It was increasingly clear what Kennedy was saying: Do what you want to with what is yours, but do not touch what is ours. If the U.S. ceded anything on West Berlin, the world “would not regard [the U.S.] as a serious country.” But as East Berlin was Soviet territory, he was suggesting that the USSR would be free to do as it pleased there.
Khrushchev did not acknowledge at the time what would later look like the makings of a deal that had been offered by Kennedy. Instead, the Soviet leader replied that the USSR “would never, under any conditions, accept U.S. rights in West Berlin after a peace treaty had been signed.”
He then lashed out at what he considered U.S. mistreatment of the Soviet Union after the war. Khrushchev said the U.S. had deprived the USSR of reparations, rights, and interests in West Germany. Beyond that, he said the U.S. practiced a double standard by refusing to negotiate a war-ending peace treaty with East Germany although it had signed just such an agreement with the Japanese in 1951—without consulting with Moscow in preparing the document. Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had led the Soviet delegation at the conference, where it had tried to stall the treaty and then refused to sign while complaining that the U.S. had not invited the Chinese and was creating an anti-Soviet, militaristic Japan.
Kennedy countered that Khrushchev had publicly declared he would have signed the Japan treaty if he had been in power at the time.
For Khrushchev, however, the point wasn’t what he might have done but rather that the U.S. had not even sought Soviet agreement. Khrushchev called Kennedy’s approach regarding Berlin a similar one of “I do what I want.”
Khrushchev said he had seen enough of that sort of U.S. behavior. Moscow would sign its treaty with East Germany, he said, and the price would be great if the U.S. thereafter violated East German sovereignty over access to Berlin.
What he wanted, Kennedy countered, was not a conflict over Berlin but an overall mending of East–West German relations and of U.S.–Soviet relations, so as to permit over time a solution to the whole German problem. He said he did not wish “to act in a way that would deprive the Soviet Union of its ties in Eastern Europe,” again reassuring Khrushchev, as he had done the first day, that he would do nothing to upset the balance of power in Europe.
Kennedy noted that the Soviet leader had called him a young man, and the president suggested that Khrushchev was trying to take advantage of his relative inexperience. However, Kennedy said, he had “not assumed office to accept arrangements totally inimical to U.S. interests.” Khrushchev repeated that the only alternative to unilateral action would be an interim agreement under which the two Germanys could negotiate and after which all Allied rights would disappear. That would “give the semblance of responsibility for the problem having been turned over to the Germans themselves.” But as they would not agree to unification, Khrushchev was certain the outcome would be the same.
With an actor’s sense of dramatic timing, Khrushchev then presented Kennedy a document, an aide-mémoire on the Berlin question, whose purpose was to give his ultimatum official force. No one on Kennedy’s team had prepared the president for such a written Kremlin initiative. Bolshakov had not even hinted at such a move. Khrushchev said the Soviet side had prepared it so that the U.S. could study the Soviet position and “perhaps return to this question at a later date, if it wished to do so.”
With that bold move, Khrushchev had put himself on a collision course with Kennedy over Berlin. He had acted in part because Kennedy, in clinging to the status quo, had not shown even Eisenhower’s willingness to negotiate the issue. That was difficult enough for Khrushchev to accept under Eisenhower, and before the U-2 incident. But now it was impossible.
The morning had passed quickly.
While Khrushchev and Kennedy retreated to a tense lunch, their wives were out doing the town. In front of the Pallavicini Palace on the sun-bathed Josefsplatz, a crowd of a thousand had gathered to get a glimpse of the two women heading for lunch. A slight murmur greeted the Soviet, followed by an outburst of cheers for Jackie. Two American reporters felt sorry for the crowd’s inattention to Nina, so as the Viennese shouted, “Ja-kee! Ja-kee!” they countered with their own chant of “Nina!” But it gained no following.
