Frederick Kempe. Berlin 1961:
Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the most
dangerous place on Earth. 2011. Putnam’s.
579 pages.
As Russia
dismembers Ukraine
with surgical skill, the West fulminates.
Is no effective response possible?
Well, Western Europe and the United States were
in similar straits in 1961, when the Soviets proposed to close the East German
border. Maybe that episode holds a clue
to solving today’s predicament. Frederick Kempe, perhaps the most skillful
storyteller among Cold War historians writing in English, describes the conflict in Berlin 1961.
Kempe hews to the conventional line that U.S.
President John Kennedy had bungled talks in Vienna
concerning the Allies’ occupation of Germany,
tempting USSR Premier Nikita
Khrushchev into building a wall in Berlin and
sending missiles to Cuba.
It seems to me that JFK had done as well as could
have been expected. Khrushchev’s goal
was to keep East Germany
from collapsing from the flight of hundreds of thousands of its skilled workers
to the West, via Berlin. “The…drain of workers was creating a simply
disastrous situation in the [German Democratic Republic], which was already
suffering a shortage of manual labor, not to mention specialized labor,” he
reflected in his memoirs. The obvious
solution was to turn over Berlin to East Germany,
whose leader, Walter Ulbricht, had never met a repressive measure that he
didn’t like. (“Whoever supports free
elections supports Hitler’s generals!” he bellowed to hardhats in East Berlin in 1961.)
But the turnover would have been a highly visible act of bad faith with
the three Western Allies who had occupied Berlin with the Soviets since the
end of World War II.
Khrushchev was desperate to resolve this
paradox when the newly elected Kennedy, two months before the summit, unwittingly
handed him a fifth ace – the Bay of Pigs debacle. The Soviet premier well knew how to play that
card; he had used the U-2 foul-up to loudly avoid concessions to President
Dwight Eisenhower in 1960. Who could
possibly deal with such conniving capitalistic imperialists? Where’s my hat? Kennedy was a loser the moment that his jet
touched down in Vienna.
Hammer,
sickle and whim
For the talks, the best of his options, all
of them bad, would be to admit his error in the Bay of Pigs and to stress that,
nevertheless, if the Soviets fought at Berlin, the West would fight back. And that’s what Kennedy did, albeit
diplomatically. It was Khrushchev who
heard only what he wanted – i.e., that the Americans would condone any Soviet
whim. “There was nothing [Kennedy] could do – short of
military action – to stop us,” Khrushchev recalled later in his memoirs. “Kennedy was intelligent enough to know that
a military clash would be senseless.
Therefore the United
States and its Western Allies had no choice
but to swallow a bitter pill as we began to take certain unilateral steps.”
Kennedy’s own sense of failure from the talks probably stemmed from his attempt on the first day to lecture the world’s leading Communist debater on the evils of Communism. He should have known, from the Kitchen Debate of Vice President Richard Nixon in 1959, where all of that was going to lead.
Kennedy’s own sense of failure from the talks probably stemmed from his attempt on the first day to lecture the world’s leading Communist debater on the evils of Communism. He should have known, from the Kitchen Debate of Vice President Richard Nixon in 1959, where all of that was going to lead.
Khrushchev was a shrewd psychologist, but
his blustering in the City of Grace had less to
do with the youth and inexperience of his antagonist than with the fact that,
in the truest sense, the Soviets had already lost Berlin.
“Whatever might be happening in other parts of the world, in Berlin the West was winning,” said Britain’s Prime
Minister, Harold Macmillan, at the time.
“It was a very poor advertisement for the Soviet system that so many
people should seek to leave the Communist paradise.”
The Soviets and the West finally arrived at
an uneasy coexistence by following Robert Frost’s advice: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The Berlin Wall expressed the tacit
understanding that the Soviets could do whatever they wanted on their side of
town as long as the Allies had a free hand in their own. Perhaps that détente would work today. Or is the Kremlin planning a return to Paradise? -- Leon Taylor tayloralmaty@gmail.com
Notes
1. By
disparaging elections, Ulbricht presumably meant that the Nazis had come to
power by winning national elections. But
in fact, Hitler received only 37% of the vote in the crucial second round of
the presidential election of 1932, noted historian Richard Evans.
Good
reading
Richard J. Evans. The
coming of the Third Reich. Penguin
Books. 2003. The first book in a detailed, objective and
absorbing trilogy.
David Halberstam. The
Fifties. Ballantine Books. 1993.
Describes the Kitchen Debate.
