The Ticking Clock
On Wednesday, June 21, Khrushchev went to the great Hall of the Kremlin for a televised military observance of the twentieth anniversary of Hitler’s invasion. He wore his green lieutenant general’s uniform: during World War II he had served as political adviser on the Stalingrad front.
Bidding for support at the outset of his Berlin crisis, he told the assembled marshals, generals, and admirals that the Red Army would get whatever it needed to defend the motherland. As he later recalled, “the hands of the clock were ticking.”
In Alma-Ata three days later, Khrushchev rambled almost incoherently on the tastiness of horsemeat. Suspecting that their leader was drunk, censors worked hard to produce an acceptable official text. The next day, Khrushchev called Berlin “the most important problem” but spent the greater part of his speech unreeling his vision of a peaceful economic competition with the United States. He pledged that the Soviet Union would overtake the “aged runner” by 1970.
Ambassador Menshikov arrived at the White House with a terrified small white fluffy dog named Pushinka. A letter from Khrushchev said that she was “a direct offspring of the well-known cosmos traveler Strelka.” The President asked his wife, “How did this dog get here?” She put her hand to her mouth. “I’m afraid I asked Khrushchev for it in Vienna. I was just running out of things to say.”
The Chairman’s gift was heartfelt, but Khrushchev also enjoyed the idea of placing an emblem of Soviet dominance of space in the President’s own household. During the campaign, Kennedy had complained that the first creatures to orbit the earth had been named “Strelka and Belka, not Rover or Fido.”* Pushinka was checked for eavesdropping devices and, as O’Donnell recalled, became a “pampered member of the family.”
Khrushchev also sent a hand-carved model of an American whaler: “Such sail-steam vessels were in use at the end of the nineteenth century in the Chukchi Sea for whale-fishing, and they would visit Russian harbors.” The President replied that the whaler “now rests in my office here at the White House.” While Pushinka’s long flight from the Soviet Union had not been “as dramatic as the flight of her mother,” she had “stood it well. We both appreciate your remembering these matters in your busy life.”
At Vienna, Kharmalov and Salinger had agreed, along with Adzhubei and Harrison Salisbury, to debate the merits of their systems on American and Soviet television. On Saturday, June 24, the sixty-minute program was taped in New York and aired by NBC.† Kennedy called Salinger from Glen Ora: “I thought you won hands down.”
On Monday morning, the President received Kharmalov, Adzhubei, and Georgi Bolshakov in the Oval Office. Briefed on the Chairman’s barbs about the “aged runner,” he told Adzhubei, “Your father-in-law has his view, but I want to tell you ours.… You’re like the high-jumper. He can raise the bar a foot at a time until he reaches a certain height—say, six feet. But for the next foot, he must raise it by inches, and after that, by fractions of inches.”
Adzhubei said, “You use one set of figures to measure our growth, and we use another.” Kennedy replied, “I’m not minimizing your effort. You’ve made remarkable economic advances. This is the kind of peaceful competition I would like to see us have. But you must do more than you are doing to see that the peace is kept. Do that, and we’ll all be around in 1970 to find out whether Mr. Khrushchev’s estimates are correct.”
Adzhubei asked why the United States kept troops in West Berlin if its intentions were peaceful. The President replied that the ten thousand men were a “token” force. Adzhubei said, “I think you ought to let us have a token force in West Berlin.” Perhaps drawing from dossiers on Kennedy’s private life, he said, “We would start with seventeen pretty nurses.”
The President laughed. “We might just be able to work that out!” Resuming his gravity, he called the American troops “a symbol of our commitment to West Berlin, a commitment we intend fully to maintain.… I just want to make sure that you and your father-in-law have no doubts about our position in Berlin.”
Kennedy had made no public comment on Berlin since the day Pravda publicized Khrushchev’s six-month deadline. During the weeks of the President’s silence, Mike Mansfield had publicly declared that “sooner or later, Berlin is likely to become the pivot of a new disaster for mankind.” He proposed that NATO and the Warsaw Pact guarantee Berlin as a “free city” in a first step toward German reunification.
At a press conference on Wednesday, June 28, the President said that Mansfield did not speak for him: Khrushchev’s proposed “free city” would be one in which “the rights of the citizens of West Berlin are gradually but relentlessly extinguished—in other words; a city which is not free.… The Soviets would make a grave mistake if they suppose that Allied unity and determination can be undermined by threats or fresh aggressive acts.”
He noted Khrushchev’s boast that the Soviet Union would out-produce the United States by 1970: “Without wishing to trade hyperbole with the Chairman, I do suggest that he reminds me of the tiger hunter who has picked a place on the wall to hang the tiger’s skin long before he has caught the tiger. This tiger has other ideas.”* He insisted that the Russians were being far outpaced by the United States and would not catch up even by the year 2000.
In the New York Herald Tribune, Roscoe Drummond recalled Kennedy’s campaign charge that American economic growth was falling dangerously behind that of the Soviet Union: “I thought I was at the wrong press conference, or that … the man who was talking was President Richard Milhous Nixon.”
As with Kennedy’s effort to reveal Soviet nuclear inferiority, Khrushchev may have wondered why the President wished to humiliate him by puncturing his economic bragging. It would not have occurred to him that by igniting a Berlin crisis he had compelled the President to ensure that the Western allies and the rest of the world knew the full extent of American strength.
Few world leaders had been more unsettled by Kennedy’s election than the eighty-five-year-old Chancellor of West Germany. Konrad Adenauer wished that Eisenhower and Dulles were still in power.
Grandson of a baker, deeply Catholic, Adenauer was a Rhinelander who felt more affinity with the southern Germans, the Dutch, and the French than with the “heathen steppes” of Protestant northeastern Germany, which he considered “almost in Asia.” Berlin was to him an “un-Christian” Babylon. As Lord Mayor of Cologne from 1917 to 1933, he had scrutinized a plan to detach the Rhineland and unite it with France.
Adenauer hated Hitler most of all for the pagan mystique that separated children’s souls from their parents. Dismissed by the Nazis, twice arrested by the Gestapo, he sat out most of the Third Reich cultivating roses and tinkering with clocks at his home in Rhöndorf, across the Rhine from Bonn. In 1949, when the Federal Republic was founded, Truman and Acheson promoted the Christian Democratic Adenauer for Chancellor over the objections of the Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who would have preferred the Socialist Kurt Schumacher.
As leader of the Christian Democratic majority in the West German parliament, “Der Alte” helped West Germany to achieve its new place as the most prosperous nation on the continent, its politics, defense, and economy firmly anchored in the Western alliance. His regional prejudices and his anxiety about what he considered to be the German propensity for folly prevented him from being passionate about reunification.
Adenauer was incensed about a Foreign Affairs piece Kennedy had published in 1957 suggesting that the Chancellor’s time was past and that Eisenhower was leaning too heavily on the Christian Democrats. He feared that Kennedy’s Secretary of State might be Stevenson, whom he considered dangerously relaxed about the idea of American recognition of the GDR. He told friends that Kennedy had “much to learn” and as President could be “fatal.” Kennedy considered him almost openly pro-Nixon.
Hours after hearing of Kennedy’s victory, Adenauer tried to recover by announcing that he would meet with the new President in February 1961. With a hint of retaliation for Adenauer’s partisanship, Kennedy’s circle replied that February would be too early: the Chancellor would have to wait his turn.
