Martin Hillenbrand, head of the State Department’s German desk, would later insist that a draft of the reply to the Soviet aide-mémoire had actually been produced promptly. But after ten days, State had discovered that the White House had misplaced it. So special assistant Ralph Dungan had the State Department send over a new draft. However, a White House official locked it up in a safe before going on a two-week leave, and he had not left behind the combination. At the same time, NATO allies were also stuck in the slow grinding of their own response.
While fingers assessing blame were pointing in various directions, an agitated Kennedy demanded that the Pentagon give him a plan for non-nuclear resistance in the case of a Berlin confrontation. It should be significant enough, he said, to prevent a Soviet advance and give the president time to talk to Khrushchev and avoid the rush to nuclear exchange. “I want the damn thing in ten days,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy told his advisers to provide him with new options beyond the current choice between “holocaust or humiliation.”
LINCOLN BEDROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
TUESDAY, JULY 25, 1961
In the late afternoon, President Kennedy retreated to his bedroom to read through the speech he would give at ten o’clock that evening to a national television audience. It was the first time Kennedy would use the Oval Office for such a purpose, and workmen had been there all day, laying cables and wires.
Kennedy knew how high the stakes had become. At home, he had to reverse a growing impression of foreign policy weakness, which made him politically vulnerable. After mishandling Cuba and Vienna, he also had to convince Khrushchev that he was willing to defend West Berlin at any cost. His problem: Khrushchev had stopped believing Kennedy would fight for Berlin, as Soviet Ambassador Menshikov was telling anyone in Washington who would listen. At the same time, however, Kennedy wanted Khrushchev to know he remained open to reasonable compromise.
Kennedy soaked in a hot bath to ease his inescapable back pain. He then ate his supper alone from a tray, as he often did. Midway through the meal, he phoned his secretary Evelyn Lincoln and said, “Will you take this down. I want to add it to the speech I am giving tonight.” He then began dictating:
Finally, I would like to close with a personal word. When I ran for the President of the United States I knew that we faced serious challenges in the Sixties, but I could not realize nor could any man who does not bear this responsibility know how heavy and constant would be its burdens.
The United States relied for its security in the late Forties on the fact that it alone had the atomic bomb and the means of delivery. Even in the early Fifties when the Soviet Union began to develop its own thermonuclear capacity we still had a clear lead in the means of delivery, but in the very recent years the Soviet Union has developed its own nuclear stockpile and has also developed the capacity in planes and missiles to deliver bombs against our country itself.
Lincoln scribbled furiously in shorthand as Kennedy continued to dictate, the words falling into perfect sentences and paragraphs.
This means that if the United States and the Soviet Union become engaged in a struggle in which these missiles are used, then it could mean the destruction of both of our people and our country.
What makes this so somber is the fact that the Soviet Union is attempting in a most forceful way to assert its power, and this brings them into collision with us in those areas, such as Berlin, where we have longstanding commitments. Three times in my lifetime, our country and Europe have been involved in wars, and on both sides in each case serious misjudgments were made which brought about great devastation. Now, however, through any misjudgments on either side about the intentions of the other, more devastation could be rained in several hours than we have seen in all the wars in our history.
Knowing the gravity of the president’s words, Lincoln concentrated on getting each one of them right. She felt the moment of history, and heard the pain in the voice of the man carrying its burden—a word he used several times in the speech and increasingly each day.
As President and Commander-in-Chief, therefore, and as Americans, you and I together move through serious days. I shall bear the responsibility of the Presidency under our Constitution for the next three-and-one-half years. I am sure you know that I shall do the very best I can for our country and our cause.
Like you, I have a family which I wish to see grow up in a country at peace and in a world where freedom endures.
I know that sometimes you get impatient and wish we could make some immediate action that would end our perils, but there is no easy and quick solution. We are opposed by a system which has organized a billion people and which knows that if the United States falters, their victory is imminent. Therefore, we must look to long days ahead, which if we are courageous and persevering can bring us what we all desire. I ask therefore in these days your suggestions and advice. I ask your criticisms when you think we are wrong, but above all, my fellow citizens, I want you to realize that I love this country and shall do my best to protect it. I need your good will and support and above all your prayers.
Evelyn Lincoln couldn’t remember when the president had ever added so much to the end of a speech just a couple of hours before its delivery.
Kennedy said to his secretary, “Will you type this up and give it to me when I come over?”
The president arrived at the Oval Office at 9:30 p.m. to test the height of the chair behind his desk and the lighting. He asked Evelyn Lincoln if he could inspect his dictation and then took it into the Cabinet Room, where he sat and scribbled revisions and made cuts, tightening it but not removing any of its anguish. When it was time to go before the cameras, he came into Lincoln’s office and asked for a hairbrush and went into her washroom to make certain every strand was in place.
Despite these preparations, the speech would be given by a perspiring and tense president in an overheated office. To improve the sound quality, technicians had shut down the air-conditioning, although temperatures that day had hit a high of 94 degrees. The office would be made all the more uncomfortable by the lights of seven news cameras and the body heat of some sixty people who jammed in to witness the historic moment.
