Berlin 1961

1 KHRUSHCHEV: COMMUNIST IN A HURRY

^{THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW}

^{NEW YEAR’S EVE, DECEMBER 31, 1960}

It was just minutes before midnight, and Nikita Khrushchev had reason to be relieved that 1960 was nearly over. He had even greater cause for concern about the year ahead as he surveyed his two thousand New Year’s guests under the towering, vaulted ceiling of St. George’s Hall at the Kremlin. As the storm outside deposited a thick layer of snow on Red Square and the mausoleum containing his embalmed predecessors, Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchev recognized that Soviet standing in the world, his place in history, and—more to the point—his political survival could depend on how he managed his own blizzard of challenges.

At home, Khrushchev was suffering his second straight failed harvest. Just two years earlier and with considerable flourish, he had launched a crash program to overtake U.S. living standards by 1970, but he wasn’t even meeting his people’s basic needs. On an inspection tour of the country, he had seen shortages almost everywhere of housing, butter, meat, milk, and eggs. His advisers were telling him the chances of a workers’ revolt were growing, not unlike the one in Hungary that he had been forced to crush with Soviet tanks in 1956.

Abroad, Khrushchev’s foreign policy of peaceful coexistence with the West, a controversial break with Stalin’s notion of inevitable confrontation, had crash-landed when a Soviet rocket brought down an American Lockheed U-2 spy plane the previous May. A few days later, Khrushchev triggered the collapse of the Paris Summit with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wartime Allies after failing to win a public U.S. apology for the intrusion into Soviet airspace. Pointing to the incident as evidence of Khrushchev’s leadership failure, Stalinist remnants in the Soviet Communist Party and China’s Mao Tse-tung were sharpening their knives against the Soviet leader in preparation for the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Having used just such gatherings himself to purge adversaries, all Khrushchev’s plans for 1961 were designed to head off a catastrophe at that meeting.

With all that as the backdrop, nothing threatened Khrushchev more than the deteriorating situation in divided Berlin. His critics complained that he was allowing the communist world’s most perilous wound to fester. East Berlin was hemorrhaging refugees to the West at an alarming rate. They were a self-selecting population of the country’s most motivated and capable industrialists, intellectuals, farmers, doctors, and teachers. Khrushchev was fond of calling Berlin the testicles of the West, a tender place where he could squeeze when he wanted to make the U.S. wince. However, a more accurate metaphor was that it had become his and the Soviet bloc’s Achilles’ heel, the place where communism lay most vulnerable.

Yet Khrushchev betrayed none of those concerns as he worked a New Year’s crowd that included cosmonauts, ballerinas, artists, apparatchiks, and ambassadors, all bathed in the light of the hall’s six massive bronze chandeliers and three thousand electric lamps. For them, an invitation to the Soviet leader’s party was itself confirmation of status. However, they buzzed with even greater than usual anticipation, for John F. Kennedy would take office in less than three weeks. They knew the Soviet leader’s traditional New Year’s toast would set the tone for U.S.–Soviet relations thereafter.

As the Kuranty clock of the sixteenth-century Spasskaya Tower ticked over Red Square toward its thunderous midnight chime, Khrushchev generated his own heat inside St. George’s Hall. He hand-clasped some guests and bear-hugged others, nearly bursting from his baggy gray suit. It was the same energy that had carried him to power from his peasant birth in the Russian village of Kalinovka near the Ukrainian border, through revolution, civil war, Stalin’s paranoid purges, world war, and the leadership battle following Stalin’s death. The communist takeover had provided many Russians of humble beginnings with new opportunities, but none had survived as skillfully nor risen as far as Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.

Given Khrushchev’s increased capability to launch nuclear-tipped missiles at the West, it had become a consuming occupation of U.S. intelligence agencies to fathom Khrushchev’s psychological makeup. In 1960, the CIA had assembled some twenty experts—internists, psychiatrists, and psychologists—to scrutinize the Soviet leader through films, intelligence files, and personal accounts. The group went so far as to inspect photo close-ups of Khrushchev’s arteries to assess rumors of their hardening and his high blood pressure. They concluded in a highly classified report—which later would reach President Kennedy—that despite Khrushchev’s mood swings, depressions, and drinking bouts (which they reported he had recently brought under greater control), the Soviet leader exhibited the consistent behavior of what they called a “chronic optimistic opportunist.” Their conclusion was that he was more of an ebullient activist than, as many had believed until then, a Machiavellian communist in Stalin’s mold.

Another top-secret personality sketch prepared by the CIA for the incoming administration noted Khrushchev’s “resourcefulness, audacity, a good sense of political timing and showmanship, and a touch of the gambler’s instinct.” It warned the newly elected Kennedy that behind the often buffoonish manner of this short, squat man lay a “shrewd native intelligence, an agile mind, drive, ambition and ruthlessness.”

What the CIA didn’t report was that Khrushchev took personal responsibility for Kennedy’s election and was now seeking the payoff. He boasted to comrades that he had cast the deciding vote in one of America’s closest presidential elections ever by refusing Republican entreaties that he release three captured American airmen—the downed U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, and two crew members of an RB-47 reconnaissance plane shot down by the Soviets over the Barents Sea two months later—during the height of the election campaign. Now he was working impatiently through multiple channels to land an early summit meeting with Kennedy in hopes it would solve his Berlin problem.

During the campaign, the Soviet leader’s instructions to his top officials had been clear, regarding both his desire for a Kennedy win and his distaste for Richard Nixon, who as Eisenhower’s anticommunist vice president had humiliated him in Moscow during their so-called Kitchen Debate over the relative advantages of their two systems. “We can also influence the American presidential election!” he had told his comrades then. “We would never give Nixon such a present.”

After the election, Khrushchev had crowed that by refusing to release the airmen he had personally cost Nixon the few hundred thousand votes he would have required for his victory. Just a ten-minute walk from his Kremlin New Year’s party, the American captives languished as a reminder of Khrushchev’s electoral manipulation inside the KGB’s Lubyanka Prison, where the Soviet leader was keeping them as political pawns to be traded at some future moment for some other gain.

As the countdown to his New Year’s toast continued, Khrushchev bathed in the crowd more like a populist politician than a communist dictator. Though still vigorously youthful, he had aged with the accelerated speed of so many other Russians, having already turned gray at age twenty-two after a serious illness. As he bantered with comrades, he often threw back his nearly bald head and exploded in mirth at one of his own stories, unself-consciously showing bad teeth with a center gap and two golden bicuspids. Closely cropped gray hair framed a round, animated face with three large warts, a slit scar under his pug nose, red cheeks with deep laughter lines, and dark, piercing eyes. He waved his hands and spoke short, staccato sentences in a loud, high-pitched, nasal voice.

He recognized many faces and asked after comrades’ children by name: “How is little Tatyana? How is tiny Ivan?”

Given his purpose that evening, Khrushchev was disappointed not to find among the crowd Moscow’s most important American, Ambassador Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, with whom he had remained close despite the decline of the U.S.–Soviet relationship. Thompson’s wife, Jane, apologized to Khrushchev that her husband was home nursing ulcers. It was also true that the ambassador was still smarting from his encounter with the Soviet leader at the previous New Year’s gathering, when an inebriated Khrushchev had nearly declared World War III over Berlin.

It had been two in the morning when Khrushchev, in an alcoholic haze, escorted Thompson, his wife, the French ambassador, and Italy’s Communist Party leader into a newly built anteroom of St. George’s Hall, curiously decorated with a running fountain filled with colored plastic rocks. Khrushchev spat at Thompson that he would make the West pay if it didn’t satisfy his demands for a Berlin agreement that would include Allied troop withdrawal. “We have thirty nuclear weapons earmarked for France, more than enough to destroy that country,” he said, tilting his head toward the French ambassador. He added for good measure that he was reserving fifty each for West Germany and Britain.

In an awkward attempt to restore a lighter mood, Jane Thompson had asked how many rockets Khrushchev had earmarked for Uncle Sam.

“That’s a secret,” Khrushchev had said with a wicked smile.

In an attempt to reverse the degenerating tone, Thompson had offered a toast to the upcoming Paris Summit with Eisenhower and its potential for improved relations. The Soviet leader, however, only escalated his threats, discarding his commitment to Eisenhower that he would refrain from any unilateral disruptions over Berlin until after the Paris meeting. Thompson was able to end the vodka-soaked session only at six in the morning, when he walked away knowing superpower relations would depend on Khrushchev’s inability the next morning to recall anything he had said that night.

Thompson had dispatched a damage-control cable to President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Christian Herter that same morning, relating Khrushchev’s remarks while at the same time declaring they should not be “taken literally,” given the Soviet leader’s intoxicated condition. He offered that the Soviet merely wished “to impress upon us the seriousness” of the Berlin situation.

A year later, and with Thompson safely at home, Khrushchev was in a more sober and generous spirit as the clock struck twelve. Following the bells welcoming the arrival of 1961, and the lighting of the forty-foot New Year’s tree inside St. George’s Hall, Khrushchev raised his glass and offered a toast that would be taken as doctrinal direction by party leaders and repeated in diplomatic cables around the world.

“Happy New Year, comrades, Happy New Year! No matter how good the old year has been, the New Year will be better still!”

The room exploded in cheers, embraces, and kisses.

Khrushchev ritually toasted the working people, the peasants, the intellectuals, Marxist-Leninist concepts, and peaceful coexistence among the world’s peoples. In a conciliatory tone he said, “We consider the socialist system to be superior, but we never try to impose it on other states.”

The hall grew silent as he turned his words to Kennedy.

“Dear Comrades! Friends! Gentlemen!” said Khrushchev. “The Soviet Union makes every effort to have friendly ties with all peoples. But I think no one will reproach me if I say that we attach great importance to improving our relations with the USA because this relationship greatly molds others. We would like to believe that the USA strives for the same outcome. We hope that the new U.S. president will be like a fresh wind blowing away the stale air between the USA and the USSR.”

The man who a year earlier had counted the atomic bombs he would drop on the West was striking a peacemaker’s pose. “During the election campaign,” Khrushchev told the crowd, “Mr. Kennedy said if he had been president he would have expressed regret to the Soviet Union” about sending spy planes over its territory. Khrushchev said he as well wanted to put “this lamentable episode in the past and not go back to it…. We believe that by voting for Mr. Kennedy and against Mr. Nixon, the American people have disapproved of the policy of Cold War and worsening international relationships.”

Khrushchev raised his refilled glass. “To peaceful coexistence among nations!”

Cheers.

“To friendship and peaceful coexistence among all peoples!”

Thunderous cheers. More embraces.

Khrushchev’s choice of language was calculated. The repetitive use of the term “peaceful coexistence” was at the same time a declaration of intent toward Kennedy and a message of determination to his communist rivals. Recognizing Soviet economic limits and new nuclear threats, Khrushchev, in his famous secret speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, had introduced the new thinking that communist states could peacefully coexist and compete with capitalist states. His opponents, however, favored a return to Stalin’s more aggressive notions of world revolution and more active preparations for war.

As 1961 opened, the ghosts of Stalin endangered Khrushchev far more than any threat from the West. After his death in 1953, Stalin’s bequest to Khrushchev had been a dysfunctional Soviet Union of 209 million people and dozens of nationalities stretching over one-sixth of the world’s land-mass. World War II’s battles had depleted a third of the Soviet Union’s wealth and had left some 27 million dead while destroying 17,000 Soviet towns and 70,000 villages. That didn’t count the millions Stalin had killed previously through man-made famine and his paranoid purges.

Khrushchev blamed Stalin for then launching an unnecessary and costly Cold War before the Soviet Union had been able to recover from its previous devastation. In particular, he condemned Stalin for the botched Berlin blockade of 1948, when the dictator had underestimated American resolve and overestimated Soviet capabilities at a time when the U.S. still retained its nuclear monopoly. The result had been the West’s breaking of the embargo, then the 1949 creation of NATO and the founding in the same year of a separate West Germany. What accompanied that was an American commitment to dig into Europe for a longer stay. The Soviet Union had paid a high price because Stalin, in Khrushchev’s view, “didn’t think it through properly.”

Having extended the olive branch to Kennedy through his New Year’s toast, a still-sober Khrushchev at two a.m. took aside West German Ambassador Hans Kroll for a private talk. For Khrushchev, the sixty-two-year-old German was the second most important Western ambassador after the absent Thompson. However, the two men were far closer personally than Khrushchev was to the American envoy, connected both by Kroll’s Russian fluency and his conviction, not unusual for Germans of his generation, that his country was more closely connected culturally, historically, and potentially also politically to Moscow than to the U.S.

Accompanied by Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and Presidium member Alexei Kosygin, Khrushchev and Kroll retreated to the same odd anteroom where the Soviet leader had threatened Thompson one year earlier. That year as well, Kroll had stormed out of the New Year’s celebration in protest after the Soviet leader used his toast to condemn West Germany as “revanchist and militaristic.”

This time, however, Khrushchev was in a seductive mood, and he summoned a waiter to pour Kroll Crimean champagne. While nursing a light Armenian red wine, the Soviet leader explained to Kroll that under doctor’s orders he was not drinking vodka or other hard drinks. Kroll savored such personal exchanges with Khrushchev, and it was his practice at such moments to draw him near physically and speak in hushed tones to underscore their closeness.

Kroll had been born four years later than Khrushchev in the then Prussian town of Deutsch Piekar, which in 1922 would be ceded to Poland. He learned his first Russian while fishing as a boy on the river that divided the German and Czarist empires. His first two years as a diplomat in Moscow had come in the 1920s when post–World War I Germany and the new communist Soviet Union, then two of the most vilified countries in the world, struck the Rapallo agreement that broke their diplomatic isolation and formed an anti-Western, anti–Versailles Treaty axis.

Kroll’s view was that European hostilities could only be calmed through an eventual accord enabling West Germany and the Soviet Union—“the two most powerful countries in Europe”—to get along better with each other. He had worked in that direction since leading the East–West trade department of the Economics Ministry in 1952, when West Germany was only three years old. His convictions had brought him into frequent conflict with the United States, which remained wary that too cozy a relationship could open the way to a neutral West Germany.

Khrushchev thanked Kroll for his help the previous autumn in getting West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to approve new economic agreements with the communist world, including the renewal of an East–West German trade accord, which had been interrupted a few months earlier. Though East Germany was the Soviet client, Khrushchev considered West Germany to be of far greater importance to the Soviet economy, due to the unique access it provided him to modern machinery, technology, and hard-currency loans.

So the Soviet leader raised his glass in a toast to what he called the Federal Republic of Germany’s remarkable postwar reconstruction. Khrushchev told Kroll that he hoped Chancellor Adenauer would use his growing economic strength and thus greater independence from the U.S. to distance himself from Washington and further improve relations with the Soviets.

Kosygin then asked Kroll for permission to raise his own toast, which the ambassador granted. “You are for us the ambassador for all the Germans,” he said, reflecting Khrushchev’s own view that the Soviet Union would be far better off if it had been the West Germans, with all of their resources, who had become their allies, rather than the burdensome East Germans with their constant economic demands and substandard goods.

Khrushchev then laced this seduction with a threat. “The German problem must be solved in 1961,” he told Kroll. The Soviet leader said he had lost his patience with the U.S. refusal to negotiate a change to Berlin’s status in a manner that would allow him to stop the refugee flow and sign a war-ending peace treaty with East Germany. Mikoyan told Kroll that “certain circles” in Moscow were increasing their pressure on Khrushchev to the point that the Soviet leader could not resist their demands much longer to act on Berlin.

Kroll assumed Mikoyan was referring to what had become known within Soviet party circles as the “Ulbricht lobby,” a group that had been greatly influenced by the East German leader’s increasingly strident complaints that Khrushchev was not defending Germany’s socialist state with sufficient vigor.

Made more agreeable by all the Soviet compliments and champagne, Kroll conceded that the Soviet leader had demonstrated remarkable patience over Berlin. He warned Khrushchev, however, that if the Soviets unilaterally upset the Berlin status quo, the result would be an international crisis, and perhaps even military conflict with the U.S. and the West.

Khrushchev disagreed. He shrugged that the West would respond with “a short period of excitement” that would quickly recede. “No one in the world will declare war over Berlin or the German question,” he told Kroll. Khrushchev, knowing Kroll would report the conversation to the Americans and his superiors, said he would prefer a negotiated agreement to taking unilateral action, but he stressed, “That will depend on Kennedy.”

At four in the morning, Khrushchev ended the meeting and then paraded Kroll, Kosygin, and Mikoyan through the still-dancing crowd, which paused and opened an aisle for them to walk through.

Even as experienced an ambassador as Kroll never knew which of Khrushchev’s frequent threats to take seriously. Yet the manner in which Khrushchev had raised the Berlin issue that evening convinced him that the year ahead would bring a confrontation over the matter. He would relay that view to Adenauer—and through him to the Americans. It was clear to Kroll that Khrushchev had concluded that the risks of inaction were growing greater than the dangers of action.

However, the way the year would play out—cooperation or confrontation—would depend on the dilemma that lay at the heart of Khrushchev’s thinking on Berlin.

On the one hand, Khrushchev remained certain that he could not afford a military competition or war with the Americans. He was committed to negotiating a peaceful coexistence with the U.S. and was reaching out to the new American president in hopes of brokering a Berlin deal.

On the other hand, Khrushchev’s meeting with West German Ambassador Kroll demonstrated the growing pressure on him to solve his Berlin problem before it became a larger threat, both to the Soviet empire and, more immediately, to his own leadership.

For that reason, Khrushchev was a communist in a hurry.

And that was not his only Berlin problem. The Berliners themselves despised him, resented Soviet soldiers, and were weary of their occupation. Their memories of the postwar period were only bad ones….

Marta Hillers’s Story of Rape

^{SOMEWHERE IN SWITZERLAND}

^{JANUARY 1961}

Marta Hillers’s only consolation was that she had refused to put her name on the extraordinary manuscript in which she had so meticulously recounted the Soviet conquest of Berlin during the cold spring of 1945. It had been a time when her life—like that of tens of thousands of other Berlin women and girls—had become a nightmare of fear, hunger, and rape.

Published for the first time in German in 1959, the book had brought to life one of the worst military atrocities ever. According to estimates extracted from hospital records, between 90,000 and 130,000 Berlin women had been raped during the last days of the war and the first days of Soviet occupation. Tens of thousands of others had fallen victim elsewhere in the Soviet zone.

Hillers had expected the book to be welcomed by a people who wanted the world to know that they, too, had been the victims of war. However, Berliners had responded with either hostility or silence. The world still felt little sympathy for any pain inflicted on a German people who had brought the world so much suffering. Berlin women who had lived through the humiliation had no desire to recall it. And Berlin men found it too painful to be reminded of their failure to protect their wives and daughters. Early 1961 was a time of complacency and amnesia in Soviet-dominated East Germany and East Berlin, and there seemed little reason to get worked up about a history that no one had the power to change or the stomach to digest.

Perhaps the German response should have been no surprise to Hillers, given the shame she herself expressed in signing her memoirs, Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin), only as “Anonyma.” She’d published them only after marrying and safely moving to Switzerland. The book had not circulated or been reviewed in East Germany, and only a few copies had been smuggled across to the communist zone in suitcases stuffed full of Western fashion magazines and other more escapist literature. In West Berlin, Anonyma’s memoirs sold poorly, and reviews accused her either of anticommunist propaganda or of besmirching the honor of German women—something she would insist that Soviet soldiers had done just fine long before her.

One such review, buried of West Berlin’s Tagesspiegel, bore the headline: A DISSERVICE TO BERLIN WOMEN / BEST-SELLER ABROAD—A FALSIFIED SPECIAL CASE. What irritated the reviewer, who accused the author of “shameless immorality,” was the book’s uncompromising narrative that so richly captured the cynicism of the postwar months. Judgments like that of Der Tagesspiegel prompted Hillers to remain underground and to prohibit any new editions of the book from being published during her lifetime, which ended at age ninety in 2001.

She would never know that, following her death, her book would be re-published and become a best-seller in several languages, including the German edition in 2003. Nor would she ever have the satisfaction of knowing her story would be made into a major German movie in 2008 and become a favorite of feminists everywhere.

Back in 1961, Hillers was more concerned with dodging the reporters who were trying to hunt her down from the few clues in her published pages. The book revealed that she was a journalist in her thirties, had lived in the Tempelhof district, had spent sufficient time in the Soviet Union to speak some Russian, and was “a pale-faced blonde always dressed in the same winter coat.” None of that had been enough to identify her.

Still, nothing better captured the German attitude of the time toward their occupiers than the substance of Hillers’s book and Berliners’ aversion to reading it. The East German relationship to their Soviet military occupiers, who still numbered 400,000 to 500,000 by 1961, was a mixture of pity and dread, complacency, and amnesia. Most East Germans had grown resigned to their seemingly permanent cohabitation. Among those who hadn’t, many had fled as refugees.

The East German pity toward their Soviet occupiers, whom they considered inferior to them, came from what they could see with their own eyes: undernourished, unwashed teenagers in soiled uniforms who would drop to the ground to retrieve the unfinished stubs of their discarded cigarettes or trade their service medals and gasoline for any form of consumable alcohol that would help them briefly escape their miserable existence.

The pity was also stirred by the occasional alarms that accompanied desperate attempts at desertion. For the teenage soldiers, the brutality of officers, hazing by fellow soldiers, and the cold and overcrowded quarters occasionally became too much to bear.

Their barracks, built during the Third Reich or earlier, housed three times the number of soldiers that Hitler had ever bunked there. The latest escape had come after an insurrection on New Year’s Eve, when a barracks uprising in Falkenberg had resulted in the escape to West Berlin of four soldiers and the dispatch of Soviet search parties along the Berlin border. Stories circulated of Soviet troops setting alight barns and other structures where deserters had gone in hiding—burning the escapees alive alongside farm animals.

That only increased a deeply ingrained German dread of the Soviets.

That dread had grown after the events of June 17, 1953, when Soviet troops and tanks had put down a workers’ revolt after Stalin’s death that had shaken the young East German state to its fragile foundations. As many as 300 East Germans had died then, and a further 4,270 were imprisoned.

Yet the deeper roots of East German terror were found in the events that Hillers had described. There was a reason why women in East Berlin froze up whenever a Soviet soldier passed by or when East German leader Walter Ulbricht spoke on the radio of the enduring friendship with the Soviet people.

Hillers described why outsiders had so little sympathy for what German women had suffered—and why many Germans wondered whether some vengeful God had delivered this punishment of rape in retribution for their own misbehavior. “Our German calamity,” Hillers wrote during the first days of occupation, “has a bitter taste—of repulsion, sickness, insanity, unlike anything in history. The radio just broadcast another concentration camp report. The most horrific thing is the order and the thrift: millions of human beings as fertilizer, mattress stuffing, soft soap, felt mats—Aeschylus never saw anything like that.”

Hillers despaired at the stupidity of Nazi leaders who had issued orders that liquor should be left behind for advancing Soviet troops on the theory that inebriated soldiers would be less dangerous adversaries. If it had not been for Soviet drunkenness, Hillers wrote, Berlin women would have suffered only half as much rape at the hands of Russians who “aren’t natural Casanovas” and thus “had to drown their inhibitions.”

With characteristic power, she described one of the many times she’d been raped and how it had driven her to seek protection.

It was at that point that Marta Hillers made her decision. She cleaned herself up a bit and went to the street to hunt for a “wolf,” a higher-ranking Soviet officer who would become her protector. She concluded it was better to be abused by just one Russian on a regular basis than by an unending string of them. Like millions of other Germans, Hillers was reaching an accommodation with an occupation she could not resist.

Only years later would researchers try to reconstruct the full horror of that time. Between the late summer and early autumn of 1945, a minimum of 110,000 women between the ages of twelve and eighty-eight had been raped. Some 40 percent of the victims were raped on multiple occasions. One in five of the rape victims became pregnant, roughly half of these gave birth, and the other half had abortions, often without anesthesia. Thousands of women killed themselves for the shame of having been raped or out of fear of being the next victims. Some 5 percent of all Berlin newborns in the following year would be “Russenbabys.” Across Germany, the number would be 150,000 to 200,000 children.

It was as these children were first becoming teenagers, in 1958, that Khrushchev would provoke what would become known as the Berlin Crisis.

2 KHRUSHCHEV: THE BERLIN CRISIS UNFOLDS

^{PALACE OF SPORTS, MOSCOW}

^{MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1958}

On an unlikely stage and before an unsuspecting audience, Nikita Khrushchev launched what the world would come to know as “the Berlin Crisis.”