When his White House visit was scheduled for early April, Adenauer was determined to win Kennedy’s reassurance that he would be as stalwart as Eisenhower about Berlin and West Germany. Facing new elections in September, he wished to show his domestic constituency that he could work with Kennedy. Polls showed the Christian Democrats were slipping against the coalition led by Willy Brandt, the young West Berlin Mayor often described as “Kennedyesque.”
Before Adenauer’s arrival, Henry Kissinger wrote the President that the intense American interest that spring in William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and in the Israeli trial of the Nazi executioner Adolf Eichmann had aroused the West Germans’ old “vague fears of being abandoned.” Urging Adenauer to be flexible would be “like telling a member of Alcoholics Anonymous that one martini before dinner will not hurt him.”
Heavily coached, the Chancellor gamely tried to give Kennedy the impression of spontaneity and informality, but the President sensed that he was “talking not only to a different generation but to a different era, a different world.” He told Jacqueline that Adenauer had hung on too long and was turning mean and bitter. He was impatient with Adenauer’s unquenchable thirst for what Sorensen called “repetitious reassurances of our love and honor.”
After his return to Bonn, Adenauer privately praised Kennedy’s ability to focus on basics but complained that the President was “a cross between a junior naval person and a Roman Catholic Boy Scout,” presiding over an entourage of “cooks,” “whiz kids,” and “prima donnas.”
The Chancellor was further unsettled by the Bay of Pigs. His military intelligence chief, General Gerhard Wessel, recalled, “It was a catastrophe that the world’s number-one power could do a thing like this. Unbelievable! It was a shock to us.… Our feeling of trust in the American leadership diminished to a very low level.” This mistrust was deepened by Vienna: “Our feeling was that Kennedy was not tough enough in his conversation with Khrushchev.”
On Thursday, June 29, the President called the NSC to the Cabinet Room and asked Dean Acheson what he should do about Berlin. The elegant, sardonic diplomat had never been a Kennedy acolyte. Before 1960, he had viewed the President’s father as a social-climbing bootlegger and prewar appeaser who had bought his spoiled son a seat in Congress. After the nominations of Kennedy and Nixon, he wrote a friend that the best campaign cheer he knew was “They can’t elect both of them.”
Acheson turned down the President-elect’s offer to be ambassador to NATO. The only full-time job he would have accepted was his old one. But when Kennedy in March 1961 publicly called on him to advise on Germany and Berlin, Acheson’s secretary noted that “DA is buoyed up by it all and looks better and younger than I have seen him in years.”
His modest return to government did not restrict his sharp tongue. In a speech to the Foreign Service after the Bay of Pigs, he reported the feeling among Europeans that they were “watching a gifted young amateur practice with a boomerang when they saw, to their horror, that he had knocked himself out.” Kennedy heard about the speech and, as Acheson recalled, “didn’t like this at all.”
Now, in the Cabinet Room, he argued that Khrushchev had started his newest Berlin crisis to weaken NATO, buttress the East German regime, and legalize the Oder-Neisse Line with Poland that the Soviets recognized as the GDR’s Eastern frontier.* Most of all, the Chairman was testing America’s will. America could not back down from such a sacred commitment as the defense of Berlin. Khrushchev would take willingness to negotiate as a sign of weakness. He had only dared start this crisis because rising Soviet strength had reduced his fear of a nuclear confrontation.
The Eisenhower State Department had quietly drafted “three essentials” to protect in Berlin even at the risk of nuclear war: access by air and ground, continued Western garrisons and other forms of presence in West Berlin, and the freedom and survival of the Western sector.*
Acheson said that Khrushchev must be made to know that the United States was “irretrievably committed” to these three interests. The President must order a rapid buildup of conventional and nuclear forces, put two or three additional divisions in West Germany, hold three to six more in reserve for transport overseas on short notice, declare a national emergency.
If Khrushchev signed a peace treaty, Kennedy should not quibble. But if the Soviets and East Germans blocked access to Berlin, the President should launch a new airlift. If they interfered with the Western planes, he should order a ground probe of two divisions—too large for East Germany to stop without Soviet help. The President must show Khrushchev that he had the resolution to go on, if necessary, to nuclear war. That done, he might offer face-saving concessions, such as barring espionage and subversion from West Berlin or even recognition of the Oder-Neisse Line.
Some in the room were upset by Acheson’s seeming nonchalance about risking nuclear war. They thought that starting off with negotiation would show Khrushchev that the West was ready to reduce West Berlin’s irritation value while protecting Western rights.
Llewellyn Thompson, back in Washington to advise on Berlin, said that Khrushchev’s chief motive in starting a new Berlin crisis was not to humiliate the United States but to improve the Communist position in Eastern Europe and disrupt NATO. Thompson favored a quiet Western military buildup, followed by a diplomatic offensive after the West German elections in September. Then the Soviet Union would have to suffer the world’s hostility for opposing the Western plan to avert a nuclear war over Berlin.
Thompson argued that a national emergency declaration would make the United States look “hysterical.” It might force a rash countermove from Khrushchev that he did not really want to make.
Kennedy asked whether it was “really to our advantage” to press the old Western demand for reunification of Berlin. Rusk said that “self-determination is a better ground than unification.” The President asked him to draft a proposal for a plebiscite allowing Berliners to choose their own destiny: no one could doubt who would win. He worried aloud that a new military buildup might be matched by the Soviet Union. Acheson agreed that “such back-and-forth challenges” should be avoided “as far as possible.”
Kennedy asked what to do “if Khrushchev proposes a summit this summer.” Acheson said, “It would not be hard to find answers as we go along.” The President should propose lower-level talks first. There were “plenty of elderly, unemployed people” like himself who could “converse indefinitely without negotiating at all.” He could easily do so “for three months on end.” Listening to Acheson, Robert Kennedy thought that he would never wish “to be on the other side of an argument with him.”
That week Newsweek published secret information on contingency planning for Berlin by the Pentagon, including a mobilization of American armed forces. Professing concern about how Khrushchev would view the information, Kennedy ordered the FBI to investigate. In fact, like the transcripts of the Vienna talks, the President or his aides may have themselves authorized the leak—in this case, to send a stiff alarm to Khrushchev.*
Khrushchev got the message. In a Moscow speech, he scoffed at “reports” of Western mobilization plans. While attending a performance by Dame Margot Fonteyn at the Bolshoi Theater, he called Sir Frank Roberts, the British Ambassador, to his box and warned that any effort to resist his German peace treaty would be futile; if the Western powers sent a new division to Germany, the Soviet Union could respond a hundredfold.
Six of his hydrogen bombs would be “quite enough” to destroy the British Isles. Nine would take care of France. Exploiting his awareness that the British were more willing than the Americans to bargain over Berlin, Khrushchev asked, “Why should two hundred million people die for two million Berliners?”
On Tuesday evening, July 4, for the first time in three years, Khrushchev and his wife turned up at Jane and Llewellyn Thompson’s Independence Day reception at Spaso House. They were followed by Mikoyan and Kozlov, Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky, and five other Soviet marshals. The Chairman’s visit was in character; he tended to make such calls when he was anxious that a crisis with the West might be about to grow overheated.
