Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  It was a ploy aimed squarely at one of Khrushchev’s most ardent—and controversial—passions. He’d been pushing the Politburo to cut defense spending, arguing that it was time to do something about the lines that wound through every street in the Soviet Union as housewives waited for bread and meat; it was an idea that triggered intense hostility from the armed forces, and from some of the old Stalinist bulls in Moscow. Johnson’s words put Khrushchev on the defensive, and he protested loudly to the President that the aggressive posture of Washington—ringing the Soviet Union with missiles in Turkey, Greece, and Iran, for instance—forced Moscow to build ever-more-powerful weapons.

  The conversation lasted until lunch—beef Wellington was the main course—and when the talks resumed, Khrushchev turned to the most urgent matter on the agenda: the status of Germany, and specifically, Berlin. World War II had ended with Germany divided; East Germany was a totally controlled satellite of the Soviet Union, a grim, gray gulag of a nation that had been stripped of much of its economic power by a Soviet Union determined to avenge the twenty million war dead. West Germany was an ally of the West with one of the most vibrant economies in Europe (French and British visitors in particular were inclined to ask, after a cursory look around, “Didn’t we win the war?”). For years, East Germans had been voting with their feet; more than two and a half million had decamped to the West in the last decade or so. It was how they fled that made Germany the most likely terrain for armed conflict between East and West. The city of Berlin, nestled 110 miles into East Germany, had also been left divided after the War; while the four allied powers had sliced up the city, the real division was between East and West. For years, Moscow had been threatening to undo the postwar arrangement that had guaranteed the West access to Berlin; in 1948, they had shut down all rail and auto routes in an attempt to starve West Berlin into accepting Soviet control. A yearlong airlift of 4,000 tons a day of food and materiel succeeded in breaking the blockade, and had birthed a different Soviet stratagem, one Chairman Khrushchev raised at irregular intervals. It is time for this artificial construct to end, he would thunder. If the West will not agree to opening up all of Berlin to East German and Soviet forces, I will sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, and turn over total control of Berlin to them.

  That was the argument Khrushchev began making to President Johnson immediately after lunch. And it would lead to the most dramatic clash of the summit, one that the Americans at first saw as a major victory, and one that triggered unimaginable consequences.

  As Khrushchev talked about Berlin, about the logic of ending the postwar arrangement, he grew emotional. Why, he asked, should so sensible a proposition produce such hostility? It would be madness to start a nuclear war, kill tens of millions of people, over a matter of diplomacy. Or is it true, Khrushchev asked bluntly, as some of my advisors believe, that your generals and admirals believe the U.S. could emerge from a war as the conquerors of the planet? Do you really have such madmen in your councils of authority? Do they not know each of us has the power to utterly destroy the other?

  It was at this point that the President asked Khrushchev if they could dismiss their aides and diplomats, and talk between themselves, with only their interpreters and a single notetaker from each side present. The Soviet leader raised his eyebrows, and asked if Johnson was going to try to persuade him to defect.

  “I thought if we let you come to Disneyland this time, you might change sides,” Johnson quipped, referring to the Premier’s 1959 visit to the U.S., when his desire to see the theme park was turned down on security grounds. “No, Mr. Chairman, I just think we might find a real conversation more fruitful.” When the subalterns had left, Johnson leaned in close to his counterpart, as he had done countless times in the Senate, often using his size to—literally—bend his targets backward as he bored in.

  “Nikita Sergeyevich,” Johnson began, using the patronymic common to Russians, but rarely employed in diplomatic conversation, “I’m going to speak very frankly, very bluntly to you. We are both men who came from hard times; we both know what it means to watch our fathers try to feed their families, to end the day with dirt on our hands, to feel the contempt of our own countrymen who think they are better than we are. So I feel I am talking to a kindred spirit when I offer you some wisdom from the folks I grew up with in Texas: Nikita Sergeyevich—Never shit a shitter.”

  Khrushchev’s interpreter turned beet-red; he groped for the right euphemism.

  “No,” Johnson said. “Tell it to him the way I said it.”

  The interpreter stumbled his way through the few words; the notetaker dropped his pencil; Khrushchev’s face flushed deep red. This was the way he talked; this was the way he threw other people off-balance. Now this American President was using his own shock tactic against him.

