Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth

7 SPRINGTIME FOR KHRUSHCHEV

^{NOVOSIBIRSK, SIBERIA}

^{SUNDAY, MARCH 9, 1961}

Nikita Khrushchev was in poor condition and foul temper.

The Soviet leader’s face was ashen, his body slumped, and his eyes lifeless—an appearance in such contrast to his usual brash buoyancy that it shocked U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson and his two travel companions, the young U.S. political counselor Boris Klosson and Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet foreign ministry’s top America hand.

It had taken Thompson ten days of pleading before he’d succeeded in winning an audience with Khrushchev to deliver the president’s first private letter to the Soviet leader, which included a long-awaited invitation to meet. Even then, Thompson had to fly 1,800 miles to catch up with Khrushchev in Akademgorodok, the vast science city Khrushchev had ordered to be built outside Novosibirsk on the West Siberian plain.

Khrushchev’s aspiration in Siberia had been to create the world’s leading center of scientific endeavor, but like so many of his dreams, this one, too, had fallen short. Just that week he had fired a geneticist whose theories he disliked, and he had ordered four of nine stories chopped off the plans for a new academy so that it conformed to a more standard Soviet size. Akademgorodok’s frustrations only added to a growing list of Soviet failures that were taking a toll on the Soviet leader’s confidence.

Khrushchev’s ongoing agricultural tour of the country had taken a physical and emotional toll, making him all the more aware of his country’s economic shortfalls. Albania had shifted its allegiance from Moscow to China in a heretically public manner, a worrisome crack in Khrushchev’s leadership of world communism. Moscow’s ally in the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, had been murdered, for which Khrushchev blamed UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld.

More fundamentally, the capitalist world was proving far more resilient than his propagandists had predicted. Decolonization in Africa had failed to damage the West’s standing in the developing world as much as his experts had envisioned. For all the Soviet efforts to divide the alliance, NATO’s integration was deepening, and the West German Bundeswehr was expanding its capabilities so quickly that it was altering the European military balance. Both in his rhetoric and his defense spending, President Kennedy was acting more anticommunist than Eisenhower. And each month, the East German refugee numbers hit new records. If Khrushchev’s luck didn’t turn soon, the Soviet leader had to worry that his October Party Congress would become a struggle for survival.

Facing such an array of new challenges, Khrushchev agreed to meet Thompson only after the U.S. ambassador had leaked to New York Times correspondent Seymour Topping—and to any number of diplomats in Moscow—that the Soviet leader was giving him the cold shoulder at a time when Kennedy was trying to reach out. On March 3, Topping had reported dutifully that Thompson had been frustrated in his efforts to pass Khrushchev a crucial message from Kennedy in hopes of “seeking to head off a serious mishap in relations.” Topping wrote that Thompson had a new mandate “to initiate a series of exploratory conversations looking to substantive negotiations on a range of East-West differences.”

Even after that, Khrushchev agreed only reluctantly to see Thompson. Khrushchev’s adviser Oleg Troyanovsky had seen his boss’s high hopes for a new start in U.S.–Soviet relations come “quickly to evaporate” in the four months since Kennedy’s election. There were few better barometers of the U.S.–Soviet temperature than Troyanovsky, the ever-present Khrushchev adviser who had attended Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., while his father served as the first Soviet ambassador to Washington in the mid-1930s. He could quote Marx and speak American slang with equal fluency.

Troyanovsky had seen Khrushchev weary of the Kennedy waiting game, having lost the opportunity he had sought to reach the new American leader before he could be infected by what Khrushchev considered Washington’s anti-Soviet bias. A little less than a year after the U-2 incident and the failed Paris Summit, Khrushchev could not politically afford another failed meeting with an American president. Yet that now seemed the most likely outcome of any such summit, given Kennedy’s determination to drag his feet on Berlin and to press for a nuclear test ban agreement that the Soviet military didn’t want. Khrushchev was already in hot water with his military brass over troop cuts, and they would resist any measures that would constrain their nuclear development or leave them open to intrusive inspections.

Khrushchev’s farm visits en route to Novosibirsk had fed his discontent. A new Soviet statistical yearbook showed the Soviet Union had achieved some 60 percent of America’s gross national product, but that was certainly an exaggeration. The CIA pegged it at closer to 40 percent, and other experts estimated that the Soviet economy’s size was no more than 25 percent of the U.S. level. Agricultural productivity was but a third of the U.S. level, and shrinking.

During his travels, Khrushchev had seen the ugly truth behind overly optimistic reports from provincial sycophants. Soviet farming was failing because of erratic planting, bad harvests, and dreadful distribution systems that often left crops to rot. Every week Khrushchev fumed at a new list of incompetent subordinates, some of whom fudged numbers to conceal their failures while others conceded their shortcomings but failed to fix them. In confessing his inadequacy, one party secretary named Zolotukhin, from the western Russian provincial capital of Tambov on the Tsna River, pulled down his trousers and asked Khrushchev three times to lash him.

“Why is it that you want your pants whipped off to show us your ass?” Khrushchev had barked. “Do you think you will give us some sort of thrill? Why would we keep such secretaries?”

At one local Communist Party gathering after another, Khrushchev demanded his underlings match American economic and agricultural benchmarks and exceed U.S. milk and meat productivity, goals that had been his fixation since his 1959 visit to the American heartland. When comrades questioned the wisdom of benchmarking against imperialists, Khrushchev said America was “the highest stage of capitalism,” while Soviets were only just getting started building the foundation for the house of communism—“and our bricks are production and consumer goods.”

The Soviet public’s awareness of the country’s failings had produced a bumper crop of humor, told in the food lines as Khrushchev hopscotched the country:

Some of the jokes involved the new U.S. president:

As sour as Khrushchev’s mood had been when Thompson arrived, it worsened as the Soviet leader read the Russian translation of Kennedy’s letter. Khrushchev could not find a single word on Berlin. Speaking calmly and wearily, Khrushchev told Thompson that Kennedy must understand that he would never back off his demand to negotiate “the German question.” Over time, Khrushchev said, he had converted Eisenhower to the realization that Berlin talks could not be avoided, but then U.S. militarists “deliberately exploded relations” with their U-2 flight.

Under instructions not to be drawn on Berlin, Thompson responded only that Kennedy was “reviewing our German policy and would wish to discuss it with Adenauer and other allies before reaching conclusions.”

Fed up with what he considered U.S. delay tactics, Khrushchev scoffed at the notion that the world’s most powerful country must consult with anyone before acting, given his own dismissive treatment of Warsaw Pact allies. “West Berlin is a bone in the throat of Soviet–American relations,” Khrushchev told Thompson, and it would be a good time to remove it. “If Adenauer wants to fight,” he said, “West Berlin would be a good place to begin conflict.”

Though Kennedy was not ready to negotiate Berlin with Khrushchev, the Soviet leader eagerly laid out his own negotiating position for Thompson so that he could relay it to the president. He told Thompson that he was ready to stipulate in any agreement that West Berliners could maintain the political system of their choice, even if it was capitalism. However, he said, the Americans would have to take the notion of German unification off the table, even if both the U.S. and Soviets might desire it over time. Abandoning the language of unification was necessary, he said, if the Soviet Union and the U.S. wanted to sign a war-ending treaty that recognized both Germanys as sovereign states.

For his part, Khrushchev assured Thompson he would not expand the Soviet empire any farther westward, but he also wanted Washington to refrain from any rollback of what was already his. Employing a voice calculated to project intimacy between old friends, Khrushchev told Thompson it was his “frank desire” to improve relations with Kennedy and make nuclear war impossible. However, he said, he could not do so alone.

Khrushchev was pushing Thompson far beyond his approved talking points. The American ambassador warned Khrushchev not to expect rapid change in the U.S. position on Berlin, further cautioning the Soviet leader that if he acted unilaterally he would only increase tensions. “If there is anything which will bring about a massive increase in U.S. arms expenditures of the type which took place at the time of the Korean War,” Thompson said, “it would be the conviction that the Soviets are indeed attempting to force us out of Berlin.”

Khrushchev dismissed Thompson’s warning. “What attracted the West so much to Berlin anyway?” he countered.

It was because America had given its solemn commitment to Berliners, Thompson responded, and thus it had its national prestige invested in their fate.

Khrushchev shrugged that it was only Germany’s World War II capitulation that had brought Western powers to Berlin. “Let us work out together a status for West Berlin,” he said. “We can register it with the UN. Let us have a joint police force on the basis of a peace treaty which can be guaranteed by the four powers, or a symbolic force of four powers could be stationed in West Berlin.” Khrushchev said his only precondition was that East Berlin would have to be left out of any such planning, as the Soviet zone of the city would remain the capital of East Germany under any new plan.

Because Berlin lacked political significance for Moscow, Khrushchev repeated that he would provide the U.S. whatever guarantees it wanted to protect its prestige and ensure West Berlin’s current political system. He was prepared to accept West Berlin as a capitalist island in East Germany, he said, because in any case the Soviet Union would surpass West Germany in per capita production by 1965, and then surpass the United States five years later. To further illustrate West Berlin’s insignificance, Khrushchev said that since the Soviet population grew each year by 3.5 million, the total population of West Berlin at two million was just “one night’s work” for his sexually active country.

Playing devil’s advocate, Thompson responded that even if West Berlin were unimportant to the Soviets, “Ulbricht was very much interested,” and would be unlikely to endorse Khrushchev’s guarantee for its democratic, capitalist system.

With a dismissive wave of the hand, as if swatting away a troublesome gnat, Khrushchev said he could compel Ulbricht to approve whatever he and Kennedy would decide.

In an effort to find safer ground than Berlin, Thompson changed the subject to U.S.–Soviet trade liberalization. On that matter, he did have an offer he hoped would mollify Khrushchev. He said the U.S. was hoping to lift all restrictions on Soviet crabmeat imports to the United States.

Instead of embracing the gesture, Khrushchev shot back his outrage at a recent U.S. decision to cancel, on national security grounds, the sale to Moscow of advanced grinding machine tools. “The USSR can fly its rockets without U.S. machines!” he snarled. He railed further against the delayed approval of a urea fertilizer factory sale, also due to its potential military application, ostensibly for chemical weapons. Khrushchev said such urea technology was so widely available that he already had purchased three such plants from Holland.

However, no amount of fertilizer could approach the importance of Berlin to Khrushchev, and the Soviet leader returned to the issue time and again until Thompson reluctantly engaged him. He assured Khrushchev that the president knew the situation was unsatisfactory to both sides, was “re-examining the whole problem of Germany and Berlin,” and would be “disposed to do something to help relaxation.” But Thompson repeated that he could not reflect Kennedy’s views until the president had consulted personally with allies—and he would do that during meetings in March and April before their own proposed summit.

Khrushchev complained that Kennedy did not understand fully what was at stake in Berlin. If he and Kennedy could sign a treaty ending the city’s postwar status, he told Thompson it would calm tensions all around the world. If they were unable to solve their Berlin disagreements, however, their troops would continue to confront each other in a situation “not of peace but of armistice.” Khrushchev dismissed Kennedy’s notion that arms reduction talks could build the confidence necessary to take on the more difficult matter of Berlin. Quite the contrary, he said; only U.S. and Soviet troop withdrawal from Germany would create the right atmosphere for weapons cuts.

After so many weeks of angling to meet Kennedy, Khrushchev now balked at the president’s invitation. He said only that he was “inclined to accept” Kennedy’s offer to get together the first week of May, some two months away, following visits to Washington by Britain’s Macmillan and West Germany’s Adenauer, and after a stop Kennedy would make in Paris to see de Gaulle. Kennedy had offered as a venue either Vienna or Stockholm. Although he preferred Vienna, Khrushchev said, he would not rule out Sweden. The Soviet leader shrugged that it would be useful to get to know Kennedy, noting they had met only briefly in 1959 when the then senator had arrived late for the Soviet leader’s visit to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Without accepting or declining the invitation, however, Khrushchev told Thompson it “would be necessary to work out a reason for the meeting.”

At the end of the lunch that followed, Khrushchev raised a glass of his favorite pepper-flavored vodka in a lukewarm toast to Kennedy that was in striking contrast to his enthusiastic New Year’s message. Khrushchev dispensed with the usual wishes for Kennedy’s health: “Being so young, he does not need such wishes.” Having withdrawn his invitation to Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union a year earlier, he regretted the time still was not ripe for him to extend his country’s traditional hospitality to Kennedy and his family.

Thompson returned by plane that evening to a snow-blanketed Vnukovo Airport in Moscow, and his driver whisked him over icy streets to the embassy, where Thompson cabled Washington his report. Although Thompson had been on the move for eighteen hours, adrenaline surged through him as he typed.

In Thompson’s experience, Khrushchev’s fixation on Berlin had never been so single-minded. The Soviet leader had convinced Thompson he would no longer delay action. “All my diplomatic colleagues who have discussed the matter consider that in the absence of negotiations, Khrushchev will…precipitate a Berlin crisis this year,” he wrote.

A week later, Thompson urged his superiors in another cable to accelerate their contingency planning for a Soviet move on Berlin. Relations between Khrushchev and the Kennedy administration were so bad, the ambassador argued, that the Soviet leader might feel he had much to gain and very little to lose over Berlin. Thompson added, however, that Khrushchev still wanted to avoid provoking a military confrontation with the West, and would instruct the East Germans not to interfere in any way with Allied military access to the city.

Thompson listed the sources of growing U.S.–Soviet tensions that had accumulated during the Kennedy administration’s first weeks: The Kremlin lacked interest in the U.S. proposal of a nuclear test ban agreement; it considered Kennedy more militant than Eisenhower with his increased arms budget; it worried about new U.S. preparations for guerrilla warfare in the developing world; and it was displeased with the Kennedy administration’s increased restrictions on selling the Soviets sensitive technologies. The Kremlin was particularly irked by Kennedy’s personal and public commitment to provide more support for Radio Free Europe, which was proving an effective tool in preventing communist regimes’ monopoly on information. In Africa and South America, wrote Thompson, proxy confrontations would continue and perhaps increase.

Laying out his thoughts for President Kennedy on what might be the focus of his likely meeting with Khrushchev, Thompson wrote: “Discussion of the German problem will be the main point of the exercise so far as [Khrushchev] is concerned. It would be at that meeting or shortly thereafter that the Soviet leader would set his course on Berlin.” Thompson thought the president’s challenge would be to convince a doubtful Khrushchev that the U.S. would fight rather than abandon West Berliners. On the other hand, a tough stance alone could not avoid confrontation. Khrushchev would force the issue ahead of his October Party Congress, Thompson predicted, and if he did so, “it could involve the real possibility of world war, and we would almost certainly be led back to an intensified Cold War relationship.”

Thompson repeated his conviction that the risks of dealing with Khrushchev must be weighed against the reality that the U.S. had no good alternative. For all his downsides, said Thompson, Khrushchev “is probably better from our point of view than anyone likely to succeed him.” It was thus in America’s interest to keep Khrushchev in power, though Thompson conceded that his embassy knew far too little about the Kremlin’s inner workings to provide any reliable advice on how Kennedy could influence Communist Party struggles.

