Adenauer no longer could conceal his disgust with Kennedy. He protested to Paul Nitze, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense who visited him in Bonn, that if Kennedy’s principles went forward, West Berlin would not have sufficient moving vans for all those who wished to flee the city. He then shot off a brusque note to Kennedy that said, “I have considerable objections against some of these proposals. I ask you most urgently, my dear Mr. President, to call an immediate pause to these proceedings….”
A leak of the paper, almost certainly blessed by Adenauer, created such an uproar that commentators on both sides of the Atlantic attacked Kennedy for engaging in retreat while his adversaries continued to gun down would-be refugees, harass Allied soldiers, and further reinforce their Wall. Kennedy was forced to withdraw his proposal. Most humiliating of all, an emboldened Khrushchev was in the process of rejecting Kennedy’s principles anyway because they did not include a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Khrushchev was playing for larger stakes.
Even as he put in place his Cuban operation, on July 5, 1962, he countered with his most detailed proposal yet to Kennedy to end what he labeled the “West Berlin occupation regime.” Under his plan, United Nations police forces would replace Allied troops. They would be drawn from the existing three Western powers but also from neutral states and two Warsaw Pact countries. Through gradual cuts to this contingent of 25 percent per year, after four years West Berlin would have no remaining foreign forces of any kind. Kennedy rejected that proposal two weeks later, on July 17, but every step of the way Khrushchev continued to move his Berlin strategy forward even as he secretly finalized his Cuban plans.
The Soviet military’s high-seas operation to Cuba was so large in scale that Khrushchev had to have assumed that Kennedy and his intelligence services would discover it, but that the president would lack the will to stop the missile deployments.
On September 4, Kennedy told select members of Congress that the CIA had determined the Soviets were helping Castro build up his defense capabilities. That evening, Kennedy issued a press statement that said much the same, and warned Khrushchev “the gravest issues would arise” if the U.S. found evidence of Soviet combat troops or offensive capability. The tone and commitment to respond was far more resolute than Khrushchev had anticipated.
Two days later, on September 6, Khrushchev flew a surprised Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, who had been in Russia visiting electrical plants, to meet with him at his Black Sea retreat at Pitsunda. He explored with Udall what shift in domestic politics might be providing Kennedy a new backbone even while he repeated his conviction that Kennedy was fundamentally weak. “As a president he has understanding,” Khrushchev told Udall, “but what he does not have is courage—courage to solve the German question.” With his Cuban operation far advanced, Khrushchev told Udall, “So we will help him solve the problem. We will put him in a situation where it is necessary to solve it…. We will not allow your troops to be in Berlin.”
Khrushchev told Udall that to avoid damaging Kennedy in the November elections, he would not press the issue until afterward. Without any reference to Cuba, he told Udall that the Soviets’ enhanced position of strength had already changed the balance of power: “It’s been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy—now we can swat your ass.” War over Berlin, Khrushchev said, would mean that with “the space of an hour” there would be “no Paris and no France.”
On October 16, 1962, with most of the Cuban launchers already in place, Khrushchev told Foy Kohler, who was Thompson’s successor as ambassador to the USSR, that he wanted to meet with the president at the UN General Assembly session in New York during the second half of November to talk about Berlin and other issues. By then, the Soviet leader would have significantly shifted the strategic balance, giving Moscow for the first time a capability of reliably hitting the U.S. with nuclear weapons. That, in turn, would leave him in a better position either to negotiate or impose the Berlin solution he wanted. Khrushchev told his new ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, that Berlin remained “the primary issue in Soviet–American relations.”
As Khrushchev would recall later:
My thinking went like this: If we installed the missiles secretly, and then the United States discovered the missiles after they were poised and ready to strike, the Americans would think twice before trying to liquidate our installations by military means. I knew that the United States could knock out some of our installations, but not all of them. If a quarter or even a tenth of our missiles survived—even if only one or two big ones were left—we could still hit New York, and there wouldn’t be much of New York left. I don’t mean to say everyone in New York would be killed—not everyone, of course, but an awful lot of people would be wiped out…. And it was high time that America learned what it feels like to have her own land and her own people threatened.
Of all Khrushchev’s moves linking Cuba and Berlin during this period, perhaps none was as telling as the Soviet construction of an aboveground oil pipeline across East Germany to fuel Soviet troop deployments to the West German border. The pipelines would send an unmistakable message to Kennedy that Khrushchev would be willing to go to war in Berlin over any Cuban pushback. Said Khrushchev: “The Americans knew that if Russian blood were shed in Cuba, American blood would surely be shed in Germany.”
