Khrushchev, who was not one to engage in honest postmortems, did not leave to history the exact reasons for his change of heart. But he knew that he had backed himself into a corner.94 By late August he was looking for an excuse to call off his ultimatum. He still dreamed of a German peace treaty as a capstone of a new European settlement, but the last few months had demonstrated that crude pressure tactics alone were not enough to get the Kennedy administration to yield. A new approach was needed: a few carrots to go with the sticks.
Thousands of miles away Khrushchev’s shifting strategy was as yet unknown. Instead a sticky pessimism settled over Washington as the tension dragged into the late summer. Dean Acheson wrote Harry Truman, who served as his father confessor throughout this crisis: “I believe that sometime this autumn we are in for a most humiliating defeat over Berlin…. I hope I am wrong, but do not think that there is the remotest chance that I am. The course is set and events are about to take control.”95 George Kennan, another architect of the U.S. strategy of containing the Soviet Union, was equally morose. Returning in August from Belgrade, where he was serving as Kennedy’s ambassador, Kennan confided to his friend Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “I do not propose to let the future of mankind be settled, or ended, by a group of men operating on the basis of limited perspectives and short-run calculations. I figure that the only thing I have left in life is to do everything I can to stop the war.”96 Schlesinger, who described these as “strange, moody days,” shared the pessimism. “I feel more gloomy about international developments,” he wrote to a friend, “than I have felt since the summer of 1939.”97
CHAPTER 16
“THE STORM IN BERLIN IS OVER”
ON AUGUST 26 the New York Times correspondent Cyrus Sulzberger received an unexpected cable at his hotel on the small Peloponnesian island of Spetsai. Yuri Zhukov, a well-placed and engaging Soviet flack, who had been a prominent Kremlin spokesman since the early days of the Korean War, had interesting news for his old friend Cy. If the journalist could make his way to Moscow, Khrushchev might see him. Zhukov suggested Sulzberger arrive in Moscow on September 2 or 3, when the Soviet leader was to return from his Black Sea vacation. Zhukov didn’t let on what Khrushchev wanted to talk about, but in August 1961 no one was talking about much else besides Berlin.1
A few days later the Soviet ambassador in Yugoslavia informed his American counterpart, George Kennan, that Nikita Khrushchev “enthusiastically endors[ed] further conversations” between the ambassadors on the issue of Berlin.2 Washington had already tried to use Kennan to communicate to the Kremlin its interest in diplomacy. The day after the wall first started going up, the State Department had authorized Kennan to approach his Soviet opposite number to sniff around for a chance to open a line to Khrushchev.3 The Kremlin had not been ready on August 14. Now it was.
Meanwhile in Brussels the chargé d’affaires at the Soviet Embassy issued an unexpected invitation to the Belgian foreign minister to visit Khrushchev in Moscow. A short man from a small country, Paul Henri Spaak was nonetheless a respected force in European affairs.4 Until February 1961 he had been NATO’s secretary-general before returning to Brussels to become foreign minister. In late July Spaak had used a roundabout way to communicate to Moscow his belief that a negotiated settlement was possible.5 Until this moment Moscow had not taken him up on his offer.
A famously short Frenchman received the fourth invitation. In the more fashionable salons of prewar Paris, Paul Reynaud had been known for his “small-man arrogance” and “walking almost on tiptoe to appear taller.”6 In the late summer of 1961 this eighty-three-year-old former French prime minister was due to visit the Soviet Union to close an exhibition of French goods and technology on display in Moscow.7 The Kremlin’s unscheduled approach to Reynaud for a session with Khrushchev was rife with symbolism. It was Reynaud who had resigned in despair when Hitler attacked France in May 1940.8 This phantom of France’s past was about to be asked to help arrange a less dramatic, though significant, Western surrender in 1961.
