Clarke didn’t report the Clay operation or his action against it to Washington, hoping the whole matter would simply disappear.
Kennedy would never know about it—but Khrushchev would. A Soviet agent hiding in the forest had snapped photos. Khrushchev had no way of knowing that General Clarke had shut down the exercise. He now had what he considered concrete evidence that the Americans might well be planning an operation in Berlin that would challenge or humiliate him during his Party Congress.
17
NUCLEAR POKER
In a certain sense there is an analogy here—I like this comparison—with Noah’s Ark, where both the “clean” and the “unclean” found sanctuary. But regardless of who lists himself with the “clean” and who is considered to be “unclean,” they are all equally interested in one thing, and that is that the Ark should successfully continue its cruise.
Premier Khrushchev to President Kennedy, in the first letter of their secret correspondence, September 29, 1961
Our confidence in our ability to deter Communist action, or resist Communist blackmail, is based upon a sober appreciation of the relative military power of the two sides. The fact is that this nation has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power than any enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of self-destruction on his part.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, Hot Springs, Virginia, October 21, 1961
CARLYLE HOTEL, NEW YORK
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1961
Carrying two folded newspapers under his arm, Georgi Bolshakov appeared as arranged at Pierre Salinger’s door at the Carlyle at 3:30 p.m., having been escorted up the back elevator by a Secret Service agent.
Concealed inside one of the papers was a thick manila envelope, from which Bolshakov removed a bundle of pages. With conspiratorial flamboyance, the Soviet spy announced that he held before him a personal twenty-six-page letter from Khrushchev to Kennedy, a manuscript he said he had spent the entire night translating. The bags under Bolshakov’s eyes were such a permanent fixture that Salinger could not know if that was true.
“You may read this,” Bolshakov told Salinger. “Then it is for the eyes of the president only.” It had been only a week since Bolshakov and Salinger had last met in the same room ahead of Kennedy’s United Nations speech. Khrushchev was impatient to test Kennedy’s conciliatory words and his expressed willingness to open new talks on Berlin, despite French and West German opposition. Bolshakov handed Salinger both the English and Russian versions of the letter so that U.S. government translators could compare them for accuracy.
Thus began what National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy would dub the “pen pal letters,” uniquely direct and private correspondence between the two leading adversaries of their time. Over the next two years, Khrushchev would continue to use the cloak-and-dagger means of having Bolshakov and others slip his letters to Salinger, to Robert Kennedy, or to Ted Sorensen on street corners, in a bar, or elsewhere, often in unmarked envelopes slipped out from folded newspapers.
Khrushchev considered the matter of such urgency that Bolshakov had phoned Salinger a day earlier with an offer to charter a plane to deliver the letter to Newport, Rhode Island, where Kennedy had been on a week’s autumn vacation at the home of Jacqueline’s mother, Janet Lee Bouvier, and stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss. However, Kennedy and Rusk wanted to avoid a potential “media sensation” in the event that one of two dozen reporters with the president spotted the Russian agent. So they dispatched Salinger to New York the next day.
“If you knew the importance of what I have, you wouldn’t keep me waiting that long,” Bolshakov had replied.
Salinger would later paraphrase the message in Khrushchev’s 6,000-word letter: You and I, Mr. President, are leaders of two nations that are on a collision course…. We have no choice but to put our heads together and find ways to live in peace.
The man who had so battered Kennedy in Vienna opened on a warm and personal note, explaining that he was resting with his family at his Black Sea retreat in Pitsunda. In the secretive Soviet Union, not even his own citizens knew where he was. “As a former Naval officer,” Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy, “you would surely appreciate the merits of these surroundings, the beauty of the sea and the grandeur of the Caucasian mountains.” Khrushchev said it was difficult in such a setting to think that problems lacking solutions “cast a sinister shadow on peaceful life, on the future of millions of people.”
But because that was the case, Khrushchev was suggesting a confidential exchange between the two men whose actions would determine the future of the planet. If Kennedy was uninterested, the Soviet leader said the president could ignore the letter and Khrushchev would never mention it again.
