a personal defeat. He had begged Khrushchev unsuccessfully not to abandon the talks.
It was in this context that Macmillan had been gathering as many data points as he could find on Kennedy so that he could better design an approach to a man who was twenty-four years his junior. Macmillan had worried to columnist friend Henry Brandon that he would never be able to replicate the unique connection he had had with Eisenhower, a man of the same generation with whom he had shared war’s cruel experiences. “And now there is this cocky young Irishman,” he had said.
Eisenhower’s ambassador to London, John Hay “Jock” Whitney, had warned Macmillan that Kennedy was “obstinate, sensitive, ruthless and highly sexed.” However, their behavioral differences would surface only many months later, when Kennedy shocked the monogamous, puritanical Scot with the impertinent question, “I wonder how it is with you, Harold? If I don’t have a woman for three days, I get a terrible headache….”
What concerned Macmillan more than the age and character differences he had with Kennedy was the possibility that the president might be overly influenced by his anticommunist, isolationist father. Perhaps the most disliked U.S. ambassador ever to the Court of St. James’s, Joseph Kennedy had warned President Roosevelt not to overdo U.S. backing for Britain against Hitler and be “left holding the bag in a war in which the Allies expect to be beaten.” So Macmillan was relieved when his research turned up that Kennedy’s hero was the interventionist Churchill—a point they had in common.
To further influence Kennedy’s thinking, during the transition Macmillan had written the president-elect a letter that proposed a “Grand Design” for the future. While Macmillan had formed his bond with Eisenhower based on their common memories of war, he had determined on the day of Kennedy’s election that he would base his approach to the new president on intellect. So he set out to sell himself “as a man who, although of advancing years, has young and fresh thoughts.”
Written with a publisher’s deft touch, Macmillan appealed to Kennedy’s vanity by quoting from the president’s earlier writings before sketching out a dangerous era ahead in which the “free world”—the United States, Britain, and Europe—could only vanquish the growing appeal of communism through the steady expansion of economic well-being and common purpose. Thus, he regarded closer transatlantic coordination to create joint monetary and economic policies as being more critical than political and military alliances.
Since he had written that letter, Macmillan had not gained much traction for his “Grand Design” in preparatory visits to allies. De Gaulle in Paris sympathized with Macmillan’s views but stubbornly opposed his desire to bring Britain into the European Common Market. When they met in London, the British prime minister found even less support from Adenauer. Macmillan concluded that the flourishing West Germany had grown too “rich and selfish” to understand his proposal. Ahead of Macmillan’s White House meeting, Kennedy discovered he had misplaced his copy of the “Grand Design.” It took a White House search to unearth it in the nursery of Caroline, his three-year-old daughter.
Despite Macmillan’s initial concerns, he and Kennedy had already begun to form a closer bond ahead of their Washington meeting than the British prime minister had anticipated, a product of shared wit, breeding, and brains—and Macmillan’s intentional efforts. They were also related by marriage: Kennedy’s sister Kathleen had married Macmillan’s nephew. Like Kennedy, Harold Macmillan had known wealth from birth and enjoyed its license for independent thinking and eccentricity. The prime minister was elegant and tall, at six feet, and had a toothy British smile under a guardsman’s mustache. He wore his hand-cut suits as casually as his intellect. Macmillan liked Kennedy’s emphasis on bravery in his book Profiles in Courage, as he had himself been wounded three times during World War I. While waiting for rescue at the Battle of the Somme with a bullet in his pelvis, he had read Aeschylus in the original Greek.
To the prime minister’s relief, he and Kennedy had hit it off ten days earlier when the president had issued him a last-minute invitation to Key West, Florida, to exchange ideas on how to address an unfolding crisis in Laos. Kennedy had listened sympathetically to Macm
illan’s advice that he should stay clear of military intervention in Laos, and the prime minister was encouraged to see the president manage the generals around him—instead of being managed by them. Macmillan had been taken by Kennedy’s “great charm…and a light touch. Since so many Americans are so ponderous, this is a welcome change.”
