A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  The Acheson case followed logically from his conviction that the Soviet Union had unlimited objectives in raising the Berlin question. But others in the government, especially some who knew the Soviet Union best, like Ambassadors Thompson and Harriman, believed that, on the contrary, Khrushchev’s objectives might well be limited. Thompson argued after Vienna that the predominant Soviet motive was the desire to improve the communist position in Eastern Europe rather than to achieve the world-wide political humiliation of the United States. As evidence, he cited the ‘free city’ proposal which, he said, Khrushchev really intended as a means of accomplishing his local aims and at the same time saving face for the allies. While Thompson favored the policy of quiet military build-up, he also argued that the west must begin a diplomatic offensive soon after the West German elections, scheduled for September 17. If this were done, then Moscow and not Washington would be in the position of saying no to a plan which might avert nuclear war.

  The State Department itself was divided about the Acheson program. Rusk was circumspect, and no one quite knew where he stood; Foy Kohler, the Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, was a complete Achesonian; while George McGhee, head of the Policy Planning Staff, and Abram Chayes, the Legal Adviser, agreed with Thompson that we should prepare negotiating as well as military alternatives. These questions were before the newly established Berlin Task Force; but this body temporarily put them aside in order to spend most of June and a good part of July composing an answer to the aide-mémoire on Berlin which Khrushchev had given Kennedy in Vienna.

  No one in the White House, least of all the President, would ever understand why this not very exacting assignment proved so difficult. Kennedy had expected a quick American response capable, among other things, of making some appeal to world opinion. Instead, week followed week with no word from the Department, and the President’s exasperation grew. When a draft finally came over in mid-July, nearly six weeks after Vienna, it was a tired and turgid rehash of documents left over from the Berlin crisis of 1958–59, sounding, as Richard Rovere said, “like the kind of speech Andrei Gromyko might make if he were on our side.” By this time it was too late to do anything but put the paper out, which the White House did, though after attaching a more cogent summary of its own.

  Meanwhile, opposition to the bleak choices of the Acheson program was mounting. Influential Senators, especially Mike Mansfield (who wanted all Berlin, East and West, to be declared a free city and put under the UN), J. William Fulbright, Hubert Humphrey and Claiborne Pell, were critical. The British were unhappy. As The Economist put it on June 24: “Unless Mr. Kennedy takes a decisive grip on the wheel, the West is in danger of by-passing one possible line of compromise after another until it reaches a dead end where neither it nor Russia has any choice except between ignominious retreat and nuclear devastation.” And in the White House Carl Kaysen, Henry Kissinger, who was in Washington regularly that summer as a consultant, and I, very much on the fringes, all wanted a more aggressive canvass of diplomatic possibilities. The first phase of the Berlin debate was under way.

  Looking back, one can now see that the early terms of the debate were artificial. On the one hand, Acheson, for all his insistence on military confrontations, was not so implacable a foe of negotiation as, in his irritation with the softheads (Washington was not yet divided into hawks and doves), he liked to imply. On the other, some of us who argued that a diplomatic approach should accompany the military build-up unquestionably had illusions as to what negotiation might accomplish. We hoped that diplomacy could at least settle the future status of Berlin and might perhaps lead to a general resolution of the problems of Germany and even of central Europe. In retrospect, this was an unrealistic hope. Acheson was probably right in suggesting that the preservation of the status quo was the goal we should seek.

  Where the debate had value was in determining how best to pursue this goal. Those of us who talked about supplementing the build-up with negotiation had hold, however dimly, of one truth: that insistence on a military showdown, accompanied by the rejection of diplomacy and, in early July, by talk of war mobilization under a proclamation of national emergency, contained the risk of pushing the crisis beyond the point of no return.

  2. THE CRISIS GROWS

  Khrushchev’s testy television report on Vienna in mid-June was soon followed by appropriately belligerent remarks by Walter Ulbricht, the Chairman of the East German Council of State. Ulbricht complained of the flow of refugees to West Berlin and forecast new restrictions, allegedly in the interests of safety, on planes flying along the air corridors from the west. Then early in July Khrushchev himself, citing Kennedy’s call for a larger American defense effort, announced a suspension of the partial demobilization of the Red Army and a one-third increase in Soviet military spending.

  On Wednesday, July 5, I received a visit from my friend Kornienko of the Soviet Embassy. After the usual preliminaries, Kornienko expressed himself as puzzled by the American attitude toward Berlin, much as he had expressed puzzlement about our policy toward Cuba two months before. This led to a long and fruitless discussion of juridical and political issues. Finally he said, “The real trouble is that you don’t believe that we are sincere when we say that we honestly wish to keep things as they are in West Berlin within the new context.” I said that I feared that this was true, that experience had made us wary, and that the so-called guarantees which Russia offered guaranteed nothing. To this he replied, “Well, if you do not consider these guarantees adequate, why don’t you propose your own guarantees? All we want to do is to have a chance to discuss these things.”

