A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  “I want peace,” said Khrushchev, “but, if you want war, that is your problem.”

  Kennedy said, “It is you, and not I, who wants to force a change.”

  Khrushchev said again that it was up to the United States to decide on peace or war. The Soviet Union had no choice but to accept the challenge. It must, and it would, respond. The treaty decision was irrevocable. He would sign in December.

  Kennedy, parting, said, “It will be a cold winter.”

  5. AFTERMATH IN LONDON

  As Kennedy, carrying Khrushchev’s aide-mémoires on Berlin and the test ban, left Vienna to see Harold Macmillan in England, he told a friend in the press that “somber” would be a good word for the meetings. For all the poise and command he displayed in the talks, the experience deeply disturbed him. Bohlen and Thompson, who had been through such conferences before, thought the President overreacted. But Kennedy had never encountered any leader with whom he could not exchange ideas—anyone so impervious to reasoned argument or so apparently indifferent to the prospective obliteration of mankind. He himself had indicated flexibility and admitted error, but Khrushchev had remained unmoved and immovable. Apart from Laos, about which Khrushchev evidently cared little, there was no area of accommodation. The test ban seemed dead. Berlin held the threat, if not the certitude, of war. Filled with foreboding, the President flew on to London. It was a silent and gloomy trip. Arriving at London Airport, on Sunday afternoon, the presidential party drove into the city as a great disarmament rally in Trafalgar Square was beginning to disperse. The streets along the way were filled with black banners marked in white letters BAN THE BOMB.

  The pretext for the stop was the christening of Lee Bouvier Radziwill’s new baby. But the essential reason was the talk with Macmillan. The two men had met twice since the inauguration—at Key West in March, when they discussed Laos, and a few days later at Washington in April for a general canvass of foreign affairs. In June their relationship was still tentative. Macmillan, indeed, was greatly concerned whether he could develop with the new President the genial relations which he had established with Eisenhower in North Africa during the Second World War and renewed during Eisenhower’s Presidency. He had been vaguely aware of Kennedy long before 1961 both as the son of an American Ambassador whom he, like all opponents of Munich, had to regard with suspicion, and also as a friend of Englishmen of a much younger generation, like David Ormsby Gore; and he worried about their differences in age and presumably in outlook. The languid Edwardian, who looked back to the sunlit years before the First World War as a lost paradise, feared that the brisk young American, nearly a quarter of a century his junior, would consider him a museum piece. Nor had he been much reassured by their conversations in Washington, when, as he thought, Dean Acheson had been permitted to dominate the proceedings with hard talk about showdowns over Berlin and the President had seemed excessively diffident.

  On Monday morning, June 5, Kennedy, tense and tired, went to 10 Downing Street. A formal conference, with each principal flanked by advisers, had been scheduled. But Macmillan said, with the usual weary fling of his hand, “Let’s not have a meeting—the Foreign Office and all that. Why not have a peaceful drink and chat by ourselves?” Kennedy seemed grateful and relieved, and the two men settled down for a talk. The President described his grim impressions of Khrushchev. He and Macmillan then agreed that western proposals for negotiation over Berlin would be taken in Moscow as a sign of weakness unless the situation grew so much worse that there seemed imminent danger of war. Macmillan remarked that the French thought negotiation would be better after a treaty was signed with East Germany than before. In the meantime, Kennedy said, military planning on Berlin had to be stepped up. They would have to decide what the west should do in a series of contingencies—if the Russians signed the treaty but made no changes in the existing arrangements; or if they interrupted the civilian supply of West Berlin; or if they interfered with military traffic. The agenda was full and imperative.