Kennedy stepped briefly outside to mop his face and lip before returning to his desk just seconds before he spoke to a national and global audience. Under lights that made reading his recently altered text difficult, he would trip over a few lines and deliver others less eloquently than usual. But few listeners noticed. His stirring, tough rhetoric masked the series of compromises he had agreed to in the previous days that had considerably weakened the Acheson plan.
Kennedy had pulled back from Acheson’s call for a declaration of national emergency, he had decided against immediate mobilization of troops, and he had reduced the increase in defense spending. In the seventeen days between his Hyannis Port meetings and the July 25 speech, the SLOBs had methodically chipped away at the Acheson approach as the workings of the U.S. foreign policy structure turned almost entirely to Berlin, including two crucial National Security Council meetings on July 13 and 19.
On July 13 in the Cabinet Room, Secretary Rusk used Acheson’s own words to soften the approach, quoting a part of his friend’s paper that spoke of keeping early steps as low-key as possible. “We should try to avoid actions which are not needed for sound military purposes and which would be considered provocative,” he said.
With Vice President Johnson’s backing, Acheson had pushed back. He believed that if, as his friend Rusk argued, one left the call-up of reserves to the end, “we would not affect Khrushchev’s judgment of the shape of the crisis any more than we could do so by dropping bombs after he had forced the issue to the limit.”
Bundy had left those in the room four alternatives: (1) Proceed with all possible speed with a substantial reinforcement of U.S. forces; (2) Proceed with all measures not requiring the declaration of a national emergency; (3) Proceed with a declaration of national emergency and all prepa
ration, except a call-up of reserves or guard units; or (4) Avoid any significant military buildup for the present on the grounds that this was a crisis more of political unity and will than of military imperative.
The president listened as his senior officials debated the options. But the first time he showed his own hand was before the TV audience. In a meeting of the National Security Council’s smaller Steering Group, he had said there were only two things that mattered to him: “Our presence in Berlin, and our access to Berlin.”
Acheson had grown so frustrated with what he considered the drift in policy during July that he told a small working group on Berlin, “Gentlemen, you might as well face it. This nation is without leadership.”
At the second key NSC meeting, at four p.m. on July 19, the Acheson plan died a quiet death after an exchange between its author and Defense Secretary McNamara. Acheson wanted a definite decision of the group to declare a national emergency and begin the call-up of reserves no later than September. McNamara preferred not to commit yet, but wanted it understood that Kennedy could declare an emergency later and call up larger ground reserves “when the situation required.”
Acheson had held his ground, arguing McNamara’s course wasn’t sufficiently energetic or concrete.
Kennedy had kept the discussion going until it gradually became clear to Acheson that the commander in chief didn’t have the stomach for a full mobilization. Acheson eventually approved the McNamara approach, which would give the secretary of defense the more flexible timetable he wanted so as not “to have a large reserve force on hand with no mission.” However, deployment would be rapid in the event of a deepening crisis.
Ambassador Thompson wasn’t in the room, but he had helped win the day with cables from Moscow that argued Kennedy would impress the Soviets more by keeping the Allies together around substantial military moves than by dividing them over excessive ones. Thompson’s logic was that a longer-term buildup in readiness would have more impact than dramatic, immediate, publicity-getting gestures. Kennedy’s intelligence advisers also argued that too strong a public posture would only prompt Khrushchev to become even more rigid and more likely to take military countermeasures of his own.
The outcome was that on July 25 the president did not declare a national emergency but said he would seek congressional standby authority to triple the draft, call up reserves, and impose economic sanctions against Warsaw Pact countries in the case of a Berlin blockade. Kennedy told the NSC meeting that a national emergency was “an alarm bell which could only be rung once,” and that taking the Acheson course would only convince the Soviets not of U.S. determination but of “our panic.”
Acheson had argued in favor of a national emergency because it would have impressed both the Soviets and his U.S. opponents of the gravity of the situation while enabling the president to call up one million reserves and extend terms of service.
Kennedy, however, was determined not to overreact, partly because he wished to rebuild Allied confidence in his leadership after he had so badly botched the Bay of Pigs. He also reckoned that he was in for a long series of confrontations with the Soviets and thus worried about a premature escalation to address what he thought might be “a false climax” in the confrontation. The president wanted to keep some powder dry.
So Kennedy called for $3.454 billion in new spending for the armed forces, almost exactly equal to Khrushchev’s announcement, though lower than the $4.3 billion Acheson had originally sought. The increase would nevertheless bring the combined defense spending increase under Kennedy to $6 billion. He wanted an increase in the Army’s authorized strength from 875,000 to 1 million. The U.S. would prepare a new Berlin airlift capability and a further capacity to move six additional divisions to Europe by Khrushchev’s December deadline for a peace treaty.