Boris Klosson entertained him until the Ambassador could gracefully leave his own receiving line: “I have a complaint. You’re going to exploit me. You’re going to print your new Twenty-year Plan on Sunday, so I am going to have to work on Sunday.”
Khrushchev said, “You mean you’re going to read that?” Jane Thompson gave him a Scotch highball, which he nursed and then gave to Nina Petrovna, saying, “I want to live. Mikoyan does all the drinking.”
Seven-year-old Sherry Thompson took the Chairman by the hand and showed him her vegetable garden. Khrushchev inevitably demanded to see her corn patch, but she told him that the stalks were not yet high enough to display.
Someone cried, “The assault of correspondents has begun!” Khrushchev said, “We will repel it, but not with rockets.” A reporter: “Our only weapon is a typewriter. Have you a secret weapon?” Khrushchev: “We need no weapons and no uniforms. All we need is brains.” Mikoyan: “His tongue is his weapon.” Another reporter: “That is a good weapon, and it gives us plenty of ammunition, but it is not a secret weapon.”
On Saturday, July 8, Khrushchev scrapped his program to reduce the Red Army by 1.2 million men. Under military pressure, he abandoned his argument that missile forces could substitute for troops. The Soviet defense budget would be increased by one third. “These are forced measures, comrades. We take them because we cannot neglect the Soviet people’s security.”
He noted that Adenauer was “shouting himself hoarse for nuclear weapons.” Kennedy had increased military spending. “This is how the Western powers have replied to the Soviet Union’s unilateral reduction of armed forces and military expenditures over the past several years.”
To remove the edge from his announcement, Khrushchev cited the President’s call for a peaceful competition. “This, of course, is much better than competing in the development of ever more destructive types of weapons.” Arkady Shevchenko recalled that “a crisis atmosphere prevailed as we waited to see what kind of countermeasures Kennedy would take.”
The President was at Hyannis Port. Told of the announcement, he said that Khrushchev had just hardened his Berlin challenge. The previous week, he had sent John McCloy to Moscow in an effort to jump-start the Geneva disarmament talks.* Now he asked Bundy, “Should we break them off, using the recent Soviet increases as our argument, and ask that the matter be taken to the UN?”
Earlier that day, wearing a beige tweed jacket and chinos, Kennedy had joined his wife, Rusk, McNamara, Maxwell Taylor, and the Charles Spaldings for fish chowder and hot dogs aboard the Marlin. Jacqueline hopped over the side to water-ski. Taylor and McNamara swam. Still wearing his business suit, the Secretary of State sat on the fantail with Kennedy, who complained that a month had passed since Vienna, and still State had produced no reply to Khrushchev’s Berlin aide-mémoire.
Rusk reminded him that the text had to be cleared with the Western allies: the Soviets would seize on the slightest nuance to wrench the alliance apart. The President bloviated that he did not intend to make himself dependent on the Allies. Didn’t Rusk understand? The United States bore the main responsibility for Berlin. In the end, it alone would decide the policy.
Kennedy had read a memo from Schlesinger and two other staff members criticizing Acheson’s fixation on the military aspects of the Berlin problem and what they thought to be the “least likely eventuality”—an immediate blockade of West Berlin. He agreed. He gave Rusk ten days to give him a plan for negotiations on Berlin.
Taylor and McNamara climbed back onto the boat. Still irritated, the President complained about the military planning on Berlin. If the Soviets severed access, NATO would be hard pressed to respond by conventional means. He wanted a wider choice than “holocaust or humiliation.”
He gave McNamara ten days to draw up a plan for non-nuclear resistance on a scale large enough to demonstrate that the West would resist a “cheap and easy” seizure of Berlin by East German guards. It must be large enough to allow a true pause—a month instead of an hour—for himself and Khrushchev to choose retreat or nuclear war.
In the Cabinet Room on Thursday, July 13, Rusk told Kennedy that “Khrushchev’s timetable is not under our control.” If the President offered negotiations now, he could “take the fever” out of the crisis. The problem was that, as Acheson had said, the United States was “not currently in a good position to negotiate.” If Khrushchev was “willing to protect our basic rights,” he would not have started this confrontation.
McNamara recommended a national emergency declaration to arouse Americans to the dangers over Berlin and prepare them for sacrifice. The President should call up the reserves and the National Guard, extend the service of those on active duty, retrieve American dependents from Europe, and ask Congress for an additional $4.3 billion for defense.
Rusk worried that an emergency declaration “would have a dangerous sound of mobilization.… We should try to avoid actions which are not needed for sound military purposes and which would be considered provocative.” Khrushchev would be more impressed if the “more drastic of our preparations” were “taken later on, as the crisis deepens.” As an alternative, the President could ask Congress for a resolution to let him call up armed forces as needed.
Acheson complained that if the President did not call up reserves until late in the crisis, it would not affect Khrushchev’s judgment any more than “dropping bombs after he had forced the issue to the limit.” Lyndon Johnson argued that the President “should take the lead” because otherwise Congress would assume that Kennedy was shifting the burden to them.
After the meeting, the President took McNamara into the Oval Office: he should proceed on the assumption that America would act with force only if West Berlin were directly threatened. Only two things mattered in this crisis: “our presence in Berlin” and “our access.” The United States would not challenge the Soviet Union in its own sphere of influence.
The U.S. government had still not responded to Khrushchev’s Berlin aide-mémoire. Members of the Kennedy circle later transformed the long delay into a famous parable demonstrating the torpor of the State Department. In an interview, the President later complained that it took “many weeks to get our answer out through the State Department.… It seems to me that one of the functions of the President is to try to have it move with more speed. Otherwise you can wait while the world collapses.”
The actual story was not so clear-cut. Martin Hillenbrand of State later recalled that a draft reply was sent shortly after Vienna, but that “White House administrative procedures were so sloppy it ended up in the safe of a presidential aide named Ralph Dungan, who then went off on a two-week holiday.… Finally we provided another draft when it was admitted that the first version couldn’t be found in the White House. Obviously none of this was told to the President by his staff, and the State Department took the blame.”
When the text finally reached the Oval Office, Kennedy and Bundy found it a paste-up of stale proposals and statements from the Berlin Crisis of 1958. They felt it had not been taken seriously: just another Cold War document to be ground out and soon forgotten.
The President asked Sorensen to write a “shorter, simpler version.” Foy Kohler complained that any new version would have to be cleared with the Allies, which would take more time. As Kohler recalled, Kennedy had yet to decide his Berlin policy, “and I was goddamned if we were going to let a note go out without a basis for something to say.” Kohler found that such arguments had “little effect” on Robert Kennedy, “who thought we were ineffective.” The reply to Khrushchev’s aide-mémoire was finally sent six weeks after Vienna.
That same month, the President complained to Bundy that a draft letter from Lyndon Johnson to Chiang Kai-shek was “hopeless”: “I am shocked that it could be approved by them.” After the Inauguration, unhappy with suggested replies to heads of state, he had finally sat down and dictated his own. Robert Kennedy recalled that major documents “all had to be done or redone by the President or somebody over at the White House, and that disgusted him.… Not only did they not have any ideas, but they were badly written.”
John Kenneth Galbraith later distilled the Kennedy view of the State Department in his pseudonymous novel The McLandress Dimension. In Galbraith’s rendering, the department acquires a large computer that enables it to realize its dream of a “fully automated foreign policy”: in reply to a Soviet harangue, the machine spits out enough boilerplate and clichés to avoid the cardinal sin of innovation.
