by Benn Steil
After two hours with Stalin, the emissaries spent three more working with Molotov “as a drafting committee.” Other than the ongoing matter of Stalin’s “insistent wish,” which the three agreed only to pass on to their governments, “things went so smoothly,” Smith told Marshall, “that I was a little worried. [I] remembered Stalin’s proverb, ‘an amiable bear is more dangerous than a hostile one.’ ” There was still inordinate detail being left to the military governors in Berlin to resolve. Would they be able to agree to a plan for simultaneous removal of the blockade and consolidation of the currency on a week’s deadline? It was “an impossible job,” Smith feared, but “I don’t see how we can spare more time.”84
Marshall and Clay expressed alarm that Molotov had refused, for reasons related to the Soviet “juridical position,” to affirm quadripartite control over Berlin in the draft directive. With what appeared to be a scolding from the secretary, Smith’s frustration boiled over.85 “Quadripartite control does not exist in Berlin today,” he cabled back, and “the Russians have no intention of permitting [its] revival . . . so long as they are unable to achieve quadripartite control of Germany.” Marshall, he believed, needed to accept reality and make up his mind: either “we simply stay [in Berlin] under present conditions and take the necessary measures to organize the life of the three western sectors independently” or we accept the blockade’s lifting “under circumstances in which we would not have complete control over the life of our sectors.” Trying to have an independent West Germany and a four-power Berlin was, to his mind, denying reality. He recommended that the Allies seek concessions from Molotov, with no expectation of success, and then pass on the directive as is to the military governors to see if they could make it conform to Washington’s demands. If they failed, Washington could then walk away.86
Ominously, Molotov refused to allow any of his or Stalin’s oral assurances into the directive, insisting he would not be drawn into discussing a “new document.” He asked repeatedly, however, that Soviet wording on the London decisions—which the Allies had rejected, and would not agree to in a form acceptable to Moscow—be included in an immediate communiqué.87 The reason for the hard line seemed clear. By the time the directive was ready to be issued to the military governors on August 30, the Bonn constitutional convention was two days away. Stalin was about to lose a critical leverage point and, with it, reason to follow through on concessions.
But Stalin had been prepared for this eventuality. He had told Tito deputy Djilas back in February that “the West will make Western Germany their own, and we shall turn Eastern Germany into our own state.”88 The objective was now to secure Berlin as East Germany’s undivided capital.
When the military governors gathered at 5 p.m. on August 31, it was the first time they had met in nearly two months. Sokolovsky’s demeanor, a concerned Murphy recorded, was “mildly provocative.” He seemed imperious, wanting to show his “mastery of the situation.” It was not an air he would put on without orders from the top. “I have never felt so discouraged and hopeless,” Clay wrote in anticipation of the encounter and the likely fallout.89
“Hold on tightly to, and do not make any concessions away from, the decisions agreed upon in Moscow,” Molotov had ordered Sokolovsky by Top Secret cable earlier that day. “Keep in mind that the western representatives are particularly striving toward a widening of the authority of the financial commission. This cannot be allowed.”90
Sokolovsky disavowed knowledge of oral understandings reached with Stalin and Molotov in Moscow. No communications restrictions introduced before June 18, he said, could be lifted.91 And new ones would now be imposed on air traffic into Berlin, limiting it to support of the occupation forces. Unregulated flights, he explained, undermined operation of the Soviet mark, the city’s sole authorized currency. As for the Soviet bank, he insisted the four-power financial commission could have no powers over its operation. Once the Allies withdrew the B-mark, the financial life of the city would pass to Soviet control. The following week, he announced that Soviet aerial military exercises would begin in the corridors over Berlin.92
With the airlift now under direct military threat, a furious Clay cabled Draper in Washington on September 3, insisting to know the endgame of U.S. policy. Was the United States determined to remain an occupying power in Berlin? Agreeing to any of Moscow’s terms, he was sure, was inconsistent with such an objective. Since the president was still groping for options short of war or withdrawal, Royall could only assure Clay that the administration would not sacrifice its rights for an end to the blockade.93
“I am sorry,” Murphy cabled Marshall on September 7, the deadline for the governors to complete an agreement, but “we are getting nowhere.” The Soviet “attitude is indifferent almost to [the point of being] contemptuous.” They “are making only those proposals which would give them complete control so as to make our acceptance impossible.” The governors adjourned without agreement on a joint report, or even agreement on a report of their disagreements.
