Berlin 1961

The aftershocks of Kennedy’s bad year

Berlin and Havana Mid-August, 1962

A year after President John F. Kennedy acquiesced to the communist construction of the Berlin Wall, two dramas occurring five thousand miles apart illustrated the high cost of one of the worst inaugural year performances of any modern president.

The first unfolded under the spotlight of a Berlin summer sun, when eighteen-year-old bricklayer Peter Fechter and a friend began their sprint to toward freedom across the so-called death strip, the no-man’s land that lay before the Wall. Two bullets pierced Fechter’s back and stomach as he watched his more agile friend leap to freedom over strands of barbed wire that adorned the barrier’s crown. Fechter collapsed backwards in a quivering heap at the base of the wall, where he bled through multiple wounds while U.S. soldiers watched helplessly, obeying orders not to assist any escapees until they had left East Berlin territory.

At about the same time and more than an ocean away, Soviet ships had begun landing secretly at eleven different Cuban ports with combat forces and the components for some twenty-four medium-range and sixteen longer-range launchers, each of which would be equipped with a nuclear warhead and two ballistic missiles. Once they were installed, the Soviet Union for the first time would have a reliable capability to hit New York and Washington, D.C. in a nuclear exchange.

On first reflection, there would seem to be little to connect the East German killing of a teenage bricklayer and the Soviet clandestine landing in Cuba. Yet, taken together, they dramatically symbolized the two most significant aftershocks of President Kennedy’s mishandling of the events surrounding Berlin in 1961:

• The first would be longer-lasting: the freezing in place of the Cold War division of Europe for three more decades, with all of its human costs. The Wall’s construction not only stopped East Germany’s unraveling at a time when the country’s viability was in doubt; it also condemned another generation of tens of millions of East Europeans to authoritarian, Soviet-style rule with its limits on individual and national freedom.
• The second aftershock would be more immediate: the Cuban Missile Crisis in late 1962 with its threat of nuclear war. Though history would celebrate Kennedy for his management of the Cuban crisis, Khrushchev would not have risked putting nuclear weapons in Cuba at all had he not concluded during the Berlin crisis in 1961 that Kennedy was weak and indecisive.

The world now knows what President Kennedy did not envision at the time: that the Berlin Wall would fall in November, 1989, that Germany and Berlin would be unified a year later in October 1990, and that the Soviet Union itself would collapse a year after that, at the end of 1991. Given the Cold War’s happy ending, it has been tempting for historians to give Kennedy more credit than he deserves for that outcome.  By avoiding undue risk to stop the Berlin Wall’s construction, their argument goes, Kennedy prevented war and set the stage for Germany’s eventual unification, for the liberation of the Soviet bloc’s captive nations, and for the enlargement of a free and democratic  Europe.

Kennedy’s showdown at Checkpoint Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin

Friday, October 27, 1961

There had not been a more perilous moment in the Cold War.

Undaunted by the damp, dangerous night, Berliners gathered on the narrow side streets opening up onto Checkpoint Charlie. The next morning’s newspapers would estimate their numbers at about five hundred, a considerable crowd considering that they might have been witnesses to the first shots of a thermonuclear war.

After six days of escalating tensions, American and Soviet tanks were facing off just a stone’s throw from one another – ten on each side, with roughly two dozen more in nearby reserve.    Much has been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis that would come a year later, but the Berlin Crisis of 1961 was more decisive in shaping the Cold War – and was more perilous.

Reporting from the scene, CBS News reporter Daniel Schorr, with all the drama of his authoritative baritone, declared to his radio listeners, “The Cold War took on a new dimension tonight when American and Russian fighting men stood arrayed against each other for the first time in history. Until now, the East-West conflict had been waged through proxies – German and other. But tonight, the superpowers confronted each other in the form of ten low-slung Russian tanks facing American Patton tanks less than a hundred yards apart…”

General Lucius Clay, President Kennedy’s new special representative in Berlin, had set the confrontation in motion a week earlier over an issue most of his superiors in Washington did not consider a war-fighting matter. Breaking with established four-power procedures, East German border police had begun to demand that Allied civilians present their identity cards before driving into the Soviet zone of Berlin.