  While nothing Kornienko said indicated that discussions would lead to agreement, it did look as if the Russians might want to get off a collision course. (One realizes now that, if this were so, it may well have been a result of the supposed supremacy of the Acheson line in Washington.) The next day Abram Chayes, Carl Kaysen and I got together to express a collective concern that the Acheson paper was shaping policy along restrictive and potentially dangerous lines. It all reminded me uncomfortably of the prelude to the Bay of Pigs; and, stimulated by this conversation, I set down my misgivings in a memorandum to the President the next morning.

  The Cuban fiasco, the memorandum suggested, had resulted in large part from the “excessive concentration [in our advance planning] on military and operational problems and the wholly inadequate consideration of political issues. This error seems likely to be repeated here.” The Acheson paper was excellent in analyzing the issues of last resort; it told us what we could fall back on when other alternatives were used up. But, if it were permitted to define our Berlin choices, there could be no systematic effort to bring these alternatives to the surface.

  The memorandum questioned whether the military contingency envisaged by Acheson was the most probable way the situation would develop. “Are we not running the risk of directing most of our planning to the least likely eventuality—i.e., an immediate blockade of West Berlin? . . . If Khrushchev restrains himself [after a peace treaty] from immediate physical violation of West Berlin and keeps saying that he will consider any guarantees for the continued integrity of West Berlin that we wish to propose, we will be very much on the political defensive. We will seem rigid and warlike, while he will seem filled with sweet reason.” While he was happily issuing statements, calling peace conferences, proposing interim agreements and so on, we would be sitting sullenly by, preparing a military response to what would be thus far a political threat.

  The memorandum concluded by mentioning another Cuban resemblance—the tendency to define the issue, “to put it crudely, as: Are you chicken or not? When someone proposes something which seems tough, hard, put-up-or-shut-up, it is difficult to oppose it without seeming soft, idealistic, mushy, etc. Yet, as Chip Bohlen has often said, nothing would clarify more the discussion of policy toward the Soviet Union than the elimination of the words ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ from the language. People who had doubts about Cuba suppres
sed those doubts lest they seem ‘soft.’ It is obviously important that such fears not constrain free discussion of Berlin.” I had to see the President shortly before luncheon about other matters. As we finished, I handed him the memorandum, saying that he might want to look at it that afternoon on his way to Hyannis Port, where he had scheduled a meeting on Berlin the next day with Rusk, McNamara and General Taylor. But he chose characteristically to read the memorandum at once. His response was immediate. Agreeing that Acheson’s paper was far too narrowly directed to military problems, he said with emphasis that Berlin planning had to be brought back into balance. Then he asked me to prepare an unsigned memorandum about the unexplored issues in the Berlin problem which he might use in his talks at the Cape. I immediately sent out calls for Chayes and Kissinger, both of whom had left their offices for luncheon. It was not till after three that I finally got them over to the East Wing, and the President’s helicopter was due to depart from the White House lawn at five. We quickly worked up an outline. Then, as Chayes and Kissinger talked, I typed. By furious effort, we got the paper to Hyannis Port in time.

  The memorandum first identified certain issues omitted in the Acheson paper:

  What political moves do we make until the crisis develops? If we sit silent, or confine ourselves to rebutting Soviet contentions (cf. the draft reply to the aide-mémoire), we permit Khrushchev to establish the framework of discussion. As we do this, we in effect invite him to demand from us a definition of the guarantees we would find acceptable. This, of course, casts the U.S. as rigid and unreasonable and puts us on the political defensive.

  The paper indicates no relationship between the proposed military action and larger political objectives. It defines an immediate casus belli; but it does not state any political objective other than present access procedures for which we are prepared to incinerate the world. It is essential to elaborate the cause for which we are prepared to go to nuclear war. Where do we want to come out if we win the test of wills? German unification, for example: what is our real intention with regard to this traditional objective?

  The paper covers only one eventuality—that is, the Communist interruption of military access to West Berlin. Actually there is a whole spectrum of harassments, of which a full-scale blockade may well be one of the least likely.

  The paper hinges on our willingness to face nuclear war. But this option is undefined. Before you are asked to make the decision to go to nuclear war, you are entitled to know what concretely nuclear war is likely to mean. The Pentagon should be required to make an analysis of the possible levels and implications of nuclear warfare and the possible gradations of our own nuclear response.

  The paper does not define the problem of the relationship of the proposed strategy to the Alliance. What happens if our allies decline to go along? Which of them, for example, will go along with the ground probe? Even de Gaulle has indicated his opposition to sending a column through. What about the United Nations? Whatever happens, this issue will go into the UN. For better or for worse, we have to have a convincing UN position.

  We concluded by recommending that the President tell the State Department to explore negotiating alternatives and ask Acheson to supply the missing political dimension in his argument.

  While we were agitating the political side, McGeorge Bundy and Kissinger were bringing the President comparable questions about the state of military planning. McNamara had informed the White House early in May that existing plans in case of trouble in Berlin assumed almost immediate resort to nuclear war. In a pre-Hyannis Port memorandum of his own, Bundy now commented on the dangerous rigidity of the strategic war plan, pointing out that it called in essence for an all-out nuclear strike against the Soviet Union and left the President little choice as to how he would face his moment of thermonuclear truth. Bundy suggested that Kennedy remand the war plan to McNamara for review and revision.