  Their talk, though brief, marked the real beginning of what became Kennedy’s closest personal relationship with a foreign leader. Macmillan, of course, was a far more serious figure than he liked to appear. He had been the first Conservative M.P. to adopt Keynesianism; he had not only opposed Munich but played a distinguished role in the war; and, underneath his affectations and mannerisms, he had a sharp, disillusioned mind, a vivid sense of history and a strong desire to accomplish certain objectives during his term in office. Possessed of a genuine horror of nuclear war, he was determined to press for a test ban and to search without cease for a détente with the Soviet Union. “The East-West conflict,” he had said, “cannot be resolved by weakness or moral or physical exhaustion of one side or the other. It cannot, in this nuclear age, be resolved by the triumph of one side over the other without the extinction of both. I say, therefore, we can only reach our goal by the gradual acceptance of the view that we can all gain more by agreement than by aggression.” To this general purpose he added two other themes: the desire to bring Britain into Europe, and the hope of reconstructing the international monetary system.

  On nearly all these points he and Kennedy made easy contact. More than that, they soon discovered, despite the differences in age, a considerable temperamental rapport. Kennedy, with his own fondness for the British political style, liked Macmillan’s patrician approach to politics, his impatience with official ritual, his insouciance about the professionals, his pose of nonchalance even when most deeply committed. Macmillan, for his part, responded to Kennedy’s courage, his ability to see events unfolding against the vast canvas of history, his contempt for cliché, his unfailing sense of the ridiculous. They found the same things funny and the same things serious. “It was the gay things that linked us together,’’ Macmillan once told me, “and made it possible for us to talk about the terrible things.” They soon discovered that they could match each other’s transitions from gravity to mischief and communicate as in shorthand. It was as if they had known each other all their lives.

  Refreshed by the stopover in London, Kennedy came back to Washington. Whatever the disappointments of Vienna or the stabbing pain in his spine, he seemed, after forty-eight hours, philosophical about the meeting. He knew how Khrushchev thought and where he stood, and that was invaluable. I think also that he felt he had tested himself and had proven more than equal to the test. The talks with Macmillan and de Gaulle had strengthened his confidence in his ability to rally the west. War was a danger but not an inevitability. In a television report to the American people on the day of his return, he described the Vienna meetings as “a very sober two days . . . no discourtesy, no loss of tempers, no threats or ultimatums by either side; no advantage or concession . . . gained or given; no major decision . . . planned or taken; no spectacular progress . . . achieved or pretended.” But he found this meeting, “as somber as it was, to be immensely useful.” The channels of communication were opened, and the chances of misjudgment on either side should now be less. Yet “we have wholly different views of right and wrong, of what is an internal affair and what is aggression, and, above all, we have wholly different concepts of where the world is and where it is going.” Khrushchev was certain that the tide was “moving his way, that the revolution of rising peoples would eventually be a Communist revolution. . . . I believe just as strongly that time will prove [this thesis] wrong, that liberty and independence and self-determination—not communism—is the future of man.”

  It took another nine days for Khrushchev to make his own report to the Soviet people. He Repeated his Vienna arguments on the test ban and disarmament, reiterated the deadline on Berlin, mentioned the agreement on Laos and discussed his differences with Kennedy over coexistence. (Kennedy in his speech had specifically endorsed Khrushchev’s point that serious social upheaval was generally the result, not of communist conspiracy, but of a spontaneous protest against misery and oppression which Communists tried to capture. Ignoring this, Khrushchev once again claime
d as Kennedy’s position “that if the people of a country want to change their social and political system, this should not be allowed.”)

  “On the whole,” Khrushchev concluded, “I am pleased with these talks.” This was apparently true. Thompson gathered on his return to Moscow that Khrushchev had been genuinely impressed by Kennedy. One day a year or so later my occasional luncheon partner in the Soviet Embassy in Washington, Georgi Kornienko, said that Khrushchev, during his 1959 visit to the United States, had asked members of the Embassy about Kennedy. “Of all the people he talked to,” Kornienko told me, “I gave the most positive picture. I said that, while Kennedy was not yet another Roosevelt, he was independent and intelligent and could be counted on for new departures. Khrushchev listened. Then came Vienna. Afterward he said to me, ‘You were right and the others were wrong.’”