Standing at the center of Moscow’s newest and grandest field house for indoor sports, the Soviet leader told a gathering of Polish communists that he planned to renounce the postwar agreements that had been the basis for Europe’s fragile stability. He would abrogate the Potsdam accord that had been signed with wartime allies and unilaterally change Berlin’s occupied status, with the aim of liquidating the city’s western part altogether, and removing all military forces from the city.

The venue for his remarks, the Palace of Sports, which rested beside Lenin Central Stadium, had opened to great fanfare two years earlier as a state-of-the-art stage to show off Soviet athletic accomplishment. Since then, however, its most memorable moment had been the stunning defeat of the Soviets by the Swedes at the 1957 ice hockey world championships, which had been tainted by the boycott conducted by the U.S. and other Western hockey powers in protest against the Soviet crackdown in Hungary. The Swedish victory had come after a defenseman had head-blocked a puck before the goal, producing a gusher of blood and the championship.

Khrushchev’s Polish audience had anticipated far less drama. Having stayed on in Moscow following a celebration of the forty-first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, they had expected the routine rhetoric of one of communism’s countless friendship meetings. Instead, they sat in stunned silence as Khrushchev declared, “The time has obviously arrived for the signatories of the Potsdam Agreement to discard the remnants of the occupation regime in Berlin and thereby make it possible to create a normal situation in the capital of the German Democratic Republic.”

The Poles weren’t the only surprised party. Khrushchev had failed to give advance notice either to the Western signatories of the Potsdam agreement or to his socialist allies, including the East Germans. He had acted without even seeking the blessing of his own Communist Party leadership. Only shortly before the speech did Khrushchev share what he planned to say with the leader of the Polish delegation, the stunned Communist Party First Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka. If Khrushchev meant what he said, Gomulka feared he could trigger a war over Berlin.

Khrushchev explained to Gomulka that he was acting unilaterally because he had wearied of Berlin diplomacy that was leading nowhere. He was prepared to risk a confrontation with the West, and he argued that he was in a better position to succeed than Stalin in 1948 because Moscow had now overcome the American nuclear weapons monopoly. Under a project called “Operation Atom,” Khrushchev would deploy a nuclear deterrent on East German territory within weeks. Twelve medium-range R-5 missiles would give Khrushchev the capability to respond to any U.S. nuclear attack on East Germany with counterstrikes on London and Paris—if not yet New York. Without reference to those still-secret weapons, Khrushchev told Gomulka, “Now the balance of forces is different…. Today America has moved closer to us; our missiles can hit them directly.” Though not literally true, the Soviet leader was newly in a position to annihilate Washington’s European allies.

Khrushchev did not share any details about the timing or implementation of his new Berlin plan, because he had not worked them out yet himself. What he told his Polish audience was that the Soviets and the Western Allies, according to his plan, would over time remove all their military personnel from East Germany and East Berlin. He would sign a war-ending peace treaty with East Germany and then hand over all Soviet functions in Berlin to that country, including control of all access to West Berlin. Thereafter, U.S., British, and French soldiers would need to seek East German leader Walter Ulbricht’s permission to enter any part of Berlin by road or air. Khrushchev told the Palace of Sports crowd he would consider any resistance to East Germany’s exercise of these new rights—which could include blocking air and road access to West Berlin—as an attack upon the Soviet Union itself and its Warsaw Pact alliance.

Khrushchev’s shocking escalation of the Cold War had three sources.

Above all, it was an attempt to win the attention of President Eisenhower, who had been disregarding his demands for Berlin negotiations. It seemed that no matter what Khrushchev did, he could not win the respect of American officials that he so craved.

His party rivals rightly argued that the U.S. had given him scant credit and no reward for a series of unilateral measures he had taken to reduce Cold War tensions since Stalin’s death. He had gone far beyond simply replacing the concept of inevitable war with peaceful coexistence. He had also cut Soviet troop numbers unilaterally by 2.3 million men between 1955 and 1958, and had withdrawn Soviet forces from Finland and Austria, opening the way for those countries’ neutrality. He had also encouraged political and economic reform among Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe.

The second source of Khrushchev’s impulsive Berlin move was his growing confidence in power after having put down the so-called anti-party coup against him in June 1957, led by former premiers Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov and his onetime mentor, Lazar Kaganovich. They had attacked him partly because of just the sort of reckless leadership style he was now demonstrating over Berlin. Unlike Stalin, he hadn’t killed them but exiled them to lesser roles far from Moscow’s power center: Molotov to Mongolia as ambassador, Malenkov to Kazakhstan to run a hydroelectric plant, and Kaganovich to the Urals to direct a small potassium factory. He thereafter removed from power his popular defense minister Marshal Georgy Zhukov, whom he also suspected of plotting against him.

To justify his bold action on Berlin, he had told his party leadership just four days before his speech that the U.S. had already abrogated the Potsdam accord first, by bringing West Germany into NATO in 1955, and then by preparing to give it nuclear weapons. After outlining his plan of action, he closed the meeting without taking the usual vote of his Presidium on matters of such significance, having sensed the possibility of opposition.

The third source of Khrushchev’s speech was Berlin itself, where the refugee bleed was accelerating. Despite his greater self-assurance in power, Khrushchev knew from personal experience that problems in the divided city could end careers in Moscow. Shortly after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev had used the threat of East German implosion to help destroy his most dangerous rival, former secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, after Soviet troops put down the East German workers’ uprising of June 17, 1953.

At the time, Khrushchev had been only a dark horse candidate for Stalin’s succession among the collective leadership that had replaced the dictator. He was a foreign policy neophyte who saw German policy primarily through a domestic political lens. As part of his power play, Beria had led a proxy campaign against Stalinist East German leader Walter Ulbricht and his harsh policy of Aufbau des Sozialismus, or “construction of socialism.” Ulbricht had been countering internal opposition and the growing refugee numbers through escalated arrests and repression, forced collectivization of farms, accelerated industrial nationalization, greater military recruitment, and expanded censorship. The result had been an even greater out-flow of refugees in the first four months of 1953—122,000 East Germans, twice the rate of the previous year. The March 1953 figure of 56,605 was six times larger than a year earlier.

At a decisive party leadership meeting, Beria had said, “All we need is a peaceful Germany. Whether it is socialist or not isn’t important to us,” even if it were “united, democratic, bourgeois and neutral.” Beria wanted to negotiate substantial financial compensation from the West in exchange for Soviet agreement to a neutral, unified Germany. He had even assigned one of his most loyal lieutenants to explore such a deal with Western countries. “What does it amount to, this GDR?” Beria had asked, using the abbreviation for East Germany’s misleading official name. “It’s only kept in existence by Soviet troops, even if we do call it the German Democratic Republic.”

The post-Stalin collective leadership did not heed Beria’s call to abandon the socialist cause in East Germany, but it did demand that he reverse what it called his “excesses.” Following Soviet orders, Ulbricht stopped new agricultural collectives and ended large-scale political arrests; introduced an amnesty for many political prisoners; reduced the repression of religious freedoms; and expanded the production of consumer goods.

Khrushchev took little active part in the debates that produced this abrupt policy change, but he also didn’t oppose the reforms. He then watched the loosening of Stalinist controls inspire an uprising that might have prompted East Germany’s collapse if Soviet tanks had not intervened.

A little more than a week after the uprising, Khrushchev masterminded the June 26 arrest of Beria. Among other charges, Khrushchev argued that Beria had been willing to abandon socialism altogether in a Germany that had been conquered at such great Soviet human cost during World War II. At the party plenary that sealed Beria’s fate and set in motion events that resulted in his execution, fellow communist leaders branded him as an unreliable socialist and called him a “filthy people’s enemy who should be expelled [from the party] and tried for treason.” It called his willingness to give up East German socialism a “direct capitulation to the imperialist forces.”

Khrushchev came away from the Beria experience with two lessons he would never forget. First, he had learned that political liberalization in East Germany could result in the country’s collapse. Second, he had seen that Soviet mistakes made in Berlin could end careers in Moscow. Three years later, in 1956, Khrushchev would grease his own rise to power by renouncing Stalinism’s criminal excesses at the 20th Party Congress. However, he would never forget the contradictory lesson that it was only Stalinist-style repression that had saved East Germany and allowed him to remove his most dangerous adversary.

In the first days following Khrushchev’s Palace of Sports speech, President Eisenhower chose not to respond publicly, hoping, as had happened so often in the past, that the Soviet leader’s bluster would not be accompanied by concrete action. Khrushchev, however, would not be ignored. Two weeks after the speech, on America’s Thanksgiving Day, he transformed his Berlin speech into an ultimatum that would require a U.S. response. He had softened some of his demands to gain his Presidium’s backing in a declaration delivered to the embassies of all interested governments.

Khrushchev backed off from his threat to immediately discard all Soviet obligations under the Potsdam agreement. Instead, he would give the West six months to negotiate with him before unilaterally altering the city’s status. At the same time, he fleshed out his plan to demilitarize and neutralize West Berlin in a manner that would leave it both outside the Soviet bloc and the West.

Khrushchev summoned U.S. correspondents, who were in their Moscow apartments carving Thanksgiving turkeys, to tell them about some knife-work he planned of his own. During his first press conference as premier, evidence itself of Berlin’s growing significance to him, Khrushchev told reporters, “West Berlin has turned into a sort of malignant tumor of fascism and revanchism. That’s why we decided to do some surgery.”

Referring to the text of the twenty-eight-page diplomatic note, Khrushchev told the correspondents that it had been thirteen years since the war had ended, and thus it was time to accept the reality of two German states. East Germany would never give up socialism, he said, nor would West Germany ever succeed in absorbing East Germany. Hence, he was giving Eisenhower a choice: within six months, he could negotiate a peace treaty that would demilitarize and neutralize West Berlin, or Moscow would act unilaterally to achieve the same outcome.

Khrushchev’s son Sergei, then twenty-three years old, worried that his father was giving Eisenhower no escape route from a collision course that could lead to nuclear conflict. He told his father that the Americans would never accept his proposed terms. Although Russians were known as chess players, Sergei knew that in this case—as in so many others—his impetuous father had not thought out his next move.

Khrushchev laughed off Sergei’s fears: “No one would start a war over Berlin,” he said. He told Sergei all he wanted was to “wring consent” out of the U.S. to start formal Berlin negotiations and preempt the exasperating diplomatic process of an “incessant exchange of notes, letters, declarations and speeches.”

Only by setting a tight deadline, Khrushchev told his son, could he move both sides toward an acceptable solution.

“What if we can’t find it?” Sergei asked.

“We’ll look for another way out,” Khrushchev said. “Something will always turn up.”

In answer to similar doubts posed by his longtime interpreter and foreign policy adviser, Oleg Troyanovsky, Khrushchev paraphrased Lenin when he explained that he planned to “engage in battle and then see what happens.”

^{KHRUSHCHEV’S KREMLIN OFFICE, MOSCOW}

^{MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 1958}

A few days after Thanksgiving, during one of the most extraordinary meetings ever between a Soviet leader and an American politician, Khrushchev made clear that his Berlin ultimatum for the moment was far more about getting President Eisenhower’s attention than it was about altering Berlin’s status.

Giving him only a half hour’s notice, Khrushchev summoned visiting Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey to his Kremlin office for the longest meeting any American official or elected politician had ever had with any Soviet leader. Though scheduled for only an hour from three p.m., their talks ended just before midnight, after an eight-hour, twenty-five-minute exchange.

To show off his knowledge of matters American, Khrushchev expounded on the local politics of California, New York, and Humphrey’s home state of Minnesota. He joked about “the new McCarthy”—not anticommunist Joe but the left-of-center congressman Eugene, who would later run for president. He shared with Humphrey a secret “no American has heard of,” telling him of the successful test of a Soviet five-million-ton hydrogen bomb using only a tenth of the fissionable material previously required to produce an explosion of its magnitude. He also spoke about the development of a missile with a 9,000-mile range, for the first time sufficient to strike U.S. targets.

After asking Humphrey to name his native city, Khrushchev bounced to his feet and drew a bold blue circle around Minneapolis on a map of the United States hanging on his wall—“so that I don’t forget to order them to spare the city when the rockets fly.” Khrushchev struck Humphrey as a man infected with personal and national insecurity, “somebody who has risen from poverty and weakness to wealth and power but is never wholly confident of himself and his new status.”

In recounting his meeting the following day to Ambassador Thompson, so that the U.S. envoy could relay it to President Eisenhower, Humphrey said Khrushchev returned perhaps two dozen times to the matter of Berlin and his ultimatum, which the Soviet leader said had followed “many months of thought.” Humphrey concluded the chief purpose of their marathon meeting was “to impress him with the Soviet position on Berlin and to convey his words and thoughts to the President.”

Khrushchev wielded an arsenal of metaphors to describe the city. It was alternatively a cancer, a knot, a thorn, and a bone in his throat. He told Humphrey he intended to cough the bone loose by making West Berlin a “free city” that would be demilitarized and guaranteed by United Nations observers. To convince Humphrey he wasn’t trying to trick the U.S. into giving up West Berlin to communist control, he recalled at length how he had personally ordered the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Austria in 1955, thus ensuring its neutrality. Khrushchev told Humphrey that at the time he had argued to Foreign Minister Molotov that Russian troops were only useful in Austria if he intended to expand westward, and he didn’t want to do that. So, he said, “a neutral Austria was established and a source of conflict was removed.”

His argument was that Soviet behavior in Austria should serve for Eisenhower both as a model for West Berlin and as reassurance about its future. Because of that, he said, the U.S., Britain, and France had no need to leave any troops in Berlin. “Twenty-five thousand troops in Berlin are of no importance unless you want to make war,” he said in a calm voice. “Why do you maintain this thorn? A free city, a free Berlin, could lead to the breaking of the ice between the USSR and the USA.”

Khrushchev insisted to Humphrey that by solving the Berlin problem, he and Eisenhower could improve their personal relationship and together achieve a historic thaw in the Cold War. And if the U.S. president didn’t like the details of his Berlin plan, Khrushchev told Humphrey, he would be open to a counterproposal. Khrushchev said he could accept any alternative suggestions from Eisenhower as long as they didn’t include either German unification or “the liquidation of the socialist system in East Germany.” For the first time, he was painting his red lines for any Berlin talks.

Khrushchev shifted so rapidly between seduction and threats that Humphrey was reminded of his father’s treatment for chilblains back in South Dakota, which involved the frequent shifting of his feet between hot and cold water. “Our troops are there not to play cards, our tanks are not there to show you the way to Berlin,” Khrushchev blurted to Humphrey at one point. “We mean business.” At the next moment, however, the Soviet leader’s eyes would moisten as he spoke with dripping sentimentality about losing a son in World War II and his affection for President Eisenhower. “I like President Eisenhower,” he told Humphrey. “We wish no evil to the United States or to Berlin. You must assure the President of this.”

Eisenhower responded to Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum just as the Soviet leader had hoped. He signed on to a four-power foreign ministers’ meeting in Geneva, which East and West German representatives would attend as observers. Although progress there proved disappointing, Eisenhower thereafter invited Khrushchev to be the first Soviet Communist Party leader to visit the United States.

Khrushchev congratulated himself, considering Eisenhower’s agreement to receive him in the capitalists’ lair “as a concrete result of the Berlin pressure he had been exerting on the Western powers.”

He felt he had finally extracted from America the respect he so profoundly craved for himself and his homeland.

^{KHRUSHCHEV’S U.S. VISIT}

^{SEPTEMBER 15–27, 1959}

As the departure date for his trip to America drew closer, Khrushchev grew increasingly concerned that his hosts were planning a “provocation,” a damaging slight upon his arrival or at other points during his visit. That in turn could be used against him at home by his now silenced but far from vanquished rivals as evidence that his high-profile U.S. visit was both naive and harmful to Soviet interests.

For that reason, Khrushchev’s considerations about how he would negotiate Berlin’s future in the U.S. were secondary to his scrutiny of every aspect of the itinerary to ensure he didn’t suffer what he referred to as “moral damage.” Though Khrushchev was a communist leader ostensibly representing the proletariat vanguard, his advance team demanded that he be treated with the pomp and circumstance of a visiting Western head of state.

Khrushchev balked, for example, when he learned his most crucial talks with Eisenhower would occur at a place called “Camp David,” a place none of his advisers knew and which sounded to him like a gulag, or internment camp. He recalled that in the first years after the Revolution, the Americans had brought a Soviet delegation to Sivriada, in the Turkish Princes’ Islands, where the stray dogs of Istanbul had been sent to die in 1911. Thinking to himself that “the capitalists never missed a chance to embarrass or offend the Soviet Union,” he feared “this Camp David was… a place where people who were mistrusted could be kept in quarantine.”

Khrushchev only agreed to the meeting after his advance team, following investigation, reported that the Camp David invitation was a particular honor, as Eisenhower was taking him to a country dacha built by Roosevelt in the mountains of Maryland during World War II. Khrushchev would later express shame about how the episode revealed Soviet ignorance. More important, however, was what it said about the potent mixture of mistrust and insecurity with which Khrushchev approached every aspect of his relationship with the U.S.

Disregarding the advice of his pilot, Khrushchev flew across the Atlantic in a still-experimental Tupolev Tu-114, which had not yet passed its required tests and had microscopic cracks in its engine. Despite the risks, Khrushchev insisted upon this means of travel, as it was the only aircraft in the Soviet fleet that could reach Washington nonstop. He would thus arrive aboard a plane that had the world’s largest passenger capacity, longest range, greatest thrust, and fastest cruising speed. That said, Soviet fishing boats, cargo ships, and tankers formed a line under the plane between Iceland and New York as a potential rescue party should the engine fissures expand and force a crash landing at sea.

Khrushchev would recall later that his “nerves were strained with excitement” as he looked from the window of his plane as it circled over its landing area and he considered the trip’s deeper significance: “We had finally forced the United States to recognize the necessity of establishing closer contacts with us…. We’d come a long way from the time when the United States wouldn’t even grant us diplomatic recognition.”

For the moment, Berlin was an afterthought to this larger national purpose. He relished the notion that it had been the might of the Soviet economy, its armed forces, and the entire socialist camp that had prompted Eisenhower to seek better relations. “From a ravaged, backward, illiterate Russia, we had transformed ourselves into a Russia whose accomplishments had stunned the world.”

To Khrushchev’s relief and delight, Eisenhower greeted him at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C., with a red carpet and a twenty-one-gun salute. Khrushchev would later recall that he was “immensely proud; it even shook me up a bit…. Here was the United States of America, the greatest capitalist power in the world, bestowing honor on the representative of our socialist homeland—a country which, in the eyes of capitalist America, had always been unworthy or, worse, infected with some sort of plague.”

It was more a result of this improved mood than any deeper Berlin strategy that moved Khrushchev to tell President Eisenhower during their first meeting on September 15 that he would like to “come to terms on Germany and thereby on Berlin too.” Without providing further details, Khrushchev said, “We do not contemplate taking unilateral action.” For his part, Eisenhower called the Berlin situation “abnormal,” language the Soviet leader considered encouraging for Berlin talks that would come at the end of the trip.

The coast-to-coast journey that followed was marked by dramatic highs and lows that illustrated both sides of Khrushchev’s complex emotional relationship with the U.S.: the eager suitor seeking approval from the world’s greatest power, and the insecure adversary scanning for the slightest offense.

He and his wife, Nina Petrovna, sat between Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra during a lunch at Twentieth Century–Fox, at which Marilyn Monroe wore her tightest dress, but the Soviet leader railed like a spoiled child at being denied entry to Disneyland—wondering whether it was because the amusement park had cholera or a missile launching pad. Khrushchev saw conspiracy in the choice of Russian-born Jewish movie mogul Victor Carter as his Los Angeles escort, blaming much of what went wrong in the city on the evil intent of the émigré whose family had fled Rostov-on-Don.

His trip had nearly ended on his first day in California, when Khrushchev struck back at conservative Los Angeles Mayor Norris Poulson during a late-night speech at a star-studded banquet. Looking to score domestic political points, the mayor had refused the appeal of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.—the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and Khrushchev’s companion throughout the trip—that he remove anticommunist lines that the Soviet leader would find offensive. “It took us only twelve hours to get here,” Khrushchev said in response, asking that his plane be prepared for departure. “Perhaps it will take us even less time to get back.”

The climactic Camp David meeting began badly, as Khrushchev and Eisenhower engaged in two days of acrimonious talks over everything from the threat of nuclear war (Khrushchev said he didn’t fear it) to discriminatory rules on what technology Americans could sell Moscow (Khrushchev sneered that he didn’t need low-tech U.S. help to make shoes or sausages). Eisenhower prevented a breakdown in talks when he flew his guest by helicopter to his Gettysburg ranch and presented him with one of his cattle as a gift. In return, Khrushchev invited Eisenhower and his grandchildren to visit the Soviet Union.

The following morning, Khrushchev agreed to abandon his Berlin ultimatum of the previous year in exchange for Eisenhower’s commitment that he would enter talks on Berlin’s status with the aim of achieving a solution that would satisfy all parties.

With unusual candor, Khrushchev shared with Eisenhower that he had only issued a Berlin ultimatum as “the result of the high-handed attitude of the U.S. toward the USSR, which had led the Soviets to think that there was no alternative.” He said he needed a disarmament agreement with the U.S., as it was hard enough to feed his country without having to bear the costs of an arms race. The two men then compared notes about how their military establishments were pushing them each toward ever larger arms purchases, always blaming the aggressive posture of the other country.

Talks nearly collapsed again when Khrushchev insisted on a joint communiqué to capture their agreement on Berlin negotiations, but demanded the U.S. side take out language that “there would be no time limit on them.” After a difficult exchange, Eisenhower accepted Khrushchev’s terms as long as he could mention at their joint press conference the Soviet leader’s agreement to abandon his Berlin ultimatum, which Khrushchev would confirm if the media asked.

For his part, Eisenhower agreed to what Khrushchev had most wanted: a four-power Paris Summit on Berlin and disarmament issues. For Khrushchev, the agreement immunized him against critics who argued his “peaceful coexistence” policy toward the West had been without result—and provided incontrovertible proof that his course was improving the Soviet Union’s global standing.

Elated by the U.S. trip and the prospect of a summit, Khrushchev preemptively cut Soviet armed forces by a further 1.2 million men in December, the largest-percentage reduction since the 1920s. Reports that France’s Charles de Gaulle and West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer were rolling back Eisenhower’s willingness to negotiate Berlin’s status did not dampen Khrushchev’s self-congratulatory optimism.

^{SVERDLOVSK, SOVIET UNION}

^{SUNDAY, MAY 1, 1960}

Just eight months after his American journey, what Khrushchev heralded as the “spirit of Camp David” exploded over Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains when a Soviet surface-to-air missile brought down a spy plane.

Initially, Khrushchev celebrated the incident as a triumph of Soviet anti aircraft technology and a change of luck. As recently as three weeks earlier, his air defense forces had failed to bring down the advanced, high-altitude CIA plane even though the Soviets knew exactly where it was flying. While in pursuit on that earlier occasion, a MiG-19 Soviet fighter had crashed in Semipalatinsk near a secret nuclear testing site that the U-2 plane was photographing. Two newly developed high-altitude interceptors also could not catch up to the U-2 as it collected images of the Tyumatom ballistic missile site.

Up until that point, a frustrated Khrushchev had kept the U.S. intrusions secret from the world so as to avoid having to admit Soviet military failure. Now that his forces had shot down the U-2, he gleefully toyed with the Americans by saying nothing about the incident while the CIA put out a false cover story—one it would later be forced to withdraw with embarrassment—that a weather plane had gone missing over Turkey.

Within days, however, Khrushchev recognized that the U-2 incident posed greater dangers to him than to the Americans. Political enemies whom he had neutralized after putting down the 1957 coup against him began to regroup. Mao Tse-tung publicly condemned Khrushchev’s wooing of the Americans as “communist betrayal.” Though still speaking privately, Soviet party officials and military brass more confidently questioned Khrushchev’s troop reductions. They argued that Khrushchev was undermining their ability to defend the homeland.

Years later, Khrushchev would concede to the American physician A. McGhee Harvey, a specialist who was treating his daughter, that the U-2 incident proved to be the watershed event after which he “was no longer in full control.” From that point forward, Khrushchev found it harder to defend himself against those who argued that he was too weak in the face of the militaristic and imperialist intentions of duplicitous Americans.

