Just another brick in the Wall

  

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. 

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.