Kennedy felt that much of the State Department “really objects to my being President.” He said, “They’re not queer, but, well, they’re sort of like Adlai.” Galbraith wrote him from New Delhi, “If the State Department drives you crazy, you might calm yourself by contemplating its effect on me. The other night I woke with a blissful feeling and discovered I had been dreaming that the whole goddamn place had burned down. I dozed off again hoping for a headline saying no survivors.”
Increasingly the President relied on McGeorge Bundy. He told Jacqueline that with the exception of David Ormsby-Gore, his national security adviser was the brightest man he had ever known: “Damn it, Bundy and I get more done in one day in the White House than they do in six months at the State Department.”
Bundy made it his business to supply the loyalty, speed, and imagination that Kennedy felt he could not get from the State Department. He hired audacious young men for his NSC staff to act as presidential eyes and ears, keep the bureaucracy from sabotaging Kennedy’s purposes, and bring the President options that might otherwise be filtered out in the struggle for bureaucratic consensus. Asked what he would have done if he were Secretary of State with Bundy at the NSC, Dean Acheson said, “Resign.”
Kennedy’s acquaintance with his foreign policy aide had been so slight at first that he frequently called him “McBundy.” By the summer of 1961, Bundy spent more time in the Oval Office than any other senior aides except O’Donnell and Sorensen.
Encouraged by the President, he departed from precedent by giving speeches that set policy and by refusing to act, as Andrew Goodpaster had, mainly as a neutral conveyor of information between the White House and the agencies.* Kennedy joked, “I only hope he leaves a few residual functions to me.” He told Ben Bradlee, “You can’t beat brains, and with brains, judgment.… He does a tremendous amount of work. And he doesn’t fold or get rattled when they’re sniping at him.”
To documents and cables Bundy often appended a note in the jocular we-own-the-world shorthand that amused his boss: “A shocker from the Italian mail.… Intercept conversation of the UAR [Egypt] Ambassador in Bonn with [Franz-Josef] Strauss which I send along because it tells a good deal about Strauss and a little about us.* … Background explanation of Saud’s bad temper.… An Afghan thriller.… The Shah gives the Secretary the business.… If you disapprove, we can turn around next week.… Memorandum showing that the Africans neither like nor dislike us as much as we think.”
With his well-developed sense of public service, Bundy was admirably willing to take the fall if a decision was likely to cause Kennedy political damage, writing, “I think the White House should gang up again on that convenient scapegoat McBungle.”
In September 1962, after a Chester Bowles speech on Cuba, Bundy reported to the President, “A semi-comedy of low-level errors.… All concerned were sloppy (and clearance within State was even sloppier). I have spread enough terror so that I doubt if this particular mistake will occur again.… I have also explained to the bright young Yale man who works for Bowles that his boss, when he speaks in this vein, is not heard by the Great American Public and is only a target for the cabbages of the Republicans.”
Another service Bundy performed was to enhance the ethnic diversity of the West Wing. He was the only full-fledged Anglo-Saxon Protestant on the first string of the Kennedy staff. Like McNamara, Dillon, McCloy, and others, he satisfied the President’s self-protective instinct to use Republicans in foreign policy. In 1962, Bundy asked Kennedy whether it would be “useful” if he reregistered as a Democrat since, after working for him, he now “felt like a Democrat.” The President replied that it was “marginally more useful to me to be able to say that you’re a Republican.” Bundy dropped the idea.
Kennedy consulted him on all manner of things. Worried that he and Jacqueline would seem like “a couple of swells,” he asked Bundy in May 1962 whether he thought it politically wise to let the First Lady go to a Virginia horse show in formal riding clothes. Bundy replied with a poem:
“Shall I let her in the Horse Show?”
The President was gloomy.
“Will our critics strike a worse blow
Than on Steel or Trib or Phoumi?”† …
It is a sign of pride—a horse,
But not a thing to hide—a horse,
Assuming you provide—of course,
A brave and lovely lady who can ride.
For voters dare to admire the fair,
And voters crave to honor the brave;
Only the rich are likely to bitch,
But which rich itch for us anyway?
So smothering doubts the President shouts,
“I who decide say, ‘Let her ride!’
I can’t say No—on with the Show;
All systems GO—and A-OK.”*
Third of three sons, Bundy was born in 1919 to what he called a “cold roast Boston” family. His mother was a Lowell. His father, born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, had finished first in his Harvard Law School class. The family saint was Henry L. Stimson, the legendary public servant under whom Harvey Bundy served when he was Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State and Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of War.
The young Bundy grew up knowing Stimson, Acheson, and other members of the northeastern foreign policy patriciate, maturing in a household that demanded brilliance, excellence, competition, and logical, persuasive argument. From an early age, he seemed governed by his own gyroscope. At Groton he resisted the hero worship for the famous rector Endicott Peabody, whom he found anti-intellectual and anti-meritocratic. Despite his considerable Harvard ancestry, he enrolled at Yale, where he was the first freshman matriculant to win three perfect scores on his entrance exams.
After graduation in 1940, Bundy gravitated to Harvard as a member of the Society of Fellows, which had been endowed by his great-uncle, the Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, to free promising young scholars from what he feared to be the deadening influence of graduate school. Invited to run for the Boston City Council in a heavily Republican district, Bundy was defeated by a Democratic unknown in what he later called “the worst-conducted campaign in history.”
After Pearl Harbor, Bundy memorized the eye chart to enter Army Intelligence. A family friend, Vice Admiral Alan Kirk, commander of amphibious forces in the Atlantic, took him on as his aide-de-camp in the invasion of Sicily.* In 1943, Bundy wrote his friend John Mason Brown, the drama critic, “Wars are full of glory and greatness, but they are not of themselves, as a whole, either one or the other—they are ugly.” Later he wrote, “Why did we all so much together—in spite of our astonishing and general loneliness? None of the novels help on this—for me at least.”
In June 1944, when the U.S.S. Augusta reached Normandy, Bundy stood on the flag bridge with Kirk. He used his excellent French to help the Admiral set up headquarters in Paris. After VE-Day, he won a transfer to the infantry in the Pacific for the invasion of Japan that never came. In 1946, he moved into the guesthouse at Stimson’s Long Island estate to collaborate on the Colonel’s memoirs, the story of America’s rise from isolationism to great power. He worked in 1948 under his old Yale economics teacher Richard Bissell on the Marshall Plan and wrote foreign policy speeches for Thomas Dewey.
Bundy joined Harvard as a lecturer on “The United States and World Politics” and became Dean of the Faculty at thirty-four, serving as a counterweight to what Galbraith called the “far from compelling rule” of President Nathan Pusey. He kept a hand in Republican politics. “I go to Temple Israel to preach the gospel according to Eisenhower,” he wrote Brown in 1952. “Come and be converted, if you’re a backslider to Adlai.”
In September 1953, Eisenhower’s national security adviser, Robert Cutler, asked Bundy to leave Harvard to serve as his deputy. Bundy had to say no; he had just been appointed Dean and could not leave after one month. He also “felt no great love” for Foster Dulles. Had Bundy taken the job and then succeeded Cutler, he would have been one of the chief defenders of the Eisenhower foreign policy against John Kennedy’s fusillades in the fall of 1960.