Salinger was struck by the peasant simplicity of Khrushchev’s language, “in contrast to the sterile gobbledygook that passes for this level of diplomatic correspondence.” The letter had none of Khrushchev’s usual threats and instead solicited Kennedy’s alternative proposals should he differ with Khrushchev’s suggestions.
Khrushchev’s initiative had several possible motivations. Most important, his Party Congress would begin in a little more than two weeks, and engaging Kennedy in such an exchange would give him greater assurance that the U.S. would do nothing to disrupt his painstaking choreography. Second, he hoped to calm the rising tensions that had produced a much larger expansion of U.S. defense spending than he had anticipated.
Khrushchev knew the Soviet Union lacked the economic depth to match a sustained arms race with the far wealthier United States. For the first time, he had to worry that the West might challenge his conventional military dominance around Berlin. Kennedy’s defense buildup was also inflaming Soviet hard-liners’ arguments that Khrushchev was doing too little to combat the West and should have gone further to neutralize West Berlin. In his letter, Khrushchev warned Kennedy that the tit-for-tat military spending, spurred by Berlin, was further reason why Moscow was “attaching such exclusive significance to the German question.”
The Soviet leader said he was willing to reexamine positions frozen through fifteen years of cold war. Writing to the Catholic Kennedy, the atheist Soviet compared the postwar world to Noah’s Ark, aboard which all parties wanted to continue their voyage, whether they were clean or unclean. “And we have no other alternative: either we should live in peace and cooperation so that the Ark maintains its buoyancy, or else it sinks.”
Khrushchev also said he was willing to expand on the quiet contacts between Secretary of State Rusk and Foreign Minister Gromyko, whose first meeting had been in New York on September 21. In addition, he was willing to take up Kennedy’s suggestion of preparatory talks between the U.S. and Soviet ambassadors to Yugoslavia, America’s legendary diplomat George Kennan and General Alexei Yepishev, a Khrushchev confidant.
Just a day after the border closure on August 14, the State Department had authorized Kennan to open that channel, but at the time Moscow had shown no interest. Now Khrushchev was eager, though he worried that without clear instructions the ambassadors would “indulge in tea-drinking” and “mooing at each other when they should talk on the substance.” Khrushchev suggested instead the use of U.S. Ambassador Thompson, since he was a trusted and proven interlocutor, though he immediately apologized, saying he understood that this would be Kennedy’s choice.
Khrushchev protested at length about Western suspicions that Moscow still intended to seize West Berlin. “It is ridiculous to even think of that,” he said, arguing that the city was of no geopolitical importance. To show his good intentions, he suggested moving the United Nations headquarters to West Berlin, an idea he had floated earlier that month in separate meetings with Belgian Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak and former French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud.
Apart from opening his new channel to Kennedy, Khrushchev was taking other measures to avoid further escalation of tensions with the U.S. Khrushchev’s party Presidium had put on ice a far-advanced plan to provide Cuba w
ith more advanced weaponry, including missiles that could reach the U.S. Khrushchev had also warned Ulbricht against a series of measures he was implementing to expand his hold on East Berlin, lecturing his troublesome client that he should be satisfied with his 1961 gains.
In his most important gesture, Khrushchev responded to Kennedy’s appeal of the previous week for progress on Laos. He confirmed their agreement of Vienna that Laos would become a neutral, independent state like Burma and Cambodia. However, he disagreed with Kennedy’s concern about specifically who should take which leadership positions in Laos, saying that should not be a matter for Moscow and Washington to decide.
With that, Khrushchev closed with best wishes to Kennedy’s wife and for his and his family’s health.
HYANNIS PORT, MASSACHUSETTS
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1961
It would take two weeks before Kennedy was ready to respond.
Working over the weekend on Cape Cod, Kennedy wrote and rewrote a draft that would balance his heightened distrust for Khrushchev with his desire to use all means to avoid war through miscalculation. A negative reply could hasten another Kremlin move on Berlin, but too positive a reply would look naive to his domestic and Allied critics. Both Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer worried that any Kennedy–Khrushchev talks were simply a recipe for new concessions on West Berlin.
