In 1958 Khrushchev had lacked the power in Moscow to launch his assault against the West in Berlin. This time he intended to get his way no matter how hard he had to push. Immediately after Vienna, Khrushchev increased the pressure on the United States and its allies. The next day he went to East Berlin to announce a December 31 deadline for a Berlin settlement. On June 9 TASS published the aide-mémoire on Berlin that Khrushchev had handed to Kennedy in Vienna. On Soviet television a week later Khrushchev repeated the vow to sign a peace treaty by the end of the year. Then, for a speech on June 21 marking the twentieth anniversary of the Nazi attack on the USSR, he donned the dark green uniform of a Soviet lieutenant general and vowed that those who tested Soviet resolve on the Berlin question would “share the fate of Hitler.”90
When he returned to the Kremlin, Khrushchev pushed his stenographers to produce a clean copy of the minutes of his first meeting with Kennedy. He wanted copies distributed far and wide as a part of the political campaign for West Berlin. “The meetings demonstrated the wisdom of taking a hard line on the Berlin question,” intoned a Central Committee resolution passed at Khrushchev’s instruction. “There must be no illusions that President Kennedy or the American government are as yet prepared to take steps to improve U.S.-Soviet relations.” The distribution list for the usually top secret Soviet document showed both the extent of Khrushchev’s self-confidence in his handling of Kennedy and the ways in which he viewed his alliances. Foreign Communist leaders were to receive their own copies. The Central Committee made a point of including Fidel Castro in that list, even though Cuba was not as yet considered a Communist or socialist country. Friendly but not doctrinaire leaders were to be briefed on its contents. Soviet ambassadors in Cambodia, Egypt, Iraq, India, Brazil, Mexico, and Ghana—to name just a few of the eighteen countries listed—were to make appointments to see the foreign leaders to read from the document. Finally, even Tito was to be honored with an oral briefing. He was not considered dependable enough to be given his own copy, however.91
Khrushchev’s mood was not simply determined; it was dark. The impatience that governed his approach to the new U.S. president now carried over to his treatment of the Soviet Union’s domestic problems. Having received additional reports on higher joblessness, theft, and vagrancy, he called in mid-June for a reversal of some of the reforms in the Soviet judicial system associated with the wave of destalinization that he had initiated. His language was crude, bitter, and the most authoritarian since the removal of Kaganovich and Molotov in 1957.
He blamed the increase in civil discontent and crime on too much liberalization. The reform of the repressive organs of KGB and the militia had gone so far, he believed, that “everything got focused on the moral.”92 When Roman Rudenko, the chief Soviet public prosecutor, explained that not all thieves were given the death penalty, Khrushchev responded: “Go to hell…. Thieves, they’re stealing, and you’re writing laws for them. What is this? What liberals you’ve become, what is it that you are expecting—praise from the bourgeoisie when no one gets shot, and all the while they are robbing the workers and the peasants.”
RUDENKO: No matter how you scold me, if the law does not provide for the death penalty, we can’t apply it.
KHRUSHCHEV: The peasants have a saying: “Get rid of the bad seeds.” Stalin had the correct position on these issues. He went too far, but we never had any mercy on criminals. Our fight with enemies should be merciless and well directed.