Bundy had attended Dexter School in Brookline with the future President and his older brother: “I doubt if I knew which Kennedy was which.… We wound up in the same college class at two different colleges, and I used to see him around Boston socially then. I saw more of his sister Kathleen, but that is the way those things work.”
In the spring of 1952, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., invited Bundy to lunch in Cambridge to “talk about whether Jack should run for the Senate.” Bundy told Kennedy that Henry Cabot Lodge was a shoo-in: “You could obviously become the Speaker of the House if you would just stay where you are.” After watching Kennedy recoil from the notion of a lifetime in the House, Bundy noted that he never asked him for this kind of political advice again.
Bundy saw Kennedy more often after the Senator was elected a Harvard overseer. In 1958, Republican advertisements quoted Bundy as saying that the Democratic Governor, Foster Furcolo, was not a bad man, just a bad governor. Kennedy laughingly asked Bundy, “What makes you think he’s not a bad man?”
By 1960, Bundy feared that the Eisenhower regime was losing the initiative in the Cold War. Finding Kennedy “much better than Nixon,” he told the Senator at the Harvard commencement that he would support him. He knew from the Dewey campaign that “you can’t help much from the outside,” but he fed ideas to the Kennedy caravan from a distance.
After the election, over drinks at the Boston Ritz-Carlton, he told Sargent Shriver he would be interested in joining the government “but it would depend on the job.” When Robert Lovett and Walter Lippmann suggested him for Secretary of State, Kennedy said, “He’s rather young, isn’t he?”
The President-elect was momentarily captured by the idea of Bundy at State. Bright, unconventional, Bundy was nationally unknown and hence had few enemies in Washington and no independent political following. He was an iconoclastic Republican and had the Establishment credentials to quell doubts about Kennedy’s age, his father, his seriousness, and his narrow plurality. Finally the President-elect observed that “two baby faces like mine and his are just too much.”
After choosing Dean Rusk, he suggested Bundy as number two, but Rusk preferred Chester Bowles. Kennedy called Bundy to the Carlyle and said that he did not want to create new jobs: he didn’t want “New Deal bureaucrats lousing up the government.” Did Bundy know Rusk and would he consider being Under Secretary for Political Affairs? This would make him number three in the Department. Bundy agreed; he knew and liked Rusk from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Embarrassed, the President-elect soon had to tell Bundy that Bowles had decided to specialize in political affairs. By statute, that meant the number three man had to specialize in economics: “I don’t think either of us could keep a straight face if we put you into that job.” As Bundy recalled, the next weeks passed in “awful silence.” Then Kennedy offered him Under Secretary for Administration. Bundy replied that he had been an administrator for years: he didn’t have it in him to straighten out “that crazy department.”
As Bundy and his family were trimming their Christmas tree, Kennedy called once more to offer him Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Bundy accepted. In 1960, this position lacked the prominence that Bundy and later incumbents of the job gave it. But Bundy shrewdly judged that the post would at least allow him to work closely with Kennedy: “That seemed to be worth whatever I didn’t know about it.”
By May 1961, he had moved across West Executive Avenue into the West Wing basement. Soon he informed O’Donnell that his quarters were too small: “The President called it a pigpen and my pride is hurt.… In the olden days of Eisenhower, the NSC people all stayed on the other side—but I can’t do my job from over there.… It all comes from having a President who has taken charge of foreign affairs.”
Bundy genuinely admired Kennedy and made certain allowances for the Kennedy style. He would probably not have been seen dancing at a party with the actress Angie Dickinson had Eisenhower brought him to the White House. On occasion he set himself apart from the Kennedy subculture. When the public learned of the President’s taste for spy novels, Bundy firmly told a reporter, “I am not an Ian Fleming fan.”
He never let off steam or tried to improve his own reputation in the manner of later presidential aides by making disloyal private cutting comments about the boss to reporters. His ample skepticism and self-esteem prevented him from becoming a yes-man. When he challenged the President, he heeded his finely tuned instinct about what would cross the line into insolence; with Kennedy, the threshold was higher than with most Presidents.
Bundy much later recalled that when he and his colleague Myer Feldman once dropped in on Kennedy, “he was having one of his pretty girls rubbing some goo on his hair, some perfect prescription that somebody had recommended for healthy hair. I said I didn’t think this kind of thing was sufficiently dignified for the Oval Office. He looked around at Mike and me—both of us without much hair—and said, ‘Well, I’m not sure you two plan your hair very well.’”
Years later Bundy could not recall Kennedy saying thank-you five times: “It wasn’t that he was ungenerous, but you don’t get to be President without being concerned about Number One.” Still, for Bundy these were glorious years when the world seemed to be young and bright with hope, a period that may have seemed especially appealing in retrospect after Bundy had the experience of working under President Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam.
In July 1961, Ambassador Menshikov was telling everyone in Washington who would listen that “when the chips are down, the American people won’t fight for Berlin.” Khrushchev’s aide Fyodor Burlatsky recalled that virtually no one in the Soviet government believed Americans would use nuclear weapons to protect Berlin: “Maybe we were wrong, maybe we were stupid.”
Robert Kennedy arranged a meeting with Bolshakov. He was evidently willing to excuse the bald misinformation that the Russian had transmitted about Khrushchev’s willingness to compromise on nuclear testing at Vienna; the Kennedys had concluded that the Chairman had had an honest change of heart. Bolshakov warned that, as usual, Menshikov was telling Khrushchev “what he’d like to hear,” that if he used pressure, the President would collapse and the Soviet Union would “take over Berlin.” Bolshakov said he was trying to correct the misimpression.
Over lunch at the Soviet Embassy, the Attorney General insisted to Menshikov that he and the President would prefer death to surrender. The envoy replied with polite incredulity. Kennedy became so angry that he almost left the room. Glaring at Menshikov, he declared that the United States would never abandon Berlin: the Ambassador had better tell that to Mr. Khrushchev—without editing.
Other Americans supplemented Kennedy’s message. Paul Nitze had Menshikov to lunch at the Metropolitan Club and warned him that the Soviet Union would be devastated by the multimegaton nuclear attacks prescribed in American war plans. Walt Rostow reminded Menshikov that when backed against the wall, people were inclined to bravery.
McNamara’s aide Henry Rowen and Carl Kaysen of the NSC staff were alarmed, as Kaysen recalled, that if the confrontation in central Europe “reached a military level and it started to go against us,” the existing plans were to “just let go with all our strategic forces against the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc countries, and China as well.”
Kaysen and Rowen decided to ask themselves, “How small a strike can you make that will … be a warning and only do such carnage as is absolutely inevitable if you’re going to use nuclear weapons at all?” They drew up a “back-of-the-envelope” first-strike plan that would disable Soviet nuclear forces before they could attack. Tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, nuclear aircraft carriers, and alert bombers would be used to “take out Soviet missile and bomber bases” with the least possible destruction of people and property not directly involved with Soviet military sites.
Paul Nitze opposed the idea, noting that it could not be certain of preventing the Kremlin from launching its many short- and medium-range nuclear weapons against Western Europe, killing tens of millions of people. The maverick Marcus Raskin of the NSC staff asked Kaysen, “How does this make us any better than those who measured the gas ovens or the engineers who built the tracks for the death trains in Nazi Germany?”