Khrushchev had decided at Pitsunda to initiate feelers to the West in an effort to jump-start negotiations. The approaches to Sulzberger and Kennan were designed to establish a new back channel to Kennedy. Khrushchev was probing for some change in Kennedy’s negotiating position. From Spaak and Reynaud Khrushchev wanted understanding and support. When he set his Berlin strategy, he had expected the Western Europeans to magnify the pressure on the United States to avoid war by accepting Soviet terms.9 Still convinced they could be used to break America’s resolve, Khrushchev decided to court prominent Europeans who had already demonstrated an interest in conciliation.
As his representatives were putting this diplomatic offensive into place, Khrushchev was himself the recipient of a surprising initiative. If a personal message from Khrushchev was a most unexpected thing for Kennan, Reynaud, Spaak, and Sulzberger that summer, its shock value was far surpassed by Konrad Adenauer’s private approach to him. On August 29, 1961, the West German chancellor sent a secret message to his Russian counterpart. As interpreted by the Soviet Foreign Ministry, after its delivery by West German Ambassador Kroll, the message read:
The Chancellor wanted his adversary to know that he fully agreed with Khrushchev that the developing serious situation must be approached soberly, not yielding to emotions. The Federal Republic knows that neither Eisenhower [sic] nor Khrushchev wanted war. But the outbreak of war was possible. The two greatest dangers: when tanks stand opposite tanks, at a distance of just some meters, as is the case now in Berlin, and the even greater danger of an incorrect assessment of the situation. The Federal Republic is convinced that negotiations constitute the sole exit from the situation, which must begin within the shortest possible time. The Federal Republic’s position regarding the direction of negotiations fully coincides with the positions of the USA and Great Britain. As is well known, France occupies a special position regarding the timetable for undertaking negotiations.10
The West German leader’s public stance was that negotiations with Moscow were dangerous because they were likely to result in Western concessions on Berlin. Through Kroll, however, Adenauer stressed to the Kremlin that there was no reason for the Soviets to wait until the September 17 West German elections to begin negotiations. Moreover, the West German asked Moscow to show its willingness to reduce tensions by releasing the last group of German citizens who remained captive in the USSR.11 Adenauer’s initiative played into Khrushchev’s stubborn notion that eventually he could attract Bonn away from Washington. Perhaps this was just a preelection trick by the wily German chancellor. Neverthless, Khrushchev needed all the European help he could get in the negotiations to come.
KHRUSHCHEV SPENT five hours with Cyrus Sulzberger on September 5. He gave the journalist enough fodder for a series of front-page articles and then got around to the reason for the meeting. Sulzberger was handed, for Kennedy’s eyes only, a private note in which Khrushchev suggested that the two leaders establish “some sort of informal contact…to find a means of settling the crisis without damaging the prestige of the United States.” All he asked was that Kennedy agree “in principle with the peace treaty and a free city.”12 For the first time he did not demand that Kennedy accept the loss of Western access rights.
