The President took a middle position. He was sure that the traditional western plan was the wrong framework for negotiations and wanted something new. The reunification of Germany seemed to him an unrealistic negotiating objective. But at the same time he had no wish to perpetuate the idea of a divided Germany by recognizing East Germany. Accepting that division as a fact, he told President Kekkonen of Finland in October, “is a different matter from giving it status and permanence. You must be aware of the melancholy state of mind induced in West Germany by the Wall. We do not want to spread that state of melancholy by legitimatizing the East German regime and stimulating a nationalist revival in West Germany. . . . Germany has been divided for sixteen years and will continue to stay divided. The Soviet Union is running an unnecessary risk in trying to change this from an accepted fact into a legal state. Let the Soviet Union keep Germany divided on its present basis and not try to persuade us to associate ourselves legally with that division and thus weaken our ties to West Germany and their ties to Western Europe.” Nor did Soviet assurances of fresh guarantees of western presence and access impress him. “The Soviet Union,” he told Kekkonen, “is asking us to make concessions in exchange for which they will give us again what we already have. And these concessions, in addition, would insure that West Germany goes nationalistic and becomes a danger to the peace. This is no bargain. We would be buying the same horse twice.”
He lost no opportunity to signal his attitude to Moscow. James Wechsler, who had come away from his talk with Kennedy moved by the earnestness with which the President discussed the nuclear peril, proposed in late September that he write a column about Kennedy’s thoughts on war and peace and challenge the Soviet press to republish it. Pierre Salinger thought this a good idea, and the President personally approved the Wechsler text. Wechsler noted that Kennedy, as the son of a rich man, was the perfect caricature for communist propagandists who assumed that wealth meant war; but “if that doctrinaire rubbish is what Mr. Khrushchev believes, he is mad, and we are all doomed.” After observing that Kennedy would not be shoved around and had achieved “a certain composure about the brutal nature of the choice he may have to face in the solitude of some ghastly night,” Wechsler added that nothing in the President’s view was non-negotiable except the dignity of free men: “I have no trace of doubt about the authenticity and depth of his desire for rational settlements in a world that has trembled on the brink so long. Russian papers, please copy.” Considerably to our surprise the Russian papers did copy in a few days, including even the suggestion that Khrushchev was a madman if he considered Kennedy a Wall Street imperialist.
There were many ways to initiate a dialogue; and in the end the substance of negotiations turned out to matter a good deal less than the willingness to negotiate. It was this which gave Khrushchev the pretext he needed for retreat, once he had stopped the refugee flight to the west. While inconclusive talks began between Gromyko and western officials, Khrushchev took the occasion to report in a six-hour speech to the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Communist Party on October 17 that “the western powers were showing some understanding of the situation, and were inclined to seek a solution to the German problem and the issue of West Berlin.” If this were so, “we shall not insist on signing a peace treaty absolutely before December 31, 1961.” The crisis was suddenly over.
6. CODA
Four months later I visited West Berlin with Robert and Ethel Kennedy. We arrived on Washington’s Birthday, a freezing, blowy, snowy day. As the Attorney General disembarked, a band launched incongruously into “When the Crimson in triumph flashing/Mid the strains of victory.” Brandt, Clay and Allan Lightner, the American Minister, met us at the airport. Thousands of people endured the chill along the streets into West Berlin to welcome President Kennedy’s brother. They waved, they shouted, some wept. Over a hundred thousand stood in the square before the Rathaus where Bobby, shivering in the bitter cold, gave an impromptu speech. When balloons bearing red flags floated over from the eastern sector, he said, “The Communists will let the balloons through, but they won’t let their people come through,” and the crowd mingled defiance and anguish in an animal roar.
That night at the Free University of Berlin he delivered the Ernst Reuter lecture in honor of the great mayor of the airlift crisis. We had discussed this talk on the plane from Rome. Someone in Clay’s headquarters had sent him an emotional draft filled with denunciations of communist perfidy and promises of American deliverance. The Attorney General had quickly put it aside. There was no point, he said, in kidding anybody, no point in exciting emotions beyond the possibility of satisfaction. This was not responsible. One had to begin with a realistic understanding of the problem and move on to the only lasting solution, which would come from the superiority, to be demonstrated in practice and over time, of one form of society to another.