  At the Hyannis Port meeting on July 8 the President made his dissatisfaction with the state of planning abundantly clear. On the diplomatic side, he decided to ask Acheson to try his hand at a “political program” for Berlin and instructed Rusk to produce a negotiating prospectus. On the military side, he asked McNamara for a plan which would permit non-nuclear resistance on a scale sufficient both to indicate our determination and to provide the communists time for second thoughts and negotiation before everything billowed up in nuclear war. The State and Defense papers were to be delivered within ten days.

  It did not, of course, prove that easy to reshape policy, but the meeting laid out the lines of battle within the American government for the rest of the summer. At first, Kennedy gained little ground. When the National Security Council met on Berlin on July 13, Rusk reaffirmed the Acheson argument that we should not negotiate until the crisis became more acute. And Acheson himself, supported by Lyndon Johnson, now argued strongly for a proclamation of national emergency. This declaration became the symbol of the drastic reaction to the crisis. It implied an immediate expansion of the armed forces, an increase in the defense budget of perhaps $5 billion, stand-by price and wage controls and new taxation. Though the proclamation would legally facilitate the calling up of reserves, its essential purpose was psychological. Only a response of this order, Acheson argued, could deter Khrushchev from irretrievable steps and make the American people understand the full gravity of the crisis.

  These attitudes disturbed the White House group. On the problem of negotiation, Henry Kissinger observed to Bundy that it was wrong “to have refusal to negotiate become a test of firmness. . . . Firmness should be related to the substance of our negotiating position. It should not . . . be proved by seeming to shy away from a diplomatic confrontation.” If Khrushchev would not accept a reasonable proposal, this, in Kissinger’s view, was an argument for rather than against our taking the initiative. Any other course would see us “jockeyed into a position of refusing diplomatic solutions,” and, when we finally agreed to discussion, as we inevitably must, it would seem an American defeat. Diplomacy, Kissinger concluded, was the “necessary corollary to the build-up.”

  As for the proclamation of national emergency, this encountered a number of objections. Rusk felt that it would have the flavor of mobilization and quoted back at Acheson his own original caution that the build-up take place in low key. McNamara also was skeptical. And the Council of Economic Advisers strongly opposed the proposal to increase taxes. This last idea had appealed at first to the President, who did not wish to risk inflation or unbalance the budget further, as well as to a number of cabinet members, of whom some, like the Attorney General, wanted to distribute the national burden in the emergency and others, like the Secretary of Labor, wanted to protect the civilian welfare programs. But, as the Treasury Department prepared recommendations for new taxes, Walter Heller argued that the real inflationary danger lay not in the additional defense spending but in the psychological reactions—scare buying to hedge against inflation—which a proclamation might touch off. In the meantime, as the projected increase in defense spending began to decline in size, the Treasury accepted the Council’s position, the tax rise disappeared, and another strong argument was registered against the declaration of national emergency.

  Kissinger, in further comment on the proclamation, argued that the Soviet Union would be more impressed by a broad and sustained improvement in American military readiness than by a single dramatic gesture, especially one which made us appear “unnecessarily bellicose, perhaps even hysterical.” Moreover, if we declared the emergency now, we used up a measure which would be more effective if taken as a response to clear-cut Soviet provocation. Ted Sorensen, summing up the position of the White House staff in an able memorandum, pointed out that the declaration of national emergency might well “engage Khrushchev’s prestige to a point where he felt he could not back down from a showdown, and provoke further or faster action on his part in stepping up the arms race.” It would also, Sorensen feared, “arouse those at home and abroad who are fearful of ‘r
ash’ and ‘trigger-happy’ actions by the United States.”

  3. THE PRESIDENTIAL STRATEGY

  The President was meanwhile fighting his way through the thicket of debate to his own conclusions. Cuba and Laos had been side issues. But Berlin threatened a war which might destroy civilization, and he thought about little else that summer. Stewart Udall, trying to talk to him about conservation, remarked, “He’s imprisoned by Berlin.” One afternoon, after a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the President talked at some length with James Wechsler of the New York Post. Only “fools,” Kennedy said, could cling to the idea of victory in a nuclear war. A once-and-for-all peace seemed equally unlikely. But he still hoped to arrive at a point where both the Soviet Union and the United States would accept the premise that the only alternatives were authentic negotiation or mutual annihilation. What worried him was that Khrushchev might interpret his reluctance to wage nuclear war as a symptom of an American loss of nerve. Some day, he said, the time might come when he would have to run the supreme risk to convince Khrushchev that conciliation did not mean humiliation. “If Khrushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt,” he told Wechsler, “it’s all over.” But how to convince Khrushchev short of a showdown? “That son of a bitch won’t pay any attention to words,” the President said bitterly on another occasion. “He has to see you move.”