Reuters correspondent Adam Kellett-Long, who had been sent from Berlin to cover the summit, was horrified as he heard photographers shout at Jackie to stick out her breasts for more alluring shots. “And she did!” he recalled later. “She behaved like Marilyn Monroe or a film star. She was lapping it up.”
From the upstairs window of the restaurant, the two women looked down on the crowd. Jackie appeared very much like a fashion magazine illustration in her navy blue suit, black pillbox hat, and four strands of pearls and white gloves. Soviet press spokesmen didn’t release what Nina was wearing, but the New York Times described her as looking like the housewife for whom Jackie’s fashion magazines were produced. None of that disturbed Nina Petrovna, who found Jackie’s conversation intelligent and who thought she “looked like a work of art.” She held Jackie’s gloved hand aloft standing before the crowd in the window frame of their restaurant—a warmth that was absent from their husbands’ last supper.
The two men conversed about weapons manufacturing and arms policies. Khrushchev said he had scrutinized the president’s May message to Congress in which he had dramatically increased defense spending. He said that he understood the U.S. could not disarm, controlled as it was by monopolists. However, he said, the U.S. buildup would force him also to increase the size of Soviet armed forces.
In that context, Khrushchev returned to their chat over lunch a day earlier at which he said he would consider a joint moon project. He regretted that such cooperation would be impossible as long as there was no disarmament. Khrushchev would not leave even this thin strand of new cooperation on the table.
Kennedy said perhaps they could at least coordinate the timing of their space projects.
Lacking conviction, Khrushchev shrugged that such a course might be possible. He then lifted a glass of sweet Soviet champagne to Kennedy.
He joked that “natural love is better than love through intermediaries,” and that it was good the two men had now talked directly to each other.
He wanted the president to understand that the new Soviet ultimatum on Berlin “would not be directed against the U.S. or its allies.” He compared what Moscow was doing to a surgical operation, which was painful to the patient but necessary for survival. Mixing his metaphors, he said Moscow “wants to cross that bridge and it will cross it.”
Khrushchev conceded that U.S.–Soviet relations would sustain “great tensions” but that he was certain “the sun will come out again and will shine brightly. The U.S. does not want Berlin, neither does the Soviet Union…. The only party really interested in Berlin as such is Adenauer. He is an intelligent man but old. The Soviet Union cannot agree to having the old and moribund hold back the young and vigorous.”
As he toasted Kennedy, Khrushchev conceded that he had put the president in a difficult position, as allies would question his decisions on Berlin. He then dismissed the influence and interests of allies, noting that Luxembourg should cause Kennedy no problem, just as the Soviet Union’s own unnamed allies “would not frighten anyone.”
Khrushchev then raised his glass and noted that Kennedy as a religious man would say, “God should help us in this endeavor.” Khrushchev said he would rather raise his own drink to common sense rather than to God.
Kennedy’s return toast focused on the two men’s obligations in a nuclear age when the effects of a conflict “would go from generation to generation.” He stressed that each side “should recognize the interests and the responsibilities of the other side.”
The gift Kennedy had brought the Soviet leader rested before them on the table, a model of the USS Constitution, whose guns, the president said, had a range of only a half-mile. In the nuclear age, where guns were intercontinental and the devastation would be far more horrible, Kennedy sa
id leaders could not allow war to happen.
Kennedy referred to their setting in neutral Vienna, and he said that he hoped they would not leave a place that so symbolized the possibility of finding equitable solutions after having increased dangers to both sides’ security and prestige. “This goal can be achieved only if each is wise and stays in his own area,” he said.
There it was again: Kennedy’s solution to the Berlin Crisis. He was once more suggesting the Soviet could do whatever he wished on his own ground. It was a negotiating point he had repeated several times during the day in different forms—and now he had employed it within his closing toast.
To take some of the sting out of that as a final word, Kennedy recalled that he had asked Khrushchev what job he had had when he was forty-four, the president’s current age. The Kremlin boss had said he was head of the Moscow Planning Commission. Kennedy joked that he would like to head the Boston Planning Commission at age sixty-seven.