THE INITIATIVE fell on fertile ground. Kennedy was also thinking hard about how to negotiate a way out of this crisis.13 The president faced some unpleasant decisions in September 1961. If he wanted to have six more divisions deployed in Europe by the beginning of the new year, he could not delay declaring a national emergency much longer. The Joint Chiefs and some of his civilian aides continued to interpret his July decision as just a postponement of the inevitable. But Kennedy wondered if those six divisions were really needed after all.14 Pressure was also building on him to decide whether to resume U.S. nuclear tests. An ever-larger group of Kennedy advisers were saying that in light of the Soviet test series at Semipalatinsk, the United States really had no choice.15
Kennedy h
ad already reacted positively to news of the Soviet approach to George Kennan before Khrushchev even met with Sulzberger. The Kremlin seemed prepared to talk instead of shout, though Kennedy wanted these discussions to take place at a higher level than Kennan and Soviet Ambassador Aleksei Yepishev. Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko was likely to be in New York later in the month for the opening of the UN General Assembly. On September 3 the State Department instructed Thompson to propose Rusk-Gromyko talks to the Soviets.16 Thompson was outside Moscow at the time, and it would take him a few days to let Khrushchev know that Kennedy was interested in talking.17
In Washington Kennedy sent a strong signal to his advisers that he wanted to give these talks a real chance of success. He ordered Secretary of State Rusk on September 12 to gather a small group of advisers to prepare the government’s position for negotiations to end the Berlin crisis.18 It was a mark of Kennedy’s desperation that he assigned a leadership role to the State Department for this initiative. Since the start of the crisis Kennedy had come to refer to American diplomats as collectively “a bowl of jelly.”19 He doubted that in the absence of firm guidance State could come up with something new and creative to offer Khrushchev. “I am talking about a real reconstruction of our negotiating proposals,” he exhorted Rusk, “and not about a modest add-on.” The formal U.S. reply sent to Khrushchev’s June Berlin ultimatum, which Rusk had crafted with the French, British, and West Germans, had been sterile. Kennedy knew very well that German reunification or the reunification of Berlin on the basis of free elections was a nonstarter in any discussion with the Soviets. “These are not negotiable proposals,” he reminded Rusk; “their emptiness in this sense is generally recognized.”20
Kennedy decided to confine this effort to rethink the U.S. position to a very small group. Dean Acheson and Lyndon Johnson, who were inflexible on negotiations, were to be cut out, and Kennedy did not want anybody at the Pentagon to know what he was doing. In the White House only the president’s assistant for national security affairs, McGeorge Bundy, and speechwriter Sorensen would know. The president did give them some room for creative thinking. He was prepared to consider turning West Berlin into a free city. But he wanted NATO to be able to protect the city and its inhabitants without Soviet or East German interference.
Kennedy, who knew nothing of Adenauer’s personal approach to Khrushchev, expected the West German leader would be the hardest ally to convince of the need for new proposals, especially anything that implied that West Berlin could not become part of West Germany. Once the new negotiating package was ready, he intended to send someone Adenauer respected, possibly even Acheson, to sell it to him. That is, of course, if Kennedy could sell the package to his own hard-liners first.
IN MID-SEPTEMBER, just as his meetings with the two specially selected Europeans were to begin, Khrushchev received the news that Kennedy wanted Rusk and Gromyko to meet in New York. The U.S. ambassador had not indicated any new U.S. position, but Khrushchev was encouraged that at least Kennedy seemed prepared to discuss his Berlin demands. He approved Soviet participation in the talks, scheduled to begin on September 21.
Meanwhile events in Germany were a reminder of the risks that both sides were taking in allowing this crisis to continue. Just after 5:00 P.M., Central European time, on September 14 two West German Air Force F-84 Thunder-jet fighters crossed into East German airspace near Zlend, seventy-six kilometers southwest of Magdeburg. The Soviet Air Force had standing orders to shoot down planes that violated East German airspace. None of the eight Soviet fighters scrambled, however, was able to intercept the F-84s in the twenty-one minutes before they landed at Tegel Airport in the French zone of West Berlin. The very next day another West German F-84 again violated East German airspace. This violation lasted only four minutes, a less glaring failure for the Soviet Air Force but still unwelcome evidence of the flimsy nature of East German sovereignty nonetheless. These two incidents worried the Soviet military command in Germany and raised some questions in Khrushchev’s mind that despite Adenauer’s secret message two weeks earlier, the West Germans might be trying to provoke a conflict.21
The Russian translation of a timely article by Walter Lippmann in the New York Herald Tribune crossed Khrushchev’s desk as he was considering the implications of these incidents. Entitled “Nuclear Diplomacy,” it was the American pundit’s astute observation on the nature of international politics in a world where either of the superpowers had the capability of destroying the other.22 “We cannot understand the realities of the Khrushchev-Kennedy encounter,” wrote Lippmann, “unless we remind ourselves that nuclear war is not just another war as history describes war, but a wholly new order of violence.” Khrushchev agreed with this analysis. It was after all the basis of his risky strategy to force the West to accept a new status for West Berlin. The Soviet leader believed that in a world dominated by nuclear weapons, rational men should be afraid to go to war, choosing diplomacy, even surrender, instead.