Adenauer’s concerns would have been even greater if he had known the instructions Kennedy had given Rusk to dramatically reconstruct U.S. positions for a new round of Berlin talks, with a peace conference as their goal. Kennedy had ruled out as a negotiator U.S. Ambassador to West Germany Walter Dowling, because “he reflects Bonn’s opinion too much.” He also wanted Rusk to leave on the table only issues acceptable to Moscow and remove Adenauer’s insistence on talks aimed at German and Berlin reunification through free elections. “These are not negotiable proposals,” he said. “Their emptiness in this sense is generally recognized; and we should have to fall back from them promptly.” What he was willing to consider were many of Moscow’s previously unacceptable ideas, including making West Berlin an internationalized “free city” as long as it was NATO that guaranteed its future and not a foreign troop contingent including the Soviets.
Considering how much he was willing to compromise, Kennedy was disappointed by the Soviet response. Soviet aircraft increasingly buzzed U.S. planes traveling to Berlin, Khrushchev had resumed nuclear testing, and the Soviet leader again was threatening to sign an East German peace treaty. On the other hand, Khrushchev had abandoned earlier threats of war and was promising to preserve West Berlin’s independence.
One matter was certain: after having tried to put the Berlin issue on the back burner at the beginning of his presidency, Kennedy was now overwhelmed by it. Unable to get the president to focus any attention on his land conservation agenda, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall complained, “He’s imprisoned by Berlin. That’s all he thinks about. He has a restless mind, and he likes to roam over all subjects, but ever since August, Berlin has occupied him totally.”
Kennedy considered reaching out to his allies to get their advice and buy-in on how to respond to Khrushchev, but experience had taught him that that would only produce muddle and press leaks. He would then lose Khrushchev’s trust. But what was that trust worth, anyway? Chip Bohlen, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, told Kennedy that his response to Khrushchev “may be the most important letter the President will ever write.”
In a letter dated October 16, more than two weeks after Khrushchev’s correspondence, Kennedy seized upon Khrushchev’s personal tone and wrote about the value of getting away from Washington and spending time on the shore with his children and their cousins. He embraced Khrushchev’s offer of confidential correspondence, and said he would not hint at it in public or disclose it to the press. However, Kennedy added to Khrushchev that he would share the letter with Rusk and a few other of his closest associates.
Kennedy embraced Khrushchev’s Noah’s Ark analogy. Due to the dangers of the nuclear age, he said, U.S.–Soviet collaboration to keep the peace now was even more important than their partnership during World War II. Kennedy could not have been clearer in his de facto acceptance of Berlin’s border closure. He called his attitude toward Berlin and Germany “one of reason, not belligerence. There is peace in that area now—and this government shall not initiate and shall oppose any action which upsets that peace.”
Although he had been willing to allow the construction of the Berlin Wall, he was now drawing the line he would not cross regarding Berlin. He rejected Khrushchev’s efforts to open negotiations to change Berlin’s status to a so-called “free city” where Soviet troops would join the other three Allies in ensuring the city’s freedom and the East Germans would control access. “We would be ‘buying the same horse’ twice,” he said, “conceding objectives which you seek, merely to retain what we already possess.” But Kennedy expressed willingness to begin exploratory talks through the American whom Khrushchev had suggested for the purpose, Ambassador Thompson.
Kennedy also wanted Khrushchev to give the U.S. more on Laos as a test case for Berlin. Said the president, “I do not see how we can expect to reach a settlement on so bitter and complex an issue as Berlin, where both of us have vital interests at stake, if we cannot come to a final agreement on Laos, which we have previously agreed should be neutral and independent after the fashion of Burma and Cambodia.” Now that it was clear that the neutralist Prince Souvanna Phouma would become prime minister, Kennedy said that he and Khrushchev should ensure that the prince “is assisted by the kind of men we believe necessary to meet the standard of neutrality.” He said the acceleration of communist attacks on South Vietnam, many from Laotian territory, were “a very grave threat to peace.”