Yet that positive beginning in Key West only made Macmillan and Lord Home all the more concerned about Kennedy’s apparent militancy toward the Soviets as expressed and encouraged by Acheson.
When thinking about how to defend Berlin, Acheson said the Brits should focus on the three military alternatives: air, ground, and nuclear. Given that the nuclear option was “reckless and would not be believed,” Acheson talked mostly about the other two. He dismissed an air response, as Soviet “ground-to-air missiles have been brought to a point where aircraft cannot survive. Thus there could be no test of will in the air. The Russians would just shoot down the planes with their rockets.”
Acheson was driving home his view that the U.S. and its allies really had only one possible credible response to a Berlin showdown, and that was a conventional ground offensive to “show the Russians that it was not worthwhile to stop a really stout Western effort.” To pull that off, Acheson said, would require a significant military buildup. Acheson crisply listed the possible military countermeasures to a Berlin blockade of one sort or another, including the dispatching of a division down the Autobahn to reopen access to Berlin with force. If blocked, said Acheson, then the West would know where it stood and could rearm and rally allies as it did during the Korean War.
Kennedy told Macmillan, whose body language of lifted eyebrows and sideways glances revealed his skepticism, that he had not yet fully considered Acheson’s views. That said, he agreed with his new adviser that Berlin contingency planning was not yet “serious enough,” given the growing likelihood of some sort of confrontation.
Macmillan focused his opposition on Acheson’s proposed response to a Berlin blockade, of sending a division up the Autobahn, as it “would be a very vulnerable body if moving on a narrow front.” It inevitably would have to spread beyond the Autobahn if trouble started, he said, and that would raise a host of difficulties. When pressed by Kennedy, however, he agreed with Acheson’s view that the Berlin Airlift could not be repeated because of improved Soviet antiaircraft capability.
U.S. and British officials then hashed out what new military planning and training would be required to allow more intensive preparation for Berlin contingencies. Secretary Rusk welcomed British–U.S. bilateral planning but suggested that the West Germans, with their expanded military capability and willingness to help defend Berlin, should be brought in “rapidly.” Lord Home frowned his dissent. The British distrusted the Germans far more than did the Americans, convinced that Adenauer’s intelligence service and other government structures were riddled with spies. Though Lord Home was happy enough to discuss Germany’s future with the Americans, he was not ready to do the same with the Germans.
Home wanted to shift the Americans from their focus on military contingencies to consideration of potential openings for Berlin talks with the Kremlin. He argued that Khrushchev had made only one public commitment that limited his room for maneuver, and that was to end Berlin’s occupation status. Lord Home believed Khrushchev “could get off this hook” if the Allies signed a treaty that would leave the status quo in place for a period of ten years or so, but that over time this would alter Berlin’s status.
“Khrushchev is not on a hook,” Acheson shot back, “and thus does not have to be taken off one.”
Acheson had no patience for what he considered British spinelessness toward Moscow. He sharply reminded Home that Khrushchev “is not legalistic. Khrushchev is pushing to divide the Allies. He is not going to make any treaty that would help us. Our position is good as it is and we should stick by it.” Acheson worried that even consideration of signing a treaty with East Germany, which would serve only Soviet interests, “will undermine the German spirit.”
The tension between Home and Acheson infused the room.
After an awkward silence, Rusk agreed with Acheson that any talk about accepting such a treaty would be “starting down a slippery slope.” He said the U.S. had to make clear it was in Berlin as a result of war, and not “by the grace of Khrushchev.” The U.S., Rusk insisted to the British, was a great power that would not be driven out of Berlin.
Home warned his American friends of the public opinion consequences in the West if Khrushchev openly proposed what might seem a reasonable change in Berlin’s legal status and the West failed to put forward any alternative approach. Western presence had to be put on a new legal basis, he argued, as the current “right of conquest” justification for Berlin occupation was “wearing thin.”
Perhaps, Acheson fired back again at Home, “it is our power that is wearing thin.”
Much the same group reconvened the next morning, although mercifully for the British, Acheson was absent on a mission. However, his spirit remained in the room. President Kennedy wanted to know from his U.S. and British experts why Khrushchev had not acted on Berlin thus far. What made him hold off?