With uncanny clairvoyance, Thompson then added: “If we expect the Soviets to leave the Berlin problem as is, then we must at least expect the East Germans to seal off sector boundary in order to stop what they must consider the intolerable continuation of the refugee flow through Berlin.”

With that thought, Thompson may have been the first U.S. diplomat to predict the Berlin Wall.

Thompson then proposed a negotiating position that he thought the Soviets might be willing to accept—and which would allow Washington to regain the initiative. He suggested that Kennedy propose to Khrushchev an interim deal on Berlin under which the two Germanys would have seven years to negotiate a longer-term solution. During that time, and in exchange for a Soviet guarantee of continued Allied access to West Berlin, the U.S. would give the Soviets assurances that West Germany would not try to recover eastern territories it had lost after World War II.

With that deal, Thompson said the East Germans could stop the refugee flow, which he argued would be in American as well as Soviet interests because the rising numbers threatened to destabilize the region. Fleshing out his plan, Thompson proposed as confidence-building measures the reduction of Western covert activities conducted from Berlin and the shutting down of RIAS, the U.S. radio station that beamed reports into the Soviet zone from West Berlin. Even if Khrushchev rejected such a U.S. offer, Thompson argued that the simple act of making it would allow Kennedy to win over public opinion and thus make it more unpalatable for Khrushchev to act unilaterally.

Kennedy, however, disagreed with his ambassador’s sense of urgency. He and his brother Bobby were beginning to suspect that Thompson was falling victim to the State Department’s malady of “clientitis” and was associating himself too readily with Soviet positions. The president conceded to friends that he still didn’t “get” Khrushchev. After all, Eisenhower had ignored the Soviet leader’s Berlin ultimatum of 1958 without paying any real price. Kennedy didn’t see why the urgency should be any greater now.

The best minds in the U.S. intelligence community reinforced that view. The United States Intelligence Board’s Special Subcommittee on the Berlin Situation, the spy world’s authoritative group on the issue, said Khrushchev was “unlikely to increase tensions over Berlin at this time.” They said Moscow would increase its pressures only if Khrushchev thought by doing so he could force Kennedy into high-level talks. Their bottom line: if Kennedy demonstrated that increased Soviet threats wouldn’t impress him, Khrushchev would not escalate in Berlin.

So once again the president decided Berlin was an issue that could wait. Two other matters had also begun to shape his thinking. First, Dean Acheson was about to deliver to the president his first report on Berlin policy, and it would provide the hawkish antidote to Thompson’s softer line.

Kennedy was also growing increasingly distracted by a matter closer to home. His top spies were putting the final pieces in place for an invasion of Cuba by exiles trained and equipped by the CIA.

^{WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{MONDAY, APRIL 3, 1961}

Acheson’s paper, the first major Kennedy administration reflection on Berlin policy, landed on Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s desk the day before British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan arrived in Washington. Characteristically, President Truman’s secretary of state had timed its delivery for maximum impact, laying down a hard line at the front end of a parade of Allied visitors.

Acheson’s central argument was that Kennedy had to show a willingness to fight for Berlin if he wished to avoid Soviet domination of Europe and, after that, Asia and Africa. Wielding words like weapons, Acheson wrote that if the U.S. “accepted a Communist takeover of Berlin—under whatever face-saving and delaying device—the power status in Europe would be starkly revealed and Germany, and probably France, Italy and Benelux would make the indicated adjustments. The United Kingdom would hope that something would turn up. It wouldn’t.”

Acheson knew Kennedy well enough to be confident that the president both trusted his judgment and shared his suspicions of the Soviets. While searching for a secretary of state during the transition, Kennedy had sought the advice of his Georgetown neighbor Acheson. With a gaggle of photographers outside his home, the president-elect told Acheson he “had spent so much time in the past few years knowing people who could help him become president that he found he knew very few people who could help him be president.”

Acheson then helped dissuade Kennedy from considering Senator William Fulbright, who he said “was not as solid and serious a man as you need for this position. I’ve always thought that he had some of the qualities of a dilettante.” He instead steered Kennedy to the man eventually chosen, Dean Rusk, who during the Truman years had capably helped Acheson fight appeasement and resist communism in Asia as his assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs. Concerning other Cabinet and ambassadorial roles, Acheson blessed some names and torpedoed others, playing the Washington blood sport he so savored. He also turned down Kennedy’s offer to become ambassador to NATO, saying he preferred maintaining his free agency and lawyerly income without “all these statutes operating on me.”

That said, Acheson was pleased to be reestablishing his influence in government through a leading role in thinking through two of America’s highest priorities: NATO’s future and the related matters of nuclear weapons use and Berlin’s defense. Acheson’s place in history was already sealed because of his leading role in creating the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Marshall Plan. He had been the primary designer of NATO—altering America’s aversion to entangling alliances—and with George Marshall had conceived the Truman Doctrine of 1947 that set America’s course as “leader of the free world,” whose mission globally would be to fight communism and support democracy. Still, being invited back into the mix by Kennedy was a pleasing confirmation for Acheson that his capabilities remained both relevant and required.

Even at almost age sixty-eight, Acheson still cut a captivating figure. As impeccably dressed as he was informed, he liked to tell friends that he lacked the self-doubt that so afflicted his opponents. With his bowler hat, wicked grin, steel-blue eyes, and upturned mustache, he would have been noticeable enough. However, he stood out all the more due to his long-legged, slender, six-foot frame. Quick-witted and intolerant of fools, Acheson had brought to his new Berlin study the determination to outmaneuver and outmatch the Soviets that had so distinguished his career. It was that hard line that had formed such a curious bond between Acheson and President Truman—the Yale-educated, martini-drinking son of an Episcopal rector and the plain-speaking Midwestern politician without a college degree.

Shortly after Kennedy’s election, Acheson had scolded Truman playfully in a letter that addressed the former president’s concerns about Kennedy’s Catholicism. “Do you really care about Jack’s being Catholic?” he had asked Truman, who dismissively called Kennedy “the young man.” Acheson told Truman he had never cared that de Gaulle and Adenauer were Catholic. “Furthermore,” Acheson said with knowing understatement, “I don’t think he’s a very good Catholic.”

Since Kennedy had hired him in February, Acheson had intensively reviewed all the options for Berlin contingencies. He agreed with Thompson that a showdown was likely during the calendar year, but that’s where their agreement ended. He counseled the president to show greater strength and abandon any hope of a negotiated solution that could improve upon the status quo. “All sources of action are dangerous and unpromising,” Acheson said. “Inaction is even worse. We are faced with a Hobson’s choice. If a crisis is provoked, a bold and dangerous course may be the safest.”

Eisenhower had rejected Acheson’s advice, which at the time had been offered from outside government, that he respond more robustly to Moscow’s repetitive tests of America’s commitment to Europe and Berlin with a conspicuous military buildup. Acheson hoped to get more traction with Kennedy. He had already won over Rusk and Bundy, and he could count as allies the two other most influential administration officials on Berlin matters, the Pentagon’s Paul Nitze and the State Department’s Foy Kohler.

Most controversially, Acheson argued in his memo that the threat of general nuclear war might no longer be sufficient to deter Khrushchev in Berlin—if it ever had been. Acheson argued that Khrushchev’s reluctance to act thus far had been based more on his desire to avoid a breakdown in relations with the West than on a conviction that the U.S. would risk atomic war to defend Berlin. Thus Acheson was prescribing for Kennedy a significant conventional buildup in Europe while at the same time counseling him to persuade the Allies, and in particular the West Germans, “to agree in advance to fight for Berlin.”

Acheson listed for Kennedy what he had concluded were Khrushchev’s five primary objectives regarding Berlin:

1. To stabilize the East German regime and prepare for its eventual international recognition.

2. To legalize Germany’s eastern frontiers.

3. To neutralize West Berlin as a first step and prepare for its eventual takeover by the German Democratic Republic.

4. To weaken if not break up the NATO Alliance.

5. To discredit the United States or at least seriously damage its prestige.

Agreeing with Adenauer, Acheson was convinced the Berlin problem had no solution short of unification, and that unification could not be achieved until far into the future and through a consistent demonstration of Western strength. Therefore, no agreement with Moscow on Berlin was currently available to Kennedy that would not make the West more vulnerable, so talks had no purpose.

Berlin was “the key to power status in Europe,” Acheson argued, and thus a willingness to defend it was central to keeping the Kremlin in check elsewhere. Whatever course Kennedy took, Acheson counseled the president to “choose quickly what constitutes grounds for fighting on Berlin” and get America’s allies to agree to those criteria.

Acheson’s bottom line for Kennedy: “We must content ourselves for the time being with maintaining the status quo in Berlin. We could not expect Khrushchev to accept less—we ourselves should not accept less.”

His groundbreaking paper then concentrated on the most appropriate military means—within U.S. capability—to deter Khrushchev. The threat of nuclear attack had long been the U.S.’s ace in the hole, but Acheson’s heresy was to argue that it was not a real capability because it was “perfectly obvious” to the Russians that Washington would not risk the lives of millions of Americans over Berlin. Acheson noted that some military leaders advocated as an alternative the “limited use of nuclear means—that is, to drop one bomb somewhere.”

He dismissed that idea as quickly as he had raised it: “If you drop one bomb, that wasn’t a threat to drop that bomb—that was a drop—and once it happened, it either indicated that you were going on to drop more, or you invited the other side to drop one back.” That struck Acheson as “irresponsible and not a wise step adapted to the problem of Berlin.”

So Acheson tabled a proposal for Kennedy designed to make Western determination unmistakable. He wanted the president to substantially increase conventional forces in Germany so that the Soviets would see more clearly the U.S. commitment to Berlin’s defense—a course that could not have been more in contrast to Thompson’s notion of a seven-year moratorium during which the two Germanys negotiated their differences. Through this buildup, he said, “we would have made too vast a commitment to back down in any way—and if there was any backing down, they would have to do it.”

Acheson conceded that reducing America’s reliance on nuclear deterrence had its risks, but added that “it was the only way of showing that we meant business without doing something very foolish.” His proposal was not to increase forces in Berlin, where they would be trapped and be of little use, but to bring in three or more divisions elsewhere in Germany. He would ratchet up U.S. reserves by as many as six divisions and provide more transport for all those new soldiers to descend on Berlin in an emergency.

Defense Secretary McNamara embraced Acheson’s paper. Kennedy took it seriously enough to use it as the basis to order a new Pentagon examination on how to break any new Berlin blockade. Acheson knew, however, that an important constituency would oppose his views: America’s allies. The French and Germans would argue against any dilution of a nuclear deterrent that they believed was all that ensured long-term U.S. commitment to their defense. And the British wanted a greater emphasis on negotiations with the Soviets, a course Acheson opposed. As the Allies couldn’t even agree among themselves about how best to defend Berlin, Acheson’s advice to Kennedy was to decide his course unilaterally and present it to the Allies as a fait accompli.

In advance of the Macmillan meeting, Bundy rushed to Kennedy what he called his friend Acheson’s “first-rate” paper. He advised Kennedy that he must make sure that his British visitors, known for being “soft” on Berlin, understood that he was determined to stand firm. Rusk echoed Acheson in saying Berlin talks had failed in the past and there was no reason to think they had any greater chance now to succeed.

Almost overnight, Acheson had taken the initiative on Berlin, filling a vacuum in the administration. Drawing upon that, National Security Advisor Bundy counseled Kennedy to politely consider any schemes London “may dream up, but in return we should press hard to get a commitment of British firmness at the moment of truth.”

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

^{WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5, 1961}

British Prime Minister Macmillan was taken aback when Kennedy nodded toward Acheson and asked him to explain why, regarding the Soviets and Berlin, he believed a confrontation was likelier than reaching an acceptable compromise solution. The president was surrounded by his top national security team as well as U.S. Ambassador to London David Bruce. Among others, Macmillan had brought along Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Yet they all turned toward Acheson, and one of the world’s most colorful diplomatic showmen launched a performance that unsettled the British.

Kennedy did not say whether he shared Acheson’s hard-line views, although Macmillan had to presume that he did. Acheson prefaced the discussion with the disclaimer that he had not reached final conclusions in his Berlin study, but he then vigorously laid out precisely what he had decided. Kennedy listened without comment.

Macmillan and Acheson were almost the same age, and Acheson’s attire, upper-class mannerisms, and Anglo-Canadian background would have suggested a cultural compatibility in any other setting. But the two men could not have differed more in their diagnosis of how to deal with the Soviets. Macmillan had lost none of his enthusiasm for just the sort of high-level Moscow talks that Acheson had consistently said would have little value, all the way back to an executive session of the Foreign Relations Committee in 1947 when Acheson said, “I think it is a mistake to believe that you can, at any time, sit down with the Russians and solve questions.”

Acheson listed what he called his “semi-premises”:

1. There was no satisfactory solution to the Berlin problem aside from a resolution more broadly of Germany’s division. And it did not seem such a solution was anywhere near.

2. It was likely the Soviets would force the Berlin issue within the calendar year.

3. There was no negotiable solution Acheson could imagine that could put the West in a more favorable position regarding Berlin than it had at the moment.

Thus, he said, “we must face the issue and prepare now for eventualities. Berlin is of the greatest importance. That is why the Soviets press the issue. If the West flunks, Germany will become unhooked from the alliance.”

The president did not interrupt Acheson’s presentation, and because of that neither did anyone else. Acheson said negotiations and other nonmilitary remedies, which everyone in the room knew were the British preference, were insufficient. There must be a military response, Acheson said, but what should it be, and under what circumstances?

Macmillan and Lord Home contained their dismay. They had just been in Paris, where they’d heard de Gaulle—who was already trying to lure Adenauer into a Gaullist view of Europe that permanently excluded the British—also vehemently oppose Berlin talks with the Soviets. The British didn’t want Kennedy on the same page.

At age sixty-seven, Macmillan had grown increasingly convinced that most of London’s aspirations in the world depended on its ability to influence Washington. That in turn relied on how he would interact with America’s new president. A keen student of history, Macmillan had come to realize that Americans represented “the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them now to make it go…. We can at most aspire to civilize and occasionally to influence them.” But how did he get Kennedy’s consent to play Rome to Macmillan’s Greece?

After Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s political collapse following the Suez Crisis, his successor Macmillan had wagered much on rebuilding a “special relationship” with the U.S. through his friendship with President Eisenhower, first forged during World War II. Macmillan had played a crucial role as an “honest broker” in convincing President Eisenhower to engage with Khrushchev on Berlin’s future through summitry, and he had considered the Paris Summit’s collapse to be a personal defeat. He had begged Khrushchev unsuccessfully not to abandon the talks.

It was in this context that Macmillan had been gathering as many data points as he could find on Kennedy so that he could better design an approach to a man who was twenty-four years his junior. Macmillan had worried to columnist friend Henry Brandon that he would never be able to replicate the unique connection he had had with Eisenhower, a man of the same generation with whom he had shared war’s cruel experiences. “And now there is this cocky young Irishman,” he had said.