At first, Khrushchev tried to keep on track the Paris Summit that was scheduled to occur two weeks after the U-2 event—a meeting that he had worked so hard to organize as a crowning moment of his rule. Khrushchev told domestic critics that if they pulled out, they would only be rewarding U.S. hard-liners like CIA chief Allen Dulles, who, he argued, had ordered the flights to undermine Eisenhower’s genuine peace efforts.

Eisenhower removed Khrushchev’s last political cover at a press conference on May 11, just five days ahead of the summit. To reassure Americans that their government had acted responsibly and under his complete control, Eisenhower said he had personally approved Gary Powers’s U-2 flight—as he had with each and every one of the sensitive missions. Such risks were necessary, he said, because Soviet secrecy made it impossible to assess Moscow’s intentions and capabilities through any other means. “We are getting to the point where we must decide whether we are trying to prepare to fight a war or prevent one,” he told his national security team.

By the time he landed in Paris, Khrushchev had concluded that if he couldn’t get a public apology from Eisenhower, he would have to prompt the collapse of the Paris talks. It was politically safer for him to abandon the summit than to go ahead with a meeting that was destined to fail, and by then it also was clear the U.S. would offer none of the concessions he was seeking on Berlin.

Though Eisenhower refused to apologize in Paris for the U-2 mission, he tried to avoid a summit collapse by agreeing to stop the flights. He went an important step further and proposed an “open skies” approach that would allow United Nations planes to monitor both countries with over-flights. Khrushchev, however, could never accept such a proposal because it was only secrecy that protected his exaggerations about Soviet capabilities.

In what would be the one and only session of the summit, Khrushchev uncharacteristically stuck to the language of a prepared forty-five-minute harangue that proposed a six- to eight-month postponement of the conference so that it would resume only after Eisenhower had left power. He also withdrew his invitation for Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union. Without forewarning the other leaders at the summit, Khrushchev then petulantly refused to attend the second session the following day. He instead retreated with Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky to the French village of Pleurs-sur-Marne—where Malinovsky had stayed during World War II—to drink wine, eat cheese, and talk about women. Well lubricated, the Soviet leader returned to Paris that afternoon to declare the summit’s collapse.

His crowning public act came during a nearly three-hour farewell press conference at which he slammed his fist so hard on a table that it toppled a bottle of mineral water. Assuming the catcalls that followed came from West German reporters, he called them “fascist bastards we didn’t finish off at Stalingrad.” He said if they continued to heckle him, he would hit them so hard “there won’t be a squeal out of you.”

Khrushchev was so unhinged by the time he debriefed Warsaw Pact envoys in Paris that he employed a crude joke in relating to them the outcome of the summit. It concerned the sad story of a Tsarist soldier who could fart the melody to “God Save Russia” but experienced an unfortunate accident when forced to perform the tune under duress. Khrushchev’s punch line was that the ambassadors could report to their governments that his own pressures applied in Paris had similarly made Eisenhower shit in his pants.

Poland’s ambassador to France, Stanislaw Gaevski, concluded from the session that the Soviet leader “was just a bit unbalanced emotionally.” For the sake of East–West relations, Gaevski wished Khrushchev had never come to Paris.

For all his theatrics, however, Khrushchev had too much at stake to abandon his course of “peaceful coexistence” with the U.S. He had given up on Eisenhower but not yet on America. Though the U-2 had undermined his summit, he could not let it undercut his rule.

On his way back to Moscow, Khrushchev stopped in East Berlin, where he replaced his Paris scowl with a peacemaker’s smile. Though originally scheduled to speak to a crowd of 100,000 in Marx-Engels Square, after the Paris debacle East German leaders had moved the event to the safer confines of the indoor Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle, where Khrushchev spoke to a select group of 6,000 communist faithful.

To the surprise of U.S. diplomats who had expected Khrushchev to escalate the crisis, Khrushchev sounded an unexpected note of patience until the Americans could elect a new president. “In this situation, time is required,” he said, adding that the prospects for a Berlin solution would then “ripen better.”

Khrushchev then began preparations for his return trip to the U.S. under dramatically changed circumstances.

^{ABOARD THE BALTIKA}

^{MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1960}

Khrushchev’s damp welcome on a rickety New York dock demonstrated just how much had changed since his grand reception by President Eisenhower at Andrews Air Force Base just a year earlier. Instead of flying to America aboard the Soviets’ most advanced passenger aircraft, which was in the shop for repairs, he had traveled aboard the Baltika, a vintage 1940 German vessel seized as reparations after the war.

To compensate and send a message of communist solidarity, Khrushchev had drafted as fellow passengers the leaders of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Byelorussia. His mood swings during the voyage were violent. At one point he fought off depression while preoccupied by fears that NATO might sink his unprotected vessel, yet on another occasion he joyously insisted the Ukrainian party boss Nikolai Podgorny entertain fellow passengers by dancing a gopak, a national dance performed with strenuous leg kicks from the squatting position.

When one of the Soviet sailors jumped ship while approaching the American shore, then sought asylum, Khrushchev shrugged in response, saying, “He’ll find out soon enough how much it costs and what it tastes like in New York.” Other indignities would follow. Khrushchev was received in the harbor by union demonstrators from the International Longshoremen’s Association, who waved huge protest signs from a chartered boat. The most memorable: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, STALIN DROPPED DEAD, HOW ABOUT YOU?

Khrushchev was infuriated. He had dreamed of arriving like America’s earliest discoverers, whom he had read about as a boy. Instead, the unionist boycott left the Baltika to be moored by its own crew and a handful of unskilled Soviet diplomats on the East River’s dilapidated Pier 73. “So, another dirty trick the Americans are playing on us,” Khrushchev complained.

The only saving grace was Khrushchev’s control of his home press. Pravda correspondent Gennady Vasiliev filed a story speaking of a happy crowd (there was none) lining the shore on a bright and sunny morning (it was raining).

None of that dampened the energy Khrushchev would invest in the trip. Speaking before the UN General Assembly, he would unsucessfully demand the resignation of Secretary General Dag Hammerskjöld (who would die the next year in a plane crash in Africa), and be replaced by a troika of a Westerner, a communist, and a nonaligned leader.” On the last day of his stay, in an iconic act that would be history’s primary recollection of the visit, he removed a shoe in protest of a Philippine delegate’s reference to communist captive nations and banged it on his UN table.

By September 26, only a week into Khrushchev’s trip, the New York Times reported that a nationwide survey showed the Soviet leader had made himself the focal point of the presidential election campaign and had helped make foreign policy the premier concern of U.S. voters. Americans were measuring which of the candidates, Richard Nixon or Senator John F. Kennedy, could best stand up to Khrushchev.

Khrushchev was determined to use his considerable leverage more wisely than in 1956, when Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin’s praise of the Soviets’ favored candidate, Adlai Stevenson, had helped the winning Eisenhower–Nixon ticket. In public, Khrushchev hedged his bets, saying that both candidates “represent American big business…as we Russians say, they are two boots of the same pair: which is better, the left or the right boot?” When asked whom he favored, he safely said, “Roosevelt.”

But behind the scenes, he worked toward Nixon’s defeat. As early as January 1960, over vodka, fruit, and caviar, Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Mikhail Menshikov had asked Adlai Stevenson how Moscow might best help him defeat Nixon. Was it better for the Soviet press to praise him or criticize him—and on which topics? Stevenson responded that he did not expect to be a candidate—and he then prayed that news of the Soviet proposition would never leak.

Yet both parties so deeply recognized Khrushchev’s potential to swing votes, either by design or by accident, that each reached out to him.

Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who had grown close to Khrushchev during his first U.S. trip, had flown to Moscow in February 1960 to convince the Soviet leader that he could work with Nixon. Lodge, who would become Nixon’s running mate, said, “Once Mr. Nixon is in the White House, I’m sure—I’m absolutely certain—he’ll take a position of preserving and perhaps even improving our relations.” He asked Khrushchev to remain neutral, realizing any endorsement would only cost Nixon votes.

By autumn, the Eisenhower administration had increased its appeals to Khrushchev to release Gary Powers and the RB-47 airmen who had been shot down over the Arctic. Khrushchev recalled later that he had refused after calculating that the election was so close any such move might have swung the outcome. “As it turned out, we’d done the right thing,” he would say later. Given the margin of victory, he said, “The slightest nudge either way would have been decisive.”

The Democrats were also at work to influence Khrushchev. W. Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s former ambassador to Moscow, recommended through Ambassador Menshikov that Khrushchev be tough on both candidates. The surest way to elect Nixon was to praise Kennedy in public, he said. The timing of the meeting, less than a month before the election and while Khrushchev was still in the U.S., demonstrated the Democrats’ recognition of Khrushchev’s electoral influence.

As guarded as he was in public, Khrushchev was explicit with underlings. “We thought we would have more hope of improving Soviet–American relations if John Kennedy were in the White House.” He told colleagues that Nixon’s anticommunism and his connection with “that devil of darkness [Senator Joe] McCarthy, to whom he owed his career,” all meant “we had no reason to welcome the prospect of Nixon as President.”

Though Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric was hawkish against Moscow, the KGB chalked that up less to conviction than to political expedience and the influence of his anticommunist father, Joe. Khrushchev welcomed Kennedy’s calls for nuclear test ban negotiations and his statement that he would have apologized for the U-2 incursions if he had been president when they occurred. More to the point, Khrushchev believed he could outmaneuver Kennedy, a man whom his foreign ministry had characterized as “unlikely to possess the qualities of an outstanding person.” The consensus in the Kremlin was that the young man was a lightweight, a product of American privilege who lacked the experience required for leadership.

The candidates continued to shower attention on Khrushchev as he monitored their campaign from his suite at the Soviet Mission at Sixty-eighth Street and Park Avenue, where he would occasionally appear on the balcony of a turn-of-the-century mansion built originally for the banker Percy Pyne. In the initial Kennedy–Nixon debate in a Chicago TV studio on September 26—the first live-broadcast presidential debate ever—Kennedy’s opening statement before sixty million American viewers spoke directly to Khrushchev’s New York stay and “our struggle with Mr. Khrushchev for survival.”

Though the debate was to have been about domestic issues, Kennedy worried that the Soviet Union was churning out “twice as many scientists and engineers as we are” while the U.S. continued to underpay its teachers and underfund its schools. He declared that he would do better than Nixon in keeping America ahead of the Soviets in education, health care, home construction, and economic strength.

During their second debate on foreign policy on October 7 in Washington, D.C., the candidates focused squarely on Khrushchev and Berlin. Kennedy predicted that the next president “in his first year is going to be confronted with a very serious question on our defense of Berlin, our commitment to Berlin. It’s going to be a test of our nerve and will.” He said that President Eisenhower had allowed American strength to erode and that he, if elected, would ask Congress to support a military buildup, because by spring or winter “we’re going to be face-to-face with the most serious Berlin crisis since 1949 or 1950.”

During the campaign, Adlai Stevenson had counseled Kennedy to avoid discussing Berlin altogether because it would be “difficult to say anything very constructive about the divided city without compromising future negotiations.” So Kennedy had raised Berlin in only half a dozen speeches. Yet before a national television audience the subject was impossible to avoid, particularly after Khrushchev had told United Nations correspondents he wanted the U.S. to join a summit on Berlin’s future shortly after elections—to be followed by a UN General Assembly meeting on the matter in April.

During their third debate on October 13, Frank McGee of NBC News asked both candidates whether they would be willing to take military action to defend Berlin. Kennedy responded with his clearest statement of the campaign on Berlin: “Mr. McGee, we have a contractual right to be in Berlin coming out of the conversations at Potsdam and of World War II that has been reinforced by direct commitments of the President of the United States. It’s been reinforced by a number of other nations under NATO…. It is a commitment that we have to meet if we are going to protect the security of Western Europe, and therefore on this question I don’t think there is any doubt in the mind of any American. I hope there is not any doubt in the mind of any member of the community of West Berlin. I’m sure there isn’t any doubt in the mind of the Russians. We will meet our commitments to maintain the freedom and independence of West Berlin.”

For all Kennedy’s apparent conviction, Khrushchev sensed the makings of compromise. Kennedy talked of U.S. contractual rights in Berlin but not of moral responsibility. He wasn’t sounding the usual Republican clarion call to free captive nations. He wasn’t even suggesting that freedom should spread across the city’s border to East Berlin. He had spoken of West Berlin and of West Berlin alone. Kennedy was talking about Berlin as a technical and legal matter, points that could be negotiated.

Before Khrushchev could test Kennedy, however, he had to put his communist house in order and neutralize rising challenges on two fronts—China and East Germany.

^MOSCOW

^{FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1960}

It was understandable that at first the West overlooked the importance of the world’s largest-ever meeting of communist leaders, given that it was characterized primarily by two weeks of mind-numbing and redundant speeches from eighty-one party delegations from around the world. Behind the scenes, however, Khrushchev was working to neutralize the challenge China’s Mao Tse-tung was mounting to his leadership of world communism—and to gain support within the party for a new diplomatic effort with President-elect Kennedy.

Soviet foreign policy strategists saw their two priorities as the Sino–Soviet alliance and peaceful coexistence with the West, very much in that order. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had argued it would be a mistake to lose Beijing without gaining anything reliable from the U.S., yet that was precisely what had happened during 1960. The Soviet embassy in Beijing reported to Khrushchev that the Chinese were using the aftermath of the U-2 incident and the Paris Summit failure to oppose Khrushchev’s foreign policy “for the first time directly and openly.”

Mao opposed Khrushchev’s foreign policy of peaceful coexistence with the West and sought a course of more intense confrontation both over Berlin and across the developing world. The Chinese delegation had come to Moscow determined to gain increased Kremlin support for national liberation movements and assorted leftists—from Asia and Africa to Latin America.

Now that relations had broken down with the U.S., a number of Soviet officials privately argued that Khrushchev should make a bolder strategic bet on the Chinese. What only a few of them knew, however, was that the personal animosity that had grown between Khrushchev and Mao would make that impossible.

By Khrushchev’s own account, he had disliked Mao since his first visit in 1954 for the fifth anniversary of the People’s Republic. Khrushchev had complained about everything from the endless rounds of green tea (“I can’t take that much liquid”) to what he regarded as his host’s ingratiating, insincere courtesy. Mao was so uncooperative during their talks that Khrushchev had concluded upon returning to Moscow, “Conflict with China is inevitable.”

When a year later West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer raised concerns with Khrushchev about an emerging Sino-Soviet alliance, Khrushchev dismissed that prospect and pointed to his own concerns about China. “Think of it,” he had said. “Already six hundred million of them and every year twelve million more…. We have to do something for our people’s standard of living, we have to arm like the Americans, [and] we have to give all the time to the Chinese who suck our blood like leeches.”

Mao had shocked Khrushchev with his readiness for war with the U.S., irrespective of the devastation it might bring. Because the Chinese and Soviets together had a vastly greater population, Mao had argued to Khrushchev that they would emerge victorious. “No matter what kind of war breaks out—conventional or thermonuclear—we’ll win,” he had told Khrushchev. “We may lose more than three hundred million people. So what? War is war.” Using what the Soviet leader considered the crudest possible term for sexual intercourse, Mao told Khrushchev the Chinese would simply produce more babies than ever before to replace the dead. Khrushchev came to consider Mao “a lunatic on a throne.”

Khrushchev’s 1956 repudiation of Stalin and of his personality cult had strained the relationship further. “They understood the implications for themselves,” Khrushchev said of the Chinese. “Stalin was exposed and condemned at the Congress for having had hundreds of thousands of people shot and for his abuse of power. Mao Tse-tung was following in Stalin’s footsteps.”

The downward spiral in relations accelerated in June 1959 when Khrushchev reneged on a pledge to give the Chinese a sample atomic bomb while at the same time moving to improve relations with the Americans. Mao told fellow party leaders that Khrushchev was abandoning communism to make pacts with the devil.

Khrushchev further strained ties when he returned to China shortly after his 1959 U.S. trip to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic. Instead of simply praising Mao’s revolution, Khrushchev used a state banquet as well to congratulate himself for reducing world tensions through the “Camp David spirit” that he had created with Eisenhower.

On the same trip, Mao blew a cloud of cigarette smoke in Khrushchev’s face while he talked—though he knew the Soviet leader hated nothing more—and mocked him for what he called disorganized rambling. Mao’s efforts to humiliate Khrushchev reached their low point at an outdoor pool where he took him for further discussions. The champion swimmer Mao dived in the deep end and performed laps gracefully while Khrushchev floundered in the shallows with the help of a life ring tossed in by Chinese aides. On the drive home from the pool, Mao told his physician that he had so tormented Khrushchev it was like “sticking a needle up his ass.”

Khrushchev knew he had been set up: “The interpreter is translating, and I can’t answer as I should. It was Mao’s way of putting himself in an advantageous position. Well, I got sick of it. All the while I was swimming, I was thinking, ‘The hell with you.’”

The first sign of how much uglier matters would get between Mao and Khrushchev had come five months earlier, on June 20, 1960, in Bucharest, where the Romanians had hosted fifty-one national communist delegations for their 3rd Party Congress. Just two days before the gathering, Khrushchev had announced that he would attend after failing to bridge differences with a Chinese delegation that had visited Moscow en route to the Romanian capital. His participation turned an insignificant, provincial party meeting into the most open warfare yet between leaders of the two most powerful communist states. To prepare the ground, Boris Ponomarev, chief of the International Department of the Soviet Central Committee, had circulated Moscow’s case against Mao’s “misjudgment of the current global situation” in the form of an eighty-one-page “Letter of Information” for Congress delegates. In it, Khrushchev explained his intention to continue his disputed course of peaceful coexistence with the new U.S. president.

With Mao absent from Bucharest, his counterthrust was delivered by Peng Zhen, the head of the Chinese delegation and a legendary communist who had guided resistance to Japanese occupation and ultimately the communist capture of Beijing in 1948.[1] Peng stunned delegates with the fierceness of his unprecedented attack on Khrushchev, which he supported by circulating copies of a lengthy correspondence the Soviet leader had sent to Mao that year. The Soviet leader’s letter shocked delegates in two respects: the crude language with which Khrushchev spewed venom at Mao, and the Chinese breach of confidentiality in sharing the private communication with others.

Khrushchev turned as vicious as veteran delegates had ever seen him in a final, closed session. He attacked the absent Mao as “a Buddha who gets his theory out of his nose” and for being “oblivious of any interests other than his own.”

Peng shot back that it was now clear Khrushchev had organized the Bucharest meeting only to attack China. He said the Soviet leader had no foreign policy except to “blow hot then cold toward the imperialist powers.”

Khrushchev was livid. In a furious, impulsive froth, he issued overnight orders that would undo Soviet economic, diplomatic, and intelligence-gathering interests in China that had taken years to establish. “Within the short span of a month,” he decreed, he would withdraw 1,390 Soviet technical advisers, scrapping 257 scientific and technical cooperation projects, and discontinuing work on 343 expert contracts and subcontracts. Dozens of Chinese research and construction projects came to a stop, as did factory and mining projects that had begun trial production.

Despite all that, the Bucharest communiqué had been crafted to carefully hide from the West the truth about the head-on collision of communism’s leaders. That would be harder to conceal at the November follow-on meeting in Moscow, which included many of the same delegates but was far larger and at a higher level.

Khrushchev’s intense lobbying before the meeting and cajoling during the conference kept the Chinese in check. Only a dozen country delegations among the eighty-one sided with China’s objections to Khrushchev’s course of liberalizing communism at home and peaceful coexistence abroad. Still, even that level of opposition to Soviet rule was unprecedented.

With Mao in Beijing, Khrushchev and Chinese General Party Secretary Deng Xiaoping locked horns behind closed doors at the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall. Khrushchev called Mao a “megalomaniac warmonger.” He said Mao wanted “someone you can piss on…. If you want Stalin that badly, you can have him—cadaver, coffin, and all!”

Deng attacked the Soviet leader’s speech, saying, “Khrushchev had evidently been talking without knowing what he was saying, as he did all too frequently.” It was an unprecedented personal insult to the communist movement’s acknowledged leader on his own turf. Mao’s new ally, the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha, made the most vicious of all the speeches, saying Khrushchev had blackmailed Albania and was trying to starve his country into submission for remaining true to Stalin.

In the end, the Soviets and the Chinese negotiated a ceasefire. The Chinese had been surprised by the support the Soviet leader could still muster and retreated, having seen the futility of splitting the communist movement at such a crucial moment. The Chinese reluctantly accepted Khrushchev’s notion of peaceful coexistence with the West in exchange for the Soviet leader’s agreement to increase support for capitalism’s opponents across the developing world.

The Soviets would resume assistance to China and thus keep construction work going on 66 of the 155 unfinished industrial projects they had begun. However, Mao didn’t get what he most wanted: high-end collaboration on military technology. Mao’s interpreter Yan Mingfu viewed the agreement as only “a temporary armistice. In the long run, events were already out of control.”

With the Chinese temporarily in check, however, Khrushchev moved to protect his East German flank.

^{THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW}

^{WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1960}

Ulbricht sat forward and erect in his chair, listening skeptically as Khrushchev briefed him on his strategy for handling Kennedy and Berlin in 1961. The East German leader had peppered Khrushchev with three letters since October, each increasingly critical of Khrushchev’s failure to counter his country’s growing economic difficulties and refugee bleed with a more determined response.

Having given up hope that Khrushchev would act on Berlin at any point soon, Ulbricht had begun to act unilaterally to tighten his control over Berlin. For the first time, East Germany was requiring that diplomats accredited to West Germany seek permission from East German authorities to enter East Berlin or East Germany—and in one high-profile incident had turned back Walter “Red” Dowling, the U.S. ambassador to West Germany. The East German moves directly contradicted Soviet efforts to expand diplomatic and economic contacts with West Berlin and West Germany. So on October 24, Khrushchev had angrily ordered Ulbricht to reverse the new border regime. Ulbricht had reluctantly complied, but tensions between the two men continued to grow.

The Soviet ambassador in East Berlin, Mikhail Pervukhin, complained to Khrushchev and Foreign Minister Gromyko that Ulbricht was disregarding Kremlin directives with ever greater frequency. A second secretary in the Soviet embassy, A. P. Kazennov, cabled his bosses in Moscow a warning that the East Germans might shut down travel across the border altogether to stop the increased refugee flow. Pervukhin reported to Moscow that a host of Ulbricht measures limiting movement and economic interaction between the two parts of the city had demonstrated the East German leader’s “inflexibility.”

Ulbricht had created a new National Defense Council to better defend his country’s security, and he had named himself to chair it. On October 19, the new council discussed potential measures to seal the Berlin border through which so many refugees were flowing. Though the West considered Ulbricht a Soviet puppet, it was increasingly the East German leader who was trying to pull Moscow’s strings.

In his most recent letter on November 22, Ulbricht had complained to Khrushchev that the Soviets were sitting on their hands while his economy was crumbling, refugees were fleeing, West Berlin freedom was becoming an international cause célèbre, and West Berlin factories were supplying the West German defense industry. He told Khrushchev that Moscow must change course “after years of tolerating an unclear situation.” Waiting to act on Berlin until after Khrushchev could organize a summit with Kennedy, Ulbricht argued, simply played into American hands.

Khrushchev assured a skeptical Ulbricht that he would force the Berlin issue early in the Kennedy administration. What he wanted was not another four-power summit, he said, but a one-on-one meeting with Kennedy where he could more effectively achieve his ends. He told Ulbricht he would resort to another ultimatum at an early stage if Kennedy showed no willingness to negotiate a reasonable agreement in the first months of his administration.

Though Ulbricht remained distrustful, he was heartened by Khrushchev’s declaration of determination to force the Berlin issue so early. At the same time, the East German leader warned Khrushchev that his repeated promises of action on Berlin were losing credibility. “Among our population,” he told Khrushchev, “there is already a mood taking shape where they say, ‘You [Khrushchev] only talk about a peace treaty, but don’t do anything about it.’ We have to be careful.” The East German client was lecturing his Soviet master.

Ulbricht wanted Khrushchev to know that time was running out. “The situation in Berlin has become complicated, not in our favor,” he said. He told Khrushchev that West Berlin’s economy was rapidly growing stronger, illustrated by the fact that some 50,000 East Berliners crossed the border each day to work for the West’s higher wages. The tension in the city was growing in rough proportion to the widening gap in living standards between East and West.

“We still have not taken corresponding countermeasures,” Ulbricht complained. He said he was also losing the battle for the minds of the intelligentsia, a great number of whom were leaving as refugees. Ulbricht told Khrushchev he couldn’t compete because West Berlin teachers earned some 200 to 300 marks more a month than teachers in the East, and doctors earned twice the Eastern salaries. He didn’t have the means to match such salaries, and lacked the ability to produce sufficient consumer goods—even if he could provide East Germans with the money to buy them.