Kaysen took the plan to Sorensen, who said, “You’re crazy! We shouldn’t let guys like you around here.” He said it was “an outrageous thought” and the President “would never consider it.” Years later Sorensen was not certain that the plan ever made it to the Oval Office.
On Wednesday afternoon, July 19, the President convened what Bundy called “the most important NSC meeting that we have had.” Kennedy had to rule on the rapid conventional buildup proposed by Acheson to show that the United States had “irretrievably committed ourselves to the defense of Berlin.”
During his Berlin crisis, Eisenhower had rebuffed such a notion. Certain that there was nothing that the Soviets wanted so badly they would risk the annihilation of the Kremlin, he felt that the United States must simply stand “right and ready”; as long as Khrushchev was convinced that the President would use the Bomb to defend Western rights in Berlin, there was no need for additional troops.*
Kennedy could not be so sure that Khrushchev respected his will. A conventional buildup would help to show the Chairman that he was not a pushover. It could also relieve a stark presidential choice between “holocaust and humiliation”—or “suicide and surrender,” the other catch phrase of the time. Kennedy was worried that Khrushchev would reduce access to Berlin so gradually that the United States would lose the city before it was provoked into waging a nuclear attack: “If Mr. Khrushchev believes that all we have is the atomic bomb, he is going to feel that we are … somewhat unlikely to use it.”
The Berlin Crisis provided both reason and a pretext for the President to promote his doctrine of “flexible response.” Even aside from the Berlin problem, McNamara’s people had found important defects and shortages in the American conventional force structure: large numbers of torpedoes without batteries, rifles without bullets, antiaircraft guns in disrepair.
Kennedy approved a substantial buildup. The United States would prepare a new Berlin airlift and the capability to move six more divisions to Europe by the time of Khrushchev’s December peace-treaty deadline. It would increase naval strength and the number of bombers on ground-alert status and tactical and transport aircraft. The additional $3.5 billion incurred by this buildup would bring the total Kennedy increase in military spending since the Inauguration to $6 billion. The President would ask Congress for standby authority to triple draft calls, call up reserves, and impose economic sanctions against the Warsaw Pact nations.
Kennedy had trimmed Acheson’s original request by $800 million and refused his demand for immediate mobilization of American forces. He was influenced in part by a Thompson cable from Moscow arguing that a measured, long-term buildup would impress Khrushchev more than sudden escalation.
Reflecting the views of Bohlen, Thompson, and most of his White House colleagues, Sorensen cautioned Kennedy not to “engage Khrushchev’s prestige to a point where he felt he could not back down from a showdown, and provoke further or faster action on his part in stepping up the arms race.” Opposing Acheson’s view that Khrushchev would interpret any bargaining offer as weakness, the President resolved to “lean forward” on negotiations as soon as he had established American resolve. He did not intend to let Khrushchev choose the “framework of discussion.”
Kennedy also vetoed Acheson’s suggestion of a national emergency declaration. Kissinger had warned that this would seem “unnecessarily bellicose, perhaps even hysterical.” Not for the first or last time, the President complained that he did not know where Rusk stood on the matter. Kennedy now felt that a national emergency “was an alarm bell which could only be rung once.” It would only convince the Soviets “of our panic.”
Some presidential advisers suggested financing the new military spending with an income tax increase of one percent or more. Robert Kennedy thought that the tax would help Americans “understand the seriousness of the situation and everybody therefore would feel involved in it.” Rusk, McNamara, and Lyndon Johnson agreed. The President overruled them when Douglas Dillon warned that the increase might kill the nation’s recovery from recession.* Kennedy later told O’Donnell that he “couldn’t believe” that his brother, a “supposedly experienced” politician, could “even think of raising income taxes at a time like this.”
The President raised the matter of fallout shelters, which he saw as a means to reduce the Soviet Union’s estimate of its ability to harm the American land mass. Kennedy had been told that without shelters, seventy-nine million people would be killed in a nuclear attack. The number could be reduced to fifty million. The President decided to ask Congress for $207 million for civil defense.
Indignant that his recommendations were not being fully adopted, Acheson now rose to the attack. He insisted on declaring a national emergency and on calling up reserves no later than September 1961. McNamara replied that it would be “wrong to accept a rigid timetable in advance.” He did not want “large reserve forces on hand with no mission.” The six newly created Army divisions and the two new Marine divisions could be sent to Europe at the moment trouble broke out. Reserves would be summoned to replace them.
Acheson later told colleagues, “Gentlemen, you might as well face it. This nation is without leadership.”
One of the two main purposes of Kennedy’s new Berlin policy was to reduce the chance that Khrushchev could quickly and easily take over the city. The other was to convince him that if the Western position were seriously challenged, Kennedy might well choose holocaust over humiliation.
That summer, with only Bundy present, Kennedy asked Acheson at what stage in the crisis he thought nuclear weapons might have to be used. More measured and quiet than usual, Acheson replied, “If I were you, I’d think about it very hard and tell no one what I’d decided.”†
McNamara later insisted that during the Berlin Crisis “there was absolutely no thought given by the President or me or Secretary Rusk to the use of nuclear weapons.”* Bundy wrote more prudently that “nobody ever knew” what Kennedy would do if forced “to choose between defeat and the release of nuclear weapons.”
The President was scheduled to speak to the American people on Tuesday evening, July 25, at ten o’clock. Bundy told Sorensen, “The President will do well in a quite literal sense to speak softly while he describes his new big stick.”
Late on Tuesday afternoon, Sorensen sent pieces of the final text to Kennedy in the upstairs West Hall of the White House. Kennedy read each passage aloud so that Dave Powers could time it for length. Sorensen considered the text more somber than any presidential speech since the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons. Kennedy scribbled a personal note to go at the end of the speech and asked Evelyn Lincoln to type it up.
The Oval Office was jammed with seven television and newsreel cameras and burning lights, White House aides, Secret Service men, technicians, still photographers, and print reporters, including Tom Wicker of the New York Times, Mary McGrory of the Washington Star, and a TASS correspondent. When Kennedy walked in, one reporter thought he looked “tense and nervous.” The President complained about the heat, mopping his upper lip, and strode out into the night air before taking his place at his desk.
Watching from Hyannis Port, Jacqueline felt “a little shooting pain of fright.” She worried that “even Jack” might not be able to make this crisis “turn out for the best.”
Kennedy looked into the camera: “Seven weeks ago tonight, I returned from Europe to report on my meeting with Premier Khrushchev and the others.… In Berlin, as you recall, he intends to bring to an end, through a stroke of the pen, first our legal rights to be in West Berlin—and secondly our ability to make good on our commitment to the two million free people in that city. That we cannot permit.”
He restated the American commitment: “We have given our word that an attack upon that city will be regarded as an attack upon us all.… We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin.” In a passage suggested by General Taylor, he went on, “I hear it said that West Berlin is militarily untenable. So was Bastogne. And so, in fact, was Stalingrad. Any dangerous spot is tenable if men—brave men—will make it so. We do not want to fight, but we have fought before.”
Announcing his Berlin defense buildup and the call-up of reserves, he said, “I am well aware of the fact that many American families will bear the burden.… Studies or careers will be interrupted. Husbands and sons will be called away. Incomes in some cases will be reduced. But these are burdens which must be borne if freedom is to be defended. Americans have willingly borne them before, and they will not flinch now.”