Students and faculty crowded every inch of the auditorium. The Attorney General began with the ritual of reassurance about the American commitment to Berlin. Then he added, “We do not stand here in Berlin just because we are against communism. We stand here because we have a positive and progressive vision of the possibilities of free society—because we see freedom as the instrumentality of social progress and social justice—because communism itself is but the symptom and consequence of the fundamental evils, ignorance, disease, hunger and want, and freedom has shown mankind the most effective way to destroy those ancient antagonists.” When he finished, the applause was vigorous and sustained.
The next morning he spoke at a breakfast attended by West Berlin dignitaries—editors, ministers and lawyers. He was direct and frank, making no effort to gratify the audience by saying the easy things. He courteously reproached the West Germans for assuming that the United States had abandoned solemn commitments whenever a month went by without some American notable coming to Berlin to reaffirm them. The Wall, he said, was an atrocity, but no miracle was going to bring it down. As for German reunification, this was remote; one could only hope that the processes of history, already having their effect in Eastern Europe, would one day change East Germany and deliver West Berlin. The group listened intently and seemed to appreciate the Attorney General’s honesty. One felt a surge of respect for their courage patiently sustained through so many years of trial.
After breakfast we made a tour of the Wall. It was more barbaric and sinister than one could have imagined—the crude, gray concrete blocks, the bricked-in windows of apartment houses along the sector line, the vicious tank traps, the tall picket fences erected to prevent East Berliners from even waving to relatives or friends in West Berlin, the plain white crosses marking places where people had jumped to their death and beside which Robert Kennedy now laid flowers. Then we passed on to an equally repellent sight—the Ploetzensee, where the heroes of the anti-Hitler putsch of 1944 had been executed, the stark, whitewashed room with the bare meat-hooks at the end, compact with an extraordinary sense of evil and fatality.
I asked Willy Brandt whether, looking back, he thought the allies should have done something to halt the Wall or to tear it down. He replied with impressive candor, “If I were to say now that something could or should have been done, it would be inconsistent with what I felt and said at the time. I do believe that the allies should have been much quicker in their condemnation of the action. But that would not have stopped the building of the Wall. On August 13 no one proposed that we stop the Wall. We all supposed that such action would run the risk of war.”
Trouble was by no means at an end. Though Khrushchev had once again forsworn his deadline and permitted the situation (with the exception of the Wall) to revert to the status quo, he continued to consider West Berlin, as he explained in typical language to Harriman in 1963, the exposed western foot and planned from time to time to stamp on the corns. The year after Vienna saw sporadic and unpredictable harassments of a more or less petty sort in the air corridors and along the Autobahn, presumably designed to test western reactions and, with luck, to nibble at western rig
hts. Worse, the Wall itself remained a haunting relic of the crisis and became, from time to time, the occasion for new tragedy, as in August 1962, when the East German police shot down a young man trying to flee to the west and left him to perish in agony in the full view of West Berlin.
General Clay, now in his second term as proconsul, reacted to provocation with speed and strength in the winter of 1961–62. Some of his initiatives alarmed the State Department and the Foreign Office, but, as Clay later said, “whenever I carried my case directly to the President, I was supported.” His stout-hearted leadership left a legacy of valuable precedent. But what some considered his compulsion to force issues led to growing friction with Washington. Having ably accomplished his mission, he took advantage of a lull between harassments and resigned his post in April 1962.
Clay’s mood reflected in restrained form the chronic discontent of the government at Bonn—a discontent which periodically soared into acute exasperation as the United States and the Soviet Union pursued desultory talks about Berlin. Bonn’s endless stream of complaints, leaks to the press and demands for reassurance increasingly irritated Washington. It was, the President said once, like a wife who asks her husband every night, “Do you love me?” and, when he keeps repeating he does, nevertheless asks again, “But do you really love me?”—and then puts detectives on his trail. The German Ambassador to Washington, Wilhelm Grewe, so bored the White House with pedantic and long-winded recitals that word was finally passed to his government that his recall would improve communication.