Khrushchev promised Ulbricht further economic assistance.

The Soviet leader shrugged. Perhaps he would have to put Soviet rockets on military alert as he maneuvered to alter Berlin’s status, but he was confident the West would not start a war over the city’s freedom. “Luckily, our adversaries still haven’t gone crazy; they still think and their nerves still aren’t bad.” If Kennedy would not negotiate, Khrushchev told Ulbricht, he would move forward unilaterally, “and let them see their defeat.”

With an exasperated sigh, Khrushchev told Ulbricht, “We must be finished with this situation sometime.”

3 KENNEDY: A PRESIDENT’S EDUCATION

^{OVAL OFFICE, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{THURSDAY MORNING, JANUARY 19, 1961}

The oldest president in U.S. history reckoned it was time to introduce the youngest man ever elected to the office to the most fearsome part of the job. It was Inauguration Eve, and in less than twenty-four hours, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, age seventy, would hand off America’s nuclear football to Senator John F. Kennedy, age forty-three, transferring to him the most destructive capability any single country had ever possessed.

And he would have it at a time when Eisenhower feared that miscalculation over numerous U.S.–Soviet flashpoints around the world, the most sensitive of them all being Berlin, could trigger a nuclear exchange. So Eisenhower planned to take Kennedy aside for a private chat on how such a war would be conducted, a session he would close with a memorable bit of show-and-tell using the paraphernalia of the world’s most powerful individual.

Eisenhower worried about Kennedy’s readiness for such responsibility. Among friends, he dismissed Kennedy as “Little Boy Blue” or “that young whippersnapper” when he wasn’t mocking him as “that young genius.” As Supreme Commander of all Allied forces in Europe during the last two years of World War II, Eisenhower had overseen the invasion and occupation of France and Germany. As a Navy lieutenant, Kennedy had piloted nothing more significant than a PT boat, a torpedo-bearing vessel so small that its squadrons were called “mosquito fleets.”

It was true; Kennedy had been decorated as a war hero after saving the lives of eleven crew members, but only after he had inexplicably allowed his PT-109 to be rammed by a lumbering Japanese destroyer. Eisenhower’s military friends didn’t buy the “dark-of-night, fog-of-war” explanation, and instead suspected Kennedy of negligence, though he was spared an investigation.

Eisenhower doubted young Kennedy ever would have achieved the presidency without his father Joe’s deep pockets and insatiable parental ambition. During the war, Joe Sr. had tasked his cousin Joe Kane, a Boston political insider, to game the electoral viability of both his eldest son Joe and Jack. It also was his father who placed the story of Jack’s bravery with author and family friend John Hersey. Its publication in Reader’s Digest and then the New Yorker helped launch Jack’s political career. A year after Jack’s anointment as a hero, Joe Jr. died in action while piloting an experimental, high-risk bombing mission. He was supposed to have ejected from an explosive-laden B-24 Liberator before the plane, now a guided missile, continued by remote control toward a German V-bomb base—but it detonated prematurely. Those who knew the family best wondered if his death hadn’t ultimately been the result of the sibling rivalry their father had nurtured over the years. A reckless gamble to outdo his younger brother may have cost Joe Jr. his life.

On the cold, overcast morning, Kennedy pulled up to the White House at 8:57, after an eight-minute drive from his Georgetown home. It was a rare show of punctuality for the habitually tardy Kennedy. The morning newspapers were sprinkled with Kennedy family biographies and artists’ renderings of Cabinet wives’ elegant ball gowns. The dowdy Eisenhower era was over. On a more serious note, General Thomas S. Power, chief of the Strategic Air Command, announced that for the first time the U.S. would conduct round-the-clock nuclear-armed bomber flights to keep America in a constant state of readiness against surprise attack.

Ahead of the meeting, Kennedy’s transition chief, legendary Washington lawyer Clark Clifford, had sent Eisenhower’s people a list of issues that Kennedy wished to discuss, since they might bite him during his first days in office: Laos; Algeria; the Congo; Cuba; the Dominican Republic; Berlin; disarmament and nuclear test talks; basic economic, fiscal, and monetary policies; and “an appraisal of war requirements versus capabilities.”

That last point was Kennedy’s shorthand for an issue that had come to occupy him more the closer he got to occupying the Oval Office: “How would I fight a nuclear war, if it comes to that.” He wasn’t at all certain he or the American people—the voters required for his reelection—would be willing to deliver on solemn U.S. commitments to defend Berlin if those commitments required the risk of a nuclear war that could cost millions of American lives.

After their first transition meeting on December 6, Eisenhower had revised some of his negative views of Kennedy. Eisenhower told Democratic political operative George E. Allen, a Clifford friend, that he had been “misinformed and mistaken about this young man. He’s one of the ablest, brightest minds I’ve ever come across.” Though still uneasy about Kennedy’s youth and lack of experience, Eisenhower had been comforted by Kennedy’s grasp of the issues he would be facing.

Kennedy had been less taken with “Ike,” whom he referred to among friends as “that old asshole.” He told his younger brother Bobby, who was to become his new attorney general, that he had found the outgoing president to be intellectually ponderous and inadequately informed about issues he should have known intimately.

Kennedy believed the Eisenhower administration had accomplished little of consequence, having treaded water in a dangerous riptide of history that could pull the U.S. under. The most obvious example was the festering problem of Berlin. He was designing his presidency for greater accomplishment, taking as his role models Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. In contrasting Eisenhower with Kennedy, French Ambassador Hervé Alphand saw the president-elect as a man who had “an enormous memory of facts, of figures, of history, he had complete knowledge of the problems he had to discuss…a will to achieve for his country and for the world a great design, to be, in other words, a great President.”

There were two great obstacles to his quest for greatness: his lack of any clear mandate after the narrowest electoral victory since 1886, and the fact that Lincoln and Roosevelt had found their place in history through war, a horrifying prospect to be avoided, since these days that could mean a nuclear holocaust.

Kennedy was perplexed that he had been elected with only a fraction less than 50 percent of the vote, over a man like Nixon, whom he considered so personally unappealing. “How did I manage to beat a guy like this by only a hundred thousand votes?” he complained to friend Kenneth O’Donnell, who would become a White House aide.

And his coattails had been short. Though the Democrats had kept their commanding majorities in Congress, they had lost one Senate seat and twenty House seats. The Southern Democrats, who had gained the most, would form a caucus with the Republicans in favor of a hard line toward the Soviets and Berlin. Kennedy likely would not have won at all had he not in the campaign been more hawkish toward Moscow than Nixon. To further burnish his conservative anti-Soviet credentials, and perhaps to prevent release of damaging intelligence about his past, Kennedy had also made the unconventional decision to keep in office Eisenhower’s CIA and FBI directors, Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover. A curious similarity between Kennedy and Khrushchev was emerging: both were being coaxed by their domestic constituencies more toward confrontation than conciliation.

His meager margin over Nixon made Kennedy all the more keen to observe Eisenhower that day, figuring he could learn a great deal from the calm and reassuring manner that had won the outgoing president two terms and such widespread public affection. Kennedy would have to build his personal popularity as quickly as possible to take on all the issues in front of him.

During his transition briefings on nuclear strategy, nothing concerned Kennedy more than the fact that Eisenhower had left him such limited and inflexible war-fighting options. Should the Soviets overrun Berlin, Kennedy had no alternative to either a conventional conflict that the Soviets invariably would win or an all-out atomic exchange that he and America’s allies would be reluctant to fight. For that reason, it would have seemed natural for Berlin contingencies to have been at the top of Kennedy’s agenda that morning.

Instead, the two teams focused far greater attention on the raging conflict in Laos and the growing danger that the Southeast Asian country could fall into communist hands as the first of multiple dominoes. Though the crisis in Berlin was of greater significance, Kennedy had been told time and again that that situation was a frozen conflict without a foreseeable solution, and thus his initial energies were best spent on other matters.

A transition document prepared by the Eisenhower team for Kennedy warned the new president—a man who prided himself on big thinking—that it was the small issues he had to watch out for regarding Berlin, everything from detailed agreements ensuring unfettered travel to and from West Berlin to a host of arcane practices under four-power agreements that protected West Berliners’ rights and Allied presence.

“Current Soviet tactics,” the memo said, “are to seek to win Berlin by whittling away at the Western position to make it hard for us to demonstrate that the real issue in each minor incident is the survival of free Berlin. Our immediate problem is to counter these ‘salami tactics.’…We have tried in every way possible to convince the Soviets that as a last resort we would fight for Berlin.” The paper warned the president-elect that he would face an early effort by Khrushchev to revive Berlin talks, with the aim of gaining the withdrawal of Western troops from the city.

However, Eisenhower’s team had no good advice for Kennedy about how he could more effectively deal with all this, aside from simply standing his ground. “No one has yet been able to devise an acceptable and negotiable formula to solve the Berlin problem separate from a solution for Germany as a whole,” the transition document said. For the moment, the U.S. position was that Germany should someday be unified through free elections across West and East Germany—and no one anticipated that happening at any point soon, if at all. Hence, the memo said, “the principal Western tactic has been to gain time and demonstrate determination to protect West Berlin, while seeking a basis for solution. The problem is increasingly one of convincing the USSR that the Western Powers have the will and the means to maintain their position.”

Martin Hillenbrand, the director of the State Department’s Office of German Affairs, put it more sharply in his own transition memo. He led a Berlin task force established by Eisenhower after Khrushchev’s 1958 Berlin ultimatum, and it met almost daily on issues large and small. It included representatives of most agencies of the U.S. government, as well as the French, British, and German ambassadors.

“We can live with the status quo in Berlin but can take no real initiative to change it for the better,” he wrote. “To a greater or lesser degree, the Soviets and East Germans can, whenever they are willing to assume the political consequences, change it for the worse…. However impelling the urge to find some new approach to the problem, the ineluctable facts of the situation strictly limit the practical courses of actions open to the West.”

What Kennedy was hearing from multiple sources was that the stirring message of change that had gotten him elected didn’t apply to Berlin, where his advisers were asking him to defend an unsatisfying status quo. It went against all his instincts, and his promises to the electorate to bring creativity to the problems the Eisenhower administration had failed to address. After weighing his options, Kennedy elected to put Berlin on a back burner while he addressed issues where it seemed he could find quicker agreement.

So Kennedy’s priority with Moscow would be the pursuit of nuclear test ban talks, which he saw as a confidence-building measure to warm up the chilly U.S.–Soviet relationship. Kennedy’s logic was that once he had improved the overall tone of relations through arms negotiations, he could then return to the more intractable matter of Berlin. That would give rise, however, to what would become the first and greatest point of disagreement between Kennedy and Khrushchev—the pace and priority of negotiating a Berlin solution.

Even before he entered the White House, Kennedy was learning that the reality of dealing with Berlin as a sitting president was a world away from the hard-line rhetoric he had employed as a senator and presidential candidate. In February 1959, Kennedy had appealed to the Eisenhower administration to do more to prepare America for the “extremely serious” prospect of an armed showdown over West Berlin’s freedom.

The following August, while putting pieces in place for his presidential run, Kennedy had declared himself prepared to use the atomic bomb to defend Berlin, and he accused the Soviets of trying to push the Americans out of Germany. “Our position in Europe is worth a nuclear war because if you are driven from Berlin, you are driven from Germany,” he said in a television interview in Milwaukee. “And if you are driven from Europe, you are driven from Asia and Africa, and then our time will come next…. You have to indicate your willingness to go to the ultimate weapon.”

In an article published by the Hearst newspapers within hours of his victory at the Democratic National Convention in June 1960, Kennedy had written, “The next President must make it clear to Khrushchev that there will be no appeasement—no sacrifice of the freedom of the people of Berlin, no surrender of vital principle.”

Yet “indicating willingness” in Milwaukee as a barnstorming senator and pledging “no appeasement” as a nominated candidate was a long way from nuclear weapons use as president. And Soviet nuclear capabilities were improving—while Moscow’s conventional superiority around Berlin remained overpowering.

The president had only 5,000 troops in West Berlin, with 4,000 British and 2,000 French—so 11,000 Allied troops in all—arrayed against CIA estimates of some 350,000 Soviet troops either inside East Germany or within striking distance of Berlin.

The last National Intelligence Estimate—the authoritative assessment from the U.S. intelligence community—that had been done on Soviet capabilities spoke with worry about shifting strategic trends that could undermine the U.S. position in Berlin by the end of Kennedy’s first term. It predicted a Soviet emergence from strategic inequality by 1965 primarily through the buildup of their intercontinental ballistic missile force and nuclear defense systems. It said the Soviets would then be emboldened to challenge the West in Berlin and elsewhere around the world.

The CIA document warned Kennedy about the mercurial nature of Khrushchev, who would use “alteration of pressure and accommodation as the regular pattern of Soviet behavior.” It predicted that Khrushchev would play the role of suitor in the early days of the Kennedy administration, but that if that failed, he would “resort to intensified pressure and threats in an attempt to force the West into high-level negotiations under more favorable conditions.”

So, with Berlin on hold, Eisenhower briefed Kennedy more deeply on Laos. A three-way civil war between Pathet Lao communists, pro-Western royalists, and neutralists had raised the possibility of communist takeover. The danger was clear: Kennedy’s first weeks in office could be spent on a military engagement in a landlocked, tiny, impoverished country about which he cared little. The last thing Kennedy wanted was to send troops to Laos as his first foreign policy initiative. He would have preferred it if the Eisenhower administration had dealt with the issue before it left office. But as it had not done so, Kennedy wanted to know Eisenhower’s thinking and preparations for military response.

Eisenhower portrayed Laos as “the cork in the bottle,” a place where he felt the U.S. should intervene, even unilaterally, rather than accept a communist victory that could spread a contagion across Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. “This is one of the problems I’m leaving you that I’m not happy about,” Eisenhower apologized. “We may have to fight.”

Kennedy was struck by Eisenhower’s relaxed manner as he discussed war scenarios. Nothing brought that home more than Eisenhower’s fifty-minute private tutorial for the incoming president on nuclear weapons use. Eisenhower’s personal effects had mostly been removed from the Oval Office into which he brought Kennedy. Some boxes lay stacked in corners, and the carpet had golf cleat damage from Eisenhower’s putting sessions.

Eisenhower briefed Kennedy on issues ranging from running covert operations to the kind of emergency procedures that were the commander in chief’s personal domain: how to respond to immediate attack and authorize atomic weapons use. Eisenhower showed Kennedy how to work the code-book and manipulate the computer device in its satchel that would launch a nuclear attack—the so-called football that was always near the president.

It was the most intimate exchange possible between an outgoing and incoming president in the nuclear age.

Eisenhower made no reference to Kennedy’s mistaken statements during the campaign that the outgoing president had allowed a dangerous “missile gap” to emerge in favor of the Soviets. Eisenhower hadn’t corrected Kennedy at the time, much to candidate Nixon’s consternation, instead preferring to protect national security secrets and avoid giving the Kremlin an excuse to arm up even faster.

Now, however, Eisenhower calmly assured Kennedy that the U.S. still enjoyed an overwhelming military advantage, particularly due to submarines armed with nuclear-tipped missiles. “You have an invaluable asset in Polaris,” he said. “It is invulnerable.”

The Polaris could reach the Soviet Union from undetectable positions in various oceans, he said. Because of this, Eisenhower thought the Soviets would have to be mad to risk nuclear war. The downside, Eisenhower said, was they just might be mad. If you judged Soviet leaders by the brutality they had used against their own people and enemies during and after World War II, Eisenhower reckoned that nuclear inferiority might not stop fanatical communists from attacking under the right circumstances. Eisenhower spoke of the Russians more as animals to be tamed than as partners with whom one could negotiate.

Like a child showing off a favorite toy to a new friend, Eisenhower then ended his Kennedy tutorial with a demonstration of how quickly the president could be whisked from Washington by helicopter in case of emergency.

“Watch this,” he said.

Eisenhower picked up a special phone, dialed a number, and said simply, “Opal Drill Three.” He put down the phone and smiled, asking his visitor to consult his watch.

In less than five minutes, a Marine Corps chopper landed on the White House lawn. It whirred on the ground just a short stroll from where they sat. As Eisenhower took Kennedy back into the Cabinet Room, where their top people remained assembled, he joked, “I’ve shown my friend here how to get out in a hurry.”

In the presence of their staffs, Eisenhower warned Kennedy that presidential authority would not always be such a magic wand.

Kennedy smiled. Eisenhower’s press secretary later said that Kennedy showed considerable interest in the “dry run.” Although his responsibilities were sobering, the powers Kennedy would soon have were intoxicating. As he drove off, he looked back with satisfaction at the building that would soon be his home.

^{WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{INAUGURATION DAY, FRIDAY, JANUARY 20, 1961}

The snow began to fall at noon, shortly after Kennedy left his meeting with Eisenhower. Washington dealt badly with inclement weather, even when it was on a preinaugural footing. Traffic snarled. Two-thirds of the sold-out crowd didn’t show for the inaugural concert that evening at Constitution Hall. The National Symphony started its performance a half hour late because so many of its musicians were caught in traffic or blocked by drifts. Frank Sinatra’s star-studded gala began only after a two-hour delay.

Yet by the clear, cold, sunny morning of January 20, a battalion of soldiers and plows had cleared the eight inches of snow. The skies opened and provided perfect lighting for the most intricately planned and most widely televised inaugural show in history. Some 140,000 feet of cable ran to fifty-four television circuits, covering the inaugural from thirty-two locations, from the oath to the last parade float. Some six hundred extra telephones had been scattered around strategic locations for reporters. However else the Kennedy administration would differ from its predecessors, it would present the most televised commander in chief in history, all in living color.

When Kennedy traveled with his wife, Jackie, in their limousine the day before the inauguration, when he sat in the bathtub that evening, and again over breakfast the next morning after four hours of sleep, the president-elect reviewed time and again the latest version of his inaugural address. Whenever he could find a moment, he familiarized himself more deeply with each of its tightly crafted 1,355 words, honed through more drafts and rewrites than any speech he had ever delivered.

Back in November, he had told his chief wordsmith, Ted Sorensen, to keep the speech short, nonpartisan, optimistic, uncritical of his predecessor, and focused on foreign policy. However, when they worked through the final draft—a process which got under way only a week before the speech would be delivered—he still found it too long and domestic for his liking. He told Sorensen, “Let’s drop the domestic stuff altogether. It’s too long anyway.” His view: “Who gives a shit about the minimum wage anyway?”

The more difficult decision was, what message to send Khrushchev? Though nuclear war with the Soviets was unthinkable, negotiating a just peace seemed unfathomable. Kennedy had campaigned from the hawkish side of a Democratic party that still hadn’t resolved its internal dispute about whether engagement or confrontation was the best way to deal with the Soviets.

Dean Acheson, who had been President Truman’s secretary of state, represented the Democratic party’s hard-liners, who were convinced Khrushchev was still pursuing Stalin’s goal of world domination. Other Democrats—Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, Chester Bowles—saw Khrushchev as a genuine reformer whose primary aim was to reduce his military budget and improve Soviet living standards.

Kennedy’s inaugural speech would place him squarely in the indecisive middle of the debate, reflecting his uncertainty about whether he would be more likely to make history by confronting the Soviets or by making peace with them. It was that same ambiguity that had fed Kennedy’s reluctance since his election to respond to Khrushchev’s many efforts through multiple channels to establish a private conduit and schedule an early summit meeting.

On December 1, 1960, Kennedy had sent an early but indirect plea for patience to the Soviet leader through his brother Robert, who had met with a KGB officer posing as a correspondent for the newspaper Izvestia in a presidential transition office in New York. At age thirty-five, Bobby had been his brother’s campaign manager and was soon to become his attorney general, so the KGB officer had no reason to doubt it when Bobby said he was speaking for his brother.

The Soviet reporter never filed a story to his newspaper but he did send an account to his KGB superiors, which likely also reached Khrushchev, as an indication of the Kennedy administration’s foreign policy direction. It contained several messages. Bobby said the president-elect would pay great attention to the relationship, and he thought a test ban treaty agreement could be concluded in 1961. He said that Kennedy shared Khrushchev’s desire for a face-to-face meeting, and that he wanted to repair the harm done to the relationship under Eisenhower.

Less encouraging to Khrushchev was Kennedy’s intention to handle Berlin far more slowly than the Soviet leader wanted. The new president would need two to three months before he could engage in a summit, Bobby said. “Kennedy is seriously concerned about the situation in Berlin and will strive to find the means to reach a settlement of the Berlin problem,” said the KGB report on the meeting. “However, if in the next few months the Soviet Union applies pressure on this question, then Kennedy will certainly defend the position of the West.”

Still, that did not dissuade Khrushchev from continuing to press for an early meeting. A few days later, on December 12, Soviet Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov invited Bobby for lunch at Moscow’s Washington embassy. The ambassador, whom U.S. officials derisively called “Smiling Mike,” cut a comic figure with his modest intelligence and supreme confidence. His fractured English once produced a much-maligned toast to the women attending a Georgetown cocktail party: “Up your bottoms!” However, the direct messages he carried from Khrushchev made even his detractors take his invitations seriously.

Menshikov argued to Bobby that U.S.–Soviet misunderstandings were often a result of the two countries’ leaders leaving crucial matters to mid-level officials. He said Kennedy and Khrushchev were unique individuals who together could find a way around their bureaucracies to achieve historic outcomes. He thus urged Bobby to get his brother to embrace the idea of an early meeting between the two nations’ leaders, to achieve a “clear and friendly understanding.”

Two days after meeting with the president’s brother, Menshikov reached out with much the same message to Khrushchev’s favorite American, Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow under President Franklin Roosevelt. A day later, Menshikov again pressed his campaign for an early Khrushchev–Kennedy meeting through the well-connected New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury. “There is more to be gained by one solid day spent in private and informal talks between Khrushchev and Kennedy,” he told the reporter, “than all the meetings of underlings taken together.”

Kennedy was the target of some similar lobbying from two-time presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, an erstwhile rival, who was trying to position himself for a major administration job. Stevenson phoned Kennedy at his father’s house in Palm Beach to volunteer himself as a middleman who could fly to Moscow immediately after the inauguration and put matters on track with Khrushchev. “I think it’s important to find out whether he wants to expand the Cold War,” Stevenson told Kennedy.

Kennedy did not take the bait. Stevenson had failed to endorse Kennedy’s nomination before the time of the Democratic convention, and that had likely cost him the post of secretary of state that Kennedy had dangled as incentive. If that weren’t enough, anticommunists on Capitol Hill considered the former Illinois governor an appeaser. And Kennedy was unwilling to run his foreign policy in anyone’s shadow. Beyond that, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had made clear through press leaks that what worried him most about the Kennedy administration was the prospect they would bring in someone as soft on Moscow as Stevenson to lead his foreign policy. So Kennedy made Stevenson ambassador to the United Nations instead, and he would not take up his offer of mediation with Khrushchev.

Weary of Khrushchev’s lobbying barrage, Kennedy asked his friend David Bruce, whom he had tapped as ambassador to London, to help him frame a response to Khrushchev’s extended hand. Bruce was a veteran diplomat who had run America’s spy service in London during the war, and he had been Harry Truman’s ambassador to Paris.

After much eating and drinking at Menshikov’s residence on January 5, the Soviet ambassador gave Bruce a letter without letterhead or signature, which Menshikov said held his personal thoughts. Its unmistakable message: Khrushchev urgently wanted a summit and would go to great lengths to arrange it.

Menshikov told Bruce that Khrushchev believed under the Kennedy administration, the two countries could “resolve existing and dangerous differences.” However, the Soviet leader believed they could only relax tensions once the two great powers at the top levels had agreed on a program for peaceful coexistence. He said this would revolve around “two outstanding problems”—achieving disarmament and solving “the German question, including West Berlin.” Khrushchev wanted to meet Kennedy before the incoming president sat down with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, meetings Menshikov said he had heard were scheduled for February and March.

Bruce told the Soviet ambassador that the meetings with those key U.S. allies would occur later than that, but this did not alter Khrushchev’s underlying message: He hoped Kennedy would depart from the usual protocol of consulting with allies before meeting with his adversary. Menshikov said that Khrushchev was willing to accelerate preparations for such a meeting through either private or official conduits. As further incentive, Menshikov sent Bruce a hamper full of his country’s best vodka and caviar after the meeting. A few days later, he invited Bruce to lunch again to underscore his message.

