This remarkable political sermon ended with an admonition directed as much to himself as to his foreign policy team in the hall. In a telling phrase, he counseled against allowing Berlin to hijack Soviet foreign policy. “For us, West Berlin is in no way like the drunkard’s addiction for alcohol. Let it be that way, please.”
“IT IS FRUSTRATING not to know what is really going on.”12 Kennedy’s chief Soviet watcher, Llewellyn Thompson, could have been on the moon for all his ability to peer inside the Kremlin. His first meeting with Gromyko on this new round of Berlin talks had taken place on January 2, and there had been little to show for it other than a restatement of the basic stumbling blocks. Not that the American had much to offer himself. The reassessment that President Kennedy had ordered in mid-September had taken three months to complete. Despite the call for something novel and potentially interesting to Khrushchev, the process had been a personal embarrassment for Kennedy. After three months of exhaustive and exhausting allied politics, there was little in Thompson’s instructions in 1962 that he could not have said on behalf of Dwight Eisenhower in 1958.
The president had discovered that his European allies were not interested in seeing any new thinking on the Western side in the negotiations. West Germany’s Adenauer had used his visit to Washington in November to upset any plans Kennedy might have had to offer recognition of an independent West Berlin or of East Germany as inducements for Khrushchev finally to accept the sixteen-year-old Western access routes. Meanwhile de Gaulle refused to support negotiations of any kind. The French president was as sure as ever—and he had made this point to the untested Kennedy before the Vienna summit—that since Khrushchev would not go to war, there was no reason to alter the status quo in the two Germanys. De Gaulle’s abstention did not stop allied discussions, especially since Macmillan and the British government shared Washington’s eagerness to find a formula that would convince Khrushchev to stop making Berlin the source of international tension. But without active French participation the United States could not be sure if it was negotiating a deal that all the Western occupying powers would accept. These unknowns, coupled with Adenauer’s steely opposition, had hampered any creative policy making on the U.S. side. The single new idea that had resulted from the entire process involved a suggestion for an international access authority that would supervise the continuation of Western access to West Berlin after a peace treaty.
On its face, this suggestion was not that imaginative. But the fact that Kennedy was thinking about access after a peace treaty was a hint that he might eventually consider West Berlin a separate entity, a major deviation from the current Western support for leaving things as they were in the German city. Not surprisingly the idea of an international access authority was the only thing that Kennedy had not passed around for allied approval before mentioning it to the Soviets. He raised it in a conversation with Nikita Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, in late November 1961, infuriating Adenauer when he heard about it later.
HAD LLEWELLYN THOMPSON known what Khrushchev was saying to his colleagues in January 1962, he would not have been surprised that the Soviet leader assumed that he would have to continue playing the Berlin game to get any interesting Western offers. His defensive tone also would not have surprised Thompson, who was one of the keenest observers of Khrushchev’s inferiority complex and had divined the Sino-Soviet problem before most other American Kremlinologists. But what the U.S. Ambassador did not see or could not grasp was that there was little about the Sooviet leader’s approach to Berlin that was negotiable for him. Khrushchev’s bottom line was not even close to something the United States could accept without seeming to abandon its commitment to the people of West Berlin. Instead the American ambassador tended to blame his own government for missing opportunities to lower the temperature in Central Europe. In particular, Thompson believed that the administration could have maneuvered Khrushchev onto a less confrontational path when the wall in Berlin had gone up. Compromise of some sort was not out of the question, but as he confided to his friend the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow George Kennan in early January, “the difficulty here is that the Soviets will almost never reveal their side of the bargain first.”13
The Thompson-Gromyko negotiations resumed on January 11. Gromyko rejected the international access authority as “violating GDR sovereignty and in effect creating a state within a state.” The Soviet foreign minister also stressed that if Western troops remained after West Berlin became a free city, then Soviet troops would also have to be stationed in the city.14 In addition, the Soviets demanded for the first time in these negotiations that a future agreement include a series of sweeping guarantees. These included a prohibition on nuclear weapons for both Germanys, border guarantees for East Germany, and a NATO-Warsaw Pact nonaggression treaty. After hearing what Gromyko had to say, Thompson pronounced the meeting “a step backward.”15
JOHN KENNEDY had the same reaction as his ambassador. The Soviets not only were brushing off his efforts but seemed to be upping the ante. Seeing few other options, the president turned again to his brother’s back channel through Georgi Bolshakov.16 Not since the tense days at Checkpoint Charlie three months earlier had the Kennedy brothers used this method to get Khrushchev’s personal attention.