Eisenhower’s ambassador to London, John Hay “Jock” Whitney, had warned Macmillan that Kennedy was “obstinate, sensitive, ruthless and highly sexed.” However, their behavioral differences would surface only many months later, when Kennedy shocked the monogamous, puritanical Scot with the impertinent question, “I wonder how it is with you, Harold? If I don’t have a woman for three days, I get a terrible headache….”

What concerned Macmillan more than the age and character differences he had with Kennedy was the possibility that the president might be overly influenced by his anticommunist, isolationist father. Perhaps the most disliked U.S. ambassador ever to the Court of St. James’s, Joseph Kennedy had warned President Roosevelt not to overdo U.S. backing for Britain against Hitler and be “left holding the bag in a war in which the Allies expect to be beaten.” So Macmillan was relieved when his research turned up that Kennedy’s hero was the interventionist Churchill—a point they had in common.

To further influence Kennedy’s thinking, during the transition Macmillan had written the president-elect a letter that proposed a “Grand Design” for the future. While Macmillan had formed his bond with Eisenhower based on their common memories of war, he had determined on the day of Kennedy’s election that he would base his approach to the new president on intellect. So he set out to sell himself “as a man who, although of advancing years, has young and fresh thoughts.”

Written with a publisher’s deft touch, Macmillan appealed to Kennedy’s vanity by quoting from the president’s earlier writings before sketching out a dangerous era ahead in which the “free world”—the United States, Britain, and Europe—could only vanquish the growing appeal of communism through the steady expansion of economic well-being and common purpose. Thus, he regarded closer transatlantic coordination to create joint monetary and economic policies as being more critical than political and military alliances.

Since he had written that letter, Macmillan had not gained much traction for his “Grand Design” in preparatory visits to allies. De Gaulle in Paris sympathized with Macmillan’s views but stubbornly opposed his desire to bring Britain into the European Common Market. When they met in London, the British prime minister found even less support from Adenauer. Macmillan concluded that the flourishing West Germany had grown too “rich and selfish” to understand his proposal. Ahead of Macmillan’s White House meeting, Kennedy discovered he had misplaced his copy of the “Grand Design.” It took a White House search to unearth it in the nursery of Caroline, his three-year-old daughter.

Despite Macmillan’s initial concerns, he and Kennedy had already begun to form a closer bond ahead of their Washington meeting than the British prime minister had anticipated, a product of shared wit, breeding, and brains—and Macmillan’s intentional efforts. They were also related by marriage: Kennedy’s sister Kathleen had married Macmillan’s nephew. Like Kennedy, Harold Macmillan had known wealth from birth and enjoyed its license for independent thinking and eccentricity. The prime minister was elegant and tall, at six feet, and had a toothy British smile under a guardsman’s mustache. He wore his hand-cut suits as casually as his intellect. Macmillan liked Kennedy’s emphasis on bravery in his book Profiles in Courage, as he had himself been wounded three times during World War I. While waiting for rescue at the Battle of the Somme with a bullet in his pelvis, he had read Aeschylus in the original Greek.

To the prime minister’s relief, he and Kennedy had hit it off ten days earlier when the president had issued him a last-minute invitation to Key West, Florida, to exchange ideas on how to address an unfolding crisis in Laos. Kennedy had listened sympathetically to Macmillan’s advice that he should stay clear of military intervention in Laos, and the prime minister was encouraged to see the president manage the generals around him—instead of being managed by them. Macmillan had been taken by Kennedy’s “great charm…and a light touch. Since so many Americans are so ponderous, this is a welcome change.”

Yet that positive beginning in Key West only made Macmillan and Lord Home all the more concerned about Kennedy’s apparent militancy toward the Soviets as expressed and encouraged by Acheson.

When thinking about how to defend Berlin, Acheson said the Brits should focus on the three military alternatives: air, ground, and nuclear. Given that the nuclear option was “reckless and would not be believed,” Acheson talked mostly about the other two. He dismissed an air response, as Soviet “ground-to-air missiles have been brought to a point where aircraft cannot survive. Thus there could be no test of will in the air. The Russians would just shoot down the planes with their rockets.”

Acheson was driving home his view that the U.S. and its allies really had only one possible credible response to a Berlin showdown, and that was a conventional ground offensive to “show the Russians that it was not worthwhile to stop a really stout Western effort.” To pull that off, Acheson said, would require a significant military buildup. Acheson crisply listed the possible military countermeasures to a Berlin blockade of one sort or another, including the dispatching of a division down the Autobahn to reopen access to Berlin with force. If blocked, said Acheson, then the West would know where it stood and could rearm and rally allies as it did during the Korean War.

Kennedy told Macmillan, whose body language of lifted eyebrows and sideways glances revealed his skepticism, that he had not yet fully considered Acheson’s views. That said, he agreed with his new adviser that Berlin contingency planning was not yet “serious enough,” given the growing likelihood of some sort of confrontation.

Macmillan focused his opposition on Acheson’s proposed response to a Berlin blockade, of sending a division up the Autobahn, as it “would be a very vulnerable body if moving on a narrow front.” It inevitably would have to spread beyond the Autobahn if trouble started, he said, and that would raise a host of difficulties. When pressed by Kennedy, however, he agreed with Acheson’s view that the Berlin Airlift could not be repeated because of improved Soviet antiaircraft capability.

U.S. and British officials then hashed out what new military planning and training would be required to allow more intensive preparation for Berlin contingencies. Secretary Rusk welcomed British–U.S. bilateral planning but suggested that the West Germans, with their expanded military capability and willingness to help defend Berlin, should be brought in “rapidly.” Lord Home frowned his dissent. The British distrusted the Germans far more than did the Americans, convinced that Adenauer’s intelligence service and other government structures were riddled with spies. Though Lord Home was happy enough to discuss Germany’s future with the Americans, he was not ready to do the same with the Germans.

Home wanted to shift the Americans from their focus on military contingencies to consideration of potential openings for Berlin talks with the Kremlin. He argued that Khrushchev had made only one public commitment that limited his room for maneuver, and that was to end Berlin’s occupation status. Lord Home believed Khrushchev “could get off this hook” if the Allies signed a treaty that would leave the status quo in place for a period of ten years or so, but that over time this would alter Berlin’s status.

“Khrushchev is not on a hook,” Acheson shot back, “and thus does not have to be taken off one.”

Acheson had no patience for what he considered British spinelessness toward Moscow. He sharply reminded Home that Khrushchev “is not legalistic. Khrushchev is pushing to divide the Allies. He is not going to make any treaty that would help us. Our position is good as it is and we should stick by it.” Acheson worried that even consideration of signing a treaty with East Germany, which would serve only Soviet interests, “will undermine the German spirit.”

The tension between Home and Acheson infused the room.

After an awkward silence, Rusk agreed with Acheson that any talk about accepting such a treaty would be “starting down a slippery slope.” He said the U.S. had to make clear it was in Berlin as a result of war, and not “by the grace of Khrushchev.” The U.S., Rusk insisted to the British, was a great power that would not be driven out of Berlin.

Home warned his American friends of the public opinion consequences in the West if Khrushchev openly proposed what might seem a reasonable change in Berlin’s legal status and the West failed to put forward any alternative approach. Western presence had to be put on a new legal basis, he argued, as the current “right of conquest” justification for Berlin occupation was “wearing thin.”

Perhaps, Acheson fired back again at Home, “it is our power that is wearing thin.”

Much the same group reconvened the next morning, although mercifully for the British, Acheson was absent on a mission. However, his spirit remained in the room. President Kennedy wanted to know from his U.S. and British experts why Khrushchev had not acted on Berlin thus far. What made him hold off?

“Was it the danger of the Western response?” he asked.

Lord Home said he thought Khrushchev “wouldn’t lay off much longer.”

Ambassador Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen agreed. The State Department’s leading Soviet specialist, who had been ambassador to Moscow from 1953 to 1957, believed the rising Chinese challenge and “strong importunities from the East Germans” were forcing Khrushchev into a more militant position. It wasn’t that the Soviets cared so much about Berlin, Bohlen insisted, but that they had concluded its loss could lead to the unraveling of their entire Eastern empire.

Kennedy brought the discussion back to Acheson’s paper. If Khrushchev had been contained by the threat of a military confrontation with the West, Kennedy said, “we should consider how to build up this threat. On Berlin, we have no bargaining position. Thus we ought to consider, as Mr. Acheson suggested yesterday, how to put the issue to Khrushchev as bluntly as possible.”

With the return of Acheson’s ghost, the group gamed Khrushchev’s next likely move and the West’s potential response. The British didn’t see how talks could be avoided, while most of the U.S. contingent doubted their utility. Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, David Bruce, a former intelligence officer who had been Eisenhower’s ambassador to West Germany, said that the United States could not cede its few remaining rights in Berlin. “We cannot disregard the consequences that would flow in Central Europe and in West Germany from weakening on Berlin,” he said.

As his meetings with Kennedy neared an end, Macmillan was dissatisfied. He still did not know, he said, at what point the West “would break” and take action against Russian moves on Berlin. Without such a clear line, he feared that Kennedy could be drawn into a war he didn’t want, over far too little cause—and might then drag Britain into the hostilities.

Differing with Acheson, Kennedy responded that he believed it was the nuclear deterrent effect that “keeps the Communists from engaging us in a major struggle on Berlin.” Thus, he said, it was necessary to keep the fact of that deterrent “well forward.”

Macmillan, however, wondered what would happen in West Germany after Adenauer died—whether the Berlin game might be lost to the Soviets under a less resolute leader. “Sooner or later, say in five or ten years, the Russians might try to offer the West Germans unity in return for neutrality,” he ventured, repeating Britain’s stubborn doubts about German reliability.

Bohlen told Macmillan that he thought the time was past when West Germans would take “the bait of neutrality.” The Soviets as well, he said, could no longer afford to let socialism go down the drain in East Germany. Bruce argued that the larger issue for the moment was that East German refugees were “weakening all that goes to make up the normal life of a state,” with 200,000 leaving in 1960, and some 70 percent of those from vital age groups.

A final internal memorandum on the meeting papered over the two sides’ dispute. It noted that both the U.S. and the UK expected an escalation of the Berlin Crisis in 1961, that they agreed the loss of West Berlin would be catastrophic, and that they believed the Allies needed to make clearer their seriousness over Berlin to the Soviets. The document also called for intensified planning of military contingencies.

In the brisk spring sunshine of the White House Rose Garden, Kennedy stood by Macmillan and read a one-page joint statement that spoke of a “very high level of agreement on our estimate of the nature of the problems which we face.” It glossed over the considerable disagreements with mushy language, saying that the two men agreed on “the importance and the difficulty of working toward satisfactory relations with the Soviet Union.”

Macmillan had achieved little with Kennedy. What he gained was that Kennedy had endorsed Britain’s efforts to join the Common Market as part of his “Grand Design,” a crucial voice of support given French opposition. The two men also had further built a personal bond through two long, private talks.

Despite that, Macmillan had failed in many of his most important aims. Kennedy had opposed Britain’s efforts to get China into the United Nations, and had made it clear that, unlike Eisenhower, he did not intend to use Macmillan as an intermediary with Moscow. Most important, the Americans planned to convene a summit with a Soviet leader for the first time on European territory without inviting their British or French allies to participate. It seemed Kennedy had clearly bought Acheson’s line that London was too soft on Berlin.

British officials surprised the Americans by leaking to their home press that the Kennedy–Macmillan talks were “rough, touchy,” in many ways inconclusive, and certainly more difficult than the communiqué suggested.

And much worse was to follow.

8 AMATEUR HOUR

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

^{FRIDAY, APRIL 7, 1961}

It was Washington’s first warm spring day, the perfect temperature for President Kennedy’s walk through the White House Rose Garden with Dean Acheson. Kennedy had suggested the stroll, explaining to Acheson that he sought urgent advice. Though Kennedy was in shirtsleeves, Acheson remained his usual formal self in jacket and bow tie. In his only compromise with the weather, Acheson removed his bowler hat and carried it under his arm.

Truman’s former secretary of state expected Kennedy to quiz him on his ongoing NATO or Berlin projects, as he was leaving the next day for Europe to brief the Allies on his progress. Instead, Kennedy said he had another, more pressing matter in mind. “Come on out here in the garden and sit in the sun,” the president said, directing Acheson to a wooden bench, then settling down beside him. “Do you know anything about this Cuba proposal?”

Acheson conceded he did not even know there was a Cuba proposal.

So Kennedy sketched out the plan that he said he was considering. A force of 1,200 to 1,500 Cuban exiles—soldiers who had been trained by the CIA in Guatemala—would invade the island. They would be supported by the air cover of B-26 bombers, also flown by exiles. The idea was that once the exiled Cubans established a beachhead, as many as 7,000 insurgents and other Castro opponents already on the island would rise up in revolt. Without requiring the use of American troops or aircraft, the U.S. would remove Fidel Castro from power and replace him with a friendly regime. The plan had been hatched by the Eisenhower administration, but it had been revised in Kennedy’s early weeks. It was supported throughout by U.S. intelligence equipment, trainers, and planners.

Acheson did not hide his alarm. He said that he hoped the president wasn’t serious about such a crazy scheme.

“I don’t know if I’m serious or not,” Kennedy said. “But this is the proposal and I’ve been thinking about it, and it is serious in that sense. I’ve not made up my mind but I’m giving it very serious thought.”

In truth, the president had already given the plan his go-ahead almost a month earlier, on March 11, 1961. He had signed off on the last details on April 5, just two days before his conversation with Acheson. He had altered only two important aspects, having moved the landing place to allow for a less spectacular invasion, and ensuring that there was a suitable airfield nearby for tactical air support. Otherwise, “Operation Mongoose” was much the plan that the Eisenhower administration had passed down to Kennedy.

Acheson said he would not “need to phone Price Waterhouse” to determine that Kennedy’s 1,500 Cubans were no match for Castro’s 25,000 Cubans. He told Kennedy such an invasion could have disastrous consequences for America’s prestige in Europe and for relations with the Soviets over Berlin, where they likely would respond with their own aggression.

Yet it was precisely because of Berlin that Kennedy wanted there to be no obviously American assets involved. He wanted to avoid giving the Soviets any pretext to do something similarly disruptive in Berlin.

The two men talked awkwardly for a little longer before Acheson left the Rose Garden without having exchanged a word with the president about anything other than Cuba. As he left for Europe, Acheson dismissed the Cuban matter from his mind, as “it seemed like such a wild idea.”

He was confident wiser minds would prevail.

^{RHÖNDORF, WEST GERMANY}

^{SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 1961}

West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s concerns about how to manage his relationship with Kennedy had grown so great that he summoned his friend Dean Acheson to meet with him in Bonn to talk strategy before his visit to the U.S. a few days later.