Just nine days before his inauguration, Kennedy had sought from George Kennan—whom he would make his ambassador to Yugoslavia—further advice about how to handle this flurry of Soviet communication. Kennedy had been communicating on Soviet matters with Kennan, the legendary former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, since January 1959. In one letter, Kennedy had praised Kennan for standing against the “extreme rigidity” toward Moscow of Dean Acheson, President Truman’s secretary of state.

Kennan had inspired the U.S. foreign policy of Soviet communist “containment” with his long telegram from Moscow as a diplomat, which was followed by his famous and anonymously written Foreign Affairs article in July 1947, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Yet Kennan now opposed the hard-line doctrines toward Moscow that he had done so much to inspire. He thought the U.S. and its allies were now strong enough to enter into talks with Khrushchev, and he complained about U.S. militarists who had misinterpreted his thinking.

During the campaign, Kennan told Kennedy that as president he should “heighten the divisive tendencies within the Soviet bloc by improving relations with Moscow,” not through formal summits and agreements but rather by using private channels of communication with the Soviet government, aimed at reciprocal concessions. “These things are difficult,” Kennan had said, “but they are not, I reiterate, not impossible.” He said such contacts helped end the Berlin blockade in 1948 and the Korean War. He had urged Kennedy in an August 1960 letter that, should he be elected, his administration should “move quickly and boldly in the initial stages of its incumbency, before it becomes enmeshed in the procedural tangles of Washington and before it is itself placed on the defensive by the movement of events.”

Kennedy wrote back that he agreed with most of Kennan’s recommendations. Now that he was about to be president, however, he wanted guidance of a more concrete and immediate nature. While speaking to Kennan on a flight from New York to Washington on his private jet, the Caroline, Kennedy briefed Kennan on the barrage of Soviet messages and then showed him the Menshikov letter.

Kennan frowned as he read. He concluded by the letter’s stiff and tough language that it had been drafted in Khrushchev’s office but cleared by a wider circle that included both those who were for and those who were against closer relations with the U.S. Contrary to his earlier advice that Kennedy move fast to open up a dialogue with Moscow, he now told Kennedy the Soviets had no right to rush him in this manner, and that the president-elect should not respond before taking office. That said, Kennan suggested he should at that time communicate privately with Khrushchev, breaking Eisenhower’s habit of making almost every exchange with Khrushchev public.

Asked by Kennedy why Khrushchev was so eager to meet with him, Kennan said with characteristic insight that the U-2 incident and the growing intensity of the Chinese–Soviet conflict had weakened the Soviet leader, and he needed a breakthrough with the U.S. to reverse that trend. Khrushchev, Kennan explained, “hoped by the insertion of his own personality and the use of his powers of persuasion he could achieve such an agreement with the United States and recoup in this way his failing political fortunes.”

For Kennedy, it was the clearest and most convincing explanation of Khrushchev’s behavior he had heard. It coincided with his own understanding that domestic politics drove foreign policy issues more than most Americans understood—even in the authoritarian Soviet Union. It made sense to Kennedy that Khrushchev was seeking help to improve his imperiled political standing at home, but that was insufficient reason for Kennedy to act before he was ready. The president-elect again determined that Khrushchev could wait—and so could Berlin.

Thus, Kennedy’s inaugural address would be his first communication with the Soviet leader on Berlin, however indirect and shared with tens of millions of others. The most compelling line was also the one most quoted in Berlin newspapers the following day: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Yet Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric concealed a dearth of policy direction with regard to the Soviets. Kennedy was leaving all options open. Multiple rewrites altered only nuance, putting his indecision in more memorable form and excising language his speechwriter Ted Sorensen had drafted that might appear too soft toward the Soviets.

A first version read, for example: “…nor can two great and powerful nations forever continue on this reckless course, both overburdened by the staggering cost of modern weapons.”

Kennedy, however, did not want to call the U.S. course either “reckless” or unsustainable. So the final text took those two ideas out and instead read: “…neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course—both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons.”

An initial draft read: “And if the fruits of cooperation prove sweeter than the drugs of suspicion, let both sides join ultimately in creating a true world order—neither a Pax Americana, nor a Pax Russiana, nor even a balance of power—but a community of power.”

A final text nixed the notion of a “community of power” with the communists, which congressional hawks would have called naive. The final version read: “And if a beachhead of cooperation can push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law….”

He mentioned no countries or places by name—neither the Soviet Union, nor Berlin, nor any other. The German newspaper Die Welt praised the “new wind” from America, which was “hard but refreshing. What we Germans notice, though: No word on Berlin!”

Instead of mentioning Khrushchev by name, Kennedy spoke only of those “who would make themselves our adversary,” having changed the word “enemy” to “adversary” at the suggestion of columnist friend Walter Lippmann. Kennedy prescribed projects of potential cooperation: exploration of the heavens and oceans, negotiation of arms control and inspection regimes, and cooperation in science to cure disease.

There was enough in the speech to please America’s hard-liners. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona applauded enthusiastically after the line about paying any price for liberty. Having achieved no progress in getting his boss an early meeting with Kennedy, Soviet Ambassador Menshikov sat impassively throughout with a gray hat pulled down over his eyes, a white scarf pulled up over his neck, and his frame wrapped in a large, gray overcoat.

Just as important as his words that day was Kennedy’s appearance, which in the competition for global favor was more than a superficial factor. The world was inspired by the charismatic smile that lit up a face bronzed during his preinaugural vacation in Florida. What no one sensed was Kennedy’s underlying ill health: he had swallowed a cocktail of pills that day for his bad stomach and his aching back, and he had taken an extra dose of cortisone to control the telltale swelling that came with his treatments for Addison’s disease. As he had looked in the mirror just four days before his swearing-in, Kennedy had spoken with shock to his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, about the impact of his treatments. “My God, look at that fat face,” he said. “If I don’t lose five pounds this week, we might have to call off the Inauguration.”

Evelyn Lincoln would help monitor the multiple medications for a young president who in many respects was far less healthy than Khrushchev, twenty-three years his senior. Kennedy could only hope that the KGB operatives digging up whatever they could find on the true state of his health did not discover the truth. To knock down rumors about his illnesses, the Kennedy team had put two doctors before the press. And just two days before the inauguration, the magazine Today’s Health, working from a report issued by the Kennedy team, had covered the president-elect’s medical history more extensively than it had any other previous president’s. It quoted his physicians on his “superb physical condition” that made him “quite capable of shouldering the burdens of the Presidency.” The article said that the fact he had overcome his many ailments demonstrated “his barb wire toughness.” It said he drank and smoked little, that he enjoyed an occasional cold beer at dinner, and that his only cocktail was a daiquiri. He didn’t smoke cigarettes—only a cigar now and again. It reported authoritatively that he kept his weight at 165 pounds and that he had no special diet, which concealed the fact that he preferred bland foods because of a bad stomach.

A closer read left plenty of reason for concern. The article listed adult health issues that included “attacks of jaundice, malaria, sciatica, and two back injuries.” All it said about his Addison’s disease, without mentioning it by name, was that Kennedy takes “medication by mouth for the aftermath of adrenal insufficiency and has an endocrinologic examination twice a year.” It noted he wore a quarter-inch lift in his shoes “and even beach sandals” to ease back pain caused by a slightly shorter left leg.

Perhaps never in American presidential history had youthful image and ailing reality stood in such contrast. While others at the inauguration wore top hats and heavy coats against the chill, Kennedy took the oath of office without overcoat or hat. With only an electric space heater to warm him in an open reviewing box, he watched the inaugural parade for more than three hours with his new vice president, Lyndon Johnson.

The next morning’s papers around the world painted the portrait of Kennedy that he wanted. Columnist Mary McGrory of the Washington Evening Star compared him to a Hemingway hero. “He has conquered serious illness. He is as graceful as a greyhound and can be as beguiling as a sunny day.”

Yet for all Kennedy’s success at shaping media coverage ahead of his inauguration, he would quickly discover he had less influence over the actions of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. When Kennedy woke up at about eight in the Lincoln Bedroom on his first morning in office, he found that atop the congratulatory cables from around the world was the offer of an inaugural gift from Moscow that would be the first gambit in U.S.–Soviet relations during his presidency. Given the right conditions, Khrushchev would release the two airmen of the RB-47 reconnaissance plane who had been sitting in a Soviet prison since their capture the previous summer.

It would be an early introduction for Kennedy to the world of U.S.–Soviet intrigue that swirled around Berlin, a place where, he would quickly learn, even seeming victories often contained hidden dangers.

The “Sniper” Comes In from the Cold

^{JANUARY 4, 1961}

David Murphy, the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Berlin base, was hungry for success stories. So his heartbeat accelerated when he heard that his most valuable asset—a Polish agent with the code name of Heckenschütze, or Sniper—had phoned the secret number he had been given for emergencies over the Christmas holidays. Certain that his cover had been blown, Sniper wanted to defect. “Are you ready to give me and my wife protection?” he asked.

Murphy had warned the CIA station’s special Berlin switchboard operators that if they missed Sniper’s call on the number that was designated only for him “they would be on the next boat home.” The caller had only said he was passing on the message on behalf of a Herr Kowalski, a code that began a set of prearranged responses. Sniper had planned his defection well. First, he had deposited perhaps three hundred photographed documents—including the names of several hundred Polish agents and organizational tables—in Warsaw at a dead drop inside a hollowed-out tree trunk near his home. The CIA had already recovered the treasure trove.

Now it was the early afternoon of January 4, and a senior CIA official who had flown in from Washington was waiting with other operatives at the American consulate in Berlin, where they had arranged that Sniper would come in from the cold. The consulate, which was open to civilians, rested conveniently beside the military section of a U.S. compound on West Berlin’s Clayallee. Murphy had already arranged for an impressive office, wired with microphones and recorders, where Sniper would have his first debriefing.

Murphy would recall later that he and deputy John Dimmer felt even greater tension than was usual for such high-profile cases, partly because after two years of receiving letters from Sniper—sometimes valuable though often indecipherable—no one had yet met the mysterious agent nor knew who he really was. Beyond that, Murphy’s Berlin Operations Base—known in clandestine cables by its acronym BOB—had been fighting a losing battle in the world’s most important and extensive spy war in a city that hosted more foreign and domestic intelligence agents than any other place on Earth.

The CIA also needed a victory after having just lost its only penetration agent inside Soviet military intelligence, Colonel Pyotr Popov, through either sloppiness or infiltration. And by any measure, the United States was being outspied by Soviet and East German services in Berlin. The problem, in Murphy’s view, was that the CIA was a relative newcomer to the espionage business and too often combined the fierce determination of the youthful with the dangerous naiveté of the uninitiated. In that respect, Murphy reckoned BOB reflected the optimistic if not always fully professional American character as the United States embraced a more global role. Berlin was a place where both Murphy’s spies and America in general had been doing a lot of growing up in the decade and a half since World War II.

Murphy’s most insuperable competitive problem was recruiting local talent, and in that respect he had fallen far behind both Moscow’s KGB and the East German Ministry for Security. The sad truth was that it was far easier for the communists to infiltrate the West’s open society, to manipulate key individuals, and to plant agents than it was for the CIA to operate within Ulbricht’s strictly controlled and monitored East Germany.

The CIA had evolved rapidly from the wartime Office of Strategic Services into America’s first peacetime civilian intelligence service. It had drawn together in a single agency both clandestine operations and intelligence analysis. By comparison, the KGB was both more experienced and more extensive. It was a proficient external and internal intelligence service that had been forged during the Russian Revolution, then battle-hardened through Stalin’s purges and war with Nazi Germany. Despite the Soviet Union’s distracting political power struggles, it had operated with stunning continuity and ongoing successes.

Murphy’s most immediate concern was the increasing effectiveness of the East German secret police, which in just a decade and a half was already outperforming its predecessor, the Gestapo, as well as the KGB. A widening army of internal informants, a data-gathering system of German efficiency, and a broad network of agents in key Western positions of influence were allowing Ulbricht and Moscow to foil many CIA case efforts before they could even get started.

With BOB already operating in full-alert status, a caller phoned at 5:30 p.m. saying that Kowalski would arrive in a half hour. The caller asked that Mrs. Kowalski be given special attention—the first indication that Sniper was not coming alone. At 6:06 p.m., a West Berlin taxi dropped off a man and woman, each of them carrying small bags. The chief of the station’s Eastern European branch watched briefly as they apprehensively walked toward the consulate entrance, and then quickly ushered them inside.

As is so often the case in the spy business, matters were not what they had initially seemed. Sniper explained that the woman was not his wife but his mistress and that he would want asylum for her as well. He then asked that she be removed from the debriefing room because she knew him only as the Polish journalist Roman Kowalski. In fact, he said, he was Lieutenant Colonel Michael Goleniewski, who until 1958 had been the deputy chief of Polish military counterintelligence. He had acted as a double agent, reporting not only to the CIA but also to the KGB on anything the Poles might be hiding from their Soviet masters.

The CIA would whisk him by military aircraft on the following day to Wiesbaden, West Germany, and then on to the United States. Goleniewski would provide the names of countless Polish and Soviet intelligence officers and agents. He would help unearth a spy ring at the British Admiralty, uncover George Blake as a KGB spy in British intelligence, and expose Heinz Felfe, a KGB agent who had served as chief of West German counterintelligence. Of potentially greater importance, Goleniewski pointed to the presence of an undiscovered mole burrowed deep in U.S. intelligence.

There was only one problem: even before his briefings had ended, mental illness began to cloud Goleniewski’s credibility. He drank to excess and played Victrola records of old European songs at high volume. He would later insist that he was Tsar Nicholas II’s son, Alexei, the only surviving heir of the Romanov imperial family, and that Henry Kissinger was a KGB spy. The most senior CIA operatives would never agree upon whether he was a genuine defector or a Soviet provocateur.

Kennedy was entering a world of intrigue and deception for which he had only inadequate preparation.

4 KENNEDY: A FIRST MISTAKE

^{THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW}

^{10:00 A.M., SATURDAY, JANUARY 21, 1961}

Nikita Khrushchev summoned the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Tommy Thompson, to the Kremlin at ten a.m., or two in the morning in Washington, where President Kennedy had not yet returned to the White House from his inaugural revelry.

“Have you read the Inaugural Address?” Thompson asked. Khrushchev appeared weary to Thompson, as if he had spent the entire night awake. His voice was hoarse.

Not only had he read the speech, Khrushchev said, but he would ask Soviet newspapers to print the entire text the following day, something no Soviet leader had done for any previous U.S. president. “If they will agree to do so,” Khrushchev said with the satisfied chuckle of someone who knew Soviet editors did as he dictated.

Khrushchev then nodded to Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov, signaling that he should read Thompson the English version of an aide-mémoire that contained his inaugural gift for Kennedy: “The Soviet Government, guided by a sincere desire to begin a new phase in relations between the Soviet Union and the U.S., has decided to meet the wishes of the American side in connection with the release of two American airmen, members of the crew of the RB-47 reconnaissance airplane of the U.S. Air Force, F. Olmstead and J. McKone.”

Kuznetsov said the Soviets would also transfer to the U.S. the body of a third airman that had been recovered after the plane was shot down.

Khrushchev had carefully calculated precisely how and when to execute the offer, timing it on Kennedy’s first day in office for maximum impact to demonstrate to the world his goodwill for the new administration. However, he would at the same time continue the incarceration of U-2 pilot Gary Powers, who, unlike the RB-47 fliers, had already been convicted of espionage and sentenced to ten years after a show trial in August. The cases couldn’t have been more different in Khrushchev’s mind. For him, the U-2 incident was an unforgivable violation of Soviet territory that had undermined him politically and humiliated him personally ahead of the Paris Summit. He would exact a higher price for Powers at another time.[2]

Back in November and just after Kennedy’s election, when asked by an intermediary how the Soviet leadership could best pursue a “fresh start” in relations, former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Averell Harriman had urged Khrushchev to release the airmen. In any case, Khrushchev’s thoughts had been running in that direction. The pilots had served their electoral purpose. They could now play a diplomatic role in jump-starting a more positive U.S.–Soviet relationship.

The aide-mémoire said Khrushchev wanted to “open a new page in relations,” and that past differences should not interfere with “our joint work in the name of a good future.” Khrushchev said he would release the airmen as soon as Kennedy approved the draft Soviet statement on the matter and promised to prevent future aerial violations of Soviet territory and ensure the freed airmen would not be used for anti-Soviet propaganda. If Kennedy did not accept his terms, Khrushchev made clear he would try the two men on espionage charges—as he had done with Powers.

Thompson improvised a response without seeking instructions from Kennedy, whom he would not disturb during his first night in the Lincoln Bedroom. Thompson said he appreciated the offer, but the U.S. maintained that the RB-47 had been shot down outside Soviet airspace. The U.S. thus could not accept wording in the Soviet draft that amounted to a confession of a deliberate incursion.

Khrushchev was in a flexible mood.

“Each side is welcome to maintain its own view,” he said. The U.S. could make whatever statement it wished.

With that settled, Thompson and Khrushchev then engaged in one of their frequent exchanges on the merits of their respective systems. Thompson complained about a January 6 speech in which Khrushchev had portrayed the U.S.–Soviet struggle as a zero-sum game of class struggle around the world. Yet the two men tangled in an amicable manner that reflected an improved atmosphere of cooperation.

Khrushchev joked that he would cast his vote for Thompson to stay on as ambassador under Kennedy, an extension Thompson wanted but had not yet received. The Soviet leader winked that he was unsure whether his intervention with Kennedy would be helpful.

Thompson laughed that he also had his doubts.

When Khrushchev’s offer to release the airmen reached Kennedy, the new president was suspicious. He asked National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy whether he was “missing a trick.” After weighing the dangers, however, Kennedy concluded he could not pass up the opportunity to bring the American airmen home and show such dramatic results with the Soviets in the first hours of his presidency. He would take Khrushchev’s offer.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent Thompson the president’s positive response two days after Khrushchev made his offer.

In the meantime, Khrushchev had served up a menu of other unilateral conciliatory gestures. As promised, Pravda and Izvestia ran the full, uncensored text of Kennedy’s inaugural address, including even the parts Khrushchev did not like. Khrushchev reduced the jamming of Voice of America radio. He would allow five hundred elderly Soviets to join their families in the U.S., he approved the reopening of the Jewish theater in Moscow, and he gave the green light for the creation of an Institute for American Studies. He would allow new student exchanges and would pay honoraria to American writers for their pirated and published manuscripts. The state and party media reported in a celebratory chorus on the Soviet people’s “great hopes” for improved relations.

Thompson saw how delighted Khrushchev was at having taken the initiative in U.S.–Soviet relations. What he didn’t anticipate was how quickly Kennedy would come to dismiss Khrushchev’s gestures, partly on the basis of a misreading of one of Thompson’s own cables.

It would be the first mistake of the Kennedy presidency.

^{NEW STATE DEPARTMENT AUDITORIUM, WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 1961}

Even as the thirty-fifth president of the United States prepared to trumpet the release of the U.S. airmen at the triumphant first press conference of his five-day-old presidency, he had also received new information from Moscow that made him question Khrushchev’s true motivations. Eager to be useful to Kennedy, Ambassador Thompson, in a cable designed to prepare the president for his first media encounter, had drawn attention to the inflammatory language of a secret Khrushchev speech on January 6: “I believe the speech should be read in its entirety by everyone having to do with Soviet affairs, as it brings together in one place Khrushchev’s point of view as Communist and propagandist. If taken literally, [Khrushchev’s] statement is a declaration of Cold War and is expressed in far stronger and more explicit terms than before.”

What Thompson failed to tell Kennedy and his superiors was that there was nothing at all new in what Khrushchev had said. The Soviet leader’s so-called secret speech was little more than a belated briefing to Soviet ideologists and propagandists on the conference of eighty-one Communist Parties the previous November. The Kremlin had even published a shortened version two days before Kennedy’s inauguration in the party publication Kommunist, though that had gone unnoticed in Washington. Khrushchev’s call to arms against the U.S. in the developing world was less an escalation of the Cold War, as Thompson suggested, than it was the result of a tactical agreement with the Chinese to prevent a diplomatic breakdown. Lacking that context, Kennedy concluded Khrushchev’s words were “game changing.” He thought he had found the clue to unlock, to paraphrase Churchill, the enigma inside the riddle of Khrushchev.

Kennedy’s interpretation of the speech was prompting him to devalue and distrust all of Khrushchev’s conciliatory gestures.

The president had initially responded to Khrushchev’s moves with positive signals of his own. The U.S. had lifted a ban on Soviet crabmeat imports, it had resumed civilian aviation talks, and it had ended U.S. Post Office censoring of Soviet publications. Kennedy had also ordered his most senior military officers to tone down their anti-Soviet rhetoric.

Beyond that, President Kennedy was learning from his initial intelligence briefings that Moscow wasn’t as threatening an adversary as the candidate Kennedy had said it was. He had learned in ever greater detail how wrong his charges had been that the Soviets had created a “missile gap” in Moscow’s favor.

Yet none of that altered Kennedy’s conviction that Khrushchev’s speech was profoundly revealing and aimed quite personally at him. Though that shift in thinking would significantly color his State of the Union message in five days’ time, Kennedy was not yet ready to volunteer his shifting thoughts on Khrushchev at his press conference—and no one asked. Reporters had not anticipated much news that day, since it was a sufficient sensation that Kennedy was hosting the first presidential press conference ever to be broadcast live on television and radio across the nation. It was a dramatic departure from Eisenhower’s practice of recording his press conferences and then releasing them only after careful editing.

Given the unprecedented media demand to attend, Kennedy staged the gathering in the newly built State Department auditorium, a cavernous amphitheater that the New York Times called “as warm as an execution chamber,” with its deep well between the president’s raised podium and the reporters. He saved the news from Moscow for the last of three prepared announcements. The Times would report the next day that a low whistle of astonishment rose from the room when Kennedy said two RB-47 fliers, who had been imprisoned and interrogated for six months, already were en route home from Moscow by air.

Kennedy lied that he had promised nothing in return to Khrushchev for the airmen’s release. The truth was that he had agreed to Khrushchev’s demand to extend the ban on spy flights over Soviet territory and, once the airmen landed, to keep them away from the media. Kennedy radiated calm self-satisfaction. His first public encounter with the Soviets had ended well. His statement contained much the same language he had cabled to Khrushchev: “The United States Government was gratified by this decision of the Soviet Union and considers that this action of the Soviet Government removes a serious obstacle to improvement of Soviet-American relations.”

But among friends and advisers, Kennedy was growing so fixated on the January 6 Khrushchev speech that he would read loudly and frequently from a translated version he carried around with him—at Cabinet meetings, at dinners, and in casual conversations—always requesting comments afterward. Thompson had advised Kennedy to distribute the speech to his top people, and Kennedy did so, instructing them to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” Khrushchev’s message.

“You’ve got to understand it,” he would say time and again, “and so does everybody else around here. This is our clue to the Soviet Union.”

The text spoke of Kremlin support for “wars of liberation or popular uprisings…of colonial peoples against their oppressors across the developing world.” It declared that the Third World was rising in revolution and that imperialism was weakening in a “general crisis of capitalism.” In one of the lines Kennedy most liked to quote, Khrushchev said, “We will beat the United States with small wars of liberation. We will nibble them to exhaustion all over the globe, in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.” Referring to Berlin, Khrushchev promised he would “eradicate this splinter from the heart of Europe.”

With its timing just ahead of his inauguration, Kennedy falsely concluded that Khrushchev’s policy shift was designed specifically to test him and thus required a response. Thompson had fed that thinking in his advice to the president on how to handle potential media questions. “Solely from a tactical point toward the Soviet Union,” Thompson had said, “it might be advantageous for the President to take the line that he cannot understand why a man who professes to wish to negotiate with us publishes a few days before his inauguration what amounts to a declaration of Cold War and determination to bring about the downfall of the American system.”

It was true enough that the Soviets and Chinese had agreed on a more active and militant policy toward the developing world. Then Secretary of State Christian A. Herter had told President Eisenhower that the communist gathering sounded “a number of danger signals which the West would do well to heed, such as a call for the strengthening of the might and defense capability of the entire socialist camp by every means.” Herter, however, dismissed the ritual call for a continuation and intensification of the Cold War as “nothing new.”

Eisenhower had heard so much similar bluster from Khrushchev during his presidency that he had shrugged off this latest version. Lacking this experience and overly confident in his own instincts, Kennedy magnified what Eisenhower had dismissed. He thus overlooked the most important point of the communist gathering, and one that would have been far more helpful to understanding Khrushchev’s predicament than his rhetoric. Herter had told Eisenhower that what was most significant was the unprecedented measure of success the Chinese had achieved in challenging Soviet leadership of world communism—despite four months of Moscow’s lobbying to contain Mao’s views.