The tenor of Khrushchev’s statements was ominous enough with respect to the average Soviet citizen, but considering the international crisis that he had just launched, this dangerous mood had potentially catastrophic implications. Angry, arrogant, and frustrated, he rammed through in July 1961 a series of changes in the Soviet criminal justice system that increased the use of the death penalty and the size of the police units within the KGB and reversed the mild liberalizing trend that Soviets had been experiencing progressively since 1956.93
Khrushchev’s determination was plain in other ways. In a speech to the graduates of Soviet military academies on July 8, he announced a one-third increase in the Soviet defense budget and a suspension of additional reductions in the size of the Soviet armed forces planned for 1961.94 At a time when the entire leadership understood that the Soviet economy was a failure, this represented a dramatic reversal of the grand policy of 1959–1960, Khrushchev’s personal crusade to improve the domestic standard of living through demilitarization and détente. If that were not proof enough that he was preparing for a dance on the brink of war, he was also talking about unilaterally ending the test ban moratorium, something he had earlier told the Presidium he would not do.95
CHAPTER 15
IRON RING
JOHN KENNEDY BLAMED himself for Khrushchev’s risk taking. He “just beat [the] hell out of me,” the president confessed to James “Scottie” Reston just after the Vienna summit.1 He was convinced that it was his own failure at the Bay of Pigs that had inspired Khrushchev to push him hard on Berlin. He had been concerned before Vienna that this might happen and had tried to communicate to the Soviets through his brother Robert that they ought not underestimate him.2 Clearly something had gone wrong. Kennedy wondered if his performance with Khrushchev had made matters worse.3 Joseph Alsop and the publisher of the Washington Post, Philip Graham, were among the close friends invited to listen as Kennedy read aloud from the transcripts of the meetings prepared by the State Department.4 Like a quarterback reviewing films of a game that he should have won, he scrutinized these exchanges to see whether there was something else he should have said or if perhaps there was something he should not have said at all.
Kennedy took a few days off at the family home on South Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach after flying back from Europe. He looked bad. He had twisted his chronically weak back in March during a tree-planting ceremony in the Canadian capital of Ottawa. The stress after Vienna had caused the pain to flare up, and White House correspondents noticed in June 1961 that his crutches were out again. Those accompanying him on the flight back from Florida watched as a fruit picker crane was used to lift the hobbling president onto Air Force One. Kennedy was also fighting a virus, for which his doctors had increased his daily dose of cortisone.5 The lack of exercise caused by the bad back and the puffiness attributable to the cortisone made him look noticeably sluggish and fatter.6
Kennedy returned to a Washington taut with fear. Headlines blared that a new Berlin crisis was on. Khrushchev’s uncompromising aide-mémoire appeared in U.S. newspapers after the Soviets released it, along with what seemed like daily reports of his various statements reaffirming the December deadline. Other evidence that Khrushchev was serious flooded in. In early July the head Soviet negotiator at the test ban discussions in Geneva announced that Moscow considered the talks a waste of time in light of American attitudes.7 A few days later the Soviet Air Force organized its first major air show since 1956 to show off a long-range four-engine supersonic plane, nicknamed Bounder by NATO.8 The West had seen Bounder before, but the flyby near Moscow was a reminder of Soviet strategic capabilities. So too was a prominent article in Aleksei Adzhubei’s newspaper, Izvestia. Referring to an apparently unflattering statement by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy on the Soviet submarine fleet, the newspaper warned: “[D]o not make any miscalculation, Mr. Kennedy, and do not overestimate your atomic weapons. The United States ceased long ago to have a monopoly on such arms.”9
A policy debate raged in the White House over how to respond to Khrushchev’s new Berlin ultimatum. Kennedy again invited a veteran of Stalin’s 1948–1949 Berlin blockade, Truman’s former secretary of state, Dean Acheson, to participate in the discussions. Acheson had headed the working group on Berlin for Kennedy’s transition, and now the young president asked the old cold warrior to coordinate his administration’s responses to Khrushchev.
Acheson rose to the challenge and prodded, pressed, and humiliated the administration’s younger hands into offering Kennedy a series
of options designed to convey U.S. toughness. He believed that it was Western resolve that had proved decisive in forcing a peaceful end to Stalin’s Berlin crisis. Despite the change in Soviet leadership and the recent reforms in Soviet society, Acheson sensed that the lessons of that earlier crisis still fitted the circumstances of the current confrontation. He advocated an immediate conventional buildup in Europe and refused to consider negotiations with Khrushchev before the Soviets understood the nation’s determination to defend its interests by force, if necessary.10
It was curious that Kennedy had enlisted Acheson’s help. As a congressman Kennedy had been very critical of the Truman administration’s foreign policy. He joined the chorus of those who blamed Truman for having “lost” China by mishandling Chiang Kai-shek and questioned the president’s firing of Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War in 1951. One Kennedy broadside against the Truman administration had caused a Massachusetts paper to editorialize that “the political point of the Kennedy speech is that the Republicans should try to sign him up for a job with their speaking bureau.”11 Kennedy also did not much like Acheson, whom he found overbearing, arrogant, and not always trustworthy. “[Dean Acheson] thinks that nothing has been done right since he left office,” Kennedy confided to the journalist Theodore White in 1961.12 Nevertheless, Kennedy understood that the institutions that made it easier for the United States to contain Soviet power were in large part the handiwork of this martinet.