Legions of Germans were out for Sunday walks on pathways under the flowering fruit trees beside the Rhine River as Adenauer, in a less leisurely manner, sped by them with Acheson in his Mercedes from the airport to his home. The chancellor savored high-speed drives in the well-engineered German cars that had become such an export hit, and Acheson held tightly to his seat as Adenauer’s driver accelerated to keep pace with a lead jeep.

A soldier sat in the jeep’s open back, providing directions with outstretched paddles. If the soldier extended a paddle out to his right, it was a sign to Adenauer’s driver that he was going to pass traffic by driving up over the sidewalk. If he pointed one up to the left, it meant the driver would scatter oncoming traffic as he passed to that side. Acheson smiled grimly at Adenauer and noticed that “the old man was just having a wonderful time.”

A small group of Adenauer’s neighbors had gathered to applaud the legendary political couple’s arrival at the chancellor’s home in the Rhine-side village of Rhöndorf. The eighty-five-year-old Adenauer looked to the zigzag stairway heading up the hill about a hundred feet from the street to his door and said to his sixty-seven-year-old guest, “My friend, you are not as youthful as you were the first time we met, and I must urge you not to take these steps too fast.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Chancellor,” Acheson replied, smiling. “If I find myself wearying, may I take your arm?”

Adenauer chuckled. “Are you teasing me?”

“I wouldn’t think of doing so.” Acheson smiled. The good-natured banter was an elixir for Adenauer’s troubled spirit.

Acheson spent much of the day calming an Adenauer whom he found “worried to death—just completely worried” about Kennedy. Adenauer’s greatest concern was that Kennedy was scheming to make a peace deal behind his back with the Russians on any number of issues that would sell out German interests and abandon Berliners. He worried as well about the rise of a new hostility among Americans toward Germans after years of postwar healing, inflamed by the shocking revelations of William Shirer’s newly published book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and the imminent trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Israel.

Beyond that, Adenauer said, he was disturbed by reports that the Kennedy administration was shifting its deterrence strategy from its overwhelming reliance on nuclear weapons to the relatively new notion of “flexible response.” That would involve a greater emphasis on conventional weaponry in all military contingencies regarding Berlin. Though such a policy change could have significant impact on West German security, the Kennedy administration had neither consulted nor briefed Adenauer or other West German counterparts.

As he argued against the new strategy, what Adenauer didn’t realize was that Acheson was one of its leading proponents and architects. Adenauer was convinced the West could only contain Moscow if Khrushchev was certain a Soviet move on Berlin would prompt a devastating U.S. nuclear response. He feared that Moscow would regard any change in the U.S. approach as an invitation to test Washington’s resolve. Though he did not say so to Adenauer that day, Acheson disagreed because he doubted any U.S. president would ever risk millions of American lives for Berlin—and he reckoned Khrushchev knew that as well.

So Acheson instead focused his efforts on reassuring Adenauer that Kennedy was as determined as his predecessors had been to defend West German and West Berlin freedoms. Acheson briefed Adenauer in some detail on the Kennedy administration’s military contingency planning regarding Berlin and on Kennedy’s own skepticism about Russian intentions.

Adenauer sighed with satisfaction. “You have lifted a stone from my heart.”

But at the same time, Acheson had to disappoint the chancellor about one of his fondest dreams. For the moment, Kennedy had rejected the plan considered by Eisenhower to place a fleet of U.S. Polaris missile submarines under NATO control, thus making the alliance a fourth nuclear power. The U.S., Britain, and France would keep their monopoly. Instead, Kennedy would put five or more Polaris submarines at the disposal of NATO, but under U.S. fleet commanders, and with caveats on their use so restrictive and the process of using them so complicated that it would fail to satisfy Adenauer’s desire for a more easily accessible nuclear deterrent.

In short, Kennedy’s evolving view toward handling Berlin military contingencies—reflected in KGB reports at the time from Paris and elsewhere—was that he wanted to ensure that any Berlin conflict remained local in character and would not escalate into a world war. That required not only backing off American reliance on nuclear arms in any Berlin confrontation, but also opposing the notion of NATO possession of atomic weapons.

Adenauer closed the day in typical fashion, inviting his guest to the rose garden to play the Italian bowling game of bocce. Removing his jacket but leaving on his tie, with sleeves rolled down, Adenauer looked disarmingly formal as he began the precision throwing game by tossing the smaller “jack” ball forward, then following it with larger balls, the goal being to land closest to the initial throw.

When Acheson was near victory, the chancellor changed the rules and began to carom shots off the sideboards.

At Acheson’s protests, Adenauer smiled: “You are now in Germany—in Germany I make the rules.”

Acheson smiled, knowing his mission had achieved its aim. He had reduced Adenauer’s alarm over Kennedy, he had predelivered whatever disappointing news Adenauer would get in Washington in a more palatable manner, and he had set a more promising tone for the first Adenauer–Kennedy meeting.

What Acheson couldn’t control were two events that would overshadow Adenauer’s visit: a historic Soviet space shot and the U.S. debacle in Cuba.

^{PITSUNDA PENINSULA, SOVIET UNION}

^{TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 1961}

On the day of Adenauer’s flight to Washington, Khrushchev was in retreat at his villa in Sochi, on the Pitsunda Peninsula of the Black Sea’s eastern coast, where he was resting and receiving regular updates on the Soviet plans to put the first man in space the following morning. He had also begun preparations for the 22nd Communist Party Congress in October.

Khrushchev would later explain his frequent retreats from public to Pitsunda by saying, “A chicken has to sit quietly for a certain time if she expects to lay an egg.” Though the metaphor had a negative connotation in English, Khrushchev described its meaning in a positive manner: “If I have something to hatch, I have to take the time to do it right.” Pitsunda was where he caught his breath in the rush of history or wrote a few pages of it himself. It had been there, between his walks through the pine grove and past cabanas on the beach, that he had crafted his 1956 speech breaking with Stalin. He liked to introduce guests to his ancient trees, many of which he had given human names, and to show off his small indoor gym and private, glass-enclosed swimming pool.

It was a measure of how important Khrushchev considered relations with Kennedy that amid all his other demands that morning he had still been willing to receive Walter Lippmann, the legendary seventy-one-year-old American columnist, and his wife, Helen. It was not just Lippmann’s national influence and access to Kennedy that endeared him to Khrushchev, but also the fact that his columns had been consistently friendly to the Soviets.

With the schedule for the space launch firmed up, however, Khrushchev passed word to Lippmann on the tarmac in Washington, in the first-class cabin of his plane to Rome, that their meeting would be postponed. “Impossible,” Lippmann boldly responded in a scrawled reply to Soviet Ambassador Menshikov.

By the time the Lippmanns landed, Khrushchev had decided he would see them, but he would not breathe a word concerning plans for his potentially historic space launch with the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the following morning.

Khrushchev had accelerated the original May Day launch date after a training accident on March 23 killed the flight’s intended cosmonaut, Lieutenant Valentin Bondarenko. Shortcuts taken by the Soviets to rush their first man into space ahead of the Americans had likely contributed to Bondarenko’s death, which came after flames engulfed his oxygen-rich training chamber. The Soviets did not disclose any of the details of the accident. They did not even announce the cosmonaut’s death, and airbrushed Bondarenko from all photographs of the Soviet space team.

Undaunted, Khrushchev grew all the more determined, and further accelerated the Soviet target launch date to April 12. The timing was chosen to keep Moscow ahead of the U.S. Project Mercury mission that was scheduled to launch astronaut Alan Shepard into space on May 5. If the flight succeeded, Khrushchev would not only make history but also get a badly needed political boost. If Gagarin’s mission failed, Khrushchev would bury all evidence of the launch.

Oblivious to that background drama, Lippmann and his wife arrived at Khrushchev’s sanctuary at 11:30 in the morning, and would remain for eight hours of walking, swimming, eating, drinking, and talking before spending the night.

Lippmann savored his access to U.S. and world leaders, and it didn’t get any better than meeting the communist world’s leader in his Black Sea lair. Before he had begun writing a column, Lippmann had been an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson and was a delegate to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles. Lippmann had coined the phrase “Cold War” and was the leading U.S. voice suggesting that Washington accept the new Soviet sphere of influence in Europe. Moscow’s interest in Lippmann was so great that a KGB spy ring in the U.S. was working through his secretary, Mary Price, to gather information on his sources and subjects of interest, an infiltration Lippmann had not yet discovered.

The tall, large-boned Lippmann towered over the short, squat Khrushchev as they walked the compound. In a lively afternoon game of badminton, however, the fiercely competitive Khrushchev teamed up with the Lippmanns’ portly female minder from the foreign ministry and thrashed the more athletic Lippmanns, who were surprised by his agility. Khrushchev viciously and repeatedly struck the shuttlecock only a few inches above the net, often aiming at his opponents’ heads.

During a lunch break, Khrushchev’s second-in-command, Anastas Mikoyan, joined the group for a three-and-a-half-hour conversation the focus of which was so exclusively on Berlin that Lippmann, like Ambassador Thompson before him, concluded that for the Soviet leader, nothing matched the importance of Berlin’s future.

White House, State Department, and CIA officials had briefed Lippmann before his departure, so he was able to float a trial balloon on their behalf. Lippmann questioned why Khrushchev considered the Berlin matter such an urgent affair. Why not negotiate a Berlin standstill of five to ten years, during which the U.S. and the Soviet Union could attend to their relationship’s other problems and create an atmosphere more conducive to a Berlin agreement?

When Khrushchev sharply dismissed the notion of further delay, Lippmann pressed him for reasons.

A German solution, said Khrushchev, must come before “Hitler’s generals with their twelve NATO divisions get atomic weapons from France and the United States.” Before that could happen, Khrushchev said he wanted a peace treaty setting in stone the current frontiers of Poland and Czechoslovakia and guaranteeing the permanent existence of East Germany. Otherwise, Khrushchev insisted, West Germany would drag NATO into a war aimed at unifying Germany and restoring its prewar eastern frontier.

Lippmann took mental notes while his wife scribbled down the conversation verbatim. Both tried to remain sober by pouring out the considerable amounts of vodka and Armenian wine that Mikoyan served them into a bowl the Soviet leader had provided them in an act of mercy.

Time and again, with Kennedy as his intended audience, Khrushchev told the Lippmanns he was determined to “bring the German question to a head” that year. Lippmann would later report to his readers that the Soviet leader was “firmly resolved, perhaps irretrievably committed, to a showdown” over Berlin to stop the gusher of refugees and to save the communist East German state.

Khrushchev laid out his Berlin thinking to Lippmann in three parts, offering greater detail than he had previously provided for public consumption. Lippmann’s three-part report on their talks would win him a second Pulitzer Prize—and appear in 450 newspapers.

First, Khrushchev told the columnist, he wanted the West to accept “there are in fact two Germanys” that would never be reunited. The U.S. and the Soviet Union therefore should codify through peace treaties the three elements of Germany: East Germany, West Germany, and West Berlin. This would fix by international statute West Berlin’s role as a “free city.” Thereafter its access and liberty could be guaranteed, he said, by symbolic contingents of French, British, American, and Russian troops and by neutral troops assigned by the United Nations. The four occupying powers would sign an agreement with both Germanys that would produce that outcome.

Because Khrushchev doubted Kennedy would accept this option, he sketched for Lippmann what he called his “fallback position.” He would accept a temporary agreement that provided the two German states perhaps two or three years during which they could negotiate a loose confederation or some other form of unification. If the two sides reached a deal during that period of time, it would be written into a treaty. If they failed, however, all occupation rights would end and foreign troops would leave.

If the U.S. refused to negotiate either of his first two options, Khrushchev told Lippmann, his “third position” was to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany that gave Ulbricht full control over all West Berlin access routes. If the Allies resisted this new East German role, Khrushchev said he would bring in the Soviet military to blockade the city entirely.

To cushion the blow of this threat, Khrushchev told Lippmann he would not precipitate a crisis before he had the chance to meet Kennedy face-to-face and discuss the matter. In other words, he was opening his negotiations with the president through the columnist.

Assuming his unassigned role of U.S. co-negotiator, Lippmann suggested to Khrushchev a five-year moratorium on Berlin talks during which the current situation would remain frozen, which he knew from his pre-trip briefings was Kennedy’s preference.

Khrushchev waved his hand dismissively. Thirty months had passed since his Berlin ultimatum, he said, and he would not agree to that long a delay, nor was he willing to let the Berlin matter go unsettled before his October Party Congress. His deadline for a Berlin solution was the fall or winter of 1961, he said.

Khrushchev told Lippmann that he didn’t believe Kennedy was making decisions anyway. He summed up the forces behind Kennedy in one word: Rockefeller. He thought it was big money that manipulated Kennedy. Despite “their imperialistic nature,” he felt these capitalists could be won over with common sense. If they were forced to choose between a mutually advantageous agreement or Soviet unilateral action or war, Khrushchev said that he thought the Rockefeller crowd would cut a deal.

Khrushchev said he was ready to call the Americans’ nuclear bluff. “In my opinion,” he said, “there are no such stupid statesmen in the West to unleash a war in which hundreds of millions would perish just because we would sign a peace treaty with the GDR that would stipulate a special status of ‘free city’ for West Berlin with its 2.5 million population. Such idiots have not yet been born.”

At the end of the day, it was the Lippmanns and not Khrushchev who flagged and retreated to bed. Khrushchev embraced each of them with overpowering hugs before they returned, tired and drunk, to their hotel room in nearby Garga. Lippmann noticed none of the weariness in Khrushchev that Ambassador Thompson had seen just a month earlier. Nothing, however, would energize the Soviet leader as much as the news he would hear the following morning.

^{PITSUNDA PENINSULA, SOVIET UNION}

^{WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 1961}

Khrushchev had only one question when Sergei Korolyov, the legendary rocket designer and head of the Soviet space program, phoned him with the good news: “Just tell me, is he alive?”

Yes, Korolyov declared, and even better than that, Yuri Gagarin had returned to Earth safely after becoming the first human in space and the first human to orbit the Earth. The Soviets had called his mission Vostok, or “East,” to drive home the point of their rise. And the project had achieved its purpose. To Khrushchev’s delight, during the 108-minute flight, Gagarin had whistled a patriotic tune composed by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1951: “The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows, where her son flies in the sky.” Over the protests of military leaders, the euphoric Soviet leader spontaneously promoted Gagarin two ranks to major.

Khrushchev exploded with joy and pride. As had been the case with the Sputnik mission in 1957, he had again beaten the Americans in the space race. At the same time, he had demonstrated a missile technology with unmistakable military significance, given Soviet advances in nuclear capability. Most important, Vostok provided him with the political booster rocket he badly needed ahead of his October party conference—effectively neutralizing his enemies.

A banner headline in the official newspaper Izvestia, whose entire issue was devoted to the flight, read: GREAT VICTORY, OUR COUNTRY, OUR SCIENCE, OUR TECHNIQUE, OUR MEN.