Kennedy’s first miscue in office regarding the Soviets had several sources. Thompson’s cable had played a role. Kennedy was also drawn instinctively to a more hawkish approach to the Soviets due to the popularity of such a course among American voters, his father’s anticommunist influence, and his search for a rallying cause around a presidency he had promised would be “a time for greatness.” His personal take on history had also played a role. His senior honors thesis at Harvard, published in July 1940, had been about British appeasement of the Nazis at Munich. Playing on his hero Churchill’s book While England Slept, he had called it Why England Slept.

Kennedy would not be caught napping.

The president was seeking a great challenge, and Khrushchev seemed to be providing it. His administration had not formally reviewed its policy toward the Kremlin nor held a major policy meeting on how to deal with Khrushchev. Despite that, Kennedy was sharply altering course from his inaugural speech’s studied ambiguity toward the Soviets ten days earlier to the drafting of one of the most apocalyptic State of the Union messages ever delivered by an American president.

Kennedy began by listing all the U.S. domestic challenges, from seven months of recession to nine years of falling farm income. “But all these problems pale when placed beside those which confront us around the world.” Reading language he had scribbled himself onto a final draft, he said: “Each day, the crises multiply. Each day, their solution grows more difficult. Each day, we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger. I feel I must inform the Congress that our analyses over the last ten days make it clear that, in each of the principal areas of the crisis, the tide of events has been running out—and time has not been our friend.”

Though new intelligence provided him during those intervening ten days had shown him that China and the Soviet Union were increasingly at loggerheads, he insisted, based on the January 6 speech, that both “had forcefully restated only a short time ago” their ambitions for “world domination.”

He asked Defense Secretary Robert McNamara “to reappraise our entire defense strategy.”

Kennedy could not have more obviously linked himself rhetorically to his heroes Churchill and Lincoln in this perceived hour of danger. Churchill had said, “Sure I am of this, that you only have to endure to conquer.” Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address had framed the Civil War as one that was testing whether “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…can long endure.”

Placing himself directly in the same crosshairs of history, Kennedy told the Congress and the nation: “Before my term has ended, we shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure.”

It was memorable rhetoric based on a false understanding.

^{THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW}

^{MONDAY, JANUARY 30, 1961}

Khrushchev was still waiting for an answer to his multiple pleas for an early summit with Kennedy when the president’s State of the Union address delivered him the first of several perceived indignities. Two days later, Khrushchev suffered what he considered the further humiliation of watching Kennedy’s America test-launch its first Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile.

Four days after that, McNamara shamed Khrushchev again—while at the same time embarrassing the White House—by dismissing as “folly,” during a Pentagon press briefing, Khrushchev’s declaration that he was expanding his missile superiority against the U.S. In both missile technology and overall striking potential, the U.S. still enjoyed a considerable edge. McNamara said the two countries had about the same number of missiles in the field, and though he didn’t mention the U.S. superiority of 6,000 warheads to about 300 for the Soviets, he nevertheless had publicly called Khrushchev’s bluff.

After his failed negotiation track with Eisenhower in 1960, Khrushchev had taken significant political risk in openly praising Kennedy’s election, freeing the airmen, offering other gestures, and reaching out to the new president for an early summit. Kennedy’s dismissive response, his ICBM test launch, and McNamara’s statement reinforced the charges of Khrushchev’s enemies that he was naive about American intentions.

On February 11, Khrushchev returned earlier than scheduled from a trip to Soviet farming regions for an emergency Presidium meeting, where his rivals called for a policy shift to address what they regarded as new American militancy.

The Soviet leader had to rethink his approach. He had failed in his desire to meet with Kennedy before the new president could establish his course toward Moscow. The Soviet leader could not afford to appear weak after Kennedy’s startling State of the Union. Khrushchev immediately altered his tone toward Kennedy and his administration, replacing it with aggressive talk about Soviet nuclear capabilities. The Soviet media shifted course as well.

The Kennedy-Khrushchev honeymoon had ended before it had begun. Misunderstandings were souring the relationship between the world’s two most powerful men before Kennedy had even chaired his first meeting on Soviet policy.

^{CABINET ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1961}

Twelve days after his State of the Union, Kennedy called together his top Soviet experts for the first time to lay the groundwork for administration policy. He had placed the horse firmly behind the cart.

He would not be the first or last newly elected U.S. president to be forced through a speaking schedule to set a policy direction before a formal policy review. Though the administration was only twenty days old, those who attended the meeting—representing both a tougher and more accommodating policy toward Moscow—realized Khrushchev’s early gestures and Kennedy’s tough response had already set a lurching train in motion that they now hoped to steer.

The long-awaited meeting would provide insight into both Kennedy’s hunger for knowledge and his continued indecision about how to deal with Khrushchev, irrespective of his speech’s apparent clarity. The president had summoned to the Cabinet Room Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Thompson, and three former ambassadors to Moscow: Charles “Chip” Bohlen, who continued as the State Department’s resident Russia expert; George Kennan, Kennedy’s new ambassador to Yugoslavia; and Averell Harriman, whom Kennedy had made “ambassador at large.”

The days leading up to the session had produced a flurry of preparatory cables and meetings. Thompson had been busiest of all, sending in a series of long telegrams designed to educate the new president and his administration on all aspects of his greatest foreign policy challenge. Kennedy had decided to keep Thompson on as ambassador, in large part due to his unique access to Khrushchev. This was his first trip to Washington, D.C., since that decision had been made. Thompson was delighted to serve a president who not only was a fellow Democrat but had already demonstrated he would read his cables far more closely than Eisenhower had ever done.

At age fifty-six, Thompson lacked the charm of his predecessor Bohlen and the brilliance of Kennan. But no one doubted his knowledge or pedigree. He had won the U.S. Medal of Freedom and had endeared himself to the Soviets for remaining in Moscow as a U.S. diplomat during the most gruesome days of the Nazi siege after the American ambassador had fled.

Thompson had been at the table in the postwar years for almost every important negotiation concerning the Soviets, from Potsdam in July 1945 through talks over Austria’s independence in 1954 and 1955. He was known for his steady hand, whether at poker with embassy personnel or at geopolitical chess with the Soviets. Thompson argued it was time for Kennedy to decide “our basic policy toward the Soviet Union.”

Privately, Thompson had been critical of Eisenhower’s failure to pick up on the post-Stalin efforts to ease Cold War tensions. He agreed with Khrushchev’s view that his efforts to reduce tensions had gone unrewarded. Thompson had cabled home in March 1959, “We have refused these overtures or made their acceptance subject to conditions he as a Communist considers impossible.” Explaining Khrushchev’s decision to launch the Berlin Crisis in late 1958, Thompson said, “We are in the process of rearming Germany and strengthening our bases surrounding Soviet territory. Our proposals for settling the German problem would in his opinion end in dissolution of the Communist bloc and threaten the regime in the Soviet Union itself.”

In the days ahead of the February 11 meeting, Thompson was careful to provide a more nuanced and complex understanding of Khrushchev than he had done ahead of Kennedy’s State of the Union. He considered Khrushchev the least doctrinaire and best of all possible Soviet leadership alternatives. “He is the most pragmatic of the lot and is tending to make his country more normal,” wrote Thompson in the sparse language of the diplomatic cable. Pointing to Khrushchev’s Kremlin opposition, Thompson warned that the Soviet leader could disappear within Kennedy’s term “from natural or other causes.”

Regarding Berlin, Thompson cabled that the Soviets cared more about the German problem as a whole than they did about the fate of the divided city. Thompson said Khrushchev wanted above all to stabilize communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe, “particularly East Germany, which is probably the most vulnerable.” He said the Soviets were “deeply concerned with German military potential and fear West Germany will eventually take action, which will face them with the choice between world war and retreat from East Germany.”

Thompson conceded that no one could predict with any accuracy Khrushchev’s intentions regarding Berlin, but it was Thompson’s best judgment that the Soviet leader would try to settle the problem during 1961 due to increased pressure from the Ulbricht regime, which felt endangered by Berlin’s increased use as an escape route for refugees and as a base for Western spy and propaganda activities. Thompson said Khrushchev would be influenced on Berlin by other issues, ranging from what sorts of trade incentives Kennedy offered to the extent of domestic pressures on him. Thompson said Khrushchev “would be disposed not to bring matters to a head” on Berlin before German elections in September if Kennedy could give him some hope that real progress could be made thereafter.

In one cable after another, Thompson tried to provide a crash tutorial for the new administration on how to handle the Soviets regarding Berlin. He was also in competition with other voices, who were prescribing tougher measures against Moscow. Walter Dowling, the U.S. ambassador to West Germany, cabled from Bonn that Kennedy had to be sufficiently tough with the Soviets so that Khrushchev would see there was “no painless way for him to undermine the Western position in Berlin,” and that any attempt to do so held as many dangers for Moscow as it did for Washington.

In Moscow, however, Thompson was arguing that the Kennedy administration had to devise better nonmilitary methods to fight communism. He said the president had to ensure that the U.S. system worked well, had to be certain the Western alliance’s member states remained united, and through deeds needed to demonstrate to the developing world and newly independent former colonies that the future belonged to the U.S. and not the USSR. He worried about U.S. mistakes in Latin America at a time when the Chinese challenge was forcing the Soviets to rejuvenate their “revolutionary posture.”

“I am sure we would err if we should treat the Communist threat at this time as being primarily of a military nature,” he wrote in a cable that got particular traction in Washington. “I believe the Soviet leadership has long ago correctly appraised the meaning of atomic military power. They recognized major war is no longer an acceptable means of achieving their objectives. We shall, of course, have to keep our powder dry and have plenty of it, for obvious reasons.”

As if to counterbalance Thompson, Kennedy announced on February 9 that he was bringing out of retirement Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, a hard-liner who was convinced from years of experience that one could counter the Kremlin only with a policy of strength. At Kennedy’s behest, one of America’s best-known hawks would lead the administration studies on Berlin, NATO, and the related issues of balancing conventional versus nuclear weapons in any future military contingencies with the Soviets. Though Acheson would not join the meeting convened two days after his appointment, he would soon provide the antidote to Thompson’s more accommodating stance.

The February 11 meeting would become typical of how the new president would reach decisions. He would bring together the top minds on an issue and then let them fire off sparks while he provoked them with probing questions. In making sense of it later in a top-secret account titled “The Thinking of the Soviet Leadership,” Bundy organized the subjects under four headings: (1) the general condition of the Soviet Union and its leadership; (2) Soviet attitudes toward the U.S.; (3) useful American policies and attitudes; and finally and most important, (4) how best Kennedy could enter negotiations with Khrushchev.

Bohlen was surprised to discover that Kennedy, after having spoken so stridently in his State of the Union, possessed so few prejudices about the Soviet Union. “I’ve never heard of a president who wanted to know so much,” said Bohlen. Kennedy had little interest in the arcane subtleties of Soviet doctrine but instead wanted practical advice. “He saw Russia as a great and powerful country and we were a great and powerful country, and it seemed to him there must be some basis upon which the two countries could live without blowing each other up.”

The men arrayed before him differed fundamentally in their views about Moscow. Bohlen worried that Kennedy underestimated Khrushchev’s determination to expand world communism. Kennan had doubts about whether Khrushchev was really in charge. He said the Soviet leader confronted “considerable opposition” from Stalinist remnants who opposed negotiation with the West, and thus Kennedy needed to deal with the “collective.” Thompson argued that although the government was a collective enterprise, it was increasingly one of Khrushchev’s making. He thought only grave failures in foreign affairs or agricultural production could threaten Khrushchev’s political control. There he saw problems, as Khrushchev could be facing a third successive year of bad harvests.

Thompson argued that the U.S. “hope for the future” was the evolution of Soviet society into one that was more sophisticated and consumer-driven. “These people are becoming bourgeois very rapidly,” he said. Based on long conversations with Khrushchev, Thompson argued that the Soviet leader was trying to buy time to allow the Soviet economy to progress in that direction. “For this he really wants a generally unexplosive period in foreign affairs.”

For that reason, Thompson said, Khrushchev badly wanted an early meeting with the president. Though he had responded to the U-2 incident as a blow to his pride, prompting him to cut off communication with the White House, Khrushchev now was eager to move forward again. Thompson thought Kennedy should be open to such a meeting, since Khrushchev’s foreign policy relied so much on his personal interaction with counterparts.

Others in the room were more cautious, wondering what value could come from meeting with a Soviet leader who was calling the U.S. “the principal enemy of mankind.” Bohlen opposed Khrushchev’s suggestion that the meeting should take place during a UN session, “because the Soviet leader cannot resist a rostrum.” Harriman reminded Kennedy that protocol required he meet first with his allies.

Whatever the timing, Kennedy made increasingly clear to the men in the room that he wanted the meeting with Khrushchev. He felt he could unlock the potential of his presidency only once he had met with the Soviet leader. As he had told his aide and longtime friend Kenneth O’Donnell, “I have to show him that we can be just as tough as he is. I can’t do that sending messages to him through other people. I’ll have to sit down with him, and let him see who he’s dealing with.” Beyond that, other countries—including close U.S. allies—were acting cautiously on crucial issues until they saw how Kennedy and Khrushchev came to terms.

Kennedy told the group he wanted to avoid a full-fledged “summit,” which he interpreted as something that was necessary only when the world was threatened by war or when leaders were ready to sign off on major agreements that lower-level officials had precooked. What he wanted was a personal, informal meeting to get a firsthand impression of Khrushchev and thus better make judgments about how to deal with him. Kennedy wanted to open up wide channels of communication with the Soviets to prevent the sort of miscalculation that had led to three wars in his lifetime. Nothing worried him more in the nuclear age than this threat of miscalculation.

“It is my duty to make decisions that no adviser and no ally can make for me,” he said. To ensure that those decisions were well-informed, said Kennedy, he needed the sort of in-depth, personal knowledge he could get only from Khrushchev. At the same time, he also wanted to present U.S. views to the Soviet leader “precisely, realistically, and with an opportunity for discussion and clarification.”

Ten days later, on February 21, the same group of experts and senior officials assembled again, and by that time all had agreed that Kennedy should put pen to paper and invite Khrushchev to meet. Khrushchev had floated the possibility of a March get-together in New York around a special UN disarmament session. To head off that option, Kennedy would suggest a spring meeting in a neutral European city, either Stockholm or Vienna. When he hand-delivered Kennedy’s letter in Moscow, Thompson would explain to Khrushchev that the president needed the time before then to consult with allies.

On February 27, Bundy instructed the State Department in the president’s name to prepare a report studying the Berlin problem. The report should deal with the “political and military aspects of the Berlin crisis, including a negotiating position on Germany for possible four-power talks.”

That same evening, Thompson arrived in Moscow with President Kennedy’s letter. It had taken the ten weeks of transition after Kennedy’s election and first month of his presidency before Kennedy had been ready to respond to Khrushchev’s multiple attempts to gain an audience and his several gestures aimed at improving relations.

But by the time Thompson phoned Foreign Minister Gromyko to arrange a time to deliver the long-sought Kennedy response, Khrushchev was no longer interested. The Soviet leader had to resume his agricultural tour of the Soviet Union, Gromyko said, and thus could not receive Thompson either that evening or the next morning before his departure. Gromyko’s frosty tone could not have transmitted Khrushchev’s snub more clearly.

Thompson protested to Gromyko about the importance of the letter he carried. He said he would “go anywhere at any time” to see Khrushchev. Gromyko replied that he could guarantee neither the place nor the time. Thompson’s extension as ambassador had been based in no small part on his vaunted access to Khrushchev, so he was sheepish as he reported the situation back to Washington.

Khrushchev delivered a speech the following day in Sverdlovsk that reflected his surly mood: “The Soviet Union has the most powerful rocket weapons in the world and as many atomic and hydrogen bombs as are needed to wipe aggressors from the face of the Earth,” he said.

It was a long way from his New Year’s toast about Kennedy’s presidency as “a fresh wind” in relations. Kennedy’s misreading of Khrushchev’s intentions and the Soviet leader’s angry response to perceived slights had undermined a brief opportunity to improve relations.

Thompson would have to fly to Siberia to try to prevent matters from turning even worse.

And in Germany itself, things were not going any better.

5 ULBRICHT AND ADENAUER: UNRULY ALLIANCES

History would record that Walter Ulbricht and Konrad Adenauer were the founding fathers of two opposing Germanys, men whose striking differences, both personal and political, would come to define their era.

In the first weeks of 1961, however, one important similarity drove their actions: Both leaders fundamentally distrusted the men upon whom their fates depended—Nikita Khrushchev in the case of Ulbricht and John F. Kennedy for Adenauer. In the year ahead, nothing mattered more to the German leaders than managing these powerful individuals and ensuring that their actions did not undermine what each German considered his legacy.

At age sixty-seven, Ulbricht was a cold, introverted workaholic who avoided friendships, distanced himself from family members, and pursued his strict, Stalinist version of socialism with a relentless focus and an unwavering distrust of others. “He was not much liked in his youth and that didn’t improve as he grew older,” said Kurt Hager, a lifelong fellow communist campaigner who would become the party’s chief ideologist. “He had not the slightest understanding of jokes.”

Small in stature and cramped in demeanor, Ulbricht regarded Khrushchev as ideologically inconsistent, intellectually inferior, and personally weak. Though the West posed many threats, nothing endangered his East Germany more immediately than what he considered Khrushchev’s wavering commitment to protecting its existence.

For Ulbricht, the lesson of World War II—which he had spent primarily in Moscow exile—was that, when given a choice, Germans had become fascists. Determined never to allow his countrymen that sort of free will again, he placed them within the unyielding guardrails of his repressive system, enforced by a secret police system that was both more sophisticated and more extensive than Hitler’s Gestapo. His life’s purpose was the creation and now the salvation of his communist state of 17 million souls.

At age eighty-five, Adenauer was an eccentric, shrewd, dryly humorous, and orderly man who had survived all the chaotic stages of Germany’s previous century: the Imperial Reich, Germany’s first unification, the Weimar Republic’s chaos, the Third Reich, and now Germany’s postwar division. He had seen most of his political allies die or fade from the scene, and he worried that Kennedy lacked the historical context, policy experience, and personal character to stand up to the Soviets in the style of his predecessors, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower.

Adenauer shared with Ulbricht a distrust of German nature, but his remedy was to lash his country irretrievably to the U.S. and the West through NATO and the European Common Market. As he would explain later, “Our task was to dispel the mistrust harbored against us everywhere in the West. We had to try, step-by-step, to reawaken confidence in Germans. The precondition for this…was a clear, steady, unwavering affirmation of identity with the West” and its economic and political practices.

As the first and still the only freely elected West German chancellor, Adenauer had helped construct from Nazi ruins a vibrant, democratic, free-market state of sixty million people. His objective was to sustain that construct until the West was strong enough to gain unification on its own terms. More immediately, he was seeking a fourth term in September with the rejuvenated purpose of a politician who felt vindicated by history.

Both Ulbricht and Adenauer were simultaneously central actors and needy dependents—both driving and being driven by events—as the ways they spent the first days of 1961 illustrate.

^{“GROSSES HAUS,” COMMUNIST CENTRAL PARTY HEADQUARTERS, EAST BERLIN}

^{WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 4, 1961}

Standing before a secret emergency session of his ruling Politburo, Walter Ulbricht scratched his goatee unhappily and contradicted his optimistic, public New Year’s message of just three days earlier.

Speaking to his subjects, he had spouted socialist triumph, extolled the success of his farm collectivization, and boasted that he had enriched East Germany economically in the previous year while improving its standing around the world. However, the situation was far too serious to risk employing the same lies on his leadership, who knew better, and whom he needed for his struggle against an opponent whose resources seemed to be expanding with every hour.

“West Berlin is experiencing a growth boom,” Ulbricht complained. “They have increased wages for workers and employees more than we have. They have created more favorable living conditions, and they have to a great degree rebuilt the main parts of the city, while construction in our part continues to lag.” The result, he said, was that West Berlin was “sucking out” the East Berlin workforce, and that more of East Germany’s most talented youth were studying in West Berlin schools and watching Hollywood movies in its theaters.

Ulbricht had never been so clear with his comrades about the enemy’s rising fortunes or their own declining position. “I am only saying this, because we need to deal with the real situation and draw its consequences,” he said, laying out his plans for a year during which he wished to shut off the refugee flow, bolster the East Berlin economy, and protect his East Germany from the spies and propagandists operating from West Berlin.

One speaker after the other rose to support Ulbricht and provide additional reasons for concern. A Magdeburg district party secretary said he had only solved a Christmas tree shortage over the holidays through an emergency harvest. His citizens blamed a shoe and textile shortage on the party’s redirection of insufficient supplies to the more politically sensitive major cities of Karl-Marx-Stadt and Dresden. Politburo member Erich Honecker complained that the West’s attractions were draining East Germany’s sports movement, for which he was responsible, of its best athletes, a serious threat to its Olympic ambitions. Bruno Leuschner, the head of state planning and a concentration camp survivor, said East Germany would only avoid collapse if it got an immediate billion-ruble credit from the Soviets. He reported that he had recently returned from Moscow, where just the technical documents to work out the required scale of Soviet help had filled a twin-engine, Ilyushin Il-14 military cargo plane. East Berlin party boss Paul Verner, a former metalworker, said he could do nothing to stop the continued flight of his city’s most skilled workers.

Ulbricht’s party lieutenants drew a picture of a country heading toward inevitable collapse. As long as so much of the country’s productive capacity was walking out the door as refugees, they complained, they could do little to reverse the trend. Their increasing dependence on the West Berlin economy for suppliers had only made them more vulnerable. Karl Heinrich Rau, the minister in charge of East Germany’s trade with the West, argued that Ulbricht could not accept Khrushchev’s position that they wait until the Soviet leader had his summit with Kennedy before he dealt with the growing problems. They had to act now.

With unusual candor before his party comrades, an exasperated Ulbricht condemned Khrushchev for his “unnecessary tolerance” of the Berlin situation. Ulbricht knew the KGB would get a report on what he told his Politburo, but he nevertheless pulled no punches. The dangers of Khrushchev’s displeasure mattered far less to him than those of his continued inaction. Ulbricht reminded his colleagues that he had been the first to declare openly that all of Berlin should be considered part of East German territory, and that Khrushchev had only later come to agree with him.

Again, Ulbricht said, he would have to take the lead.

The West would not know until years thereafter—through the release of secret East German and Soviet documents—how crucial Ulbricht’s actions during the first days of 1961 would be in shaping everything that followed. That said, his decision to escalate his pressure on Khrushchev, despite the potential political perils for himself, was consistent with a career during which he had repeatedly overcome Soviet and internal opposition to create a state that was more Stalinist than even Stalin had envisioned.

Like his mentor Stalin, Ulbricht was unusually short, standing at just five feet, four inches, and like Stalin he had a physical peculiarity that helped define his misshapen personality. For Stalin, the scars were pockmarks, a limp, and a crippled left arm from childhood disease. Ulbricht’s enduring defect was his distinctive squeaky falsetto voice, born of a diphtheria infection when he was just eighteen. He hammered home his harshest points in a high-pitched, often indecipherable Saxon dialect, leaving listeners waiting for him to calm down and drop an octave or two. His anti-imperialist rants—most often delivered while he wore crumpled suits and shirts with clashing ties—had made him such an object of derision during the 1950s that he had become the butt of jokes among East German citizens (in their bolder or more inebriated moments) and West Berlin cabaret comedians alike. Perhaps in response, Ulbricht had shortened his speeches and begun to wear more neatly pressed double-breasted suits with silver ties. However, those changes had done little to alter his public image.

Like Stalin, Ulbricht was an organizational zealot who remembered people’s names and closely cataloged their loyalties and personal foibles. It was useful data for manipulating friends and destroying enemies. He lacked rhetorical skill and personal warmth, deficits that made it impossible for him to ever gain public popularity, but he compensated with methodical organization skills that would be crucial to running a centrally planned, authoritarian system. Though his East Germany provided a far smaller canvas than that of Stalin’s Soviet empire, he shared the Soviet dictator’s knack for taking and holding power against all odds to achieve improbable outcomes.