Kennedy’s words and actions during the thirteen days of the Cuban crisis, from October 16 to 29, underscored his conviction that Khrushchev’s Cuba and Berlin strategies were interlinked. From the beginning, he suspected that Khrushchev’s Cuban strategy was ultimately aimed at winning Berlin, the Soviet leader’s greater priority. Thus, Kennedy told the Joint Chiefs:
Let me just say a little, first, about what the problem is, from my point of view. First, in general, I think we ought to think of why the Russians did this. Well, actually, it was a rather dangerous but rather useful play of theirs. We do nothing and they have a missile base there with all the pressure that brings to bear on the United States and our prestige. If we attack Cuban missiles, or Cuba in any way, that gives them a clear line to take Berlin, as they were able to do in Hungary under the Anglo war in Egypt [the Suez Crisis]. We would be regarded as the trigger-happy Americans who lost Berlin. We would have no support among our allies. We would affect the West Germans’ attitude towards us. And [people would believe] that we let Berlin go because we didn’t have the guts to ensure a situation in Cuba. After all, Cuba is five or six thousand miles from them. They don’t give a damn about Cuba. But they do care about Berlin and about their own security.
Kennedy’s decision to take a harder line with the Soviets over Cuba in 1962 than he had done regarding Berlin in 1961 had at least three motivations. First, the perils were greater to the U.S., as the danger was closer to home. Second, the domestic politics of mishandling Cuba were more dangerous to Kennedy’s reelection chances than they had been regarding faraway Berlin. Finally, Kennedy had at long last learned that his demonstrations of weakness had only encouraged Khrushchev to test him further. The Soviet leader had brazenly misled him, saying that he was postponing Berlin talks in deference to U.S. elections when he was merely buying time to put his missiles in place.
Kennedy drove home the Berlin connection again when he informed British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of the photographic proof of the missiles in a secret teletype message that was received in London on October 21 at 10:00 p.m. He wrote:
I recognize fully that Khrushchev’s main intention may be to increase his chances at Berlin, and we shall be ready to take a full role there as well as in the Caribbean. What is essential at this moment of highest test is that Khrushchev should discover that if he is counting on weakness or irresolution, he has miscalculated.
Kennedy repeated his Berlin concern to Macmillan in a second message a day later, just a few hours before his historic television address informing Americans of the danger, demanding the Soviets remove the missiles, and introducing a naval
quarantine of Cuba. “I need not point out to you the possible relation of this secret and dangerous move on the part of Khrushchev to Berlin,” he said.
In 1962, Kennedy also rejected the advice of the so-called SLOBs, the Soft-Liners on Berlin. Ambassador Thompson, who had returned from Moscow to the State Department, wanted Kennedy to stop military traffic to Berlin during the Cuban showdown so as not to provoke the Kremlin, a notion the president rejected. National Security Advisor Bundy wondered whether some deal was possible under which one could trade Berlin for the missiles. Kennedy refused that as well, not wanting to be the president who lost Berlin.
For all his newfound resolve, however, Kennedy opposed his military’s suggestion of an attack on the Cuban bases, in no small part due to concern about a Soviet tit-for-tat military retaliation in Berlin. At one point General Curtis E. LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, protested Kennedy’s unwillingness to strike by saying, “This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” LeMay’s argument: “If we don’t do anything to Cuba, they’re going to push on Berlin and push real hard because they’ve got us on the run.”
Kennedy told the Executive Committee, the body he had created from his National Security Council to handle the crisis, that he worried even a quarantine could prompt a corresponding Soviet blockade of Berlin. The president appointed a subcommittee of that group, chaired by Paul Nitze, to wrestle with Berlin-related issues. He even lined up General Lucius Clay to return to Berlin if needed to coordinate U.S. actions.
In his October 22 speech to the nation, Kennedy publicly warned Khrushchev on Berlin: “Any hostile move anywhere in the world against the safety and freedom of peoples to whom we are committed—including in particular the brave people of West Berlin—will be met by whatever action is needed.”
With that, Kennedy’s Berlin Crisis had moved to Cuba.
In his meeting with U.S. Ambassador to London David Bruce on the evening of Kennedy’s speech, Prime Minister Macmillan worried: “Was it not likely that Khrushchev’s real purpose was to trade Cuba for Berlin? If he were stopped, with great loss of face, in Cuba, would he not be tempted to recover himself in Berlin? Indeed, might not this be the whole purpose of the exercise—to move forward one pawn in order to exchange it for another?” For his part, Kennedy worried to Macmillan that Khrushchev might preemptively take military action in Berlin that would require a proportionate U.S. response against Cuba. “That’s really the choice we now have,” he wrote. “If [Khrushchev] takes Berlin, then we will take Cuba.”
Instead, Khrushchev backed down in Cuba once challenged by a decisive Kennedy, exactly as General Clay had predicted he would a year earlier in regard to Berlin. When Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vasili Kuznetsov suggested a diversionary strike on Berlin to Khrushchev, the Soviet leader warned him, “Keep that sort of talk to yourself. We don’t know how to get out of one predicament, and you [want to] drag us into another?” Khrushchev also rejected Ambassador Dobrynin’s idea of responding to Cuba through the “first step” of closing ground routes to Berlin. “Father considered any action in Berlin to be unduly dangerous,” Khrushchev’s son Sergei would recall later, insisting that “not for a moment” did he consider a nuclear strike on the U.S. After Kennedy’s speech, Khrushchev began to withdraw Soviet troops from the West German border so that it would be clear he had no intention of escalating the conflict.