Khrushchev exulted to his son Sergei that he would stage a grand event that would allow the Soviet people to celebrate a real hero. Sergei tried to talk his father out of an immediate return to Moscow, given the toll the stressful year already had taken on his health, but Khrushchev would not be dissuaded. The KGB hated the idea of crowds they could not completely control, but Khrushchev would not heed their warnings either.

The Soviet leader ordered the biggest parade and national celebration since World War II’s end on May 9, 1945. His sense of triumph was so great that he spontaneously jumped into the open limousine that drove Gagarin and his wife down Leninsky Prospekt to Red Square. On sunlit streets, they together waved to cheering crowds who climbed trees and hung out of windows for better views. Roadside balconies so groaned with people that Khrushchev feared they would collapse.

From atop the Lenin Mausoleum, Khrushchev used his cosmonaut’s nickname as he declared, “Let everyone who’s sharpening their claws against us know…that Yurka was in space, that he saw and knows everything.” He scorned those who had belittled the Soviet Union and thought Russians went “barefoot and without clothes.” Gagarin’s flight seemed as much a personal confirmation for Khrushchev of his leadership as it was a message to the world about his country’s technological capability. The peasant boy who had been illiterate and shoeless had outdone Kennedy and his far more advanced country.

More than three weeks later, Project Mercury would make Alan Shepard the second human and first American in space. History would always record that Khrushchev and Yurka got there first.

^{WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 1961}

Adenauer’s timing could not have been worse.

The West German chancellor landed in Washington just a few hours after Yuri Gagarin had parachuted to safety in Kazakhstan. He sat in the Oval Office with a president who was eager to get him out of town and get on with the invasion of Cuba.

All the more awkward, Adenauer had arrived in Washington roughly a month after the visit of Willy Brandt, the Berlin mayor, with the speaker of the Berlin Senate Egon Bahr. It was almost unprecedented that a newly elected U.S. president would schedule a meeting with key opposition representatives of an Allied country before he had met with the national leader, but such was the nature of the strained Kennedy–Adenauer relationship.

Kennedy had told Brandt that “of all the legacies of World War II which the West had inherited, Berlin was the most difficult.” Yet the president said he could think of no good solution to the problem, and neither could Brandt. “We will just have to live with the situation,” Kennedy had said.

Brandt joined the list of those who were telling Kennedy that Khrushchev would be likely to act to change Berlin’s status before his October Party Congress. To test Western resolve, Brandt said the East Germans and Soviets were increasing their harassment of civilian and military movement between the two sides of Berlin. If the Soviets again blockaded West Berlin, he said the city had built up stockpiles of fuel and food that would last for six months. This would give Kennedy time to negotiate his way out of any Berlin difficulty.

Brandt had used his forty minutes in the Oval Office to try to instill in Kennedy a greater passion for the cause of Berlin’s freedom. He called West Berlin a window to the free world that had kept alive East German hopes for eventual liberation. “Without West Berlin this hope would die,” he said, and American presence was the “essential guarantee” for the city’s continued existence. Brandt was relieved to hear Kennedy for the first time reject the Soviet proposal of a UN–protected “free city” status for West Berlin, an outcome Kennedy had been rumored to support. For his part, Brandt assured Kennedy that his Social Democrats’ earlier flirtations with the Soviets over neutrality were a thing of the past.

A month later, Kennedy’s conversations with Adenauer would be less congenial. Kennedy asked Adenauer many of the same questions he had posed to Brandt, but with less satisfying a result. When asked what the Soviets might do during 1961 in Berlin, Adenauer told Kennedy, “Anything or nothing could happen,” noting that he was not a prophet. Adenauer said that when Khrushchev issued his six-month ultimatum in November 1958, no one had expected him to be so patient, and still he had not delivered on his threats.

Kennedy wanted to know what Adenauer believed the U.S. reaction ought to be if the Soviet Union did sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, assuming Khrushchev did so without interfering with access to Berlin.

Adenauer delivered an elderly man’s lecture to the young president about how complicated the legal situation was regarding Germany. Was the president aware, he asked, that there still had been no peace treaty signed by the four powers with Germany as a whole? Was the president aware, he inquired further, of “the little-known fact” that the Soviet Union still maintained military missions in parts of West Germany? The three Allies had asked Adenauer not to say much about this, the chancellor said, as they also kept such outposts in East Germany, which enabled them to gather intelligence.

Since his boss had failed to answer Kennedy’s direct question, Foreign Minister Brentano assessed Soviet alternatives. The first possibility was that of another Berlin blockade, which he thought unlikely. The second was the Soviet transfer of control over Berlin to the East German leadership, followed by harassing tactics impeding access to the city, an outcome Brentano considered more probable. So Brentano suggested contingency planning for that possibility.

Given such a case, Adenauer said West Germany would stand by its military commitments under NATO and intervene to defend Western forces against Soviet attack. “If Berlin fell, it would mean the death sentence for Europe and the Western World,” said Brentano.

What followed then was a complex discussion about which parties had what legal rights under what contingencies in a Berlin crisis. What rights did West Germany have in international law over Berlin? What rights did it want? What rights did the four powers have to supply and defend Berliners? What was the essence of the NATO guarantee for Berlin? When might it be exercised, and by whom? At what point did the West go nuclear in a Berlin conflict?

All those questions required work, Adenauer said.

Kennedy fidgeted as he listened impatiently to the translation.

For Adenauer, the solution to the Berlin Crisis was to reinforce the division of the city into East and West to match that of Germany as a whole. In his mind, West Germany’s integration into the West was a prerequisite for eventual unification, as it would provide a better chance to negotiate from strength. He told Kennedy that West Germany had no interest in entering bilateral talks with the Soviets. “In the great game of the world,” he said, West Germany was “after all only a very small figure.” He needed a fully committed America, however, in order for his approach of refusing direct talks with Moscow on Berlin to work.

Kennedy said he was concerned about the $350 million “gold drain” each year caused by keeping U.S. troops in Germany, a situation not helped by the appreciation of the deutsche mark. He called it “one of the major factors in our balance of payments accounts.” He wanted the chancellor to help him reduce U.S. costs in Germany and to increase German procurements of military and other goods in the United States. The president wasn’t seeking direct budgetary relief from Adenauer, as had been rumored the previous December after the visit of Eisenhower Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson. But he did want a richer West Germany to provide more support for lesser-developed countries, in part to reduce this global burden for the U.S. Adenauer agreed to that and other economic measures that would lighten the U.S. load.

The discussion over the budget impact of the U.S. security guarantee for West Germany marked an important shift. Kennedy was less personally committed to Germany than his predecessors, and beyond that he believed a more prosperous Germany should also be more capable of offsetting U.S. costs.

The communiqué at the end of the Kennedy–Adenauer sessions was limp. It was vague concerning their points of agreement and left out entirely the issues where the sides differed. The correspondent of the German magazine Der Spiegel reported that Adenauer had been bitterly disappointed by a visit that did nothing to address Bonn’s major concerns. He said the three long meetings between Adenauer and Kennedy over two days “had eaten up the bodily strength of the West German chancellor, and had annihilated his political plans.” Adenauer, he said, walked down the White House steps following their talks “visibly exhausted, his suntanned face seemingly ashen-yellow against his sunken torso.”

Der Spiegel reported that the Kennedy administration had not satisfied Adenauer’s request to spend the weekend after his White House meetings with his friend President Eisenhower in Pennsylvania. Instead, the magazine said, Kennedy’s people “banned” Adenauer to Texas and “Vice President Johnson’s out-of-the-way cattle farm.”

For all the rising economic success of his country, Adenauer was suffering from the declining currency of his own leadership in Washington. The U.S. allies with whom he had executed the Marshall Plan, had rebuilt his country, had joined NATO, and had stood down the Soviets were mostly out of power. His closest co-conspirator, John Foster Dulles, had died two years earlier. A couple of German reporters had swallowed the White House spin that Adenauer and Kennedy had formed a deeper personal bond, but there was no evidence to support it.

At the end of the visit, Kennedy stepped out onto the White House lawn in the raw cold of Washington’s April dampness to praise the Adenauer to whom he had given so little. “History will deal most generously with him,” Kennedy said. “His accomplishments have been extraordinary in binding the nations of Western Europe together, in strengthening the ties which link the United States and the Federal Republic.”

Adenauer returned Kennedy’s favor, calling the man he so deeply doubted a “great leader” who carried “huge responsibility for the fate of the free world.”

Little noticed was Adenauer’s later response to a reporter’s question at the National Press Club about a rumored concrete wall that might be built along the Iron Curtain. “In the missile age,” Adenauer said after a short pause, “concrete walls don’t mean very much.”

^{STONEWALL, TEXAS}

^{SUNDAY, APRIL 16, 1961}

At high noon on a sunny Sunday, Adenauer rode off by plane from Washington with his daughter Libet and Foreign Minister Brentano to Austin, Texas. From there he would helicopter some sixty miles to Stone wall, population about five hundred, Vice President Johnson’s birthplace and home of his LBJ ranch. Adenauer was trading a world of real problems for one of almost mythical attraction to Germans—the open spaces of America and the Old West made popular by the best-selling novels written by German author Karl May (who, by the way, had never visited America).

Johnson’s central Texas of ranches and wooded hills had been settled by German pioneers a century earlier, and their ancestors warmly welcomed the Bundeskanzler with signs bearing messages such as WILLKOMMEN ADENAUER and HOWDY PODNUR. Father Wunibald Schneider staged a special afternoon Mass in German for Adenauer at Stonewall’s St. Francis Xavier Church.

When Adenauer visited nearby Fredericksburg, where German was still widely spoken, he said in his native tongue that he had “learned two things in his life. A man can become a Texan, but a Texan can never stop being one. And second, there is only one thing larger than Texas in the world, and that is the Pacific Ocean.” The crowd loved it, as did Johnson. With star German reporters in tow, Adenauer was using Texas as an antidote for his Washington disappointments and a campaign stop for his forthcoming elections. Though never happy being Kennedy’s errand boy for lower-profile missions, Johnson nevertheless followed Kennedy’s instructions that he “butter up” Adenauer, even though the vice president would have preferred being in Washington to push for his harder line on Cuba.

Adenauer was savoring some sausage at a Texas barbecue in two giant tents down by the Pedernales River that ran through the LBJ ranch at about the same time the CIA-supported Brigade 2506, loaded with arms and supplies, converged on its rendezvous point forty miles south of Cuba. Johnson put a ten-gallon hat on the chancellor’s head, which Adenauer cocked for a memorable photo that would appear in all the major German newspapers. Johnson gave him a saddle and spurs and praised how bravely Adenauer had been riding the horse of freedom through the Cold War. Adenauer enthused about how much he felt at home in Texas.

On their drive to the airport for Adenauer’s Monday, April 17, departure, Johnson took a phone call from Kennedy. He passed the president’s greetings to the chancellor and the fact that Kennedy regarded West Germany as a “great power.” Johnson then whispered to Adenauer that an uprising had begun in Cuba, triggered by an invasion of exiles, information just provided by Kennedy.

One would have to wait for developments, Johnson told Adenauer.

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

^{TUESDAY EVENING, APRIL 18, 1961}

With Adenauer safely back in Bonn, President Kennedy took a break from his unfolding Cuba crisis to put on a white tie and tails and sip champagne with members of Congress and their spouses at the White House. They all basked in the elegance and charm that the Kennedys had brought to Washington.

Most of Kennedy’s guests didn’t know that the previous morning 1,400 Cuban exiles, armed and trained by the CIA in Guatemala, had begun their landing at the Bay of Pigs, nor that the operation was already heading for disaster.

Two days earlier, eight B-26 bombers with Cuban markings, launched from a secret CIA air base in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, had failed in their preparatory strikes for the assault. They had destroyed only five of Castro’s three dozen combat planes, leaving the landing party’s boats vulnerable even before they had run aground on unanticipated coral reefs.

Castro’s fighters sank two freighters loaded with ammunition, food, and communication gear. Many of the U.S.-backed Cuban brigade’s men had landed in the wrong locations, and all had insufficient supplies. On the morning of the white-tie gala, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy had delivered to Kennedy the bad news: “The Cuban armed forces are stronger, the popular response is weaker, and our tactical position is feebler than we had anticipated.”

Nevertheless, the Marine Band played on that evening, striking up “Mr. Wonderful.” A singer belted out the lyrics from the Broadway hit as the perfect couple with their perfect smiles, the president and the First Lady, descended red-carpeted stairs to enormous applause.

Jackie danced with senators. The president schmoozed, elevated by popularity ratings that still exceeded 70 percent.

At 11:45 p.m., the president pulled away from his guests for a meeting that would be the last chance to save the failing Cuba mission. It was a scene out of Hollywood: the president and his Cabinet members in white tie talking battle plans with a military leadership in their most formal dress uniforms, medals dripping from their chests. Meanwhile, in Cuba, men they had sent into battle were being cut apart. Although Kennedy had tried to preserve deniability by refusing to use American soldiers or planes in the operation, his fingerprints were all over the unfolding calamity.

Most of the military brass in the room had been in their jobs under Eisenhower when in January 1960 he had approved the plan to overthrow Castro. Allen Dulles, the sixty-eight-year-old CIA director whom Kennedy had kept on from the Eisenhower administration, was overseeing the operation. He had produced the first plan for the assault, modeled on a successful 1954 coup in Guatemala that had toppled a leftist government using 150 exiles and U.S. pilots flying a handful of World War II fighter planes. The CIA men involved in Guatemala had also served as Dulles’s point men for the new Cuba plan.

Most important at the meeting was Richard Bissell, who was the sort of high-intellect, high-class, high-secrecy figure that appealed to the Kennedy brothers’ spy world fascination. The tall, stooped former Yale economics professor was CIA director of plans and had direct charge of the Cuban operation. Sophisticated and self-deprecating, he had amused Kennedy by describing himself as a “man-eating shark” when the two men had first met over a dinner put on for the new president by CIA officers at the all-male Alibi Club.

Now working for Kennedy, Dulles and Bissell had put the final touches on a plan for a high-profile amphibious landing of some 1,400 exile soldiers. The notion was that the assault force’s success would somehow trigger an anti-Castro uprising among what U.S. intelligence estimated to be 25 percent of the population, spurred by 2,500 members of resistance organizations and 20,000 sympathizers.

Kennedy had never questioned their numbers, yet had ordered changes in the plan that had weakened its chances of success. He had altered the landing site from Trinidad, a Cuban town on the south-central coast, to the Bay of Pigs on the argument that the new site would allow a less spectacular nocturnal landing with less chance of opposition. Kennedy had insisted there be no air or other support traceable to the U.S. and had reduced the initial air strike from sixteen to eight planes—again, to “play down the magnitude of the invasion.” Berlin had factored in the president’s considerations: he wanted to avoid providing Khrushchev with any pretext for Soviet military action in the divided city through a too-direct U.S. involvement in the Cuban invasion.