“Was it the danger of the Western response?” he asked.
Lord Home said he thought Khrushchev “wouldn’t lay off much longer.”
Ambassador Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen agreed. The State Department’s leading Soviet specialist, who had been ambassador to Moscow from 1953 to 1957, believed the rising Chinese challenge and “strong importunities from the East Germans” were forcing Khrushchev into a more militant position. It wasn’t that the Soviets cared so much about Berlin, Bohlen insisted, but that they had concluded its loss could lead to the unraveling of their entire Eastern empire.
Kennedy brought the discussion back to Acheson’s paper. If Khrushchev had been contained by the threat of a military confrontation with the West, Kennedy said, “we should consider how to build up this threat. On Berlin, we have no bargaining position. Thus we ought to consider, as Mr. Acheson suggested yesterday, how to put the issue to Khrushchev as bluntly as possible.”
With the return of Acheson’s ghost, the group gamed Khrushchev’s next likely move and the West’s potential response. The British didn’t see how talks could be avoided, while most of the U.S. contingent doubted their utility. Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, David Bruce, a former intelligence officer who had been Eisenhower’s ambassador to West Germany, said that the United States could not cede its few remaining rights in Berlin. “We cannot disregard the consequences that would flow in Central Europe and in West Germany from weakening on Berlin,” he said.
As his meetings with Kennedy neared an end, Macmillan was dissatisfied. He still did not know, he said, at what point the West “would break” and take action against Russian moves on Berlin. Without such a clear line, he feared that Kennedy could be drawn into a war he didn’t want, over far too little cause—and might then drag Britain into the hostilities.
Differing with Acheson, Kennedy responded that he believed it was the nuclear deterrent effect that “keeps the Communists from engaging us in a major struggle on Berlin.” Thus, he said, it was necessary to keep the fact of that deterrent “well forward.”
Macmillan, however, wondered what would happen in West Germany after Adenauer died—whether the Berlin game might be lost to the Soviets under a less resolute leader. “Sooner or later, say in five or ten years, the Russians might try to offer the West Germans unity in return for neutrality,” he ventured, repeating Britain’s stubborn doubts about German reliability.
Bohlen told Macmillan that he thought the time was past when West Germans would take “the bait of neutrality.” The Soviets as well, he said, could no longer afford to let socialism go down the drain in East Germany. Bruce argued that the larger issue for the moment was that East German refugees were “weakening all that goes to make up the normal life of a state,” with 200,000 leaving in 1960, and some 70 percent of those fr
om vital age groups.
A final internal memorandum on the meeting papered over the two sides’ dispute. It noted that both the U.S. and the UK expected an escalation of the Berlin Crisis in 1961, that they agreed the loss of West Berlin would be catastrophic, and that they believed the Allies needed to make clearer their seriousness over Berlin to the Soviets. The document also called for intensified planning of military contingencies.
In the brisk spring sunshine of the White House Rose Garden, Kennedy stood by Macmillan and read a one-page joint statement that spoke of a “very high level of agreement on our estimate of the nature of the problems which we face.” It glossed over the considerable disagreements with mushy language, saying that the two men agreed on “the importance and the difficulty of working toward satisfactory relations with the Soviet Union.”
Macmillan had achieved little with Kennedy. What he gained was that Kennedy had endorsed Britain’s efforts to join the Common Market as part of his “Grand Design,” a crucial voice of support given French opposition. The two men also had further built a personal bond through two long, private talks.
Despite that, Macmillan had failed in many of his most important aims. Kennedy had opposed Britain’s efforts to get China into the United Nations, and had made it clear that, unlike Eisenhower, he did not intend to use Macmillan as an intermediary with Moscow. Most important, the Americans planned to convene a summit with a Soviet leader for the first time on European territory without inviting their British or French allies to participate. It seemed Kennedy had clearly bought Acheson’s line that London was too soft on Berlin.
British officials surprised the Americans by leaking to their home press that the Kennedy–Macmillan talks were “rough, touchy,” in many ways inconclusive, and certainly more difficult than the communiqué suggested.
Berlin 1961 Page 18