He was asking for new funds to “identify and mark space” for “fallout shelters in case of attack” and to stock them with “food, water, first-aid kits, and other minimum essentials for survival.” No President had ever spoken so directly about the possibility of nuclear attack. “The lives of those families which are not hit in a nuclear blast and fire can still be saved—if they can be warned to take shelter, and if that shelter is available.”
To convey willingness to negotiate, Sorensen had included something Kennedy had said during his Berlin deliberations: “We do not want military considerations to dominate the thinking of either East or West.” At Bundy’s suggestion the President acknowledged the Soviet Union’s “historical concern” about its European security after “ravaging invasions.” The United States was ready to “remove any irritants in West Berlin” but not the city’s freedom. He used a line provided by Edward R. Murrow, the fabled broadcast newsman whom he had appointed Director of the U.S. Information Agency: “We cannot negotiate with those who say, ‘What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable.’”
He spoke to his international audience: “The source of world trouble and tension is Moscow, not Berlin. And if war begins, it will have begun in Moscow and not Berlin.… It is the Soviets who have stirred up this crisis. It is they who are trying to force a change.* … To sum it all up, we seek peace, but we shall not surrender.”
Now he read from the peroration he had scrawled out in his bedroom. “I would like to close with a personal word. When I ran for the Presidency of the United States, I knew that this country faced serious challenges. But I could not realize—nor could any man realize who does not bear the burdens of this office—how heavy and constant would be those burdens.… I know that sometimes we get impatient.… But I must tell you that there is no quick and easy solution. The Communists control over a billion people, and they recognize that if we should falter, their success would be imminent.…
“I ask for your help and your advice. I ask for your suggestions, when you think we could do better. All of us, I know, love our country. And we shall do our best to serve it. In meeting my responsibilities in these coming months as President, I need your goodwill and your support—and above all, your prayers. Thank you, and good night.”
After the hot lights were dimmed, Kennedy did not smile or say a word to the dozens of people in the Oval Office. He walked back to the family quarters alone.
“That boy is cool,” said Lyndon Johnson. “If he has to press that button, he will.… He’s tough. I know. He beat me!” Richard Nixon backed Kennedy’s toughness on Berlin but asked why he did not also resume nuclear testing and move against Castro. Nixon and other Republicans said that the President should have increased taxes or cut social programs to support his new military proposals. So did the largest number of the twenty thousand letters and telegrams sent to the White House. A few proposed assassinating Khrushchev.
Robert Hartmann wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Kennedy was “trying very hard to be a great leader of a troubled nation, yet he conveyed the impression that he was the most troubled citizen of all.” The Indianapolis News said that “America has been waiting for that kind of talk from the White House.” TASS claimed that the President’s defense buildup was intended to rescue his industrialist masters from their economic slump.
The Times of London said, MR. KENNEDY “READY TO SEARCH FOR PEACE.”* Most American newspapers ignored the President’s references to negotiation, stressing instead the defense buildup and fallout shelters. To send a message to the Russians that Kennedy was serious about bargaining once American resolve had been demonstrated, anonymous government officials leaked specific items on which they said the President might be flexible.
In the New York Times, James Reston reported that “the eastern boundary of Germany is negotiable. So is the level of forces in Berlin, all of Germany, and Eastern Europe.” Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune, whose daughter’s godfather was the Attorney General, reported that Kennedy was thinking of “some kind of 20- to 50-year nonaggression pact” with the Soviet Union, providing “reciprocal guarantee against a revival of German nationalism.”
After learning that Kennedy would announce his Berlin decisions on July 25, Khrushchev had invited John McCloy to fly from Moscow to Pitsunda. He almost certainly wanted to use the diplomat as a means of direct communication with the President after his Berlin speech, if it proved necessary.
McCloy arrived with his wife, his twenty-year-old daughter, and a niece. The next morning, Khrushchev buzzed over to the McCloys’ villa by motorboat. Wearing a pair of the Chairman’s oversized bathing trunks, McCloy leaped into the Black Sea with Khrushchev. A photographer was called to photograph the smiling Communist in the water with his fleshy arm around the bare shoulder of the smiling capitalist.
Khrushchev was in a jolly mood as they strolled in the lush gardens and played badminton. Exchanging diplomatic notes, he said, was like kicking a football back and forth: this would continue until a treaty was signed and the Soviet Union kicked a different kind of ball. Then the Chairman was sent a Russian translation of Kennedy’s Berlin speech. His merriment ended.
The next morning, he told McCloy that the United States had just declared “preliminary war” on the Soviet Union. What he had said in his speech on wars of liberation had been right: the capitalist world had clearly lost faith in its ability to prevail by peaceful means. President Kennedy seemed a “reasonable young man,” filled with energy and doubtless eager to display it. But if war broke out, Kennedy would be “the last President of the United States.” The next war would be decided by the biggest rockets. These were under the Soviet Union’s command.
He warned McCloy that the Russians now had a hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb, the largest in the world. His scientists were eager to test it. He had assured them that the United States would soon give them the opportunity by breaking the moratorium, saying, “Don’t piss in your pants. You’ll have your chance soon enough.”
Khrushchev told McCloy that he would sign a German treaty “no matter what.” Access would be cut off, and the United States would have to “make a deal” with East Germany. “If you attempt to force your way through, we will oppose you by force. War is bound to be thermonuclear, and though you and we may survive, all your European allies will be completely destroyed.”
As he did when he habitually promised to drop hydrogen bombs on London, Paris, and other cities, Khrushchev softened his threat by saying that he still believed in the President’s good sense. After thunderstorms, people cooled off and thought problems over. The Soviets and the Americans were both great peoples and should be friends. There was nothing to go to war about if both sides were reasonable. They should negotiate to guarantee access to Berlin and settle the German problem—“the only serious one between us.”
After returning to Moscow, McCloy wired Kennedy at Hyannis Port that Khrushchev was “really mad on Thursday after digesting the President’s speech. He used rough, warlike language, returning to cordiality after the storm had passed.… My estimate is that the situation is probably not yet ripe for any negotiation proffers by us but too dangerous to permit it to drift into a condition where cramped time could well lead to unfortunate action.”
McCloy reported that both Ambassador Thompson and he felt the Soviets would soon be pressing the Western allies “with threats of destruction to weaken their determination to go along with us.” He was flying to Europe and wished to “personally emphasize to NATO heads the importance of standing firm.” He wrote that “de Gaulle may wish to see me in Paris.” He assumed he could “talk freely with him re Khrushchev’s comments.”*
The President liked McCloy but was wary that this self-made, willful, loquacious Republican might try to tie his hands by conducting his own diplomacy in Europe. He had Rusk wire McCloy, “Believe you should report personally to President prior to any report to NATO representatives.… President and I therefore request that you return directly to Washington.”
East Germans were more fearful than ever that their access to the West through Berlin would soon be closed. The refugee flow had been quickened in recent years by East Germany’s brutal efforts to collectivize agriculture and reform heavy industry. Khrushchev had urged the East Germans not to be “so quick” with the changes. But as his aide Burlatsky recalled, “We were not in control. Khrushchev knew he was not like Stalin, who felt he could but move his little finger in order to be in control of the Eastern bloc.”