However, more important to Khrushchev than the content of Kennedy’s letter was the fact that the president had taken his bait and replied at all. Now the Soviet leader could be relatively certain that Kennedy was ready to engage in new talks regarding Berlin, and thus would refrain from confrontational speeches or actions that might disrupt Khrushchev’s careful planning for his crucial, fast-approaching Party Congress. Only two months after closing the Berlin border, the Soviet was drawing Kennedy into new negotiations on the city’s status, without having suffered even the modest hand-slap of economic sanctions.
What Kennedy would get out of the exchange was less satisfying. Khrushchev’s next communication would come in the form of a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb.
PALACE OF CONGRESSES, MOSCOW
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1961
Sunlight glimmered through the morning mist off the golden domes of the Kremlin’s fifteenth- and sixteenth-century churches. The red flags of the fifteen Soviet republics fluttered in front of the modern, glass-walled red and gold Palace of Congresses, just finished for the 22nd Soviet Party Congress.
The massive auditorium was filled to capacity. Not one of its red seats was vacant. Never had so many communists met in one place at the same time. Some 4,394 voting delegates and 405 nonvoting delegates—nearly 5,000 in all—had gathered from eighty communist and noncommunist countries. That was three and a half times more delegates than in the preceding three congresses.
The numbers were a reflection of the party’s growth, now reaching the 10 million mark in membership, after having added nearly 1.5 million members since the 21st Party Congress in 1959. Khrushchev wanted a record crowd for his 1961 show, so he had entitled each party organization to send additional delegates.
The Palace of Congresses was unique, if only because everything worked so much better than in most Soviet government buildings. It had escalators with nearly silent motors, the latest stereophonic sound, West German–made central air-conditioning, British-manufactured refrigerators, and hot and cold running water in marble lavatories. Western correspondents gathered for drinks and food on the seventh floor, which they called the “Top of the Marx.”
Time magazine assessed the crowd: �
��comrades from small Russian villages, café-sophisticated Parisians, bamboo-tough agitators from Asia.” The stars included the Viet Minh’s Ho Chi Minh; Red China’s Chou En-lai; America’s seventy-one-year-old labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; the Spanish Civil War’s famed “Pasionaria,” Dolores Ibárruri; and János Kádár, the leader who had helped put down the 1956 rebellion in Hungary. They filed in beneath a giant silver bas-relief of Lenin on a purple background.
Western reporters habitually called Khrushchev the “absolute leader” of the Soviet Union, but the truth was more complicated. After only a year in power, Khrushchev had narrowly survived a coup in 1957. After the G-2 incident and the Paris Summit failure in May 1960, Stalinist remnants began to rally against Khrushchev. In particular, they seized upon what they considered his irresponsible reduction of Soviet armed forces, his alienation of communist China, and his embracing of the imperialist Americans. Through early votes on prefabricated resolutions, Khrushchev monitored potential rivalries that could be his undoing.
Kennedy’s three leading American political opponents—Republican Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and former Vice President Richard Nixon—were meek compared with Khrushchev’s less visible and more dangerous opponents, men bred in Stalin’s bloodiest times.
Though he owed his position to Khrushchev, Presidium member Frol Kozlov personified the sort of thug that had begun to plot against Khrushchev after the Paris Summit failure. He was ill-educated, short, boorish, Stalinist, and hostile to the West. American diplomat Richard Davies described him as a nasty drunk who ate like a pig and drank like a fish. Yet Khrushchev also faced a smoother and more ruthless kind of potential enemy in Mikhail Suslov, the party’s leading ideologist and intellectual.
Khrushchev had strengthened his hold on power during 1961 through favors, factional purges, and visits throughout the country with local party leaders. The Gagarin space shot, the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna Summit, and the Berlin border closure had also neutralized would-be opponents. It seemed to party colleague Pyotr Demichev that Khrushchev was enjoying a rare “time in the sun.” Time magazine put it this way: “In 44 years and 15 Party Congresses since the October 1917 Revolution, Communism’s inner hierarchy has never seemed more stable or more successful.”
Berlin 1961 Page 47