“Perhaps the President would like to become head of the planning commission of the whole world,” Khrushchev sneered.
No, said the president. Just Boston.
With their two days of talks ending so badly, Kennedy took a last stab at a more positive outcome. He asked Khrushchev for one more post-lunch meeting alone with their interpreters.
“I can’t leave here without giving it one more try,” Kennedy told Kenny O’Donnell.
When the president’s staff told him that that would throw them off their scheduled departure, Kennedy barked that nothing in the world could be more important at the moment than getting matters right with Khrushchev. “No, we’re not going on time! I’m not going to leave until I know more.” Throughout his life, Kennedy had depended on his charm and personality to overcome obstacles. Yet none of that had broken through Khrushchev’s force field.
Kennedy opened their last, short exchange by acknowledging the importance of Berlin. However, he hoped that Khrushchev, in the interest of relations between their two countries, “would not present him with a situation so deeply involving our national interest.” He underscored yet again “the difference between a peace treaty and the rights of access to Berlin.” He hoped relations would unfold in a way that would avoid direct confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Yet with Kennedy already in his chokehold, Khrushchev squeezed harder. If the U.S. insisted on its rights, thus violating East German borders after the signing of a peace treaty, “force would be met by force,” he declared. “The U.S. should prepare for that, and the Soviet Union will do the same.”
Before leaving Vienna, Kennedy wanted to understand clearly the options the Soviet was leaving him. Under the interim arrangement that Khrushchev had suggested, would U.S. military forces in Berlin remain, along with free access to the city? Kennedy asked.
Yes, for six months’ time, responded Khrushchev.
And then the forces would have to be withdrawn? Kennedy asked.
Khrushchev said that was so.
The president said that either Khrushchev did not believe the U.S. was serious or the situation was so “unsatisfactory” to him that he believed he needed this “drastic action.” Kennedy said he would see British Prime Minister Macmillan in London on his way home and would have to tell him that he was faced with the unhappy alternative of accepting a Soviet fait accompli on Berlin or confrontation. Kennedy said he had the impression that Khrushchev was leaving him with the only alternatives of conflict or capitulation.
Khrushchev suggested that in order for Kennedy to save face, U.S. and Soviet troops could be maintained in Berlin not as occupation forces but subject to East German control and registered with the United Nations. “I want peace,” Khrushchev said. “But if you want war, that is your problem. It is not the USSR that threatens with war, it is the U.S.”
Kennedy’s extension of their meeting wasn’t going well. “It is you, and not I, who wants to force a change,” the president protested, avoiding Khrushchev’s provocative use of the word “war.”
It was as if two teenage boys with nuclear sticks were arguing over who was trying to pick a fight with whom.
“In any event,” said Khrushchev, “the USSR will have no choice but to accept the challenge. It must respond and it will respond. The calamities of a war will be shared equally…. It is up to the U.S. to decide whether there will be war or peace.” Kennedy, he said, could tell this to Macmillan, de Gaulle, and Adenauer.
Khrushchev said his decision on Berlin was “irrevocable” and “firm”: a peace treaty with East Germany by December with all its consequences on Allied control of West Berlin, or an interim agreement that would lead to the same outcome.
“If that is true, it’s going to be a cold winter,” said Kennedy.
For all the power of Kennedy’s single-sentence summation, he got even that wrong. His troubles would come much earlier.
BERLIN
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, JUNE 4, 1961
While Khrushchev and Kennedy engaged in angry exchanges about the possibility of war in Berlin, Berliners themselves were out in droves on the first sunny, dry weekend after a month of rain. They were riding in cars and on motor scooters, in the elevated train and subway, heading for Berlin’s many parks and lakesides to swim, sail, play, and enjoy the sun.