The Kennedy-Khrushchev nuclear poker

Palace of Congresses, Moscow

Tuesday, October 17, 1961

Nikita Khrushchev would celebrate his Berlin triumph at the 22nd Communist Party Congress in Moscow — and through it send the most powerful message imaginable that President John F. Kennedy had failed to create a more peaceful planet through his acquiescence to the construction of the Berlin Wall two months earlier.

Never had so many communist party leaders met in one place at the same time, nearly 5,000 in all from eighty communist and non-communist countries.  For Khrushchev, the capacity crowd was intentional. He had entitled each party organization to send additional delegates to create the right  theater for the message he wished to send.

Khrushchev had regained a greater hold on power during 1961 through favors, factional purges, and visits throughout the country with local party leaders. He had been able to neutralize would-be opponents as well by putting the first man in space while outmaneuvering Kennedy at their Vienna Summit and during the Berlin border closure. Time magazine wasn’t far off when it said, “In 44 years and 15 Party Congresses since the October 1917 Revolution, Communism’s inner hierarchy has never seemed more stable or more successful.”

In jocular and self-satisfied mood, Khrushchev jolted his listeners with a revelation that he would conclude successful nuclear weapons tests by detonating a hydrogen bomb by October’s end with a yield of fifty million tons of TNT.  Encouraged by the cheering crowd, Khrushchev confirmed that he also had developed a hundred megaton bomb, but would not explode it “because even if we did so at the most remote site, we might knock out all of the windows.”

It was classic Khrushchev. On the final day of the Congress, the Soviet Union would detonate the most powerful nuclear weapon every to be constructed. The “Tsar Bomba,” as it would later be nicknamed in the West, had the equivalent of ten times the explosives used in the World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Berlin Wall’s first victim

Humboldt Harbor, East Berlin

Thursday, August 24, 1961

Günter Litfin, a twenty-four-year-old tailor whose boldest acts until that point had been performed with a needle and thread, summoned the courage to flee East Berlin eleven days after the communists had sealed the border.

Until August 13, Litfin had lived divided Berlin’s ideal life, taking maximum advantage of each side’s benefits as one of the city’s 50,000 Grenzgänger, or “border jumpers.” By day, he worked in West Berlin earning hard Westmark, which he exchanged on the black market at a five-to-one rate for East Germany money, or Ostmark.

He worked out of an atelier near West Berlin’s Zoo Station, where he had already become a tailor to the city’s show-business greats: Heinz Rühmann, Ilse Werner, and Grete Weiser. Actresses in particular were drawn to his boyish manner, dark eyes and curly black hair. At night, he retreated to a comfortable East Berlin apartment in the Weissensee district, which he rented cheaply for those plentiful Ostmark.

The border closure overnight dramatically altered tens of thousands of lives in the city of 3.2 million. Sons and daughters were separated from parents, lovers were separated from lovers, and people like Günter Litfin were separated from their livelihoods and their dreams.  Some would quietly accept the new world, but a few like Litfin thought it was worth risking flight as they saw the East German regime gradually closing all escape hatches.

With each successive day, Litfin had grown more convinced that the Americans would not rescue East Berliners. And the communists had begun replacing the temporary barriers of sawhorses and barbed wire with a ten-foot high wall built of prefabricated concrete sections and connecting mortar. So Litfin decided it was time to get out himself before it was too late.

West Berlin’s impertinent mayor

Oval Office, The White House

Wednesday Morning, August 16, 1961

President Kennedy was enraged.

He considered the letter from Mayor Willy Brandt that had landed on his desk that morning, three days after the Berlin border closure, to be insulting and impertinent. Even given the gravity of Berlin’s crisis, it overstepped the sort of language any city mayor should use with the American president. With each line that he read, Kennedy grew more certain that the letter’s primary purpose was to serve Brandt’s campaign against West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer for national elections a month later.

Worse yet, Brandt had revealed the contents of the ostensibly confidential letter that day to a rally outside his city hall with more than 250,000 West Berliners, who had grown as angry at the Americans about their role in condoning the border closing operation as they were with the East Germans and their Soviet minders for conducting it.  West Germany’s most-read newspaper, Bild-Zeitung, with its circulation of 3.7 million, had covered the entire top half of its front page with a headline that captured the public mood: THE EAST ACTS – AND THE WEST? THE WEST DOES NOTHING.