Since Khrushchev’s July 8 speech increasing the Soviet defense budget by one third, twenty-six thousand East Germans had fled to the West. Harold Macmillan noted in his diary that this was “a record number of refugees leaving the Marxist Heaven of East Germany for the Capitalist Hell (or at least Purgatory) of West Berlin.”
In Washington on Sunday morning, July 30, Senator Fulbright was asked on national television whether he thought the Berlin Crisis should be eased by closing the West Berlin escape hatch. He said, “The truth of the matter is, I think, the Russians have the power to close it in any case. I mean, you are not giving up very much because … next week, if they chose to close their borders, they could, without violating any treaty. I don’t understand why the East Germans don’t close their border because I think they have a right to close it.”
Outraged, Der Tagespiegel of West Berlin noted that Dean Acheson had helped to provoke the Korean War by declaring South Korea outside the American defense perimeter. East German papers exulted that Fulbright had offered a “realistic” formula for compromise. Bundy gave Kennedy what he called “a variety of comment from Bonn and Berlin, including reference to the helpful impact of Senator Fulbright’s remarks.”
Years afterward Bundy insisted that his use of the word “helpful” was meant to be sarcastic. But many wondered whether Fulbright’s suggestion, along with Mansfield’s about a “free city” in June, spoken by the two Senate Democrats with the greatest foreign policy influence, were inspired by the President in order to telegraph Khrushchev about a possible Berlin compromise that he dare not mention in public himself.
On Monday evening, July 31, Kennedy saw McCloy in the White House family quarters and interviewed him about his sessions with Khrushchev. A few days later, striding with Rostow down the colonnade outside the Oval Office, he pondered what would happen next. Thompson had cabled from Moscow in March, “If we expect the Soviets to leave the Berlin problem as is, then we must at least expect the East Germans to seal off the sector boundary in order to stop what they must consider intolerable continuation of the refugee flow through Berlin.”
Now the President told Rostow, “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. I can hold the Alliance together to defend West Berlin, but I cannot act to keep East Berlin open.”
*“Or even Checkers,” as he sometimes added in Richard Nixon’s honor.
†The Russians later reneged on their pledge to air the debate, claiming that the videotape was incompatible with Soviet television equipment.
* Staff members chuckled at this. In the West Wing, Kennedy was colloquially known as “the tiger.”
*At the Potsdam conference in July 1945, the Allies had provisionally established the Oder and Neisse rivers as the boundary between the old western and eastern German provinces, the latter of which were allocated to postwar Poland. The extrusion of the eastern provinces from what had been Germany before the war remained a live political issue in the FRG. Adenauer’s aide Felix von Eckhardt brought a secret request from the Chancellor to both Kennedy and Nixon in July 1960 not to mention the Oder-Neisse Line during the campaign: “He realizes there may be some pressure from Poles in this country.… All sensible Germans recognize that there cannot be a change in the Line. But with the German elections coming up in September 1961, any statements in the U.S. would be used in … local campaigns to the disadvantage of the Chancellor and his party.”
Von Eckhardt transmitted his message to Kennedy through Harriman, who told him that “the sooner all hands agreed to the Oder-Neisse Line, the better it would be for everybody.” Since Kennedy was eager to avoid the issues of Berlin and Germany anyway, he was happy to comply with Adenauer’s request. The closest he came to discussing the Oder-Neisse Line in the fall campaign was to tell the Polish-American Congress of Chicago, “We must eliminate Poland’s fear of the West, fears that are very real, and this includes in particular fear of Germany.”
*When the West Germans were told of the three essentials at a NATO meeting in May 1961, Mayor Brandt’s aide Egon Bahr had complained, “This is almost an invitation for the Soviets to do what they want with the Western sector.”
*David Klein of the NSC, whose mandate included Berlin, supposed that the culprit was in the White House or Defense Department.
*McCloy wrote Eisenhower that he was leaving “for another session with the Russians which I really do not relish, as my hands are pretty well tied, due to our relations with the Allies as well as to the other government agencies.”
*Under Eisenhower, Goodpaster’s official title had been Staff Secretary, but he performed most of the functions later fulfilled by men like Bundy, Rostow, Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, all of whom held the title of Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Gordon Gray, who held this title under Eisenhower, concentrated on long-range foreign policy planning.
*This refers to a report of a conversation intercepted by American intelligence in Bonn, perhaps by an eavesdropping device placed in the West German Defense Ministry or the Egyptian Embassy.
† “Steel” and “Trib” referred to the President’s 1962 confrontation with U.S. Steel president Roger Blough over a steel price increase, and his cancellation of White House subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune out of pique at what he took to be its anti-Kennedy line.
*As with most of Kennedy’s presidential life, this episode had its subtext. Attending the horse show caused Mrs. Kennedy to miss her husband’s vast forty-fifth birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden, at which Marilyn Monroe sang her famous sultry chorus of “Happy Birthday,” joining the President afterward at a private party.
*In 1961, Bundy persuaded Kennedy to appoint Kirk Ambassador to Taipei, arguing that the Admiral’s experience with amphibious landings would allow him to show Chiang Kai-shek how difficult it would be to retake the mainland.
*Eisenhower wrote John McCloy in June 1961, “I think the evidence is clear that Russia respects and fears our destructive power.… She is so determined to avoid an out-and-out military challenge with us that ever since World War II she has used only satellite or puppet forces, except in the single case of Hungary, an area already behind the Iron Curtain.”
*After consulting Wilbur Mills, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, O’Donnell told Robert that his tax proposal “would have been stuck in the House of Representatives for the next twenty-five years.”
†In a 1959 Saturday Evening Post article, Acheson had written that the correct final choice might be to accept defeat if the only alternative was nuclear war. Bundy years later wrote that Acheson “may have consoled himself with the thought that nothing is more secret than a sentence buried in a two-year-old weekly.” In fact, in 1961, some enterprising reporters unearthed and published his view. The fact that even this most militant of Kennedy’s advisers on Berlin questioned the wisdom of nuclear war over the city was almost certainly noted by Khrushchev’s circle and would have further convinced him that the President would not use the Bomb if pushed to the brink.
*He recalled that at one point he privately advised Kennedy never to initiate the use of nuclear weapons and Kennedy agreed. If this exchange conveyed Kennedy’s genuine views, it very likely took place later and was the partial result of the President’s experience in the Berlin Crisis.
*Here the President was quoting himself to Khrushchev at Vienna in a line provided by de Gaulle.
*The previous week Ambassador David Bruce had cabled from London, “The prospect of the Berlin Crisis provoking or leading, through inadvertence or accident, to nuclear war is regarded here with horror.” Bruce noted that stout as the British were in a showdown, “their national political temperament inclines them to compromise, even at the expense of principle.… Nor do German prosperity, rates of taxation … and tranquil subordination to leadership endear their citizens and institutions to the British. Joy through work is not a British ideal, as it is in West Germany. Envy of nascent German power is galling to those who for more than a century considered the exercise of power in Europe their peculiar prerogative. The same reflection applies, in diminished force, to their suspicion and envy of ourselves.”
*The French Ambassador, Herve Alphand, had already complained to Bundy on de Gaulle’s behalf about sending McCloy to the Soviet Union at a time when the United States was supposed to demonstrate fortitude on Berlin.