The Berlin newspapers were calling it “beautiful summit weather,” and the consensus was that a meeting of the two leaders controlling their fate was more likely than not to reduce tensions. Berliners from both sides of the city filled West Berlin’s cinemas in the evening to see the latest releases: Spartacus, with its four Oscars; Ben-Hur, with Charlton Heston; and The Marriage-Go-Round, with James Mason and Susan Hayward. The film ads reminded East Berliners that their soft East marks would be accepted in a one-to-one exchange for entrance—the best bargain in town.
In the East, Walter Ulbricht was weathering a bread shortage and was out with the people celebrating the communist youth organization’s Children’s Day. With little news from the Vienna Summit, the papers were filled with photographs and accounts of the two wives’ joint Vienna outings.
Fewer refugees registered during the Vienna Summit weekend than at any time for the last many years, because East Germans were holding out hope that the Vienna talks would bring a change for the better.
When asked what he expected from the talks, Ulbricht said he was adopting a wait-and-see attitude. Mayor Willy Brandt told his citizens, “Our good cause is in good hands with President Kennedy…. The best we can hope for is that some of the misunderstandings that might give rise to new threats and dangers in the future are cleared up.”
VIENNA
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, JUNE 4, 1961
Having just threatened him with war, Khrushchev smiled broadly as he bid farewell to a frowning, shell-shocked Kennedy on the Soviet embassy’s steps. Photographers caught their contrasting moods for the next day’s papers.
Khrushchev knew he had won the day, even if he could not yet know the consequences. He would recall later that Kennedy “looked not only anxious, but deeply upset…Looking at him, I couldn’t help feeling sorry and a little bit upset myself. I hadn’t meant to upset him. I would have liked very much for us to part in a different mood. But there was nothing I could do to help him…. As one human being toward another, I felt bad about his disappointment….
“Politics is a merciless business,” Khrushchev concluded.
The Soviet leader could guess what U.S. hard-liners would argue when they discovered how poorly Kennedy had performed. “We’ve always said the Bolsheviks don’t understand the soft language of negotiations,” Khrushchev reckoned they would say. “They understand only power politics. They tricked you; they gave your nose a good pull. You got a good going-over from them, and now you’ve come back empty-handed and disgraced.”
After seeing off Kennedy at the airport, Austrian Foreign Minister Bruno Kreisky visited with Khrushchev. “The President was very gloomy at the airport,” said Kreisky. “He seemed upset, and his face
had changed. Obviously the meeting did not go well for him.”
Khrushchev said he had also noticed Kennedy’s sour mood and told Kreisky that Kennedy’s problem was that he “still doesn’t quite understand the realignment of forces, and he still lives by the policies of his predecessors—especially as far as the German question is concerned. He’s not ready to lift the threat of world war which hangs over Berlin. Our talks were helpful in that they gave us a chance to sound each other out and get to know each other. But that’s all, and it’s not enough.”
With the two days of meetings so fresh in his mind, Khrushchev recounted for Kreisky much of his dialogue with Kennedy—knowing Kreisky would pass word of his triumph to other European leftists, including Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt.
In contrast to Kennedy, Khrushchev left Vienna in as unhurried a manner as he had arrived. While the Soviet leader joined a dinner given in his honor by the Austrian government, Kennedy licked his wounds en route to London.
Kennedy was brutally honest about his poor performance.
As he drove away from the Soviet embassy with Secretary Rusk in his black limo, with presidential and American flags fluttering on its wings, he banged the flat of his hand against the shelf beneath the rear window. Rusk in particular had been shocked Khrushchev had used the word “war” during their acrimonious exchange, a term diplomats avoided and invariably replaced with any number of less alarming synonyms.
Despite all the president’s pre-summit briefings, Rusk felt Kennedy had been unprepared for Khrushchev’s bullying brutality. The extent of Vienna’s failure would not be as easy to measure as the Bay of Pigs fiasco. There would be no dead exile combatants in a misbegotten landing area who had risked their lives in the expectation that Kennedy and the United States would not abandon them. However, the consequences could be even bloodier. Confirmed in his suspicions of Kennedy’s weakness, Khrushchev might engage in just the sort of “miscalculation” that could lead to nuclear war.
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