Bolshakov and the attorney general met twice in mid-January.17 Hopes that perhaps Khrushchev just needed a prod from an official higher than Ambassador Thompson were soon dashed. On January 18 Khrushchev used Bolshakov as a messenger boy to deliver a tough note to his U.S. counterpart.
“[My] proposals do not make harm to anyone,” argued Khrushchev. Instead it was the U.S. side that was to blame for the stalemate. Khrushchev returned to the theme of power to explain this American intransigence. “The President of the United States has himself said and everybody knows it that now the balance of power is equal. How, then, is it possible proceeding from the equal initial conditions to attempt to conduct a policy of encroachment on the interests of the USSR and its allies—socialist countries? But what the U.S. Government is proposing is aimed precisely against our interests.”18 At the end of his letter, Khrushchev hinted that if Kennedy did not give him what he wanted, he would force a defeat on Washington: “If on its part the United States does not display an understanding of this, some time will pass and the world will witness that this policy is suffering the same and [an] even greater defeat [than] before.”
There was quite a dissonance between how U.S.-Soviet relations were perceived in Moscow and how the Kennedy brothers thought about the problem. Whereas Khrushchev was saying in the Kremlin that Kennedy and Eisenhower were the “same shit” and held out little hope that words alone could change any U.S. president’s mind, Kennedy still believed that by developing a private connection to the Soviet leader he could lower the temperature of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry.
The days spent discussing Berlin in January 1962 had cemented a bond between Robert Kennedy and Georgi Bolshakov. The attorney general admired the rough-hewn physicality of the spry, squarely built Russian. Bolshakov soon found himself a regular guest at the Kennedy house at Hickory Hill. One such evening, which fellow celebrant journalist Theodore White called a “mad night at Bobby[’s],” left no doubt that Bolshakov had entered the charmed circle.19
The Kennedys assumed that it was still possible to create such a human relationship with Khrushchev himself. The clan had gotten quite fond of Bolshakov, yet had no reason to believe that Bolshakov was close to Khrushchev, and the president wanted a similarly close connection to someone within Khrushchev’s charmed circle. Aleksei Adzhubei, Khrushchev’s son-in-law, was incontestably close to the Soviet leader. The White House had invited Adzhubei for an interview with the president in September 1961, which the Kremlin had delayed until late November, around Thanksgiving, before it took place. In early 1962 Adzhubei was on a lengthy tour to Latin America and could come back for a second visit. Kennedy requested that this be arranged.20
As Kennedy prepared to meet Adzhub
ei, he had more than just his brother’s meetings with Bolshakov and the Thanksgiving visit with Adzhubei to draw upon. One of the lessons that Kennedy thought he had learned at Vienna was the importance of putting himself into the mind of his adversary. He had made a fundamental error in launching an ideological debate with an ideologue on that first day. Kennedy was not doctrinaire by nature, and he was too much of a pragmatist—and too ironic—to be wedded to any ideology. With Adzhubei Kennedy decided he had to try to speak in terms Khrushchev would understand; he would talk about power, interests, respect, and peace.
The president and Mrs. Kennedy invited Adzhubei and his wife, Khrushchev’s daughter Rada, to lunch on January 30, 1962, in the White House. Although Rada Khrushcheva was a linguist who could speak English as well as French fluently, her husband had trouble speaking English.21 So Bolshakov tagged along as the official Soviet translator. After the lunch and a tour of the mansion, Kennedy and Adzhubei repaired to the Oval Room in the family quarters of the White House for a more intimate conversation. There Kennedy attempted to underline his hope for negotiations on a wide range of subjects in an atmosphere of mutual respect.