Kennedy’s last-minute changes to the operation had required such quick fixes that the result was a number of oversights. No one had anticipated the Bay of Pigs’ treacherous coral reefs. Nor had anyone thought to replace the earlier site’s escape route for insurgents into the mountains, should matters go amiss. Also, leaks had been widespread. Already, on January 10, the New York Times had splashed a three-column headline across its front page: U.S. HELPS TRAIN AN ANTI-CASTRO FORCE AT SECRET GUATEMALAN AIR-GROUND BASE. Then, just hours ahead of the invasion, Kennedy had to intervene through aide Arthur Schlesinger to get the New Republic magazine to withhold a story that richly and accurately detailed the Cuban invasion plans.

“Castro doesn’t need agents over here,” Kennedy had complained. “All he has to do is read our papers.”

The April 17 invasion had produced a sharp exchange of letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev. The Soviet leader, not yet knowing how badly the operation was going, fired a warning shot on April 18 at 2:00 p.m. Moscow time in the most threatening language he had yet employed with Kennedy. Making the Cuba–Berlin link, he said, “Military armament and the world political situation are such at this time that any so-called ‘little war’ can touch off a chain reaction in all parts of the globe.”

Khrushchev wasn’t buying Kennedy’s disclaimers, saying it was a secret to no one that the U.S. had trained the invasion force and supplied the planes and bombs. Warning Kennedy about the chances of a “military catastrophe,” Khrushchev vowed, “There should be no mistake about our position: We will render the Cuban people and their government all necessary help to repel armed attack on Cuba.”

Kennedy had responded to Khrushchev at about 6:00 p.m. Washington time on the same day. “You are under a serious misapprehension,” he protested to the Soviet leader. He recited all the reasons Cubans found the loss of their democratic liberties “intolerable,” and how that had bred growing resistance to Castro among more than 100,000 refugees. That said, he stood by the fiction of American noninvolvement and warned Khrushchev to also keep his hands off. “The United States intends no military intervention in Cuba,” he said, and if the Soviets intervened in response, then the United States would honor its obligations “to protect this hemisphere against external aggression.”

With that exchange fresh in his mind, Kennedy resisted all calls for greater American involvement. He rejected Bissell’s argument that he should urgently provide the exiles with limited U.S. air cover, with which Bissell argued victory could still be had. Bissell said all he required were two jets from the aircraft carrier USS Essex to shoot down enemy aircraft and support the stranded force.

“No,” said the president.

Just six days earlier, Kennedy had been irritated when aides expressed doubts about the mission. “I know everybody is grabbing their nuts on this,” he had said. Now he was just as annoyed when told by the people who had gotten him into this mess that he couldn’t succeed without escalating military action in a manner that would more clearly show the U.S. hand.

“The minute I land one Marine, we’re in this up to our necks,” he told Bissell. “I can’t get the United States into a war and then lose it, no matter what it takes.” Moreover, Kennedy didn’t want another “American Hungary,” a situation in which the U.S. was perceived to have encouraged an uprising that in the end it did nothing to defend. “And that’s what it could be, a fucking slaughter. Is that understood, gentlemen?”

If the president didn’t want to use warplanes, argued Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke, a hero of World War II and the Korean War, he could use a U.S. destroyer’s guns to help the Cuban brigade. Known as “31-knot Burke” for his tendency as admiral to drive his destroyers at boiler-breaking speed, Burke now wanted Kennedy to push up the throttle. He said Kennedy could change the whole course of battle if just one destroyer “knocked the hell out of Castro’s tanks,” which he insisted would be a relatively easy task.

“Burke,” the president fumed, “I don’t want the United States involved in this.”

“Hell, Mr. President, we are involved,” retorted Burke, speaking with the tone of a four-star to a young PT boat captain. He had seen often enough how political indecision could cost lives and shift battle outcomes.

Kennedy ended the three-hour meeting at 2:45 a.m. with a weak compromise. He approved a plan that would send six unmarked jets to protect the exile force’s B-26s as they dropped supplies and ammunition. But the bombers arrived an hour ahead of the U.S. escorts, and the Cubans shot down two of the planes.

When it was all over, Castro had killed 114 of the CIA’s trainees and had taken 1,189 prisoners. He had gained his enemies’ surrender after three days of fighting.

Acheson immediately grasped the negative impact Kennedy’s Cuba failure would have on Khrushchev’s thinking and on Allied confidence. He considered it “such a completely un-thought-out, irresponsible thing to do.”

Speaking before diplomats at the Foreign Service Institute, he said, “The European view was that we were watching a gifted young amateur practice with a boomerang, when they saw, to their horror, that he had knocked himself out.” He told his audience the Europeans were “amazed that so inexperienced a person should play with so lethal a weapon.”

With a tone of dismay, Acheson wrote to his former boss Truman after returning from his Europe trip, referring to his Rose Garden meeting with Kennedy but without mentioning the president’s name. “Why we ever engaged in this asinine Cuban adventure,” he said, “I cannot imagine. Before I left it was mentioned to me and I told my informants how you and I had turned down similar suggestions for Iran and Guatemala and why. I thought that this Cuban idea had been put aside, as it should have been.”

He told Truman that the impact of Cuba on European thinking about Kennedy would be profound. “The direction of this government seems surprisingly weak,” he said of Kennedy. “So far as I can make out the mere inertia of the Eisenhower plan carried it to execution. All that the present administration did was to take out of it those elements of strength essential to its success. Brains are no substitute for judgment. Kennedy has, abroad at least, lost a very large part of the almost fanatical admiration which his youth and good looks have inspired.” Acheson told Truman that Washington was “a depressed town,” where “the morale in the State Department has about struck bottom.”

Reports of Acheson’s comments to diplomats-in-training made their way back to Kennedy, who asked to see a full transcript of the meeting. From that point forward, Acheson noticed “an unfortunate effect” on Kennedy’s trust in him and a sharp reduction in his level of personal access.

Acheson’s colorful criticism had cut too close to the bone.

^MOSCOW

^{THURSDAY, APRIL 20, 1961}

Khrushchev could hardly believe his good fortune.

He had known in advance that Kennedy would act in Cuba, and he had told columnist Lippmann as much at Pitsunda. Yet never in his fondest dreams had he anticipated such incompetence. In his first major foreign test, the new U.S. president had lived down to Khrushchev’s lowest expectations. Kennedy had demonstrated weakness under fire. He had lacked the backbone to cancel Eisenhower’s plans or the character to make them work as his own. He had lacked the resolve to bring to a successful conclusion an action of so much importance to American prestige.

Though Kennedy had avoided giving Khrushchev a pretext for a tit-for-tat response in Berlin, at the same time, through his failure, he had provided the Soviet leader valuable intelligence on the sort of man who was leading the U.S. “I don’t understand Kennedy,” Khrushchev said to his son Sergei. “Can he really be that indecisive?” He compared the Bay of Pigs unfavorably to his own bloody but bold intervention of Soviet troops in Hungary to ensure the country remained firmly in the communist sphere of influence.

That said, Khrushchev was concerned by the possibility that CIA chief Dulles, whom he had blamed for the U-2 incident the year before, might have executed the invasion to undermine preparations for a U.S.–Soviet summit. Khrushchev was also sufficiently self-centered to believe Kennedy may have launched his Cuban landing to humiliate the Soviet leader on his April 17 birthday. Instead of ruining his celebration, however, Kennedy’s failure would provide Khrushchev with an unanticipated gift.

The KGB reports on Kennedy that followed struck Khrushchev as simultaneously encouraging and troubling. On the positive side, the KGB was reporting from London—apparently from sources at the American embassy—that Kennedy had been telling colleagues in the wake of Cuba that he regretted having kept on Republicans like Dulles as CIA chief and C. Douglas Dillon at Treasury. At the same time, however, Khrushchev wondered what the Cuban operation said about the nature of the Kennedy presidency. Was the president really in control, or was he being manipulated by anticommunist hawks like Dulles? Was Kennedy himself a hawk? Or, more likely, did the botched plan suggest that Kennedy was perhaps something even more dangerous—an incalculable and unpredictable adversary?

Whatever the truth, what was indisputable was that Khrushchev’s fortunes had shifted dramatically for the better in the space of a single week. Very little could have provided a more dramatic shift in momentum than the combination of the Gagarin space triumph and the Bay of Pigs setback. It had been just six weeks since Khrushchev had met Ambassador Thompson in Siberia and relayed his reluctance to accept Kennedy’s invitation for a summit meeting.

Now that Kennedy had been so weakened, Khrushchev was more inclined to risk drawing him into the ring.

Although the Soviet leader’s luck had changed far faster than he could have imagined, he knew he had to move faster still. The situation on the ground in Berlin remained stubbornly unchanged. A whole new generation was congregating in Berlin, eager to soak up the sights and atmosphere of the only city in the world where they could watch the world’s two feuding systems compete openly and without mediation.

Khrushchev wanted to take no chances about where it would all lead.

Jörn Donner Discovers the City

What drew young Finnish writer Jörn Donner to Berlin was his conviction that the place was more of an idea than it was a city. For that reason, it served his postgraduate lust for adventure and inspiration far better than any of the available alternatives.

Paris’s Left Bank had Sartre and his disciples, Rome’s Via Veneto offered its Dolce Vita, and nothing could rival London’s Soho when it came to Donner’s search for the combined attractions of learning and debauchery. Yet only Berlin could provide Donner such a unique window on the divided world in which he lived.

Donner considered the difference between East and West Berliners to be purely circumstantial, and thus they served as the perfect laboratory mice for the world’s most important social experiment. They had been the same Berliners shaped by the same history until 1945, when an abrupt application of different systems left one side with the decadent vices of prosperity and the other with the virtues of a straitjacket. Berliners had always been pinched geographically between Europe and Russia, but the Cold War had transformed that map into a psychological and geopolitical drama.

Twenty years later, Donner would produce Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander, and it would win four Academy Awards. But, for the moment, he fashioned himself as a modern-day Christopher Isherwood, and, having just completed his studies at the University of Stockholm, he wanted to launch his artistic career by chronicling Berlin as the living history of his times.

Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin had tracked the improvised street battles between communists and Nazis during the 1930s that were the prelude to World War II and the Holocaust. Donner regarded the story he would tell of no less historic significance, though the role of Berliners themselves would be more as passive bystanders to the high politics that surrounded them.

Germans disparagingly employ the term Berliner Schnauze, or “Berlin snout,” to describe Berliners’ irreverent boisterousness, and none of that had been lost during their postwar occupation. Author Stephen Spender described Berliners’ apparent Cold War courage this way: “If Berliners show a peculiar fearlessness which excites the almost unbelieving wonderment of the world, that is because they have reached that place on the far side of fear, where, being utterly at the mercy of the conflict of the great powers, they feel there is no use being afraid, and therefore they have nothing to be afraid of.”

In the cold damp of the West Berlin subway, Donner studied the unpleasant, incurious Berlin faces that were at the center of his drama. Though the fate of humanity might be decided in their city, Donner found Berliners curiously apathetic, as if the reality were too much for them to absorb.

In a search for the right metaphor to describe the divided city, Donner would later apologize to his readers that he could not resist “the sleepwalker’s almost automatic mania” to describe Berlin’s division through the contrasting nature of its two most prominent avenues—West Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm and East Berlin’s Stalinallee.

Like West Berlin, the Ku’damm (as locals called it) had emerged from the chaos of the postwar years full of restless energy, neon lights, aspirational fashion, and new cafés and bars competing for expanding wallets. Like East Berlin, the Stalinallee concealed the underlying fragility of its society with its centrally planned neoclassical grandeur, which dictated everything from each apartment’s size to the width of its hallways and height of its windows. State security directives determined precisely how many informants would be planted among what number of residents.

Though the heart of the Ku’damm was but four kilometers long, that stretch contained seventeen of the country’s most expensive jewelers, ten car dealers, and the city’s most exclusive restaurants. War widows begged on corners where they knew the city’s finest citizens would pass. One such spot was directly before Eduard Winter’s Volkswagen showroom, where Berlin’s richest man was known to sell thirty cars a day when not running his Coca-Cola distributorship.

Isherwood, whose book gave rise to the movie Cabaret, spoke of prewar Ku’damm as a “cluster of expensive hotels, bars, cinemas, shops…a sparkling nucleus of light, like a sham diamond, in the shabby twilight of the town.” The Cold War atmosphere remained much the same, though postwar reconstruction had introduced the sharper concrete and glass architectural edges of the 1950s.

The Ku’damm’s seedier side had also survived the war. In one tawdry bar, called The Old-Fashioned, Donner observed a Düsseldorf businessman licking the ear of a blond bar girl until she wearily drew back and his lips fell into her armpit. Berlin was a place where Germans came to pursue their pleasures in anonymity and without curfew, from its transvestite bars to more conventional amusements. What happened in Berlin stayed in Berlin.

Across town in communist East Berlin, Donner found the Ku’damm’s alter ego. In 1949, in honor of Stalin’s seventieth birthday, Ulbricht renamed the city’s grand Frankfurter Strasse for the dictator, and it would keep his name through November 1961, even though he was dead and had been renounced by Khrushchev.[3] During World War II’s final days, Soviet soldiers had hung Nazis from trees that lined the street, often fastening to their corpses identifying papers with the inscription: HERE HANGS SO-AND-SO, BECAUSE HE REFUSED TO DEFEND WIFE AND CHILD.

Ulbricht had rebuilt the street as Stalinallee to be a showcase for the power and capabilities of communism, “the first socialist road of Germany,” whose purpose was to provide “palaces for the working class.” So construction crews from 1952 to 1960 produced a long row of eight-story apartment houses of Stalinist monumental architecture. Wartime rubble was transformed into high-ceilinged flats with balconies, elevators, ceramic tiling, marble staircases, and—a luxury at the time—baths in every apartment. To provide a sufficiently wide and long promenade for military marches, builders made Stalinallee a tree-studded, six-lane, ninety-meter-wide, two-kilometer-long highway. Stalinallee would provide the backdrop for the annual May Day parade, but it also was where the 1953 workers’ uprising gained its momentum.

Only a short distance from Stalinallee, Donner described the quiet desperation of East Berliners who had passed through the ravages of World War II, only to again land on the wrong side of history. The Raabe-Diele was one of the oldest pubs in Berlin and sat on Sperlingsgasse, a narrow lane still blocked in the middle by wartime ruins that had not yet been cleared. It had but three tables, a counter, benches along the walls, and simple, tattered chairs.

Its sole proprietor was Frau Friedrich Konarske, who at age eighty-two had worked the same counter for fifty-seven years. She would not discuss her own sad life but happily gossiped with Donner about her clientele, all men save for a loud, forty-something woman who drank straight shots while recounting her stomach operations.

“Ten drunk men are better than one half-sober female,” complained Konarske.

Two middle-aged men strummed their guitars at a table by the window and sang sentimental songs. As they prepared to go home, a man with a hunchback shouted a last request in a squeaky voice. “Play ‘Lili Marlene.’ That’s what I want to hear. And then I’ll buy you a round.”