Kennedy also shared many of Acheson’s concerns. He knew that he could not negotiate at gunpoint. Once again it was a matter of “we arm to parlay.” Khrushchev would need to be convinced that the United States was prepared to fight to retain its access to West Berlin. Kennedy was already a devotee of Maxwell Taylor’s ideas on the importance of conventional weapons in the superpower contest. A thinking man’s war hero who had proved his grit at the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, Taylor had almost single-handedly inspired a public debate over Eisenhower’s nuclear policy in the late 1950s. Taylor argued that by relying so heavily on the threat of massive nuclear retaliation, Ike had devalued the currency of deterrence. Taylor advocated instead a more balanced approach to deterring Khrushchev, including building up U.S. nonnuclear forces so that the Kremlin understood that conventional war was still possible in the nuclear age. The fact that Khrushchev kept threatening to alter the status quo in Central Europe was strong proof for both Taylor and Kennedy that the Soviet leader believed the United States was too afraid of the consequences of massive retaliation to fight for anything but its homeland. The remedy was to present him with credible U.S. commitments to defend regional interests abroad with conventional forces.
In mid-July specific recommendations on how to demonstrate U.S. resolve to the Soviets flowed to Kennedy. Most his advisers believed that this was essentially a military crisis like 1948 and not the political crisis of 1958 that Eisenhower had handled so well by doing nothing. Acheson led the group that believed the potential was greater now for a military clash than in 1958. Khrushchev was so bloody-minded now that he might have to be defeated in a localized conventional struggle in Germany. “Khrushchev has, I believe, sensed weakness & division in the West and intends to exploit it to the hilt,” Acheson wrote to his former boss, Harry Truman. “It wouldn’t take more than an error or two on each side to carry us over the edge into nuclear war.”13 Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze joined the former secretary of state in advocating maximum preparations at the earliest possible time. A note of alarmism soon crept into their arguments. The hawks wanted Kennedy to declare a national emergency. Acheson predicted a congressional revolt if he did not declare a national emergency by the end of July. Johnson agreed, arguing that Congress expected a demonstration of presidential leadership. Nitze asserted that without this declaration of emergency now, there would be no hope of having enough soldiers and pilots in place by the end of 1961, when they might be needed for the next Battle of Berlin.14
Kennedy had not yet made up his mind whether to embrace the full Achesonian program when he received some unusually good intelligence that suggested that the main threat was more political than military.15 On July 13 Allen Dulles, who remained CIA director until November, informed him that for some months the CIA and the British had been jointly operating an agent who had remarkable insight into what the Kremlin might be thinking. He was Oleg Penkovsky, an unusually well-connected colonel in the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence service.16
Penkovsky was a social friend of Chief Marshal Sergei Varentsov, a member of the Central Committee and a deputy to the Supreme Soviet. On June 25 Varentsov took Penkovsky aside at a party to chat with him about Khrushchev’s intentions. It turned out to be much more than gossip. The gist of Khrushchev’s May speech to the Presidium had managed to leak out to Varentsov. “Soon after the Party Congress [October 1961] a peace treaty will be signed,” he told Penkovsky. “The Soviet government knows that signing this treaty means a certain risk and danger, but they are not worried, because they know that the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany] still is not ready for war and needs two or three years more. The U.S., Britain and France, because of this, will not start a big war and will retreat. We also do not want a big war, but we want to force the West to begin to negotiate with the GDR on the procedures for movement along the access routes, the procedure for entrance and exit from Berlin, etc.”17 The mole then repeated this conversation to his Western case officer.