  “You know there are people in both of our countries who are under the delusion that they can win a nuclear war; you know that this is madness, that millions of your citizens and mine, and millions of others all across Europe, would die horrible deaths in another world war. But”—and here Johnson leaned so close to Khrushchev that their foreheads almost touched—“you also know what I know: that there is no real equivalence in what we have. The war hawks in my country are indeed mad if they think anyone can really prevail in a nuclear war, but they have reason to believe that their misguided beliefs are based in fact. They know my running mate, John Kennedy, was wrong when he talked about a missile gap. Yes, there is a gap, but it is not on our side. That’s why, Mr. Chairman, it is imperative that we do nothing to encourage these people to put any pressure on me to act on this imbalance. As far as I’m concerned, the fact that you could wipe out millions of Americans and Europeans is deterrence enough. But you do not want—and I don’t want—to create a crisis where the war hawks start to demand that we play this deadly numbers game.”

  The Soviet chairman sat mute for a long moment. Johnson’s words struck like a dagger to the heart. His entire diplomatic posture, and much of his political stature at home, depended on the illusion that Soviet and U.S. forces were in rough equivalence. If the West thought that much of Moscow’s nuclear might was a Potemkin village, how seriously would they treat Soviet diplomatic demands? If his own military thought the United States had gained a strategic advantage during Khrushchev’s reign, how secure would his position be at the top of the USSR’s unstable political pyramid? And if Washington threatened once again to overthrow the outpost of socialism in Latin America, how credible would Soviet promises be if Washington did not put real credence in the power of Moscow to match the U.S. kiloton for kiloton?

  After a moment, Khrushchev put on a truculent face.

  “Mr. President,” he said sternly, pointing a finger in Johnson’s face, “if you are living under the delusion that you are stronger than we, then I am afraid we will have to present evidence that even your ineffectual Central Intelligence Agency won’t be able to miss. And I want to caution you in the clearest possible term: We will either reach an agreement on Berlin by year’s end, or the Soviet Union will sign a treaty with the German Democratic Republic, and the postwar arrangement will end.”

  “That, Mr. Chairman, will be unacceptable to the United States and to Great Britain and France. I hope you will reconsider,” said Johnson. “Perhaps we might move to a more hopeful arena.” And they spent an hour going through the motions of possible cooperation in outer space. But the rest of the day—indeed, the rest of the summit—was a matter of putting the best face on a non-meeting of the minds. Through the state dinner at Schönbrunn Palace, through the opera, the ballet, and a truncated second-day gathering at the Soviet Embassy, and the very correct joint press briefing celebrating a “frank and fruitful discussion,” it was clear that nothing of any substance had been accomplished. The impassive expression on President Johnson’s face, the dour frown on Khrushchev’s, spoke far more eloquently than the pro forma words.

  The really consequential words were those spoken by Khrushchev t
o Gromyko on the long train ride back to Moscow.

  That son of a bitch believes he holds the whip hand, Khrushchev thundered. We need to show him that he cannot bully the Soviet Union. Before the train had arrived back home, he ordered his military to resume nuclear testing with the biggest hydrogen bombs possible—30 megatons, 50 megatons, big enough to put the fear of God into Johnson and his monopolist friends. But the most significant conclusion he drew from Johnson’s words he kept to himself.

  He had to move as quickly as possible to redress the imbalance between Moscow and the West. He had to find a way to make the United States as vulnerable as was the Soviet Union. And he had to do it in a way that would answer the disparate pressures that were closing in on him. China had become an increasingly painful thorn in his side; its leaders were openly signaling their dissatisfaction with Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, with his campaign to drain money away from the military in favor of satisfying consumer demands, and with his talk of “peaceful co-existence.” His enemies in the party and the government were striking the same chords. The East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, was demanding that his Moscow superiors do something about the ceaseless flight of citizens to the West. He wanted something dramatic, perhaps a wall, to pen in his disaffected subjects. And his favorite Marxist, Fidel Castro, never stopped warning of a second American attempt to overthrow him, never stopped urging Khrushchev to provide protection.

  It was not immediately obvious what he could do, but it would have to be something bold, something dramatic, something that would shock the West into recognizing that it had to deal with the Soviet Union as a genuine superpower, fully capable of inflicting as much damage as the United States could inflict on the Motherland. It took months, but by the summer of 1962, it had come to him. Summoning five of his closest advisors, and swearing them to absolutely secrecy, he said, “It is time to throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants.”