The trouble began as soon as Kennedy sought to establish the ground rules for that mutual respect. He wanted the Soviets not only to understand U.S. interests but to respect them. He wanted Khrushchev to accept once and for all that the United States was in West Berlin to stay. The president stressed that access was an issue separate from the freedom of West Berlin, which needed to be assured, and that he could never accept any agreement that forced the removal of U.S. troops or required the presence of Soviet troops in West Berlin. As if this were not enough to raise Khrushchev’s temperature, he then suggested a possible agreement that would freeze the status quo in West Berlin for three to five years.
Kennedy also had something to say about another point of friction between the blocs, words that would provoke Khrushchev when he learned of them. In an effort to evoke his sensitivity to events in Cuba, Kennedy likened U.S. interests on the island to those Khrushchev had in Hungary. He then awkwardly told a story of having asked Allen Dulles—Khrushchev’s bête noire—why the Soviet intervention had been so successful in Hungary while the Bay of Pigs had been a fiasco. “You should learn from the Russians,” Kennedy recalled having said to his DCI. “When they had difficulties in Hungary, they liquidated the conflict in three days…. But you, Dulles, have never been capable of that.”22 Comparing Cuba with Hungary was about the most provocative way Kennedy could have chosen to underline his determination to remove an unfriendly regime that was within his sphere of influence.
Then Kennedy offered Adzhubei insight into his personal timetable for doing something about this nearby problem. “If I run for reelection and the Cuban issue remains as it is today,” Kennedy said, “then Cuba will be a major issue in the campaign and we will have to undertake something.”23 Even more than the Hungarian comment, this assertion upset the Soviet. “This is a sad and alarming statement,” replied Adzhubei. When word reached Khrushchev of this conversation, the president’s comments on West Berlin and Cuba suggested to the Soviet leader that Kennedy felt strong enough to challenge Soviet interests in Europe and the Caribbean and was not about to budge in negotiations.24
THE ADZHUBEI MEETING ended a monthlong period of mixed signals from the Kremlin. Up to this point Soviet foreign actions, toward either Berlin or any other regional concern, had not uniformly reflected the tough language of the secret meniscus speech. Indeed, throughout the month of January the Soviet Defense and foreign ministries had acted as though the Berlin crisis were finally over. On January 10, for example, the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany brought its alert level down from highest to normal and stopped sending Khrushchev daily reports on the status of U.S. forces and the situation in Berlin.25 The Foreign Affairs Ministry’s handling of some carping from the East Germans also reflected this assumption about a relaxation of tensions. Ordinarily an East German complaint about something—in January the protest was directed at the use of the autobahn by U.S. Army—would be followed up by a “Me, too!” response from the Soviets. In mid-January they had let the issue slide.26
With Adzhubei’s report in hand, Khrushchev decided it was time to pour water to the edge of the wineglass. First he would remind the United States of its vulnerabilities in Central Europe, where the idea of waiting another five years for a solution was repugnant to him. Every week there were approximately six hundred flights along the three air corridors to and from West Berlin. Since 1945 the Soviets had never placed any restrictions on Western use of these corridors. There was a quadripartite Berlin Air Security Control that existed to prevent Soviet and Western aircraft from unintentionally bumping into each other, but the Western allies could fly at will. The challenge began with an unexpected Soviet announcement on February 7 that for three hours the next morning the airspace between three and eight thousand feet in the southern air corridor would be closed to all non-Soviet traffic. The Soviets had never blocked Western use of an air corridor before. Meanwhile they refused to file flight plans for their own planes, as was customary, if not required, and would not assure the safety of any Western flights in the southern corridor at the reserved altitudes. This too was unprecedented.27 On the advice of General Clay, his personal representative in West Berlin, Kennedy ordered two unarmed military aircraft to fly along the southern air corridor at between five and six thousand feet during the time of the attempted Soviet closure.28
On February 8 the Soviets flew L-2 military transports along the southern air corridor as they had previously warned they would do. On February 9, the Soviet Air Force announced it was closing the northern air corridor as well. On the fourteenth and fifteenth the Soviets reverted to closing only the southern corridor for a limited time. Until February 14 there were no incidents between U.S. and Soviet military aircraft. However, on that day and the next, ten Soviet fighters began buzzing the six U.S. aircraft trying to fly in the southern corridor at the time “reserved” by Moscow.29
Walter Ulbricht misunderstood Khrushchev’s strategy. The East German leader interpreted the Soviet harassment of Western aircraft as evidence that the Kremlin was gearing up for another Berlin crisis in 1962. This was good news for Ulbricht, who still believed that his economic and political troubles would be solved if only Moscow would sign a peace treaty with his regime. Since this was not the message Khrushchev had wanted to convey, the East German leader was summoned to the Kremlin for a February 26 meeting.