  “Neither side,” Khrushchev continued in his report to the Soviet people, “evaded bringing up and discussing the most acute questions. . . . We listened with attention to the position of the United States Government and set out in detail the position of the Soviet Government. . . . I have the impression that President Kennedy understands the great responsibility that lies with the governments of two such powerful states. . . . Thank you, dear comrades. Good-by. Good night.”

  Each man came away from Vienna with greater respect for the mind and nerve of his adversary. Having survived their personal confrontation and defined the impassable difference over Berlin, they now faced their first battle of wills.

  XV

  Trial in Berlin

  OFTEN DURING THE YEAR, on both public and private occasions, the President set forth his conception of the American stake in Berlin. I think, however, the analysis I heard him make in the autumn to President Kekkonen of Finland carried particular cogency. For here Kennedy stripped the case of the legalistic and moralistic arguments so cherished in the west and placed it in terms of geopolitical realism which he hoped would be understood in Moscow.

  Kekkonen, who had recently visited the Soviet Union, began by reporting what he described as a genuine Russian fear that Germany might be the cause of a third world war.

  “We do not accept the idea that the Soviet Union is in danger from West Germany,” Kennedy replied. “West Germany is’ a nation of sixty-five million people in an acutely vulnerable strategic situation. We have been successful in tying West Germany into Western Europe through NATO, the Common Market and so on. We want nothing to happen over Berlin which would weaken the ties of West Germany to Western Europe and set West Germany off on a nationalistic and independent course. It is in this possibility that the real danger lies of Germany setting off another war.”

  As we see Soviet policy in Berlin, the President continued, “it is designed to neutralize West Germany as a first step in the neutralization of Western Europe. That is what makes the present situation so dangerous. West Germany is the key as to whether Western Europe will be free.” The pressure on West Berlin was the first move in a Soviet effort to break up NATO. The Soviet campaign left the United States no choice but to resist—or to see our position in Western Europe disintegrate. “It is not that we wish to stand on the letter of the law or that we underestimate the dangers of war. But if we don’t meet our commitments in Berlin, it will mean the destruction of NATO and a dangerous situation for the whole world. All Europe is at stake in West Berlin.”

  1. THE BERLIN DEBATE

  The administration had begun to consider its Berlin policy well befor the President went to Vienna. In March Kennedy had invited Dean Acheson to undertake special studies of the problems of NATO and Germany. This did not mean (as Joseph Alsop hoped and Walter Lippmann feared) that he was handing American policy over to the so-called hard-liners. But Kennedy considered Acheson one of the most intelligent and experienced men around and did not see why he should not avail himself of ‘hard’ views before making his own judgments.

  When Harold Macmillan came to Washington in early April, Kennedy accordingly asked Acheson to take part in the discussion of Berlin. Acheson proceeded to do this in the session that somewhat distressed Macmillan; and, though he explained that his proposals had not yet been submitted to the administration, his strong personality and program governed the exchange. It looked, he said, as if the Soviet Union planned to force the Berlin issue this year. He did not believe that Berlin could be satisfactorily settled apart from the larger question of Germany; and he saw no prospect of any agreement on either Berlin or Germany compatible with the interests of the west. Therefore, when Khrushchev moved to cut off West Berlin, the allies must instantly demonstrate their determination to stand up to the Soviet challenge. Skipping over possibilities of diplomatic or economic response, Acheson crisply offered a formidable catalogue of military countermeasures, concluding tentatively in favor of sending a division down the Autobahn. This, he hoped, would make clear that western interest in preserving access was greater than Russian interest in blocking access. If the Russians repulsed the probe, then at least the west would know where it stood, and it could rally and rearm as it did during the Korean War.