  THE AUTUMN OF 1962 was the season of President Lyndon Johnson’s content. The American economy, always the key to a President’s political fortunes, was in full bloom. Fifteen years into the post-World War II boom, the United States held the commanding heights of the world’s economy, and Americans were coming to believe that an unbroken rise in their standard of living was something close to a law of nature. More than half of Americans owned their own homes; well over half had savings accounts that held six months’ salary or more; the eight million veterans of World War II who had gone through college on the GI Bill were now part of the thriving middle class. The core American dream—that we would live better than our parents, and that our children would live better than us—was morphing from aspiration to reality.

  With unemployment dropping below 5 percent, with the postwar inflation now a receding memory, with economic growth hitting nearly 10 percent a year, President Johnson was presiding over a government that could simultaneously offer balanced budgets and expanded benefits. He’d pried the first federal aid to education bill out of Congress last November—signing the law in a one-room schoolhouse he’d attended back in Stonewall, Texas—and a health-care program for old folks was almost within his reach. It was bottled up in the Senate by that coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, but if the midterm elections went the way he thought they would, he’d have enough allies on Capitol Hill to pass it. And, with a month to go, those elections were looking to make the kind of history beyond Johnson’s fondest dreams.

  Not since 1934, when FDR was presiding over the New Deal, had a party holding the White House actually gained seats in the Congress. Now, some of the prehistoric Republican bulls in the Senate—Wiley of Wisconsin, Capehart of Indiana, Bottum of South Dakota—were in danger of falling to a new breed of young Democrat: Birch Bayh, Gaylord Nelson, and that ex-bomber pilot in South Dakota, George McGovern. Even the South was showing some promising signs; yes, a lot of angry white voters would be looking to take their anger out on Democrats—“backlash,” they were starting to call it—but there were also hundreds of thousands of Negroes who were already registered to vote, and that was already bearing fruit. A few dozen cities and small towns had elected Negroes to town councils and magistrates’ courts—hell, there were even a handful of black sheriffs in Mississippi and South Carolina and Georgia—and with those men in power, the night riders and Klansmen were rapidly fading into history. Even without a federal law to desegregate restaurants and lunch counters and hotels, local authorities feeling the pressure of newly enfranchised Negroes were changing the law on their own. And would anyone, a few years back, have imagined that Senator Strom Thurmond, the “Dixiecrat” candidate for President in 1948, would have hired three Negroes to help staff his field offices in South Carolina? Or that George Wallace of Alabama, who’d lost a governor’s race to a hard-shell segregationist in 1958, would be on the verge of unseating that governor in the Democratic primary with the help of the new Negro vote? It was an achievement striking enough that some of the leading liberal voices, the UAW’s Walter Reuther and columnist Walter Lippmann among them, were beginning to talk about “a third Roosevelt Presidency.” And more and more, the memory of John Kennedy—the President who never was—was dimming.

  As for his prospects for election in 1964, it was looking more and more likely that the Republicans were heading into their second full-scale civil war in a dozen years. Back in 1952, the permanently simmering clash between Eastern internationalist liberals and Midwest isolationist conservatives had turned the Republican convention into Gettysburg. Not even the landslide victories of Eisenhower had dimmed the fury of the true believers who felt their tribune, Ohio Senator Robert Taft, had been cheated out of his due. Now these warriors were rallying behind Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a conservative who shared their dreams of repealing the New Deal and carrying the Cold War to the doors of the Kremlin. And while the more liberal Republicans were looking to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Johnson had a surprise in store for them; right after the elections—Rockefeller was cruising to a second term—he was going to offer Rockefeller the number three post at State, with the implied promise that he would succeed Fulbright as Secretary (international affairs was always Rockefeller’s favorite arena; as he put it, “Building a thruway is not exactly my idea of making history”). If Rockefeller saw the writing on the wall—that Johnson’s reelection was unstoppable—he would save himself a few million of his grandfather’s dollars. Meanwhile, some other governor—Michigan’s George Romney, or Pennsylvania’s Bill Scranton—would carry the liberal Republican banner. And if Goldwater prevailed at the convention and split the party? As Johnson said to his increasingly influential aide Bill Moyers, “If I run against Barry, I’d get four hundred electoral votes if they caught me getting a blow job from a secretary in the Oval Office.”