In the letter, Brandt called the Communist encroachment “the most serious in the postwar history of this city since the (1948) blockade.”  In a surprisingly direct rebuke of Kennedy’s acquiescence, he wrote, “While in the past Allied Commandants have even protested against parades by the so-called National People’s Army in East Berlin, this time, after military occupation of the East Sector by the People’s Army, they have limited themselves to delayed and not very vigorous steps.”

He charged that the Allies, and thus Kennedy, had thus endorsed the “illegal sovereignty of the East Berlin government.” Brandt protested, “We now have a state of accomplished extortion.”

Kennedy writes the script, East Germany builds the Wall

Washington

August 13, 1961

Among those closest to him, President John F. Kennedy did not hide his relief after East German forces, with the approval of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, sealed the Berlin border in the early morning hours of August 13 in an operation of stunning speed and German efficiency.

After all, in many respects Kennedy had written the script for how Khrushchev had executed the operation – staying strictly within the bounds of what the U.S. President had made clear he would accept.  From the time of their meeting at the Vienna Summit two months earlier, Kennedy had been sending clear messages that he could live with a border closure in Berlin if the Soviet leader didn’t disrupt West Berlin access or freedom.

And during the August 13 border closure and the hours that followed, the East Germans had been careful to erect their barbed wire barriers entirely within East Berlin territory – leaving checkpoints through which allied personnel were allowed to pass. For both Kennedy and Khrushchev, the flood of refugees out of East Germany, which the border closure was designed to stop, was more of a political inconvenience than a point of difference.

For Kennedy, the refugees – leaving by July at a rate often of more than 2,000 a day, reaching a total of 2.8 million since 1945 — were so destabilizing the fragile status quo of a divided Europe that they stood on the way of potential negotiations with the Soviets on a nuclear test ban and other matters Kennedy considered of greater importance than East Berliners’ freedom, which he felt he couldn’t defend anyway. For Khrushchev, addressing the refugee threat was existential: to the viability of East Germany, to Communist ideology, and to his own hold on the power.

In the week before the August 13 border closure, Kennedy had said to Walt Rostow, a White House economic adviser, “Khrushchev is losing East Germany. He cannot let that happen. If East Germany goes, so will Poland and all of Eastern Europe. He will have to do something to stop the flow of refugees. Perhaps a wall. And we won’t be able to prevent it.”

A Kennedy speech that was weaker than it sounded

The White House, Washington, D.C.

Tuesday, July 25, 1961

In the late afternoon, President Kennedy retreated to the Lincoln Bedroom to read through the latest draft of a speech he would deliver live at ten o’clock that evening to a national television audience. It was rare for any president to use the Oval Office for such a purpose, and workmen had been there all day, laying cables and wires.

Kennedy knew how high the stakes had become. At home, he had to reverse a growing impression of foreign policy weakness, which made him politically vulnerable. After mishandling Cuba and Vienna, he had to convince Khrushchev that he was willing to defend West Berlin even while he left the door open for negotiations.

The result was a speech whose rhetoric was far stronger than its underlying message.  If Khrushchev were looking for it, this was a timely signal to him that if he didn’t touch the access or freedom of West Berlin, he could do virtually anything he wanted on his own side of the Berlin border.  Coming less than three weeks before the historic Berlin border closure, that message may have been decisive.

“The immediate threat to free men is in West Berlin,” Kennedy said, using visual teaching aid of a map for the American people to show West Berlin an area of white floating 110 miles inside the black of Communist East Germany. He said West Berlin was “more than a showcase of liberty, a symbol, an island of freedom in a communist sea. It is even more than a link with the Free World, a beacon of hope behind the Iron Curtain, an escape hatch for refugees.”

The Kissinger – Kennedy connection

The White House, Washington, D.C.

Friday, July 7, 1961

Henry Kissinger spent only a day or two each week in Washington working as a White House consultant, commuting from his post at Harvard University, but that had proved sufficient to put him at the center of the struggle to shape Kennedy’s thinking on Berlin.

At age 39, the ambitious professor would happily have worked full-time for the president: that, however, had been blocked by his former dean and now D.C. boss, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. Though Kissinger had mastered the art of flattering his superiors, Bundy was more immune to it than most. Along with the president, Bundy regarded Kissinger as brilliant also tiresome. Bundy imitated Kissinger’s long, German-accented discourses and the rolling of the president’s eyes that accompanied them.

For his part, Kissinger would complain that Bundy had put his considerable intellectual talents to “the service of ideas that were more fashionable than substantial.” Kissinger biographer Walter Isaacson concluded that their differences were a matter of class and style: the tactful, upper-class Bostonian condescending to the brash German Jew.