But there were new problems, Murphy explained. Soviet “tactics in Berlin [were] getting rough.” On September 6, a 1,500-strong Communist mob blocked the City Assembly from meeting. Three American reporters were beaten up. Under orders from a Soviet officer, uniformed police from the eastern sector arrested dozens of plainclothes officers from the western sector brought in by the deputy mayor to keep order. Murphy feared they were led off “to death or worse.”94
Over 300,000 Berliners rallied on September 9 in the city’s Platz der Republik, near the Brandenburg Gate, to hear Reuter and other city leaders condemn the Soviet blockade. “We cannot be bartered, we cannot be negotiated, we cannot be sold!” Reuter shouted. “[We will] stand together until this fight has been won!” Riots broke out when East Berlin police beat back demonstrators passing through the gate. A Soviet War Memorial flag was burned and police cars overturned. Twelve days later, CDU interim mayor Ferdinand Friedensburg would meet with Major Boris Otschkin, the Soviet chief of the Department of Civil Administration within the city’s four-power occupation authority (the Kommandatura), using remarkably bold language to criticize the policies and behavior of the Soviet occupiers:
The fundamental relationship of the German population to Soviet power has been deteriorating. . . . A balancing of the tensions, that have now assumed global political extent . . . can only be achieved by improving the immediate relations of the German population to the Soviet occupation. . . .
The Soviet occupation forces have committed two fundamental errors. . . . The first is that the use of government and administrative forms that have proven themselves in the Soviet Union is in no way possible in the same manner towards the German population. [Germans] aspire to make their political life according to their own democratic forms and to establish good relations with the Soviet Union in accordance with those forms. However, these efforts stand against the policy of the Soviet military administration. . . . which holds fast to the imposition of other political forms and restricts the area of German self-government. . . .
The second is that the Soviet occupying power relies . . . on the Communists, to whom they give all possible support. [But] the Communists constitute a small minority, and will also be a small minority in the future, having been rejected by the vast majority of the German people. . . .
The intransigence of the Soviet occupying forces has led the German people to a rigid and often imprudent behavior towards them. [I] deeply regret that after 3 1/2 years of Soviet occupation the German and Soviet people have failed to achieve mutual understanding.95
Privately, the city leaders also criticized western diplomacy for being weak. They struggled to rebuff rumors in the city that the Allies would withdraw the B-mark as a prelude to withdrawing troops. These rumors were undermining the currency’s value.96
“Sokolovsky’s position,” Marshall concluded, “and with even greater force the Soviet-inspired disorders designed to overthrow the city Government elected under q
uadripartite supervision make it plain that the Soviet Government seeks to nullify our rights in Berlin.”97 Truman assembled his top military brass on September 13 to review options, including nuclear strikes.98
In Moscow the following day, the Allied emissaries made a final request for a meeting with the Soviet leader. They were told Stalin was “on vacation.” Molotov received them four days later, but dismissed their complaints that Sokolovsky had not followed the directive. It was they who had distorted it, he said, by demanding financial commission powers “over the whole activity of the German Bank” and repudiating an earlier 1945 air corridor accord.99
The directive being ambiguous on the commission’s powers, the Allies had depended on a measure of Soviet goodwill in hewing to Stalin’s oral assurances. Soviet literature, however, had extolled the use of currency manipulation during the Russian Revolution; and Douglas, for one, was not surprised that Stalin wanted to retain that weapon in Berlin. His backtracking on currency cooperation, together with new air traffic restrictions, convinced Marshall the Soviets were yet again negotiating in bad faith.100 Looking back on events months hence, Foy Kohler, the American chargé in Moscow, would conclude that the Kremlin had fashioned the impasse “to spin out negotiations indefinitely, maintaining [the] blockade meanwhile.”101
Indeed, Stalin had shifted his chips. Having failed to stop the Bonn constitutional convention, he was now betting the house on the airlift collapsing by winter—and with it the morale of West Berliners. The airlift “had been more successful than we had anticipated,” Marshall told the NSC, yet he warned that “in many respects time was [still] on the side of the Soviets.” British tonnage had topped out at 1,463 in August, and would fall to 1,259 in September and 1,030 in October as mechanical and logistical problems emerged.102 But on the American side, even Marshall could not yet see that the Allies were on the verge of a breakthrough. It began quietly in late July, with the appointment of a new airlift commander in the Wiesbaden headquarters.
MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM TUNNER WAS not your typical air commander. He did not share his colleagues’ fixation on bombing. A devotee of Frederick Taylor’s theories of scientific management, Tunner took an odd interest in the ability of planes to move people and equipment long distances at great speed. He brought in motion-study engineers to analyze the airlift in theory and practice, and ordered what seemed to all involved baffling changes in practice and procedure. They paid off: average daily deliveries rose from 2,226 tons in July to just over 3,800 in August, within reach of Clay’s target of 4,500.103 That month the French also added a new airport in their zone, at Tegel.
By September, the airlift was shuttling in a record 4,593 tons daily, just above Clay’s target (though below the 6,000 tons Friedensburg thought necessary). Clay was now arguing that he could best the blockade indefinitely if he could just get some more planes—116 more, to be precise. In Washington, however, it seemed a dangerous gamble to commit more resources. Half the available military air fleet was already devoted to the Berlin mission. Shifting more would degrade the strike force the United States might need to deter or repel a Soviet attack.104
Politically, Marshall was being squeezed. To his right, the Joint Chiefs were critical of efforts to contain Russia with relief supplies and diplomacy. To his left, the president was frustrated by failure to nail down what seemed a done deal just a few weeks earlier. Stung by cries of “warmonger” from the Wallace camp,105 Truman began maneuvering behind Marshall’s back to cut a deal with the Soviet leader.
At the urging of political advisers who pointed to rising numbers of voters “fear[ing] the possibility of war,”106 Truman decided to send a personal envoy to Moscow to meet with Stalin. This would demonstrate to Americans his commitment to securing peace.
Eisenhower—like Marshall, a war hero—was the most prominent name in the mix.107 But Truman wanted someone he knew, someone who knew him and could speak for him. Someone not like Ike. He insisted on his longtime poker partner and former treasury secretary Fred Vinson. Now Supreme Court chief justice, Vinson had no special knowledge to bring to bear on Berlin, nor experience in Soviet affairs. But Truman hoped he might break down barriers with Stalin, letting him “unburden himself to someone on our side he felt he could trust.” The two sides might then “get somewhere.”
That a president who prided himself on standing up to the Russian menace should believe that such a complex, dangerous conflict could be treated as a personal misunderstanding reflected, in equal measures, desperation and ignorance of how the Soviet system worked. He had been unchastened by Stalin publishing Smith’s private remarks in May. Truman referred to “old Joe” as a “decent fellow,” one who was being misled by Molotov and pushed about as “a prisoner of the Politburo.” Yet even if it had been true, the idea that it could be overcome by a heart-to-heart with a hard-boiled Kentucky politico seemed far-fetched. Vinson himself was “astonished” at the request, and agreed only with reluctance.
On October 4, Truman finalized the draft of a public address explaining the gravity of the conflict with Russia and his decision to send an envoy to Moscow. Vinson’s assignment would not be to “negotiate with respect to the Berlin crisis,” but to discuss “the moral relationship” between the two countries. “Premier Stalin,” he wrote, had “assured [him] of his desire to talk with Justice Vinson.” Truman also implied that the secretary of state had approved the mission.108 Marshall knew nothing about it.