Ulbricht was also a man of precision and habit. He started every day with ten minutes of calisthenics and preached to his countrymen in rhyming slogans about the value of regular exercise. Before skating on winter evenings across his private lake with his wife, Lotte, he demanded that the staff smooth the surface so that it did not show a scratch. The fact that Ulbricht, unlike Stalin, did not execute his real or perceived enemies did not alter the single-minded purpose with which he had imposed a Bolshevik system on the Soviet-occupied third of a broken postwar Germany. And he had done so against the instructions of Stalin and other Kremlin officials, who had doubted their own particular style of communism would take among Germans, and thus dared not impose it.

Ulbricht had no such qualms. Almost from the hour of Nazi Germany’s collapse, Ulbricht’s vision had shaped the Soviet-occupied zone. At six in the morning on April 30, 1945, just hours before Hitler’s death, a bus picked up the future East German leader and ten other German leftists—known as the Ulbricht Gruppe—from the Hotel Lux, the wartime hostelry for exiled communist leaders. Ulbricht’s assignment from Stalin was to help create a provisional government and rebuild the German Communist Party.

Wolfgang Leonhard, the youngest member of the group at age twenty-three, observed that from the moment they landed, “Ulbricht behaved like a dictator” over local communists, whom he considered unfit to rule postwar Germany. Ulbricht had fled Nazi Germany to fight in the Spanish Civil War before retreating to exile in Moscow, and he didn’t hide his disdain for German communists who had remained inside the Third Reich but who had done so little to bring down Hitler—leaving the job to foreigners.

Ulbricht provided a preview of his leadership style when he received a group of a hundred communist district leaders in May 1945 to provide them with their orders. Several of them stood to argue that their most urgent task was to heal the social wounds from widespread incidents of Soviet soldiers raping German women. Some called upon Ulbricht to provide doctors with permission to abort the resulting pregnancies. Others sought a public condemnation of the Red Army’s excesses.

Ulbricht snapped. “People who get so worked up about such things today would have done much better to get worked up when Hitler began the war,” he said. “Any concession to these emotions is for us quite simply out of the question…. I will not allow the debate to be continued. The conference is adjourned.”

As would happen so often in the future, Ulbricht’s would-be opponents remained silent, assuming he had Stalin’s blessing. The truth was that Ulbricht exceeded Stalin’s orders from the beginning. One example came in 1946 when the Soviet dictator asked Ulbricht to fully merge his Communist Party of Germany, or KPD, with the less doctrinaire Social Democratic Party, SPD, to create a single Socialist Unity Party, or SED. Instead, Ulbricht purged enough of the SPD’s key figures to ensure his own leadership and a more dogmatic party than even Stalin had sought.

As late as April 1952, Stalin had told Ulbricht, “Although two states are being currently created in Germany, you should not shout about socialism at this point.” Stalin preferred a unified Germany with all its national resources, one that would exist outside America’s military embrace, rather than Ulbricht’s rump state inside the Soviet bloc. Ulbricht, however, had his own plans, and he campaigned to create a distinct and Stalinist East Germany through the nationalization of 80 percent of the industry and the exclusion from higher education of the children of so-called bourgeois parents.

By July 1952, Stalin had embraced Ulbricht’s plan for a draconian period of forced collectivization and greater social repression. Ulbricht’s convictions only grew deeper after Stalin’s death, when he survived at least two efforts by liberalizing party comrades to unseat him. Both failed after Soviet military interventions put down first the East German and then the Hungarian uprisings of 1953 and 1956—rebellions that had been inspired by reforms that Ulbricht had opposed.

Just as Ulbricht had been more determined than Stalin to create a Stalinist East Germany, he was also more determined than Khrushchev to protect his creation. Speaking to his Politburo on January 4, 1961, he bluntly blamed East Germany’s own shortcomings for 60 percent of all refugee departures. He declared that the party had to address housing shortages, low pay, and inadequate pensions, and that it must reduce the workweek from six to five days by 1962. He complained that 75 percent of those fleeing their country were under twenty-five years old, evidence that East German schools were not properly preparing young people.

The most important action of the Politburo’s emergency session was its approval of Ulbricht’s plan to create a highest-level working group whose purpose would be to design plans to “fundamentally stop” the refugee bleed. Ulbricht put his three most loyal, reliable, and resourceful lieutenants on the job: Minister for State Security Erich Honecker, Interior Minister Karl Maron, and Erich Mielke, the head of his vast secret police operation.

Having circled the communist wagons at home, he was ready to turn his attention to Khrushchev.

^{FEDERAL CHANCELLERY, BONN}

^{THURSDAY, JANUARY 5, 1961}

By tradition, Catholic and Protestant orphans arrived first to congratulate Konrad Adenauer on his eighty-fifth birthday. Shortly after ten in the morning, two boys dressed as dwarfs and a girl clad as Snow White entered the cabinet hall, where West Germany’s first and only chancellor was receiving well-wishers. One dwarf wore a red cap, blue cape, and red pants, and the other was dressed in a blue cap, red cape, and blue pants. Both shrank behind their identical white beards as the nuns pushed them forward to greet one of German history’s great men, who sniffled badly with a lingering cold.

The chancellor’s friends were convinced that Adenauer’s inconsolable concerns about Kennedy’s victory had worsened his illness, contracted before the election, from a cold to bronchitis and then to pneumonia. He was only now recovering. Though the chancellor had publicly praised Kennedy with false effusiveness, he feared privately that Americans had elected a man of dangerously flawed character and insufficient backbone. His intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, had provided Adenauer with reports of Kennedy’s sexual infidelities, a weakness the communists would know how to exploit. Yet Kennedy’s undisciplined personal behavior was just one of many reasons Adenauer concluded that Kennedy, forty-two years his junior, was “a cross between a junior naval person and a Roman Catholic Boy Scout,” both undisciplined and naive at the same time.

Adenauer knew Kennedy had little higher regard for him. The incoming president considered the chancellor a reactionary relic whose considerable influence in Washington had constrained U.S. flexibility in negotiations with the Soviets. Kennedy preferred that Adenauer be replaced in the upcoming elections by his Social Democrat opponent, Willy Brandt, the charming and handsome Berlin mayor, who at age forty-seven was presenting himself as the German Kennedy.

Adenauer faced four challenges in 1961: managing Kennedy, defeating Brandt, resisting Khrushchev, and wrestling with the inescapable biological fact of his own mortality. Nevertheless, the chancellor smiled with delight as Snow White and the dwarfs recited memorized rhymes about animals of the forest and their love for him. The children presented him with homemade gifts, and Adenauer, after wiping his dripping nose with a handkerchief, handed each of them some of his favorite Sarotti chocolates.

One of the great men in German history would be photographed for the next day’s newspapers standing ramrod stiff and looking oddly serious between two frightened-looking children in the attire of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

Call it the banality of success.

Adenauer’s young country was growing more robust by the month. The average annual growth of per capita income in the decade leading up to 1961 had been 6.5 percent. The country had reached full employment, driven by a manufacturing boom of everything from cars to machine tools, and it was now the world’s third-largest exporter. No other developed country was performing as well.

For all that accomplishment, Adenauer was an unlikely hero of sometimes comical contradictions. He was a buttoned-down man who sang German drinking songs with relish, a proper Catholic who like Churchill napped naked at midday, and a fierce anticommunist who ran his democracy with authoritarian zeal. He craved power but vacationed frequently on Italy’s Lake Como when the stress grew too great. He championed Western integration just as intensely as he feared U.S. abandonment. He loved Germany but feared German nationalism.

Dean Acheson, President Truman’s secretary of state, spoke of his longtime friend Adenauer as a man of “stiffness and inscrutability” who at the same time valued nothing more than good gossip or a close male friendship, which he opened up to cautiously but then nurtured over years irrespective of the individual’s continued position. Said Acheson, “He moves slowly, gestures sparingly, speaks quietly, smiles briefly, and chuckles rather than laughs when amused.” He particularly valued Adenauer’s sharp wit deployed against politicians who refused to learn history’s lessons. “God made a great mistake to limit the intelligence of man but not his stupidity,” Adenauer often told Acheson.

On the morning of his birthday celebration, Adenauer walked briskly to the cabinet hall, where he would receive his guests. An automobile accident in 1917 had left the chancellor with a medically rebuilt, parchment-like face that appeared more Tibetan than German. He had high cheekbones and blue, oriental eyes set apart by the flat bridge of his uneven nose. Some likened his profile to that of the Indian on the American nickel.

Adenauer’s twelve years in power had already equaled the length of Hitler’s reign, and he had used that time to undo much of the harm his predecessor had inflicted on Germany. While Hitler had excited nationalism, genocidal racism, and war, Adenauer projected a sense of serene and peaceful belonging to Europe, with himself as Germany’s custodian within the community of civilized nations.

Just eight years after the Third Reich’s collapse, Time magazine had made Adenauer its Man of the Year in 1953, calling his Germany “a world power once more…the strongest country on the continent save Soviet Russia.” He had built on that reputation since then, joining NATO and negotiating diplomatic relations with Khrushchev in Moscow in 1955, then easily leading his Christian Democrats to reelection with an absolute majority in 1957.

It was his conviction that the division of Germany and Berlin was more a consequence of East–West tension than its cause. Thus, the only safe way to reunite Germany was through European reunification as part of the Western community, and only after a larger U.S.–Soviet détente could be achieved. Adenauer thus had dismissed Stalin’s offer in early March 1952 that Germany be reunified, neutralized, demilitarized, de-Nazified, and evacuated by occupying powers.

Adenauer’s critics complained that this wasn’t the act of a visionary leader but rather the choice of an opportunistic politician. And it was true that the Catholic Rhinelander likely would have lost Germany’s first elections if the Protestant Prussians who dominated eastern Germany had joined in the vote. That said, Adenauer’s suspicion of Russian motivations was real and consistent. As he explained later, “The aim of the Russians was unambiguous. Soviet Russia had, like Tsarist Russia, an urge to acquire or subdue new territories in Europe.”

In Adenauer’s view, it was failing Allied determination after the war that had allowed the Soviets to swallow up a big piece of prewar Germany and install subservient governments across Eastern Europe. That had left his western Germany “between two power blocs standing for totally opposed ideals. We had to join the one or the other side if we did not want to be ground up between them.” For Adenauer, neutrality had never been an option, and he wished to join the side that shared his views of political liberty and personal freedoms.

Over the two days of his birthday celebration, choreographed more for a monarch than a democratic leader, Adenauer received European leaders, ambassadors, German Jewish leaders, political party chiefs, union bosses, editors, industrialists, folkloric groups in colorful costumes, and his political opponent Willy Brandt. Cologne’s archbishop bestowed blessings. Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss led a delegation of generals.

Time was allotted like scarce rations: family members got twenty minutes, cabinet members ten, and lesser mortals five. Adenauer had fumed in protest when the West German press reported, on the basis of leaks from inside his own government, that it was because of his fragile health that Adenauer’s eighty-fifth birthday celebration had been extended over two days, thus providing him sufficient recovery time between visitors. The real cause for the prolonged observance, Adenauer insisted, was that his protocol people couldn’t cram into a single day the hordes who wanted to congratulate Der Alte, or “the Old Man,” as his countrymen endearingly knew him.

Hovering darkly over the entire celebration were Adenauer’s concerns about Kennedy. Few issues differentiated the Kennedy administration from the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies more than their attitudes toward Adenauer and his West Germany.

During his election campaign, Kennedy had said of Adenauer, “The real trouble is that he is too old and I am too young for us to understand each other.” But the problem went beyond the fact that Adenauer was one year short of being twice Kennedy’s age. More telling were differences of character and background that gave them little common ground upon which to build other than their shared Catholicism.

Kennedy had been born into a life of wealth and privilege and as an adult had surrounded himself with glamour and beautiful women. He impatiently sought new ideas and solutions to old problems. Adenauer had been raised in the austere, late-nineteenth-century home of a stern civil servant father who had survived the Battle of Königgrätz, the largest military confrontation until that time in Europe, which had opened the way to German unification. Adenauer prized order, experience, and reflection, while he distrusted Kennedy’s reliance on flair, instinct, and razzmatazz.

President Eisenhower had considered Adenauer one of the great men of twentieth-century history, a man who had countered nationalist and neutralist instincts among Germans. In Eisenhower’s view, Adenauer helped provide both the philosophy and the means for the Western containment of Soviet communism, arguing that greater Western military strength had to be a prerequisite for successful negotiations with the Soviets.

Eisenhower’s National Security Council summed up its admiration for Adenauer in a top-secret report handed to the Kennedy transition team. “The main German development of 1960 was a marked increase in self-reliance and independence,” said the NSC’s Operations Coordinating Board, which implemented foreign policy across all U.S. agencies. It said West Germany had emerged as a national state and was no longer viewed by its population as a temporary construct pending unification. Instead, it said, West Germany was “successor to the Reich and the essential framework of the reunited Germany of the future.”

It gave the “firmly established rule of Adenauer” full credit for creating a country that was so successful that even the wayward Social Democrats had abandoned doctrinaire socialism and accommodation with the Soviets in order to give themselves an electoral chance. The group praised West Germany’s sound and strong economy, its hard currency, its export success, and its home market, which all together had produced a labor shortage even while the population was increasing.

U.S. Ambassador to Bonn Walter Dowling joined the enthusiasm for Adenauer in his own transition memo. “His self-confidence, fed by the conviction that his grasp of the political verities has been fully vindicated by the events of recent years, is unimpaired. At eighty-five, he still identifies his exercise of political power with the well-being and destiny of the German people. He sees his victory in the coming elections as necessary to the continued security and prosperity of the country.” Dowling’s bottom line: “Adenauer remains the controlling influence at the center of political life, his political instincts still acutely alive.”

None of that swayed Kennedy from his contrasting view, first laid out in an article in Foreign Affairs in the autumn of 1957 and still circulated and read with concern by those closest to Adenauer. The then junior senator from Massachusetts complained that the Eisenhower administration, like Truman’s before it, “let itself be lashed too tightly to a single German government and party. Whatever elections show, the age of Adenauer is over.” He thought the socialist opposition had proved its loyalty to the West and that the U.S. had to prepare for democratic transitions across Europe. “The United States is ill-advised to chase the shadows of the past and ignore the political leadership and thinking of the generation which is now coming of age,” Kennedy had written.

The Eisenhower National Security Council portrayed Adenauer not as history’s shadow but as a man whose influence had only grown with his increased parliamentary majority from the 1957 elections. With France’s de Gaulle turning more nationalist and anti-American, the NSC regarded Adenauer as the crucial link both for continued European integration and closer transatlantic relations. Beyond that, Adenauer’s Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss had vigorously pursued a military buildup that was making West Germany the largest European contingent in NATO, with 291,000 men, eleven divisions, and modern weapons systems.

But at the same time the NSC sounded warning bells about trends that could endanger the relationship, strains that could grow more pronounced should the personal links erode between the men who ran both countries. West Germans were tiring of their prolonged division, the report said, and were beginning to doubt whether they could rely on Washington’s commitment. They despaired that the most likely U.S.–Soviet conflict would be fought on their territory and over German corpses.

Kennedy’s election had fed Adenauer’s fears of being abandoned by the U.S., which had only increased since the death in May 1959 of his friend and staunchest U.S. supporter, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state. Adenauer calmed his restless nights only with larger doses of sleeping tablets. Adenauer dismissed Kennedy’s brilliant young advisers, known by others as “New Frontiersmen,” as “Harvard prima donnas,” theoreticians who “had never served at the political front.”

Adenauer was painfully aware of Kennedy’s doubts about him. As far back as 1951, after then Congressman Kennedy made his first political visit to Germany, the young man had concluded it was Social Democratic leader Kurt Schumacher, and not Chancellor Adenauer, who was “the strongest of Germany’s political figures.” Schumacher, who had lost narrowly in West Germany’s first elections two years earlier, would have been ready to take Stalin’s deal of unification for neutrality and thus forgo both deeper West European integration and NATO membership. Acheson had considered Schumacher a “bitter and violent man” determined to weaken Germany’s links with the West. Even after his death in 1952, Schumacher’s Social Democrats continued to oppose West Germany’s NATO membership in 1955.

It wasn’t the first time Kennedy had gotten Germany wrong. While traveling through Europe as a student in 1937, four years into Hitler’s rule, he had written in his diary: “Went to bed early…The general impression seems to be there will not be a war in the near future and that France is much too well prepared for Germany. The permanence of the alliance of Germany and Italy is also questionable.”

Adenauer’s successful 1957 campaign slogan and his advice to Eisenhower on Berlin and the Soviets were the same: No experiments. Yet Kennedy’s campaign had been all about experimentation; he believed underlying changes in Soviet society offered the chance of more fruitful negotiations. “We should be ready to take risks to bring about a thaw in the Cold War,” he said at the time, suggesting a new approach to the Russians that might end “the frozen, belligerent, brink-of-war phase…of the long Cold War.”

Adenauer considered such talk naive, an attitude that had hardened following his historic trip to Moscow in 1955 to open diplomatic relations and free German prisoners of war. Adenauer had held out hope that he could bring home as many as 190,000 POWs and 130,000 German civilian captives out of the 750,000 who were believed to have been captured or kidnapped and then imprisoned.

Nothing in Adenauer’s life had prepared him for the verbal abuse and battering talks that followed. When the Soviets informed their German visitor that only 9,628 German “war criminals” remained in Soviet gulags, Adenauer asked what had become of the rest. “Where are they?” Khrushchev had exploded. “In the ground! In the cold, Soviet ground!”

Adenauer had been shaken by “a man who was, without a doubt, crafty, shrewd, clever, and very savvy, yet at the same time crude and without compunctions…. He pounded his fist on the table, half wildly. So I showed my fist as well, and that is what he understood.”

Khrushchev got the better of Adenauer, gaining de facto recognition of East Germany in exchange for so few living POWs. For the first time, Adenauer accepted that there would be two ambassadors from the two Germanys in Moscow. The physical strain from the trip left Adenauer with double pneumonia. Die Zeit correspondent Countess Marion Dönhoff wrote, “The freedom of 10,000 was bought at the price of the servitude of 17 million.” The U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Charles Bohlen, wrote, “They traded prisoners for the legalization of the division of Germany.”

Having never forgotten this unsettling encounter, Adenauer worried Kennedy would fare even worse with Khrushchev, though the stakes would be far higher. For that reason, Adenauer had only badly hidden his preference for Nixon over Kennedy. Adenauer even sent Nixon a condolence letter after he lost the election, saying, “I can only imagine the way you feel now.” The suggestion was clear: he shared Nixon’s pain.

However, on his eighty-fifth birthday, Adenauer briefly put aside such concerns and basked in the adulation of admirers.

The morning began as Adenauer had choreographed it at a Mass read by his son Paul at St. Elisabeth Hospital in Bonn, followed by a breakfast with doctors and nurses. He then joined a Catholic service in Rhöndorf, a neat village of tidy homes with well-tended flower boxes just across the Rhine from Bonn, where he had settled in retreat from the Nazis in 1935. The official explanation for choosing Bonn as West Germany’s provisional capital was to avoid the greater permanence that would have been associated with a major city. However, Germans knew the choice also suited Adenauer’s lifestyle.

In Bonn, things were as Adenauer liked them—unruffled and in their place. The crisis of Berlin some four hundred miles away was real, but Adenauer seldom visited the city, the Prussian charms of which were lost on the Rhinelander. He considered Germany, like ancient Gaul, to be a country of three parts defined by its chosen alcoholic beverage. He called Prussia the Germany of schnapps drinkers, Bavaria the land of beer drinkers, and his Rhineland a place of wine drinkers. Of the three, Adenauer believed only wine drinkers were sober enough to rule the others.

The chancellor’s office window looked out upon barren winter trees to the morning shimmer of the Rhine. His room was simply decorated: an old grandfather clock, a Winston Churchill painting of a Greek temple (a personal gift from the artist), and a fourteenth-century sculpted Madonna, presented to him by his Cabinet on his seventy-fifth birthday. Roses that Adenauer raised and cut himself rested in a delicate crystal vase on the shiny surface of the polished credenza behind his desk. If he had not been a politician, he told friends, he would have been a gardener.

His birthday celebration ran according to the same sense of order, aside from Adenauer’s indulgence of twenty-one grandchildren. They romped through his Cabinet Hall as West Germany’s President Heinrich Lübke praised the irreversible nature of the chancellor’s achievements. Economics minister Ludwig Erhard declared that, thanks to Adenauer, the German people had rejoined the community of free peoples.

In all, Adenauer received 300 guests and 150 gifts during his two-day celebration. But no visit was more revealing than that of Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt, who at age forty-seven was both Adenauer’s opponent and his opposite. Born Herbert Frahm, the illegitimate son of a Lübeck shop assistant, he was a lifelong leftist who had fled the Gestapo to Norway, where he changed his name for safety. When the Germans invaded Norway, he relocated to Sweden and remained there until the war’s end.

That Brandt was paying his respects was a reflection of how far West German politics had come. The Social Democrats had concluded that their policy platform of neutrality and closeness to the Soviets would never get them elected. So in 1959 at their Bad Godesberg party conference, and again in November 1960, when they elected Brandt as their leader, they revised their domestic program and embraced West Germany’s NATO membership.

The SPD’s shift to the right could not have been more apparent at Adenauer’s birthday procession. A year earlier on Adenauer’s birthday, the Social Democrat press service had accused him of abusing power and acting autocratically and cynically in executing his country’s highest office. A mid-ranking official had dropped off some carnations. This year Brandt himself visited, and SPD parliamentary leader Carlo Schmid personally delivered eighty-five red tea roses.

Still, Adenauer did not trust the conversion of Brandt or his socialists. He considered Brandt a particularly treacherous opponent due to his charm and significant political skills, and because he represented the more electable center of the Social Democratic Party. So Adenauer applied one of his political maxims: he portrayed his most dangerous foe as the most despicable of characters and questioned the origins of his birth and the genuineness of his patriotism. Adenauer told his party’s ruling council, “Consideration must now be given to what can be said about Brandt’s background….” He told another party gathering later, “Whoever wants to be chancellor must have character and a clean past, because the people must trust him.”

When Brandt asked Adenauer to his face whether such unfriendly competition was really necessary, the chancellor protested with false innocence, “I would tell you, if I had anything against you,” and then he continued conspiring against Brandt. Some questioned whether Adenauer at his age should seek another term, but nothing injected him with more youthful energy than the necessity of defeating the socialists.

In a New Year’s radio interview, Adenauer set the standard low for what would constitute success in 1961. When pressed about his ambitions, he said, “I would say that 1961 will have twelve months. No one can dispute that. What will happen in those twelve months no one in the world knows…. Thank God that the year 1960 did not bring any catastrophe down upon our heads. And we want to work hard and diligently in 1961 as before. I hope 1961 will also be free of catastrophes for us.”

So that was Der Alte’s fondest dream: a year free from disaster—providing more time to erode the Soviet bloc through his policy of strength and Western integration. He was convinced Khrushchev would test Kennedy in 1961 and that Germany’s future would lie in the balance. At a Cabinet meeting he held on the fringes of his birthday celebration, he said, “We will all need to keep our nerves. No one will be able to do that by himself. We have to do that in a common effort.”

At the end of the long celebration, Adenauer’s secretary Anneliese Poppinga remarked that the chancellor must feel wonderful seeing such adulation.

Waving his hand, Adenauer said, “Do you really think so? A good feeling? When you are as old as I am, you stand alone. All the people I knew, all those I cared for, my two wives, my friends, are dead. No one is left. It is a sad day.”

As he scanned stacks of written congratulations with her, he spoke of the stress of the year ahead: the trips in the coming days to Paris, London, and Washington, and the need to keep Brandt down and Berlin free. “Old people are a burden,” he said. “I can understand those who talk so much about my age and who want to be rid of me. Don’t let all the attention today fool you. Most don’t know how I am and that I remain so healthy. They think that with my eighty-five years I must be tottering and not right in my head.”

He then laid his papers to the side, stood, and said with a sigh to his secretary in his flawless Italian, “La fortuna sta sempre all’altra riva”—Good fortune always lies on the far side of the river.

Yet even in Adenauer’s darkest moments, he knew the buoyant Federal Republic of Germany, through the irrepressible dynamism of its economy and the free agency of its people, was winning the struggle against communism. No matter what dangers Adenauer foresaw from President Kennedy’s inexperience or Mayor Brandt’s socialism, none of them amounted to the existential threat facing Ulbricht’s East Germany: the refugee exodus.

The Failed Flight of Friedrich Brandt

Friedrich Brandt was hiding in his family barn’s hayloft when the East German Volkspolizei burst through the front door of his nearby home. Brandt knew his crime: he was resisting the state-mandated collectivization of his family farm, which had been the Brandt property and livelihood through four generations.