The best-dressed man in the bar—and who, because of that, the others took to be a Communist Party member or state security officer—shouted his objection on the grounds that the song had been one of Hitler’s favorites.

The hunchback protested angrily, “What’s that? ‘Lili Marlene’ was played during the war in order to give voice—yes, to give voice—to the longing of the soldiers for peace. It has nothing to do with Nazism.” And it was true: the song had been written during World War I by soldier Hans Leip while he marched to the Russian front from Berlin. The hunchback protested that even Americans and Englishmen loved the song.

“It’s a universal melody!” shouted an inebriated young man who looked like he had been a boxer, with his large, flat nose, cauliflower ears, and finger-tips yellowed by nicotine. One after another of Frau Konarske’s clientele sounded agreement in an uprising against the supposed communist, but the singers still hesitated, as momentary acts of defiance could result in long jail sentences.

Made courageous by drink, the boxer type threatened the well-dressed man: “If you don’t want to listen, you can leave.” He then began to sing the first verse alone, after which the two musicians joined in, followed by one additional voice after the other, until the entire pub joined in song around the still-silent man in the dark suit who sipped his beer.

Frau Konarske offered drinks on the house. She then took Donner aside and showed him the small, framed text behind her on the wall, dating from World War II. It read: WE SHALL GO TO OUR DEATH JUST AS NAKED AS WE CAME INTO THE WORLD.

She asked the stranger, “Do you think that anyone will take over my place after I am gone? All my relatives and friends are in West Germany. Do you think they want to come over to East Berlin and work in a little hole from ten in the morning until two at night?”

She answered her own question: “No.”

9 PERILOUS DIPLOMACY

^{WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{TUESDAY, MAY 9, 1961}

Wearing a white shirt, a loosened tie, and a jacket held casually over one shoulder, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy bounded down the steps of the side entrance to the Department of Justice on Pennsylvania Avenue and extended his hand to Soviet spy Georgi Bolshakov.

“Hi, Georgi, long time no see,” the attorney general said, as if reacquainting himself with a long-lost friend, though he had met him only briefly once, some seven years earlier. Beside Kennedy stood Ed Guthman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who had become his press officer and sounding board. Guthman had arranged the unprecedented meeting through the man who had delivered Bolshakov by taxi and stood beside him, New York Daily News correspondent Frank Holeman.

“So shall we take a walk?” Kennedy asked Bolshakov. The attorney general’s casual manner was disarming, considering the unconventional, unprecedented contact he was about to initiate. He nodded to Guthman and Holeman to stay behind as he and the Russian spy walked onto the Washington Mall in the spring evening mist, making small talk about the magazine that Bolshakov had been editing that day.

At Kennedy’s suggestion, the two men sat on a secluded patch of lawn, the air scented with freshly mowed grass. The U.S. Capitol stood in the background to one side, and the Washington Monument to the other, with the Smithsonian Castle’s front gate directly behind them. Lovers on early evening walks and small groups of tourists looked to the rain clouds above, which threatened a storm.

Bolshakov described his closeness to Khrushchev, and he offered himself up as a more useful and direct contact to the Soviet leader than Moscow’s ambassador to the United States, Mikhail Menshikov, whom Bobby and his brother had come to consider a clown.

Bobby told Bolshakov that his brother was eager to meet with Khrushchev, and that he hoped to improve communication in the run-up to their first meeting so that the two sides could get the agenda right. The attorney general said he already knew about Bolshakov’s links to some of Khrushchev’s top people and was confident he could play that role, if he was willing. “It would be great if they receive information firsthand, from you,” Bobby said. “And they, I believe, would have a chance to report it to Khrushchev.”

After a roll of thunder, Kennedy joked, “If a bolt of lightning kills me, the papers will report a Russian spy killed the president’s brother. It could trigger a war. Let’s get away from here.” They first walked briskly and then accelerated to a run to escape the downpour, regrouping in the attorney general’s office after riding up in his private elevator. They removed their wet shirts and continued their conversation while wearing undershirts and sitting in a tiny room with two armchairs, a refrigerator, and a small library.

Thus began one of the most unique and—even years thereafter—only partially understood relationships of the Cold War. From that day forward, the attorney general and Bolshakov would communicate frequently—during some periods as often as two or three times monthly. It was an exchange that went almost entirely unreported and undocumented, an omission Robert Kennedy would later regret. He never took notes at the meetings, and reported on them directly and only orally to his brother. Thus the Bolshakov–Kennedy exchanges can be reconstructed only imperfectly through a dissatisfying Robert Kennedy oral history, Soviet records, Bolshakov’s partial recollections, and the memories of several others who were involved at one point or another.

President Kennedy had approved of his brother’s initial meeting with Bolshakov without consulting or advising any of his chief foreign policy advisers or Soviet experts. That reflected the Kennedys’ increased distrust of his intelligence and military apparatus following the Bay of Pigs, their penchant for clandestine activities, and their desire to put the pieces in place as carefully as possible for a smooth summit meeting.

For Khrushchev, however, Bolshakov was more of a useful pawn than a significant player. On a complex chessboard, Khrushchev could deploy Bolshakov to draw out Kennedy without revealing his own game. From the beginning, the structure of the exchange provided the Soviet leader with an advantage. President Kennedy could learn from Bolshakov only what Khrushchev and other superiors had provided him to transmit, while Bolshakov could extract much more from Bobby Kennedy, who so intimately knew the president and his thinking.

Bolshakov was just one of two channels Khrushchev was working to reach Kennedy in early May, and while top Soviet officials engaged in both to their maximum benefit, their U.S. counterparts knew only about the formal contact made five days earlier. It was then that Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had telephoned Ambassador Thompson with Khrushchev’s belated response to Kennedy’s letter of two months earlier, inviting the Soviet leader to a summit meeting.

Gromyko had apologized to Thompson that Khrushchev himself could not personally transmit his interest. The Soviet leader was leaving Moscow for yet another trip to the provinces to put the pieces in place for his October Party Congress, and he would not return until May 20. But speaking on Khrushchev’s behalf, Gromyko said the Soviet leader “deplored the fact that discord” had grown between the two countries over the Bay of Pigs and Laos.

Reading carefully scripted language, Gromyko said, “If the Soviet Union and the U.S. do not consider that there is an unbridgeable gulf between them, they should draw the appropriate conclusions from this, namely that we live on one planet and therefore ways should be found to settle appropriate questions and build up our relations.” Motivated by that end, Gromyko said Khrushchev was now ready to accept Kennedy’s invitation to meet, and believed “bridges have to be built which would link our countries.”

What Gromyko wanted to know from Thompson was whether the Kennedy invitation “remains valid or is being revised” after the Bay of Pigs. Though Gromyko had posed the question politely, its underlying message was an impertinent one. He was asking whether Kennedy still dared meet with Khrushchev after having so badly shot himself in the foot in Cuba.

With that, Khrushchev’s approach to President Kennedy had entered its third stage. The first had been Khrushchev’s initial flurry of efforts to meet Kennedy directly after the U.S. election and during his first days in office. The second had been Khrushchev’s withdrawal of interest following the new president’s hawkish State of the Union message. Now Khrushchev was again eager to meet and press his perceived advantage over a now weakened opponent.

Thompson put down the phone and prepared a cable. He immediately concluded that if the president wished to reverse a perilous worsening of relations, the dangers of agreeing to such a meeting were far outweighed by its necessity. Thompson followed his 4:00 p.m. secret telegram reporting on his conversation with Gromyko with a similarly classified message to Secretary Rusk that urged the president to grasp Khrushchev’s extended hand. Critics would argue that Kennedy was walking like wounded prey into a bear trap, but Thompson suggested Kennedy reveal publicly that he had issued the invitation to Khrushchev long before the Bay of Pigs, and that the Soviet leader was only now responding.

Thompson then laid out his arguments in favor of the meeting:

• The very prospect of such a summit would prompt the Soviets to take a “more reasonable approach” to issues such as Laos, nuclear testing, and disarmament.

• A face-to-face meeting would be the best place for Kennedy to influence crucial decisions of the October Party Congress that could set the stage for the superpower relationship for years to come.

• Because Mao Tse-tung opposed such U.S.–Soviet consultations, Thompson suggested the “mere fact of meeting will exacerbate Soviet–Chinese relations.”

• Finally, showing the world a willingness to talk directly to Khrushchev would influence public opinion in a way that would make it easier for Kennedy to maintain a strong U.S. position in favor of defending West Berlin’s freedoms.

Despite the negative turn in relations with Moscow, Thompson also argued that Khrushchev had not fundamentally altered his desire to do business with the West, nor had he abandoned his foreign policy doctrine of peaceful coexistence. Thompson often worried about being labeled by his Washington critics as a Khrushchev apologist, but he nevertheless argued that the Soviet leader had not initiated confrontation with the West in the Third World but had merely taken advantage of U.S. setbacks in Cuba, Laos, Iraq, and the Congo.

However, too much was at stake for Kennedy to agree to such a summit without preconditions that would more thoroughly test Soviet intentions—and avoid further foreign policy mistakes. Through diplomatic probes, Kennedy wanted to determine whether Khrushchev genuinely wished to improve relations.

After a day of reflection, Kennedy responded cautiously to Thompson through Rusk. Rusk wanted the ambassador to tell Khrushchev that the president “remains desirous” to meet the Soviet leader and hoped they could still do so by early June in Vienna—the Soviets’ preferred location. Kennedy regretted, however, that he couldn’t yet make a firm decision but would do so before Khrushchev returned to Moscow on May 20.

What followed were the conditions.

Most important, Rusk cabled that Thompson should relay to Khrushchev that the chances for such a summit weren’t good if the Soviets didn’t change their approach to the ongoing conflict in Laos. The Geneva talks were beginning the following week, and Kennedy wanted to end the war and achieve a neutral Laos. But the Soviets had been stalling in Geneva while fighting escalated.

Special envoy Averell Harriman, who was leading the U.S. delegation in Geneva, had reported to Kennedy that he doubted Khrushchev was ready to accept a neutral Laos because the “commies in Geneva are full of confidence and appear utterly relaxed about achieving their goals in Laos.” The Soviets, Harriman said, were maneuvering to put the U.S. in the unacceptable position of having to attend the conference before they had an effective ceasefire, hardly the actions of a country that would engage usefully in a summit meeting.

Beyond that, Rusk told Thompson that “for domestic political reasons,” the president wanted Khrushchev to provide some prospect that he would work toward Kennedy’s goal of achieving a nuclear test ban agreement during their Vienna talks. Furthermore, the president wanted assurance that any public statement in Vienna would exclude reference to Berlin, a matter he was unprepared to negotiate.

Three days later, President Kennedy was test-driving the same message via his brother as RFK sat in his undershirt with Bolshakov at the Justice Department.

It suited Bolshakov fine that Bobby had picked May 9—a national holiday in Moscow—for their first, furtive meeting. Though it was just another workday in Washington, the Soviet embassy’s staff had the day off to celebrate the sixteenth anniversary of the Nazi defeat. That served Bolshakov’s purpose of concealing even from his closest comrades the ultrasecret conduit to President Kennedy that he had established.

In going forward with the contact, Bolshakov had disregarded the opposition of his nearest superior, the station chief, or rezident, at the embassy for Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. For Bolshakov’s boss, it was unthinkable that a mid-level Soviet agent would establish the most important U.S.–Soviet intelligence back channel imaginable. In meeting with Robert Kennedy, Bolshakov was connecting with a man who was at the same time the president’s brother, his closest confidant, and his attorney general, thus overseeing all the counterintelligence activities of the FBI.

What gave Bolshakov the confidence to nevertheless pursue such a high-level mission was the sanction of the Soviet leader himself through Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, editor of the newspaper Izvestia and Bolshakov’s friend. Adzhubei had recommended Bolshakov to Khrushchev as someone who could help counsel him when he was planning his first trip to the U.S. in 1959. (Until shortly before then, Bolshakov had loyally served Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the decorated war hero and defense minister whom Khrushchev had purged.)

What followed was Bolshakov’s new posting to the U.S. under the cover of embassy information officer and editor of the English-language Soviet propaganda magazine USSR. It would be Bolshakov’s second tour in Washington, the first having come under cover as correspondent for the news agency TASS from 1951 to 1955.

For a cloak-and-dagger operative, Bolshakov had an unusually high profile as Washington society’s favorite Soviet. He was a gregarious, hard-drinking bon vivant with wisps of black hair, piercing blue eyes, and a central-casting Russian accent. His friends and acquaintances included a number of Kennedy circle insiders: Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee; reporter Charles Bartlett, who had introduced the president to his wife, Jacqueline; the president’s chief of staff, Kenny O’Donnell; his special counsel, Ted Sorensen; and his press secretary, Pierre Salinger.

However, Bolshakov’s most important link to Kennedy had been Frank Holeman, a Washington journalist who had been close to Nixon and was now trying to ingratiate himself with the Kennedy administration. With his six-foot-eight frame, Southern accent and manners, deep voice, and ever-present bow tie and cigar, he was known by colleagues as “the Colonel.” Though only forty years old, Holeman was a Washington fixture, having covered presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and now Kennedy. He knew Washington was all about contacts, and he had them everywhere.

Bolshakov had worked Holeman as an unpaid informant from the time they had met at a 1951 Soviet embassy lunch in the American correspondent’s honor. Holeman had endeared himself to the Kremlin by blocking a National Press Club effort to ban Soviet journalists from membership in response to the Czech government’s jailing of the entire Associated Press bureau in Prague. Explaining why he had done so, Holeman joked that the club should be a place where all parties could “swap lies.” He then went even further on behalf of the Soviets, landing club membership for a new Soviet press officer, an individual likely to be a spy.

When Bolshakov returned to Moscow in 1955, he handed off the Holeman contact to his GRU successor, Yuri Gvozdev, whose cover was as a cultural attaché. Gvozdev had passed through Holeman, who described himself as the Soviets’ “carrier pigeon,” a crucial message that the Eisenhower administration should not overreact to Khrushchev’s November 1958 Berlin ultimatum because Khrushchev would never go to war over Berlin. Working through Holeman, Gvozdev also helped lay the groundwork for Nixon’s visit to the Soviet Union thereafter, handling negotiations over the conditions.

When Bolshakov replaced Gvozdev in 1959, he reacquainted himself with Holeman and the two struck up such a close friendship that their families often got together socially. As fortune would have it, Holeman had been close for some years to the new attorney general’s press secretary, Ed Guthman, to whom he had been passing on the most interesting aspects of his conversations with Bolshakov. Guthman in turn had reported the gist of those talks to Robert Kennedy. With Guthman’s blessing, Holeman on April 29 first floated the possibility of a meeting when he asked Bolshakov, “Don’t you think it would be better to meet directly with Robert Kennedy so that he receives your information at first hand?”

Ten days and countless conversations later, Bolshakov sensed something important was up when Holeman asked if he would join him for a “late lunch” at about four p.m.

“Why so late?” Bolshakov asked.