Lovett was beside himself. He warned the president that his boss, then huddling on the crisis with Bevin and Schuman in Paris, would resign. Truman agreed only to postpone a decision until he returned.
Marshall was now as bullish on Germany and the airlift as he had ever been, and therefore determined to take a firm line with Stalin. A presidential emissary with no knowledge of the recent months of grueling diplomacy was not what he had in mind. “We are on the road to victory,” he told Bevin and Schuman. “We have put Western Germany on its feet.” As for Berlin, “the air ferry counteracts the blockade very well.” It can “take care of the needs of the western sectors . . . for as long as we wish. It is not even [that] expensive.”109
So when Lovett broke news of the Vinson mission to him on October 5, he was apoplectic. This was, Marshall said, an initiative unique “in the history of diplomatic bungling.” But before he could get home to deal with Truman, the story had leaked and broken in the Chicago Tribune.
Now having to confront the fallout, Truman regretted the whole idea and was determined to put things right with Marshall. “I won’t do it,” he told his advisers, even as they insisted that the Vinson mission was still his best chance to stay in office. When Marshall arrived on October 9, the two concocted a story that they had discussed having Vinson carry a message to Stalin “regarding the atomic problem” and the president’s “desire to see peace firmly established in the world.” But in the end, the statement explained, Truman “decided not to take this step” owing to “the possibilities of misunderstanding.”110
Though the mission was now scotched, Marshall thought his efforts in Paris badly undermined. Indeed, Bevin and Schuman were now less sure than ever whether Truman wanted to start a war, abandon them to one, or both. On October 14, State Department Kremlinologist Foy Kohler cabled Marshall from Paris: Stalin, he said, had concluded that there was now “no chance of preventing” the creation of a West German state “by negotiation, even at the price of concessions with respect to Berlin.” The only way he saw to “[bring] about the destruction of the London decisions and [disrupt] the . . . unity of Western Powers” was, therefore, to undermine their governments. His new strategy was to use “Communist-directed disturbances in France . . . to hasten the advent of de Gaulle,”111 who was himself bitterly opposed to those decisions.
Loyal and discreet, Marshall may or may not have used the word “resign,” but, in poor health, he made clear to Truman that he would not remain in his post beyond inauguration day. Expecting Dewey to win the election in any ca
se, he even suggested to John Foster Dulles that, owing to the “emergency character of the world situation,” he should replace him immediately following the election. A stunned Dulles reminded Marshall that Truman would still be in office another three months, and that even lame ducks choose their own secretaries of state.112
THE CREATION OF THE UNITED nations was meant to be Roosevelt’s crowning contribution to the postwar order. It would, he believed, prevent an American retreat into isolationism and turn the Soviets from confrontation to cooperation.
Instead, Marshall was now determined to use it to isolate Moscow on the world stage. In October, he took the blockade to the Security Council under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which covered threats to peace. He set the United States up as prosecutor, targeting its case to the six “neutrals:” Argentina, Belgium, Canada, China, Colombia, and Syria.
Bevin and Schuman signed on only after putting up spirited resistance. The sole purpose they could discern in involving the U.N. was to secure moral sanction to break the blockade with arms, and it was their nations that would bear the brunt of the Soviet response.113 The Russians, Bevin groused privately, had “played their cards very badly,” but this had “forced us into a closer association with the Americans in Germany than we had wished.”114
Truman, however, who had only just abandoned a peace mission, had made no decision to use force. Some in the administration, like Royall, were still pushing for a face-saving withdrawal from Berlin. Draper called the city “an untenable military outpost.” Backtracking from his earlier hard line, Kennan, too, was now concerned over the Allies’ “increasingly unfavorable position.”115 He opposed using the U.N. to isolate the Soviets. Rather than mobilize the “smaller nations,” he said, it would likely “alarm” and “paralyze” them, undermining “their will to play an active part in the organization.” As for “the Russians,” if cornered they will just “leave the Organization.”116 Smith, believing the crisis to be a self-inflicted wound, argued that “any U.N. action that enables us to get out of Berlin would be very desirable.”117