Most striking, but entirely unnoticed by the media, was the speech’s mention seventeen times of West Berlin, continuing the president’s regular addition of the qualifier “West.” Kennedy was repeating his message to Khrushchev in Vienna that the Soviets were free to do what they wanted with the city’s eastern portion as long as they didn’t touch the western part.
Just the previous day at lunch, one of the top officials of the U.S. Information Agency, James O’Donnell, had complained to speechwriter Ted Sorensen about the emphasis on “West” Berlin in a final draft of the speech. O’Donnell’s opinion mattered, since he was a Kennedy family friend and veteran Berlin hand who as a conquering soldier had been the first non-Soviet to examine the interior of Hitler’s bunker. He had written a book about Hitler’s final days and had then lived through the Berlin blockade as a Newsweek correspondent. His standing was such that he had written a memo for candidate Kennedy on the four-power agreements regarding Berlin.
Sorensen had proudly shown the draft of the July 25 speech to O’Donnell, arguing that “even hard-liners” like him would like it. Yet the more closely O’Donnell scrutinized it, the more he was taken aback by the unilateral concessions it contained. The speech spoke of Kennedy’s willingness to remove “actual irritants” in West Berlin while declaring that “the freedom of that city is not negotiable.” According to Ulbricht, those “irritants” included West Berlin’s lively and free media, the American radio station RIAS, the freedom with which Western militaries and intelligence agencies were operating, and—most important—the ability of East Germans to cross the open border and seek refuge.
Another paragraph recognized “the Soviet Union’s historical concern about their security in Central and Eastern Europe, after a series of ravaging invasions, and we believe arrangements can be worked out which will help to meet those concerns, and make it possible for both security and freedom to exist in this troubled area.”
What could Kennedy have meant by that? O’Donnell wondered, not knowing that this built on similar language Kennedy had privately used in Vienna. Was he buying into Moscow’s complaints about resurgent German militarism? Was he ceding forever to the Soviets the captive countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary?
But nothing troubled O’Donnell more than repetitive references exclusively to “West” Berlin’s security. That could only have been an intentional message that, in O’Donnell’s view, gave the Soviets a free hand in East Berlin, though the city technically remained under four-power rule.
Kennedy’s speech told Americans, “The immediate threat to free men is in West Berlin.” He used the visual teaching aid of a map for the American people to show West Berlin as an island of white in a sea of communist black. Said Kennedy:
For West Berlin, lying exposed 110 miles inside East Germany, surrounded by Soviet troops and close to Soviet supply lines, has many roles. It is more than a showcase of liberty, a symbol, an island of freedom in a communist sea. It is even more than a link with the Free World, a beacon of hope behind the Iron Curtain, an escape hatch for refugees.
West Berlin is all of that. But above all it has now become—as never before—the great testing place of Western courage and will, a focal point where our solemn commitments stretching back over the years since 1945, and Soviet ambitions now meet in basic confrontation. The United States is there; the United Kingdom and France are there; the pledge of NATO is there—and the people of Berlin are there. It is as secure, in that sense, as the rest of us—for we cannot separate its safety from our own…we have given our word that an attack upon that city will be regarded as an attack upon us all.
Kennedy returned to West Berlin at the end of the thirty-one-minute speech.
The solemn vow each of us gave to West Berlin in time of peace will not be broken in time of danger. If we do not meet our commitments in Berlin, where will we later stand? If we are not true to our word there, all that we have achieved in collective security, which relies on these words, will mean nothing. And if there is one path above all others to war, it is the path of weakness and disunity.
Sorensen was upset that O’Donnell was underestimating the importance of the speech’s emotiv
e commitment to defend Berlin. As for its disregard for captive East Berlin and Eastern Europeans generally, Sorensen argued to O’Donnell that the speech was merely recognizing reality. The Russians did what they wanted anyway in their sector. Americans would be reluctant enough to accept a military buildup to safeguard two million West Berliners, but it would be expecting far too much of Americans to risk their lives for the lot of a million East Berliners caught on the wrong side of history.
O’Donnell suggested an easy fix. The president could simply omit the word “West” in most of the places where it appeared before the word “Berlin.” After an hour of argument, Sorensen protested: “I can’t monkey around anymore with the text of this speech…this speech has been churned through the mills of six branches of government. We have had copies back and forth for ten days. This is the final version. This is the policy line.
“This is it.”
The lunch ended on that note.
Sorensen had also pushed back similar protests from elsewhere inside the government. The so-called Berlin Mafia, the group of senior officials who had been following every comma and semicolon of the fragile Berlin standoff for years, felt that the president was committing heresy, essentially telling the Soviets they could ignore four-power agreements and do anything they wanted with their part of the city.
“There was an ‘Oh, my God!’ feeling as one saw the language,” said the Austrian-born Karl Mautner, who served in the intelligence and research bureau of the State Department after having been posted to the American Mission in Berlin. Having fought during World War II with the 82nd Airborne at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, he was outraged at Kennedy’s backsliding. “We knew immediately what it meant…. We were undercutting our own position.”
Berlin 1961 Page 35