Kennedy had begun with great respect for Adenauer, for his historic role in binding West Germany to the Atlantic community and for his undiminished personal vitality; he was amused to figure out when Adenauer came to Washington in 1961 that, if he were President of the United States at the Chancellor’s age, it would be the year 2002. “He is a greater man than de Gaulle,” he said after dinner at the White House one evening in October 1961, “because his objectives transcend his nation while de Gaulle dedicates himself to the aggrandizement of his nation.” But, as time passed and Adenauer looked back with growing nostalgia to the days when John Foster Dulles allowed him a virtual veto over American policy, Bonn’s laments and obstructions mounted. Kennedy, though he preserved polite relations, came to feel that the old Chancellor was hanging on too hard. He welcomed the rise of Gerhard Schröder, who became Foreign Minister after the elections in 1961, greatly liked Willy Brandt and had hopes for the younger generation of German leaders.
The Berlin crisis of 1961 represented a further step beyond Laos in the education of the President in the controlled employment of force for the service of peace. One never knows, of course, what would have happened if Kennedy had ordered full mobilization, or if he had rushed straight to negotiation; but either extreme might well have invited Soviet miscalculation and ended in war. Instead he applied power and diplomacy in a combination and sequence which enabled him to guard the vital interests of the west and hold off the holocaust. The weeks from Vienna to the 22nd Party Congress had nevertheless been cruel and disheartening. The Berlin crisis, along with the Soviet resumption of nuclear tests, left the President no alternative but to forgo his pursuit of a standstill and harden his policy and purpose.
As for the negotiations which had seemed so urgent in the early autumn of 1961, they lost their priority after Khrushchev dropped his deadline and descended from the heads of state to the foreign office bureaucracies. In early 1962 each side tabled its set of proposals in a succession of Rusk-Gromyko talks. But technical formulas were not likely to bridge the gap between the allies’ determination to stay in Berlin and the Soviet determination to drive them out. It seemed probable that Khrushchev did not want the gap bridged. He realized after the summer of 1961 that he could not expel the west within the existing equilibrium of military force. But he still cherished his dream of a communist Berlin, and this no doubt led him to ponder in 1962 how he might revise the militaryequilibrium to permit the renewal of his campaign under a balance of power more favorable to the Soviet Union.
It would take still another and more terrible crisis—the moment of supreme risk which Kennedy had predicted to James Wechsler—before Khrushchev was willing to abandon the politics of intimidation and before Kennedy, two long years after Vienna, was able to pick up the threads of his policy and try again to lead the world beyond the cold war.
XVI
The Reconstruction of Diplomacy
THE FRUSTRATIONS of the summer over Berlin brought the President’s discontent with his Department of State to a climax. One muddle after another—the Department’s acquiescence in the Bay of Pigs, the fecklessness of its recommendations after the disaster, the ordeal of trying to change its attitude toward Laos, the maddening delay over the answer to Khrushchev’s aide-mémoire and the banality of the result, the apparent impossibility of developing a negotiating position for Berlin—left Kennedy with little doubt that the State Department was not yet an instrumentality fully and promptly responsive to presidential purpose.
He well understood the difficulty of converting a tradition-ridden bureaucracy into a mechanism for swift information and decision. But resistance was no less great in Defense, where McNamara was plainly making progress in annexing the Pentagon to the United States government. Other departments provided quick answers to presidential questions and quick action on presidential orders. It was a constant puzzle to Kennedy that the State Department remained so formless and impenetrable. He would say, “Damn it, Bundy and I get more done in one day in the White House than they do in six months in the State Department.” Giving State an instruction, he remarked, snapping his fingers with impatience, is like dropping it in the dead-letter box. “They never have any ideas over there,” he complained, “never come up with anything new.” “The State Department is a bowl of jelly,” he told Hugh Sidey of Time in the summer of 1961. “It’s got all those people over there who are constantly smiling. I think we need to smile less and be tougher.”
1. THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF FOREIGN POLICY
Kennedy had come to the Presidency determined to make the Department of State the central point, below the Presidency itself, in the conduct of foreign affairs. As Dea Rusk told the Department’s policy-making officers a few weeks after he inauguration, there was not “a passive reliance but an active expectation on his part that this Department will in fact take charge of foreign policy.” McGeorge Bundy emphasized to the Jackson Subcommittee, which had long been casting a critical eye on the organization of national security policy, that the President wanted no question to arise concerning “the clear authority and responsibility of the Secretary of State, not only in his own Department, and not only in such large-scale related areas as foreign aid and information policy, but also as the agent of coordination in all our major policies toward other nations.”*
In embarking on this course, Kennedy was influenced not only by a desire to clarify and concentrate the making of foreign policy but also, I believe, by a basic respect for the skills of the Foreign Service. No doubt his attitude toward professional diplomats was mixed. He probably recalled his father’s complaints as ambassador to England (Harold Ickes noted in his diary in 1938 that Joe Kennedy “inveighed eloquently against ‘the career boys’ . . . insisted that the State Department did not know what was going on . . . that nothing got to the President straight unless he sent it to the President direct”). And his visit to Southeast Asia as a young Congressman in 1951 had left him, as he said on his return, with an impression that Foreign Service officers often knew all too little about the nations to which they were accredited, were indifferent to their language and customs, did not represent contemporary America and spent too much time at tennis and cocktails.** Nevertheless there were always the Charles Bohlens, Llewellyn Thompsons and Edmund Gullions; and Kennedy’s disappointment about the State Department as President sprang in part, I think, from a special sympathy for the diplomatic enterprise. He expected generals and admirals to be refractory
and obtuse, but he was not inclined, like Franklin Roosevelt, to write off professional diplomats as inherently stuffy and wrong. In other circumstances he would have liked to be an ambassador himself. He knew that many of ‘the career boys’ had resented the Dulles regime, and he had looked forward to fruitful collaboration with the Foreign Service and the Department.
The Foreign Service, after all, was the elite unit of the American government. It was in great measure a self-administered body, selecting, assessing and promoting from within. It had deep pride in its esprit de corps. “Foreign Service work,” as George Kennan wrote, “breeds its own morale, outwardly undemonstrative, often not externally visible, but inwardly far tougher and more devoted than is generally realized.” The typical career officer, Kennan continued, was able and patriotic, anxious to learn, to grow in his work and to serve the nation, only too anxious to give loyalty where loyalty was given in return. The process of ‘lateral transfer’—the admission to the upper levels of the Service of men trained in other parts of the government—had somewhat diluted the mandarin character of the Service during and after the war; and it entered the postwar world with new accessions of skill and spirit. Anyone who had seen the Service in action well knew the intelligence, decency and selflessness of this group of exceptionally devoted men and women. The White House could always win any battle it chose over the Service; but the prestige and proficiency of the Service limited the number of battles any White House would find it profitable to fight.
Still, as his pre-election task forces reminded Kennedy, the Service had its professional deformations. Moreover, both its vast increase in size and the trauma of the Dulles-McCarthy period had had a disturbing impact on its thought and operation. Thus Adlai Stevenson in his foreign policy report mentioned the “tremendous institutional inertial force” in the Department of State “which, unless manipulated forcefully from the outset, will overwhelm and dictate to the new regime. A similar institutional force in the Defense Department has systematically absorbed a series of Secretaries of Defense.” With such comments in mind, Kennedy set up after the election a task force on “State Department Operations Overseas and in Washington.” “Even such a distinguished career group as the Foreign Service,” the new group soon reported, “has failed to keep pace with the novel and expanding demands of a changing world.” The Department had to recognize that “the prototype diplomatic officer of the past, the so-called ‘generalist’ whose experience was largely ‘political,’ cannot be the apogee of the Service.” Reform, the report conceded, would provoke the cry that the morale of the Service was in danger; but “that raises the question of whose morale? The morale of real concern to the country is that of the young, imaginative, all too frequently circumscribed officer.” The task force pointed out that, if Kennedy himself had entered the Foreign Service instead of politics, he could at this point barely qualify for appointment to Class II under existing Foreign Service regulations and would have to wait for seven more years before he could even hope to become a Career Minister.
A Thousand Days Page 49