The spy’s report alone might not have been that reassuring, but at the same time, and from highly reliable technical sources, Kennedy received information that Khrushchev was playing an extremely weak hand.18 A U.S. satellite had just produced an unprecedented set of photographs showing the status of the Soviet missile program. After Powers’s U-2 had been shot down, the United States had put its faith in the Corona satellite program to determine the size of the Soviet missile threat. Information from the most recent mission revealed that there were no more than two ICBM sites between Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and the Ural Mountains, with a combined total of eight launchpads.19
Kennedy had believed in the missile gap.20 Despite some contrary indicators and the skepticism of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, it was not until mid-July 1961 that Kennedy realized how far the Soviets were behind the United States.21 Just before the Corona photographs came in, the intelligence community was still advising the president that the Soviets probably had between fifty and a hundred ICBMs.22 Now he was assured that they had fewer than twenty, enough to destroy New York and Washington, if accurate, but nowhere near the offensive threat that the alarmists had predicted. There was indeed a missile gap, but it favored the United States, and it was enormous. At that moment United States had an ICBM fleet of over two hundred Titan and Atlas missiles, with hundreds of the new solid-fuel Minutemen missiles in development.23 The brink, it seemed, was a much more dangerous place for the Soviet Union than for the United States.
Some wisdom from Gettysburg reinforced the reassuring information about missile developments in the Soviet Union and the United States.24 Kennedy had asked for Eisenhower’s opinion on the options he was considering and dispatched Dulles and McNamara to brief the former president at the Pennsylvania farm to which he had retired. Dulles and McNamara also brought along the new Corona intelligence. In return Eisenhower gave Kennedy the best advice he was to receive in the crisis. He dismissed Dulles’s prediction that Khrushchev would probably test the United States after the West German elections scheduled for September. Eisenhower was confident that the United States was so much stronger than the Soviet Union that Khrushchev would not dare push too far. When McNamara mentioned the appearance of the Bounder bomber, Eisenhower recalled the bomber gap nonsense of the mid-1950s and advised the new defense secretary not to listen to congressional fears. “Congress,” he said, “is not capable of exercising sound judgment regarding military programs.” The thrust of his advice was that the Kennedy administration s
hould not overreact. Declaring a national emergency, he said, “would be the worst mistake possible” in that it would give Khrushchev the idea that “all [he] has to do is needle us here and there to force us into such radical actions.”
Two days later Kennedy made his decision. He chose preparedness over provocation, selecting those elements of Acheson’s proposal necessary to demonstrate a willingness to fight a conventional war in Central Europe without causing panic.25 He would request a massive increase in the defense budget and issue a call-up of some reserve troops and the National Guard, but he would not formally declare a national emergency. He and the Defense Department had wanted six additional army divisions to be in place by January 1962, but Kennedy knew that these deployments would be impossible without a declaration of national emergency, and he did not want to declare one. McNamara had assured him that this drastic call-up could be postponed until early September, and Kennedy hoped that Khrushchev might have given up on his ultimatum by then. In addition, Kennedy signed off on a tepid aide-mémoire that warned Khrushchev to stop trying to force unacceptable settlements down Western throats.
The human and satellite intelligence, as well as the advice from Eisenhower and others, had bolstered Kennedy’s natural caution. In Vienna he had warned Khrushchev about the dangers of miscalculation in a nuclear struggle, and he was not about to make that mistake himself. In teeing up the decision for the president, McGeorge Bundy had noted that the country’s prominent sparring columnists, Walter Lippmann and Joseph Alsop, both believed that Kennedy would have to take the lead in resolving this problem.26 Kennedy agreed. He would use a televised speech to the nation on July 25 to request the additional $3.25 billion from Congress for defense, announce the call-ups, and also introduce a new program of civil defense, which was more a public confidence measure than a realistic approach to protecting the country in future nuclear crises.
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