  It wasn’t that the waters were totally calm. His closest aide from his Senate days, young Bobby Baker, had stayed on as Secretary to the Democratic caucus under Mike Mansfield—Johnson liked having a set of eyes and ears back at the Capitol—and the Republicans were digging into some nasty stories about just how the young man on a government salary had accumulated a town house, some pricey country real estate, and three luxury cars. Earl Warren’s Supreme Court was stirring up a lot of anger among blue-collar folks with its decisions about dirty books, and keeping prayers and Bibles out of public schools, and letting criminals go free because the police hadn’t treated them with kid gloves. He was pretty sure that his first pick for the Court—Connecticut Governor Abe Ribicoff—would follow the liberal line, but Johnson figured the goodwill he’d earn by putting a second Jew on the bench would be worth it.

  The more serious trouble, of course, was coming from the world beyond America’s borders . . . but then, wasn’t that where trouble was likely to come from? Some of it turned out to be little more than noise: For months after the Vienna Summit, Khrushchev had hurled one threat after another about signing a separate peace treaty with East Germany, walking away from the prewar understanding about Berlin, an
d letting Walter Ulbricht’s forces control the rail and road corridors to West Berlin. But 1961 ended, and that treaty never did happen. Khrushchev must have gotten the message at Vienna about who held the whip hand when it came to military might, because while he ordered up an impressive show of force (exploding those 30- and 50-megaton H-bombs he’d talked about at the summit), the rumors of a “wall” around East Berlin to stem the flood of refugees turned out to be just that—rumors. A series of troop movements around the Brandenburg Gate, suggested by Dean Acheson, among others, got the message through. The East Germans sharply increased border patrols, even shot and killed a few dozen would-be refugees—but they (at the direction of Moscow) seemed unwilling to test the West’s resolve. If Khrushchev did indeed call West Berlin “the testicles of the West,” he had decided not to squeeze.

  In fact, so massive was the American stockpile of nuclear weaponry that some thinkers in the defense community were starting to wonder whether a more subtle approach to their potential use was needed. Current U.S. strategy, embodied in the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP-62) called for “massive retaliation,” the unleashing of the full U.S. arsenal, in the face of a Soviet attack. Perhaps this was excessive; perhaps a more limited deployment of weapons, aimed at Soviet military targets, could lessen the destructive impact of a nuclear war. A bright young German refugee at Harvard, Henry Kissinger, had made just such a point, and within the Pentagon and Defense Department-funded think tanks, there was much interest in a policy that could keep potential American deaths in the low millions—not counting European and Soviet casualties, of course.

  There was, to be sure, pressure from the Reds, but it was coming from the other side of the world. In South Vietnam, infiltrators from the North and guerrillas in the South were assassinating officials in hamlets and villages, and making life miserable for the underpaid, disorganized soldiers of the South Vietnamese Army. And that was making life increasingly uncomfortable for Lyndon Johnson, because his military advisors were pressing him to move and move hard into the South. Not so much McNamara; the Defense Secretary was crunching numbers, ordering up computer simulations, looking for the most measured possible American policy. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff? They and the commanders on the ground in Saigon were champing at the bit, calling for a massive increase of support, 100,000, maybe 200,000 Americans, “surgical” bombing strikes at the North, assuring Johnson that China wouldn’t enter the fight. (“That’s what MacArthur thought in Korea,” Johnson said. “This is different,” they replied.) They reminded the President that if waves of the Chinese did come in, well, that’s what tactical nuclear weapons were for. Once again, Johnson found himself pulled in two different directions. He believed, heart and soul, in the “domino theory”: Lose South Vietnam, and Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, maybe even Australia, were put at risk. He believed that a show of force was what Communist predators understood and respected. But he also remembered his own refusal as Senate leader to stand with Nixon and John Foster Dulles in ’54 when they wanted to commit American lives when the French were falling to Ho Chi Minh’s forces in the North. He knew that General Douglas MacArthur, the hero of the American right, had warned for years about committing American combat troops into a land war in Asia. And he knew what such a commitment had historically meant to liberal dreams at home.