Brandt’s wife wept and his thirteen-year-old son Friedel stood in stony silence while police ransacked every room, dumping out drawers, overturning mattresses, cutting open picture frames, and tipping over bookshelves in the pursuit of incriminating evidence. However, they already had all the proof they required in a letter that Farmer Brandt had written several weeks earlier to East German President Wilhelm Pieck.

Brandt was confident that Pieck, a trained carpenter whom he considered a hardworking man of integrity, would protect his country’s farmers and their property if only someone would tell him about collectivization’s excesses and its costs to agricultural production:

Brandt was just one among thousands of East Germans who had fallen victim to Ulbricht’s accelerated efforts at agricultural collectivization and the completion of his industrial nationalization under his second five-year plan for 1956–1960. The East German leader had executed the Stalinist plan with a vengeance after two efforts by reformers to oust him had been defeated, and the uprisings of 1953 and 1956 showed Soviet leaders that the cost of a too-liberal East German leadership was dissolution.

The first two years of the plan had introduced an impressive 6,000 agricultural cooperatives—which quickly became known by the abbreviation LPG, short for the lengthy German name Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft. For Ulbricht, that was insufficient, as 70 percent of all arable land still belonged to the country’s 750,000 privately owned farms. So in 1958 and 1959, the Communist Party sent agitation teams to villages throughout the country to cajole and threaten the locals into “voluntary” collectivization. By the end of 1959, the state set unachievable quota measures for those farmers who remained private. The State Security Directorate then began to imprison farmers who resisted collectivization.

Brandt had been one of the few holdouts. The state sector’s 19,000 LPGs and dozens of other state farms controlled 90 percent of the arable land by then and produced 90 percent of its agricultural products. It was a remarkable achievement for Ulbricht, coming while he reduced private enterprise’s share of total industrial production to only 9 percent. The cost, however, was that tens of thousands of the country’s most skilled business leaders and farmers had fled the country, and state enterprises were being run by individuals more skilled at party fealty than at effective management.

Having terrorized the Brandt family, the People’s Police left his farm before even trying to find their missing suspect. They had restricted his and his wife’s ability to travel or flee to the West by taking their identity papers, which left them naked in a country of frequent, random document checks. Authorities would return later to arrest Herr Brandt for resisting collectivization and conspiracy to commit the further crime of Republikflucht, or flight from the Republic, which carried a prison sentence of three years.

So Brandt decided to leave the country that night, joining the four million who had left the Soviet zone and then East Germany from war’s end until 1961. To avoid possible police inspections on public transport, he rode his bicycle for four hours through the night to the home of his wife’s sister in East Berlin near a border crossing on a bridge over the Teltow Canal. She offered to conceal him, but after a short conversation Brandt decided to make his way west before the border posts had his description or police began checking the homes of his relatives the next morning. The odds were good that Brandt would be spared any identity check, along with the tens of thousands of others who safely crossed the open border each day for work, shopping, and social visits.

After she heard the next day from her sister about her husband’s decision, Brandt’s wife decided to flee as well, along with her son. With their farm lost and her husband likely to be already safely in the West, it was an easy decision. Her sister, with whom she shared a resemblance, provided her with identity papers with which she could travel. If she was caught, to protect her sister she would say she had stolen the documents. Life meant nothing to her without her Friedrich.

When stopped by East German police on the same bridge her husband likely had crossed, she collapsed on the ground and cried from the tension. She was certain she had been found out. But luck was on her side that evening. In the random ways that determined East German life, the border police gave Frau Brandt’s papers only a cursory look and allowed her to pass.

When she arrived with her son at the Marienfelde refugee camp in West Berlin, the administrator running the registration office said no one of her husband’s name or description had arrived. After she waited and worried for three days, a friend arrived from their village and reported that Friedrich Brandt had been captured and jailed before he could cross the border. The charge was one that Ulbricht was employing frequently: “endangerment of the public order and antisocial activities.” In a touch of irony, authorities had further justified his imprisonment by pointing to his letter’s slanderous contention that East Germany was a land of injustice.

Brandt’s village friend urged her to remain in the West, but she protested: “What should I do alone with the boy in the West? I cannot allow Friedrich to sit in a jail there with no one to help him.”

She returned home the next morning with her boy, hoping she could still land a job on the collective farm to sustain their diminished family while Friedrich was in prison. Their brief freedom became years of quiet desperation as they disappeared into East Germany’s drab society, quietly awaiting his release.

Friedrich Brandt’s arrest was a small victory for Ulbricht. But he knew he would lose the larger war on refugees without far more decisive help from Khrushchev.

6 ULBRICHT AND ADENAUER: THE TAIL WAGS THE BEAR

^{EAST BERLIN}

^{WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 1961}

Walter Ulbricht had never written a letter of greater consequence. Though it was marked SECRET, Ulbricht knew that what he was about to send to Khrushchev would also circulate among all the top Soviet leader ship. Separately, he would forward copies to other communist allies who might support the new pressure he was placing on the Soviet leader.

Every word of the East German leader’s fifteen-page correspondence was written for maximum impact. Just two short months after their last meeting in Moscow, Ulbricht had again lost faith that Khrushchev would get the job done in Berlin. He rejected Khrushchev’s plea for patience, feeling his problems were growing too rapidly to be laid aside until Khrushchev could test relations with Kennedy.

“Since Comrade Khrushchev’s statement on the West Berlin question in November 1958, two years have flown by,” Ulbricht complained. In a brief concession to Khrushchev, the East German leader acknowledged the Soviet leader had used the time to convince more countries that “the abnormal situation in West Berlin must be eliminated.” But he spent most of the letter arguing why it was finally time to act on Berlin and how to do so. Even Moscow’s NATO adversaries, Ulbricht argued, knew negotiations to change West Berlin’s status “are unavoidable.”

Conditions in the coming year favored communist action, Ulbricht argued, because Adenauer would want to avoid a disruptive conflict before his September elections, and Kennedy would go to great lengths to prevent a confrontation during his first year in office.

Ulbricht then brazenly issued what he called “GDR demands.” Writing more as the ruler than the ruled, Ulbricht listed in detail what he expected of Khrushchev in the coming year. He wanted him to end postwar Allied occupation rights in West Berlin, bring about the reduction and then withdrawal of Western troops, and ensure the removal of Western radio stations and spy services with all their subversive influences.

His catalog of expectations was lengthy, touching on issues small and large. From Khrushchev, he sought the transfer to East Germany of all the state functions in Berlin that were still controlled by the four powers, ranging from postal services to air control. In particular, he wanted control of all air access to West Berlin from West Germany, which would provide him with the capability to shut down the daily scheduled and chartered flights that were ferrying tens of thousands of refugees to new homes and better-paying jobs in West Germany.

If Ulbricht could control all access to West Berlin, he could also squeeze it and over time erode its viability as a free, Western city. Ulbricht knew he was suggesting something similar to Stalin’s failed Berlin Blockade of 1948, but he used Khrushchev’s own arguments that the Soviets would be more likely to succeed this time because Moscow had closed the gap on Western military superiority and faced a less determined adversary in Kennedy than had been the case with Truman.

On three matters, Ulbricht demanded that Khrushchev make immediate decisions and announce them publicly.

The tail was furiously trying to wag the bear.

First, he wanted Khrushchev to issue a statement that Moscow would ratchet up Soviet economic assistance to the GDR to show the West that “economic blackmail” against his country could not succeed. Second, he appealed to Khrushchev to announce that there would be an East German–Soviet summit in April to raise the standing of Ulbricht and his country in negotiations with the West. Finally, he demanded that the Soviet leader convene a Warsaw Pact summit to rally Moscow’s allies to support East Germany militarily and economically. Thus far, Ulbricht complained, these countries had been unhelpful bystanders. “Although they report in the press about these problems,” wrote Ulbricht, “they basically feel uninvolved in this matter.”

Ulbricht reminded Khrushchev that it was the Soviets who had stuck East Germany with such an impossible starting point from which Ulbricht now had to defend the Kremlin’s global standing. “We are a state,” he lectured Khrushchev, “which was created without having and still does not have a raw material base, and which stands with open borders at the center of the competition between two world systems.”

Ulbricht groused to Khrushchev that the Kremlin had deeply damaged East Germany during the first ten postwar years by extracting economic resources through reparations, including the complete withdrawal of factories, while the U.S. had built up West Germany through the enormous financial support and credits of the Marshall Plan.

Perhaps reparations had been justified at the time, Ulbricht conceded, given all of the Soviets’ wartime suffering and the need to strengthen the Soviet Union as the world communist leader. But now, Ulbricht argued, Khrushchev should recognize how much such measures had damaged East Germany in its competition with West Germany. From the war’s end through 1954, Ulbricht said, the per capita investment in West Germany had been double that in East Germany. “This is the main reason that we have remained so far behind West Germany in labor productivity and standard of living,” he wrote.

In short, Ulbricht was telling Khrushchev: You got us into this mess, and you have the most to lose if we don’t survive, so now help get us out. Ulbricht escalated the economic demands he had made in November, which Khrushchev had mostly accepted. “The booming economy in West Germany, which is visible to every citizen of the GDR, is the primary reason that in the last ten years around two million people have left our republic,” he said, adding that it was also what allowed the West Germans to apply “constant political pressure.”

An East German worker had to labor three times as long as a West German to buy a pair of shoes, if he could find them at all. East Germany had 8 cars per 1,000 people, compared with 67 per 1,000 in West Germany. The East German official growth rate of 8 percent came nowhere near measuring the real situation for most citizens, since the figures were inflated by heavy industrial exports to the Soviets that did nothing to satisfy consumers at home. The result in 1960, when West German per capita income was double that of East Germans, was a 32 percent increase in refugees, from 140,000 to 185,000, or 500 daily.

Because of all that, Ulbricht appealed to Khrushchev to dramatically reduce the remaining East German reparations to the Soviet Union, and to increase supplies of raw materials, semifinished goods, and basic foodstuffs like meat and butter. He also sought new emergency loans, having already asked Khrushchev to sell gold to help East Germany. “If it is not possible to give us this credit, then we cannot maintain the standard of living of the population at the level of 1960,” he wrote. “We would enter into such a serious situation in supplies and production that we would be faced with serious crisis manifestations.”

Ulbricht’s message to Khrushchev was clear: If you don’t help now and urgently, you will face the prospect of another uprising. Khrushchev had barely survived the 1957 coup attempt that had followed Budapest, so Ulbricht knew the Soviet leader could not ignore his warning.

Ulbricht was combining maximalist demands with threats of dire consequences if Khrushchev failed to act. His letter might offend the Soviet leader, but that was the least of Ulbricht’s worries. Khrushchev’s failure to act could bring the end of East Germany—and of Ulbricht.

On the same day, Ulbricht sent an indirect but just as unmistakable message through Khrushchev’s nemesis: Beijing.

Ulbricht did not seek Khrushchev’s permission, nor did he provide prior notice before dispatching a high-level mission to China’s capital, led by Politburo member and party loyalist Hermann Matern. Given Ulbricht’s insider knowledge of Khrushchev’s ugly dispute with Mao, it was an unfriendly act in both timing and execution.

It was only the inescapable flight route through Moscow that alerted the Soviet leadership to the mission. Yuri Andropov, then the Politburo member responsible for Socialist Party relations, asked to be briefed on the trip during the delegation’s airport layover. Matern insisted the mission’s purpose was purely economic, and Ulbricht knew Khrushchev could not object at a time when East Germany’s needs were growing and the Kremlin was complaining about the cost of satisfying them.

But everything about the trip’s timing and choreography was political. In China, the group was received by Vice Premier Chen Yi, Mao’s confidant and a legendary communist commander during the Sino-Japanese War and marshal of the People’s Liberation Army. He told Matern that China regarded its Taiwan problem and Ulbricht’s East German problem as having “very much in common.” They both involved areas of “imperialist occupation” of integral pieces of communist countries.

In a direct challenge to Khrushchev, the East Germans and the Chinese agreed to assist each other in their efforts to recover these territories. The Chinese view was that Taiwan was the eastern front and Berlin the western front of a global ideological struggle—and Khrushchev was faltering in both places as world communist leader. Beyond that, Chen promised that China would help get the Americans out of Berlin because the situation there affected all other fronts in the global communist struggle.

Chen reminded the East Germans that communist China had shelled the Taiwanese islands of Quemoy and Matsu in 1955, causing a crisis during which Eisenhower’s Joint Chiefs had considered a nuclear response. This happened, he said, not because China had wanted to increase international tensions, but rather because Beijing had needed “to show the USA and the whole world that we have not come to terms with the current [Taiwan] status. We as well had to remove the impression that the USA is so powerful that no one dares to do something and one must come to terms with all of its humiliations.”

His suggestion was that the same determination was now necessary regarding Berlin.

The warmth of the East German–Chinese exchange was in sharp contrast to the Sino–Soviet chill that had set in. Ulbricht knew from his November meeting with Khrushchev in Moscow how competitive the Soviet leader felt toward Mao, and he had already played that card to successfully increase Moscow’s economic support. Khrushchev had declared at the time that he would provide East Germany with the sort of economic assistance Mao could not, creating joint enterprises with the East Germans on Soviet territory—something the Soviets had done with no other ally. “We aren’t China,” he declared to Ulbricht. “We are not afraid of giving the Germans a boost…. The needs of the GDR are our needs.”

Three months later, the Chinese were becoming an ever greater problem for Khrushchev, despite the apparent truce he had negotiated with them at the November gathering of Communist Parties in Moscow. While the East Germans were in Beijing seeking economic assistance, China was in Tirana encouraging xenophobic Albanian leader Enver Hoxha to break with the Soviet Union. During the Fourth Congress of the Albanian Communist Party, from February 13 to 21, Albanian communists had torn down public portraits of Khrushchev and replaced them with those of Mao, Stalin, and Hoxha. Never had a Soviet leader suffered such humiliation in his own realm.

Ulbricht’s course of greater diplomatic pressures on Khrushchev had its risks.

The far more powerful Khrushchev might have decided it was finally time to replace Ulbricht with a more submissive and obedient East German leader. He might have decided the China mission had crossed some impermissible line. However, Ulbricht had gambled correctly that Khrushchev had no good alternatives.

^{THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW}

^{MONDAY, JANUARY 30, 1961}

Khrushchev’s response landed on Ulbricht’s desk twelve days after the East German leader had written to him and, by coincidence, on the day of John F. Kennedy’s State of the Union speech. Given the impertinence of Ulbricht’s demands, Khrushchev’s letter was surprisingly submissive.

The Soviet leader reported to Ulbricht that the Central Committee “has discussed your letter carefully” and that Moscow’s leaders agreed with much of it. The fact that Khrushchev had shared it with party bosses showed that he recognized the gravity of Ulbricht’s criticisms and the urgency of his requests. That said, Khrushchev again asked Ulbricht to contain his mounting impatience.

“Currently, we are beginning to initiate a detailed discussion of these questions with Kennedy,” he wrote. “The probe which we carried out shows that we need a little time until Kennedy stakes out his position on the German question more clearly and until it is clear whether the USA government wants to achieve a mutually acceptable resolution.”

The Soviet leader conceded that the extreme measures Ulbricht had suggested in his letter “under the circumstances” would prove necessary. “If we do not succeed in coming to an understanding with Kennedy, we will, as agreed, choose together with you the time for their implementation.”

Ulbricht had achieved less than he had sought, but more than he might have considered probable. Khrushchev again would ratchet up economic assistance. The Soviet leader would also convene a Warsaw Pact meeting on Berlin. Of all Ulbricht’s demands, Khrushchev refused to agree only to the East German–Soviet summit.

Khrushchev had accepted Ulbricht’s diagnosis of the problem, and he had not rejected the steps Ulbricht had suggested toward a cure. Ulbricht could be satisfied that he had penetrated and influenced Soviet Communist Party thinking on Berlin at the highest levels.

Khrushchev was still buying time to work the new American president. However, Ulbricht had put all the pieces in place to move forward decisively at the moment Khrushchev’s efforts to negotiate a Berlin deal with Kennedy failed. And the East German leader was certain they would.

In the meantime, Ulbricht would put his team to work on contingencies.

^{THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1961}

The clouds were already gathering around the U.S.–West German relationship when Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano di Tremezzo walked into the Oval Office with his satchel full of Adenauer’s concerns.

For several years, Americans had been warming to the West Germans, impressed by their embrace of U.S.-style freedoms. Now, however, public opinion was turning more negative again, fed by media reports about the impending trial in Israel of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and publicity around William L. Shirer’s best-selling book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, with all its sordid new details about the not-so-distant German past.

The West German foreign office had warned Adenauer at the beginning of the year: “There are still some resentments and suspicions which lie dormant under the surface, but which are ready to break out under certain stimuli.” In exasperation at the shifting mood, West German ambassador Wilhelm Grewe told a group of U.S. journalists at a conference of the Atlantik-Brücke, an institution created to bring the two countries closer, that they had “to choose whether they consider us as allies or a hopeless nation of troublemakers.”

Kennedy’s briefing papers for the Brentano meeting warned the president that his visitor was coming to express Adenauer’s concern that his administration might sell out West German interests in Berlin in exchange for a deal with the Soviets. “The Germans are acutely aware that vital aspects of their destiny are in hands other than their own,” said the position paper, signed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk. It advised Kennedy to both reassure Brentano of continued U.S. commitment to West Berlin’s defense and share with him as much of the president’s thinking as possible about the possibility of Berlin negotiations with Moscow.

Given past experience, however, U.S. officials distrusted their West German partners’ ability to keep a secret. American intelligence services assumed that their West German counterparts were infiltrated and thus unreliable. “While frankness is desirable particularly in view of the chronic German sense of insecurity,” the Rusk memo said, “the German government does not have a good record for retaining confidences.”

Detractors said that Brentano—a fifty-seven-year-old bachelor whose life was his job and its trappings—was little more than the genteel, cultured instrument of the strong-willed Adenauer, and the foreign minister did little to alter this impression. Adenauer was determined to run his own foreign policy, and no independent actor could remain long in Brentano’s job. Where Brentano and Adenauer did differ was their attitude regarding Germany’s European calling. While Brentano was of a younger generation that considered Europe as Germany’s natural destiny, Adenauer regarded European integration more as a means of suppressing German nationalism.

Kennedy opened what would be a stiff meeting with Brentano by speaking from a script about “the appreciation of the U.S. government for the cooperation and friendship of the German government during the past years.” He very much wanted to arrange a meeting soon with Adenauer, he said, and hoped “that all mutual problems would be worked out satisfactorily.”

Adenauer’s political opponent Willy Brandt had already manipulated matters so that he would arrive in Washington ahead of Adenauer in March for a personal meeting with Kennedy, a breach of the usual protocol that put the head of an Allied government before any city mayor. Rusk had supported the Brandt visit to keep “freshly before the world our determination to support West Berlin at all costs.” He wanted the Adenauer meeting to follow as closely thereafter as possible to avoid giving the impression that Kennedy favored Brandt in upcoming German elections, which of course he did.

Kennedy reassured Brentano that his failure to mention Berlin by name in the inaugural address or in his State of the Union, a matter that had become such an issue in the German press, “did not by any means signify a lessening of United States interest in the Berlin question.” He said he had merely wanted to avoid provoking the Soviets at a time of relative calm in the city. Kennedy told the foreign minister that he expected Moscow to renew pressure on Berlin in the coming months, and he wanted Brentano’s suggestions about how one could best counter “the subtle pressures” Moscow was likely to exert.

Brentano said Berlin’s absence from Kennedy’s speeches was of such little concern that it had not even been in talking points Adenauer had given him. He agreed there was no reason yet to raise the Berlin question, but added, “We would have to deal with it sooner or later.” Brentano frowned, declaring, “The leaders of the Soviet Zone cannot tolerate the symbol of a free Berlin in the midst of their Red Zone.” He told Kennedy that East German leaders “will do all in their power to stimulate the Soviet Union to action with regard to Berlin.”

On the positive side, Brentano estimated that 90 percent of the East Berlin population opposed the East German regime, which he called the region’s second-harshest communist system after that of Czechoslovakia. His message was that the people in both Germanys heavily favored its Western version and therefore would over time support unification.

Kennedy probed deeper. He worried the Soviets would unilaterally sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and then cut short West Berlin’s freedom, maintaining the status quo for only a brief period in order to mollify the West.

Brentano agreed such a course was probable, so Kennedy asked what the NATO allies should do about it.

Brentano described to Kennedy his chancellor’s “policy of strength” approach, and said the Soviets would “hesitate to take drastic steps with regard to Berlin as long as they know that the Western Allies will not tolerate any such steps.” As long as Kennedy remained firm, he said, the Soviets “may continue to threaten but will not take any actual steps for some time to come.” However, Brentano agreed that recent U.S. setbacks in the Congo, Laos, and Latin America all increased the chance that the Soviets would test Kennedy over Berlin.

As if to prove Brentano’s point, Khrushchev simultaneously escalated pressures on Adenauer in Bonn.

^{FEDERAL CHANCELLERY, BONN}

^{FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1961}

Ambassador Andrei Smirnov’s urgent requests for meetings with Adenauer were seldom good news.

It was invariably Smirnov, Khrushchev’s envoy in Bonn, who was the vehicle for the Soviet leader’s bullying. So the West German chancellor was already apprehensive upon receiving Smirnov’s demand for an immediate meeting, considering that its timing coincided with his foreign minister’s visit to the White House.

More often than not, Smirnov was a charming and courteous diplomat who delivered the fiercest communication with a calm demeanor and outside the public spotlight. A rare exception had come the previous October, when he had exploded in rage at the comments of Adenauer’s number two, Ludwig Erhard, to a visiting delegation of two hundred African leaders from twenty-four countries, many of them newly independent. “Colonialism has been overcome,” Erhard had said, “but worse than colonialism is imperialism of the Communist totalitarian pattern.”

Before storming out of the hall, Smirnov rose from the audience and shouted, “You talk about freedom, but Germany killed twenty million people in our country!” It was a rare public display of the enduring Russian resentment toward Germans.

This time Smirnov’s task was a more familiar one. He was presenting Adenauer with a nine-point, 2,862-word aide-mémoire from Khrushchev that would provide the most compelling evidence yet during the Kennedy administration that Khrushchev had again turned confrontational on Berlin. Soviet intelligence reports tracked Adenauer’s doubts regarding Kennedy’s reliability, and Khrushchev was wagering that Adenauer might be more susceptible to Soviet entreaties than he had been under the more dependable Truman or Eisenhower.

“An entirely abnormal situation has emerged in West Berlin, which is being abused for subversive activities against the German Democratic Republic, the USSR and other socialist states,” the Khrushchev document said in clear, undiplomatic language. “This cannot be allowed to go on. Either one continues down the path of an increasingly dangerous worsening of relations between countries and military conflict, or one concludes a peace treaty.”

The aide-mémoire, written in the tone of a personal letter from Khrushchev to Adenauer, called Berlin the most important issue in Soviet–German relations. It criticized what it called ever louder and more emphatic popular support in West Germany for revising postwar agreements that had ceded a third of the Third Reich’s territory to the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. “If Germany now has different borders than it had before the war, it has only itself to blame,” the letter said, reminding Adenauer that his country had invaded its neighbors and killed “millions upon millions.”

Though the aide-mémoire had been delivered by the Soviet ambassador to Adenauer, its tough message was intended just as much for Kennedy. In unmistakable fashion, the Soviet leader was declaring that he had lost all patience with Western dithering. First, he complained, the U.S. had asked the Soviets to wait for Berlin talks until after its elections, then Moscow was told to wait until Kennedy could settle into his job, and now Moscow was being asked to wait again until after West German elections.

“If one gives in to these tendencies,” Khrushchev wrote, “it could go on forever.”

The letter closed with Khrushchev’s characteristic cocktail of seduction and threats. He appealed to Adenauer to use “all his personal influence and his great experience as a statesman” to secure European peace and security. If matters turned more confrontational, however, the letter reminded Adenauer that the current correlation of military forces provided the Soviet Union and its friends with all the force they required to defend themselves.

The letter scoffed at West Germany’s appeal for disarmament at a time when Adenauer was quickly building up his military forces and seeking nuclear weapons while trying to transform NATO into the fourth nuclear power. It scolded Adenauer over talk that his party’s coming election campaign would focus on anticommunism. “If that is really the case,” the letter said, “you… must be aware of the consequences.”

The Kennedy administration was not yet a month old, but Khrushchev had already shifted course on Berlin. If Kennedy was unwilling to negotiate an acceptable deal with him, Khrushchev was determined to find other ways to get what he wanted.