All that said, Kennedy was never as uncompromising in Cuba as it appeared to the U.S. public. On October 27, the president’s brother Bobby and Dobrynin reached an agreement that the U.S. would withdraw its Jupiter nuclear missiles from Turkey. When Khrushchev mentioned the concession the following day in a letter to Kennedy, Bobby returned the letter to the Soviets and denied that such a trade had been made. But Khrushchev considered the Turkey retreat crucial to his agreement.
Nevertheless, Kennedy had even won over his biggest Allied critics. De Gaulle famously told Kennedy’s emissary Dean Acheson, who had been sent to brief him during the crisis, that he did not need to see the proof of spy photographs from “a great nation” in order to support Kennedy. Adenauer said he would throw his lot behind Kennedy even if the U.S. found it must bomb or invade Cuba. “Absolutely, the missiles must go,” he said, thereafter bracing his country for a Berlin blockade or even a nuclear exchange. Tellingly, Kennedy rejected the dovish Macmillan’s offer to mediate with Moscow and call a summit on Cuba, which he felt would be disastrous for Berlin. “I don’t know quite what we will discuss at the meeting,” Kennedy said, “because he’ll be back with the same old position on Berlin, probably offering to dismantle the missiles if we’ll neutralize Berlin.”
Most surprised of all by Kennedy’s demonstration of strength was Khrushchev himself, who had bet so much against it. General Clay suggested to diplomat William Smyser that the Cuban Missile Crisis never would have occurred had it not been for Khrushchev’s perception of Kennedy’s weakness, and Clay believed as well that the threat to Berlin only receded once Kennedy made it clear he would no longer tolerate Moscow’s bullying.
West Berliners celebrated the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis more enthusiastically than any others. They concluded that the Soviet threat to them had passed.
RATHAUS SCHÖNEBERG, CITY HALL OF WEST BERLIN
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26, 1963
Kennedy would make his first and last presidential trip to Berlin eight months after the Cuban crisis, on June 26, 1963. After visiting Checkpoint Charlie and walking along the Wall, he came to speak before City Hall, where some 300,000 Berliners had gathered. Most would remember the moment the rest of their lives.
Perhaps another million Berliners had also lined the thirty-five-mile route from Tegel. For most of the ride, Kennedy stood up on the far right side in the backseat of his open Lincoln convertible beside Mayor Willy Brandt and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. To catch a glimpse of their American hero, Berliners were hanging from trees and lampposts and standing on rooftops and balconies. The Red Cross, which had mobilized to handle casualties in the crowd, would report that more than a thousand people fainted.
At the airport and as they rolled through Berlin in their motorcade, some in the Kennedy delegation sneered that Hitler had drawn delirious German crowds as well. Berliners’ enthusiasm for Kennedy was so extreme that it unsettled Adenauer, who whispered to Rusk, “Does this mean Germany can one day have another Hitler?” At one point Kennedy was so dismayed that he told his military aide, General Godfrey T. McHugh, “If I told them to go tear down the Berlin Wall, they would do it.”
Yet the more time Kennedy and his entourage spent on the ground in West Berlin, the more they were smitten by its subjects. Kennedy was both stirred by West Berliners’ courage and shocked by the sight of the Wall, whose construction he had done so little to prevent. “He looks like a man who just glimpsed Hell,” observed Time correspondent Hugh Sidey. As Kennedy drove through the city, he redrafted the most important of the three speeches he would deliver, tossing out the wishy-washy language that had been crafted back in Washington so as not to provoke the Soviets. His speech outside West Berlin’s city hall would be the most emotional and powerful he would ever deliver abroad.
There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that Communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress.
At that point, Kennedy threw in a German line that had not appeared in his original text, but one that he had practiced before the event with Robert Lochner, the head of Radio in the American Sector of Berlin, or RIAS, and Adenauer’s interpreter Heinz Weber. He had written out what he wished to say phonetically on index cards. “Let them come to Berlin…Lasst sie nach Berlin komme
n,” he said. “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’”
Or as Kennedy had written on his cards: “Ish bin ine Bear-LEAN-er.”
Years later, amateur linguists would argue that Kennedy had misspoken and by using the article ein in front of Berliner, which was the name of a German pastry, he had actually told the crowd, “I am a jelly doughnut.” Yet the president had debated just that point with his two tutors, who had rightly concluded that by leaving out the article he would be suggesting he was born in Berlin and perhaps confuse the crowd, and thus lose the emphasis of his symbolic point. In any case, no one in the delirious crowd had any doubt about Kennedy’s meaning.
Expressing all the outrage he had not shown in August 1961, Kennedy renounced communism. He conceded that democracy was imperfect, “but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.” Much to the delight of Adenauer, for the first time during his presidency he also talked of the right to reunification that Germans had earned through their eighteen years of good behavior. He spoke of his faith that Berlin, the German nation, and the European continent would someday be unified.
It was a new Kennedy.
The president summoned General Clay, who had traveled with him to Berlin, to stand beside him at the podium. Together they basked in the crowd’s roars—the man who had privately condemned Kennedy for lacking the will to stand up to the Soviets, and the commander in chief who now was acting so Clay-like, much to the consternation of his advisers. After the speech, Bundy told the president, “I think you went a little too far.”
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