  This rather bloodcurdling recital, delivered with the usual Ache-sonian aplomb, startled the British. Lord Home, the British Foreign Secretary, objected that it would be easy to isolate a single division on the Autobahn and tried to turn the discussion from military to political issues. The western position, he said, was negative. We were offering no alternative to Khrushchev’s proposal of a peace conference and a treaty. We were in Berlin because of the right of conquest, but the right of conquest was wearing thin. Acheson coolly replied that perhaps it was western power which was wearing thin. Home continued that he was never happy about entering a negotiation without a position. To this a State Department official observed that, since no acceptable agreement was possible, we should do everything we could to avoid negotiation. The President sat poker-faced, confining himself to questions about the adequacy of existing military plans and saying that, if Khrushchev could be deterred only by fear of direct encounter, the allies must consider how to convince him that such an encounter would be sufficiently costly.

  This preliminary discussion opened up a number of the themes which ran through the Berlin argument for the next six months. It also suggested the diversity of opinion within the American government. Some of the Americans present, like Adlai Stevenson, were as dismayed as the British by Acheson’s concentration on the military showdown. “Maybe Dean is right,” Stevenson said later, “but his position should be the conclusion of a process of investigation, not the beginning. He starts at a point which we should not reach until we have explored and exhausted all the alternatives.”

  Acheson’s basic thesis, which he developed in a long and powerful paper delivered to the President three weeks after Vienna, was that West Berlin was not a problem but a pretext. Khrushchev’s démarche had nothing to do with Berlin, Germany or Europe. His object, as Acheson saw it, was not to rectify a local situation but to test the general American will to resist; his hope was that, by making us back down on a sacred commitment, he could shatter our world power and influence. This was a simple conflict of wills, and, until it was resolved, any effort to negotiate the Berlin issue per se would be fatal. Since there was nothing to negotiate, willingness on our part to go to the conference table would be taken in Moscow as evidence of weakness and make the crisis so much the worse.

  Khrushchev had only dared precipitate the crisis, Acheson continued, because his fear of nuclear war had declined. Our problem was to convince him that this complacency was misplaced and that we would, in fact, go to nuclear war rather than abandon the status quo. This called for the build-up—prompt, serious and quiet—of both our conventional and nuclear forces. If Khrushchev signed his treaty with East Germany, we should not quibble about this or about changes in access procedures. But, the moment there was interruption of access itself, we must act: first an airlift—and then, if that could not be sustained against Soviet counter-measures, a ground probe in f
orce too large to be stopped by East German troops alone. Acheson cited a Joint Chiefs of Staff estimate that two Allied divisions could hold out indefinitely inside East Germany against an enemy of three or four divisions. The point would be, not to defeat the communist forces in the field, but to persuade Moscow that we had the resolve to go on, if necessary, to nuclear war. There was a substantial chance, Acheson said, that the necessary military preparations would by themselves cause Khrushchev to alter his purpose; but he added frankly that there was also a substantial possibility that nuclear war might result.

  Though the preamble of the paper expressed categorical opposition to any form of negotiation, the paper itself was slightly less intransigent. If Khrushchev were to change his mind, Acheson was willing to offer a formula to cover his retreat through negotiations launched after the military build-up and before the signing of the treaty with East Germany. He even sketched the outlines of a settlement, suggesting that Khrushchev’s treaty be accompanied by an exchange of declarations assuring the western position in Berlin, along with certain western concessions—perhaps guarantees against espionage and subversion from West Berlin, perhaps even recognition of the Oder-Neisse line—thrown in to make the result more palatable to Moscow.

  But this section had somewhat the air of an afterthought. Acheson’s attitude toward negotiation was basically determined by his belief, as he later wrote, that “in making political and military judgments affecting Europe a major—often the major—consideration should be their effect on the German people and the German government.” It was understandable that the former Secretary of State, priding himself on the arrangements of 1949–50 which tied West Germany so securely into the structure of Western Europe, should reject any action which he felt might loosen those ties. But his view came close to endowing the Bonn government with a veto over American policy in Europe; and it meant that the political planning in his paper mostly concerned a plausible casus belli over Berlin rather than a forward political strategy. For Acheson the test of will seemed almost an end in itself rather than a means to a political end. And the thrust of Acheson’s rhetoric, and especially of his brilliant and imperious oral presentations, helped fix the debate for a time in terms of a clear-cut choice between negotiation and a military showdown.