On September 16, Khrushchev praised Lippmann and the column in front of Paul Reynaud: “This is a man who understands and I agree with a lot of his conclusions. He is certain that today war means suicide.”23 But Khrushchev apparently had not comprehended or preferred not to discuss the tag line of Lippmann’s piece. “This being the nuclear age,” Lippmann concluded, “it is the paramount rule of international politics that a great nuclear power must not put another great nuclear power in a position where it must choose between suicide and surrender.”
Any hopes that the fear of general nuclear war would make his two European guests pliable were quickly frustrated. Khrushchev’s three-hour meeting with Reynaud was little other than opéra bouffe. The Frenchman turned out to be an unapologetic white imperialist, more concerned about the yellow peril than nuclear danger. “The first two European wars gave world supremacy to the Americans,” said the former prime minister in arguing that Khrushchev had an obligation to stop his saber rattling. “A new war would bring the suicide of the white race, giving China the chance to dominate the world.” These comments were not at all helpful to Khrushchev, who wasted no time telling Reynaud that as an internationalist he put class over race. The Soviet leader certainly had his problems with Mao, but he was not about to talk about his Chinese allies in racial terms with this representative of the French bourgeoisie.24
The meeting with Spaak a few days later was less strange but no more successful. The Belgian had drawn the Kremlin’s interest by telling the Poles that the “proposal of granting West Berlin the status of a free city with certain guarantees of access, as the Soviet Union has declared it would, could bring an agreement by the western countries with him [Khrushchev].”25 Spaak had thus become the first Western foreign policy maker to endorse the concept of a free city of West Berlin in a conversation with a Soviet bloc diplomat. However, Khrushchev’s hopes were soon dashed once the Belgian was in his office and the two discussed specifics. Spaak, while still in favor of a free West Berlin, also wanted NATO to retain its special access routes to the city. Khrushchev left the meetings with Reynaud and Spaak thinking that he had yet to meet a Western European figure who accepted his definition of a free city of West Berlin.26
Khrushchev could be forgiven if he believed that he was now giving the Europeans more than he received in return. With Reynaud and Spaak, Khrushchev revealed that he would be prepared to see the United Nations move its headquarters to West Berlin.27 This admission dramatized his willingness to let a future West Berlin remain independent and even capitalist. Indeed, Dwight Eisenhower had once mused about offering to put the UN in West Berlin, though John Foster Dulles had put a stop to the idea.28 Khrushchev had also let slip in the course of his discussion with Spaak that he had no deadline in mind for the start of negotiations, meaning that he might be willing to lift the looming ultimatum in 1961 as he had done in 1959. As Spaak told a special session of the NATO Council at the end of September, Khrushchev was not especially in a hurry. The Soviet leader, he said, “preferred delayed negotia
tions to a hasty war.”29
IN NEW YORK, Rusk and Gromyko began their discussions after a long lunch on September 21. Neither had anything new to say or present.30 Khrushchev assumed that the ball was in Kennedy’s court, and the review of the administration’s Berlin policy that Kennedy had initiated on September 12 was still weeks away from completion.
Khrushchev was nevertheless satisfied with this first meeting of the foreign ministers. He noted approvingly that Rusk had said nothing critical about the Berlin Wall. As Gromyko later affirmed to the Central Committee, the “representatives of the USA recognize in [these] talks that the measures of 13 August 1961 correspond to the vital interests of the GDR and other socialist states.”31 Khrushchev presumably also liked the fact that the Kennedy regime had dropped the Eisenhower administration’s insistence on only talking about a free city of Greater Berlin that encompassed both the eastern and western halves of the city. Although each side still saw the problem of Berlin differently, the Americans at least were now willing to discuss West Berlin as if it were a separate entity.
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