Khrushchev tried to explain his strategy of maintaining pressure on the West without an ultimatum. He said that he feared that if he tried to sign the treaty now, the result would be a Western economic blockade. Since November 1961 the East German economy had gotten weaker, and it was now absolutely certain that Berlin would not be able to meet its economic targets for 1962. Given the weakness of the East German economy and its reliance on West Germany for industrial inputs—metal pipe, specialty steel, etc.—the effect of Western economic warfare would be disastrous. “We must put pressure to get a peace treaty,” said the Soviet leader. “But we must not put the question in these terms: life or death.”30
Despite Khrushchev’s efforts to persuade him to be satisfied with the gains that East Germany had already made since the Berlin Wall went up on August 13, Ulbricht pleaded not to let the wall become an excuse for delaying a peace treaty. “A wide swath of our population,” he said, “is starting to think that the USSR and the GDR…cannot fulfill [this promise].” He also made it plain that his own patience had worn thin. “We have already carried out this propaganda [in behalf of signing a peace treaty] for many years. But how much longer will it be?”
In the hopes of triggering a new Soviet ultimatum to the West, Ulbricht suggested that there be a foreign ministers’ conference at the end of the summer to draft the peace treaty. “Even if it were a bad treaty,” he said, “the negotiations would settle the questions of the East German border and its capital.”
Khrus
hchev was no longer as frank with Ulbricht as he had once been. He did not tell the East German about his new grand strategy to seek to build up Soviet power until he could force a Berlin settlement on the West. Instead he patronized the East German leader, advising him not to allow his country to remain as vulnerable to the West Germans. “Adenauer has you by the short hairs, and he is yanking at them,” he said contemptuously. Khrushchev also underplayed his hopes for a future deal with the West: “I believe that all we can expect from West Berlin we received on August 13. Now our task is to work quietly.”
When Ulbricht did not register satisfaction, Khrushchev stressed that going to the brink now would just deepen the Soviet bloc’s economic difficulties. “It wouldn’t bring war, but you would be the first to come to us with a demand for 100 million dollars, and then would come Gomulka and Novotny,” said Khrushchev referring to the Polish and Czech leaders. At the end of the conversation he hinted that a shift in the correlation of forces lay behind his willingness to wait. “Today we have medium range ballistic missiles that can travel 2,000 kilometers and we are not even building any more of them. [Instead] we had accelerated the construction of powerful [inter]continental missiles and next year we will have enough.” Cryptically, Khrushchev concluded by saying, “Our tactic must be to press, then to wait.”
MARCH 1962 brought another uncomfortable reminder for Khrushchev of American power. At a secret meeting with Bolshakov arranged by Robert Kennedy, the White House informed the Kremlin on March 2 that President Kennedy would soon announce a resumption of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. Since Khrushchev’s decision to test in the atmosphere in the summer of 1961, Kennedy had ordered the resumption of underground testing but, over the objections of his advisers, had held off resuming atmospheric testing. He believed that atmospheric testing introduced harmful airborne radioactive elements and knew that this testing would subject the United States to international criticism.
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