Still, being so near the center of American power was a heady experience for Kissinger, and an early introduction to the White House infighting that would become such a part of his extraordinary life. Kissinger worried that Kennedy’s aides, and perhaps the president himself, might be naïve enough to be tempted by Khrushchev’s “free city” idea, under which West Germany would fall under United Nations control. Kissinger was also concerned about Kennedy’s distaste for the great West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. He believed the traditional U.S. commitment to eventual German unification through free elections was fanciful, and should be negotiable.

Kennedy, Kissinger feared, didn’t sufficiently realize that inattention to Berlin could breed a crisis for the Atlantic Alliance that would hurt U.S. security interests far more than any deal with Moscow could justify. So he put his warning to Kennedy in unmistakable language:

The East German refugee who became a beauty queen

Miami Beach, Florida

July 5, 1961

She was East German leader Walter Ulbricht’s ultimate humiliation in a year when a hemorrhage of refugees was threatening the existence of his Communist state.

As Ulbricht maneuvered behind the scenes to win Soviet approval to close his Berlin border, one of his refugees was strutting down the catwalk of a Miami Beach stage in her shimmering Miss Universe gown. Amid the flashing of camera bulbs, Ulbricht’s most intractable problem had assumed the unmistakable shape of former East German electrical engineer Marlene Schmidt, someone judges had declared “the world’s most beautiful woman.”

There are so often moments in the rush of history that one freeze frame speaks volumes.  And during 1961, there were plenty of such images:  Kennedy in top hat during his inauguration, Kennedy and Khrushchev facing off in Vienna, and the iconic image of an East German border guard leaping over the barbed wire with arms outstretched like wings.

Yet for every little girl in every Communist country, the pictures relayed around the world of the new Miss Universe spoke of a world of unimaginable glamour and opportunity. For their Communist masters, however, the crowning of Marlene Schmidt would play into their propaganda about the superficiality of a commercial society.  What no one had in doubt was that the judges had intended just the ideological message that her crowning symbolized.

At age twenty-four, Marlene Schmidt was intelligent, radiant, blonde, a little shy, and a lot statuesque. West Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine described her as someone with an engineer’s brain atop a Botticelli figure. But her real draw – the one that was getting her headlines around the world – was the story of her fairy tale flight to freedom.

The worst day of JFK’s life

Vienna, Sunday, June 4, 1961

President John F. Kennedy was brutally honest about what would prove to be one of the worst performances of an American leader with his leading global counterpart of his time – his two-day summit with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

As he drove away from the Soviet embassy with Secretary of State Dean Rusk in his black limo, Kennedy banged the flat of his hand against the shelf beneath the rear window. Rusk had been shocked that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had used the word “war” during their acrimonious exchange about Berlin’s future, a term diplomats invariably replaced with any number of less alarming synonyms.

Despite all the president’s pre-summit briefings, Rusk felt Kennedy had been unprepared for Khrushchev’s brutality. The extent of Vienna Summit’s failure would not be as easy to measure as the Bay of Pigs fiasco six weeks earlier. There would be no dead, CIA-supported exile combatants in a misbegotten landing area, who had risked their lives on the expectation that Kennedy and the United States would not abandon them.

However, the consequences could have be even bloodier. A little more than two months after Vienna, the Soviet would oversee the construction of the Berlin Wall. That, in turn, would be followed in October 1962 by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Already in Vienna Kennedy was distraught that Khrushchev, assuming that he was weak and indecisive, might engage in the sort of “miscalculation” that could lead to the threat of nuclear war.  He didn’t know then that his prediction would become prophesy.

Kennedy carried with him from Vienna to London, for his follow-up meeting with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, the Khrushchev aide-memoire delivered in Vienna that detailed the Soviet demands for a German settlement within six months, “or else.” If the Soviets made it public, as Kennedy had to assume they would, his critics would accuse him of having walked into a Berlin trap in Vienna that he should have seen coming.

Before leaving Vienna himself, Kennedy met in a private room, behind closed blinds, at the U.S. ambassador’s residence with New York Times columnist James “Scotty” Reston.  He wanted to get across to Reston the seriousness of the situation, and then use him as a conduit to paint a grim picture for the American people.  He spoke to Reston in the tone of the confessional.