Holeman explained he had tried to reach Bolshakov several times over the course of the day but that the holiday duty officer had told him Bolshakov was at the printing office, finishing the new edition of his magazine.

A short time later, after they had settled into the chairs in the corner of a cozy, inconspicuous Georgetown restaurant, Holeman looked at his watch. When Bolshakov asked whether it was time for him to go home, Holeman said, “No, it’s our time to go. You have an appointment with Robert Kennedy at six.”

“Damn it,” said Bolshakov, looking at his old suit and frayed shirt cuffs. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Are you afraid?” asked Holeman.

“Not afraid, but I’m not ready for such a meeting.”

“You are always ready.” Holeman smiled.

At the Justice Department, Bobby told the Soviet his brother worried that tension between the two countries was caused in large degree by misunderstanding and misinterpretation of each other’s intentions and actions. Through the Bay of Pigs experience, Bobby said, his brother had learned about the dangers of taking action based on bad information. He told Bolshakov that his brother had made a mistake after the Bay of Pigs in failing to immediately fire the senior officials responsible for the operation.

“The American government and the President,” said Bobby, “are concerned that the Soviet leadership underestimates the capabilities of the U.S. government and those of the President himself.” The message he wanted Bolshakov to relay to the Kremlin could not have been clearer: If Khrushchev tried to test his brother’s resolve, the president would have no choice but to “take corrective action” and introduce a tougher approach toward Moscow.

He told Bolshakov, “At present, our principal concern is the situation in Berlin. The importance of this issue may not be evident to everybody. The President thinks that further misunderstanding of our opinions on Berlin could lead to a war.” Yet, he added, it was precisely because of the complications of the Berlin situation that the president didn’t want the Vienna meeting to focus on a matter where it would be so difficult to achieve progress.

What the president wanted, Bobby told Bolshakov, was for Khrushchev and his brother to use the meeting as a chance to better understand each other, to create personal ties, and to outline a course to further develop their relationship. He wanted real agreements on matters like the nuclear test ban. On Berlin, however, he believed in delaying significant diplomatic steps until both sides had had more time to thoroughly study the matter.

For an individual who had only been called to join the meeting a couple of hours earlier, the Soviet seemed well prepared to respond. If the top U.S. and Soviet leaders met, Bolshakov said, Khrushchev would then consider “substantial” concessions on nuclear testing, and would also offer progress on Laos. Bolshakov did not comment on RFK’s insistence that Berlin remain off-limits in any summit decisions, which Bobby may have misinterpreted as agreement.

Encouraged by Bolshakov’s response, Bobby sketched out a potential nuclear test ban deal. The two countries had been negotiating at lower levels since 1958, but their sticking point was verification. The U.S. had sought without success the right to inspect sites in the Soviet Union. Bobby proposed a unilateral concession under which the U.S. would cut in half, from twenty to ten, the number of inspections it was demanding each year on each other’s territory to investigate seismic events. The condition for this agreement, he said, would be that neither side would veto the creation of an international commission that could monitor complaints.

Behind Bobby’s proposal lay a growing U.S. fear that the Soviets were digging holes so deep and large that they could conceal a weapons test. The most annual inspections Moscow had been willing to accept previously were three. And Moscow wanted any verification to be performed by a “troika”—three officials representing the Soviet bloc, the capitalist West, and the Third World. U.S. officials had opposed that approach as it would have granted a Soviet representative a de facto veto. Said Bobby, “The President does not want to repeat the sad experience of Khrushchev’s meeting with Eisenhower at Camp David and hopes that this forthcoming meeting will produce concrete agreements.”

Playing the role of suitor, Bolshakov said nothing that would make Bobby believe the president’s preconditions for a summit were unacceptable to Khrushchev. There was only one problem: Bolshakov was a mere message carrier who could not know Khrushchev’s mind as well as Bobby knew that of his brother.

The perils to the U.S. of the Bolshakov–Bobby Kennedy contact were deep and multiple. Bolshakov could deceive on Moscow’s behalf without knowing he was doing so, while Bobby was far less likely to engage in disinformation and, even if he had tried, would have been less skilled in doing so. Beyond that, Bolshakov almost undoubtedly was tailed by FBI agents. Reports back from field agents on their meetings could have increased FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover’s suspicions of the Kennedys.

Finally, Bolshakov lacked Bobby’s license to horse-trade. And because JFK would keep the contacts secret even from his own top Cabinet members until after the Vienna Summit, he had no independent means to verify Bolshakov’s reliability. Moscow not only controlled what Bolshakov could discuss, it also determined the precise manner in which he would raise issues. If Robert Kennedy raised a matter for which Bolshakov was unprepared, the Soviet spy would respond that he would consider the issue and get back to the attorney general later.

The most important messages Bolshakov brought back from his first meeting with Bobby relayed the president’s readiness for a summit, his fear that the Soviet leader perceived him as weak, his aversion to negotiating Berlin’s status, and his desire above all else to achieve a nuclear test ban deal. Bobby came away from the initial contact unable to provide his brother any greater insight into Khrushchev. He was at the same time gaining the false impression that Khrushchev was ready to accept his brother’s conditions.

After five hours of conversation, Bobby gave Bolshakov a ride home. Kept awake by adrenaline, the Soviet operative stayed up all night before cabling a full report to Moscow early the next morning. Through Bolshakov, Khrushchev knew far better what Kennedy hoped to achieve through a summit and what he feared about it. At the same time, he had effectively misled the president about what the Soviet side was willing to accept.

^MOSCOW

^{FRIDAY, MAY 12, 1961}

Eager to close agreement for a Vienna Summit, Khrushchev rapidly satisfied Kennedy’s desire for confidence-building gestures.

In Geneva, Soviet officials negotiating Laos reached agreement with British representatives on a formula to defuse an impending crisis. The result would be a fourteen-nation conference on Laos in Geneva, with the goal of an end to hostilities and a neutral Laos.

On the same day, Khrushchev delivered a speech in Tbilisi, in the Soviet republic of Georgia, that senior State Department officials considered the most moderate Soviet statement on U.S.–Soviet relations since the U-2 incident the previous May. Repeating language he had used in his acceptance of Kennedy’s summit invitation, Khrushchev said, “Although President Kennedy and I are men of different poles, we live on the same Earth. We have to find a common language on certain questions.”

On that day, too, Khrushchev sent a letter to Kennedy accepting his invitation of nearly two months earlier to a summit meeting. The letter made no mention of a nuclear test ban, though it touched upon areas where they might make progress, such as Laos. However, Khrushchev was not willing to lay Berlin to the side. He said he did not seek unilateral advantage in the divided city, but wanted through their meeting to remove a “dangerous source of tension in Europe.”

Now it was Kennedy’s move.

^{WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{SUNDAY, MAY 14, 1961}

Not wanting to appear rushed, Kennedy took forty-eight hours to reply. He was unhappy about Khrushchev’s failure to embrace the test ban issue and his insistence on discussing Berlin. The Soviet leader’s letter had walked away from Kennedy’s preconditions as relayed by Bobby to Bolshakov. Yet for all the perils, Kennedy saw no option but to agree to the meeting.

Khrushchev’s Tbilisi speech and his gestures on Laos were encouraging. However, the awkward truth was that what could be one of the most decisive meetings since World War II was less than one month off and there would be little time for the two sides to reach agreement on what diplomats referred to as the summit’s “deliverables.” To veteran diplomats, the president’s haste looked restless and naive.

Kennedy sent cables to his closest allies informing them of the upcoming meeting, knowing particularly the Germans and the French would be skeptical of his plan. To the distrustful Adenauer, he wrote, “I would assume you would share my view that since I have not previously met Khrushchev, such an encounter would be useful in the present international situation. If the meeting in fact takes place, I would expect to inform you of the content of these discussions with Khrushchev, which I anticipate will be quite general in character.”

Preparations went into high gear for what everyone knew would be a historic meeting—the first such summit of the television age. Despite Kennedy’s efforts to avoid the Berlin issue, his foreign policy team was coming to accept that it would define the president’s first year in office far more than Cuba, Laos, a nuclear test ban, or any other issue.

On May 17, State Department Policy Planning staff member Henry Owen captured the growing consensus of the administration. “Of all the problems the administration faces, Berlin seems to me the most pregnant with disaster.” He suggested putting more money into the fiscal year 1963 budget for conventional arms and the defense of Europe, “to enhance our capability to deal with—and thus perhaps deter—a Berlin Crisis.”

Two days later, on May 19, the Kennedy administration officially announced what the press had been reporting from leaks for several days: The president would meet with Khrushchev in Vienna on June 3 and 4 after seeing de Gaulle in Paris.

Western European and U.S. commentators worried that a weakened president was heading to Vienna at a disadvantage. The intellectual weekly Die Zeit compared Kennedy to a traveling salesman whose business had fallen on bad times and who was hoping to improve his prospects by negotiating directly with the competition. In its review of European opinion, the Wall Street Journal said Kennedy was projecting the “strong impression…of a faltering America desperately trying to regain leadership of the West in the Cold War.” The influential Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung despaired that the summit was being badly prepared by the Americans, and that Kennedy had abandoned his prerequisite that the Kremlin demonstrate a changed attitude before any such meeting take place.

Although Vienna was technically neutral ground, European diplomats still considered Austria to be far closer to the Russian sphere of influence than the alternative of Stockholm. “Thus there is an impression of Kennedy going to see Khrushchev at a place as well as a time of Khrushchev’s choosing,” said the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. It saw a damaged U.S. president “rushing about to patch up his alliances and coming meekly to Austria to meet the powerful Russian leader face-to-face.”

^{EAST BERLIN}

^{FRIDAY, MAY 19, 1961}

Sensing the wind shift in his favor, East German leader Walter Ulbricht moved with greater confidence in Berlin. The Soviet ambassador in East Germany, Mikhail Pervukhin, complained to Foreign Minister Gromyko that Ulbricht, without Kremlin approval, was ratcheting up pressure on West Berlin through heightened identity controls of civilians.

“Our friends,” said the ambassador, employing the term used by Moscow for its East German allies, “would now like to establish such control on the sectoral border between Democratic West Berlin which would allow them to, as they say, close ‘the door to the West,’ reduce the exodus of the population from the Republic, and weaken the influence of economic conspiracy against the GDR, which is carried out directly from West Berlin.” He reported that Ulbricht wanted to slam shut the Berlin sectoral border, in contradiction to Soviet policy.

Khrushchev worried Ulbricht might go so far that he would prompt the Americans to cancel the Vienna Summit, so he asked Pervukhin to restrain his increasingly impatient and insolent East German client.

^{WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{SUNDAY, MAY 21, 1961}

President Kennedy began to fear he was walking into a trap.

Two weeks ahead of the summit, Robert Kennedy again reached out to Bolshakov, this time on a Sunday when their meeting would be less noticed. The attorney general invited the Soviet spy to Hickory Hill, his brick country house in McLean, Virginia, for a two-hour conversation.

Bolshakov laid out the Soviet position, having memorized with great skill five pages of detailed briefing notes before his meeting. His recall was remarkable, and his informal manner masked the fact that his conduit role was still unfamiliar terrain.

Bobby made clear he was speaking for the president. He told Bolshakov to call him only from a pay phone when making contact, and to name himself only to his secretary and his press spokesman Ed Guthman. On occasions when Bolshakov didn’t want to risk telephoning himself, Holeman did so for him, saying to Guthman, “My guy wants to see your guy.” Bobby told Bolshakov that only his brother knew of their meetings—and that he approved of them.

By contrast, Bolshakov’s role was now becoming known to a larger circle of Soviet officials. The GRU relayed all Bolshakov’s reports to Anatoly Dobrynin, the foreign ministry official who headed the group of Soviet advisers for the Vienna talks. One of Bolshakov’s Moscow bosses wrote with astonishment about the May 21 meeting with Bobby Kennedy, “The situation when a member of the U.S. government meets with our man, and secretly, is without precedent.” Moscow was sending directions to its embassy and its intelligence operatives on how to ensure that the meetings were kept secret from the U.S. press and the FBI.

Bobby told Bolshakov he had been disappointed that Khrushchev had not had more to say in his letter to the president about the possibility of a nuclear test ban treaty. He offered a concession to Bolshakov: Washington would accept the troika of inspectors that the Kremlin wanted—representing the Soviet, Western, and nonaligned world—but Russia could have no veto over what could be inspected.

Bolshakov encouraged Bobby to think he had been given more leeway to negotiate than actually was the case. He said the Soviets would accept fifteen unmanned detection stations on Soviet soil, which came closer to what had become the American demand of nineteen.

Seeking a further bond with Khrushchev, Bobby said he and his brother agreed in principle with the Soviets on what they regarded as the historic German problem and sympathized with their fear of German revanchists. He said the president shared Soviet opposition to the notion of a nuclear Germany trying to recover its eastern territories. “My brother fought them as enemies,” Bobby told Bolshakov. The two sides only disagreed on the remedies, he said.

Bolshakov and Bobby Kennedy continued their meetings as close to a week before the Vienna Summit. Perhaps for that reason it took only a day for Moscow to respond to President Kennedy’s request that the two leaders include more tête-à-têtes at the summit, attended only by interpreters.

However, it would not be until two days after the final Bolshakov meeting before the Vienna Summit that Khrushchev would send the clearest message of all regarding how determined he was to negotiate Berlin’s future.

For that, he would use the official channel of Ambassador Thompson in Moscow. He wanted no one to mistake his intention to force the issue.

^{PALACE OF SPORTS, MOSCOW}

^{TUESDAY, MAY 23, 1961}

By coincidence, Khrushchev would make clear that he intended to bring the Berlin matter to a head in the same sports field house where he had launched the Berlin Crisis two and a half years earlier before an audience of Polish communists.

Within minutes of Ambassador Thompson’s arrival with his wife in Khrushchev’s box at a guest performance of the American Ice Capades, the Soviet leader complained that he had seen enough ice shows to last a lifetime. So he escorted the Thompsons to a private room for dinner, explaining that his invitation to them had all along been an excuse to discuss Vienna.

Thompson did not take notes, but he would have no trouble afterward recalling the conversation in a cable to Washington. Against the background sound of American music, skates scraping on ice, and the crowd’s applause, Khrushchev delivered an unmistakable message. Without a new agreement on Berlin, he told Thompson, he would take unilateral action by fall or winter to give control of the city to the East Germans and end all Allied occupation rights.

Khrushchev dismissed Kennedy’s focus on nuclear disarmament, which he said would be impossible as long as the Berlin problem existed. If the U.S. used force to interfere with Soviet aims in Berlin, he said, then it would be met with force. If the U.S. wanted war, it would get war. Thompson had seen this saber-rattling side of Khrushchev before, but coming just days ahead of the Vienna meeting it was more unsettling.

Khrushchev shrugged, however, saying that he did not expect conflict. “Only a madman would want war and Western leaders were not mad, although Hitler had been,” he said. Khrushchev pounded the table and talked of the horrors of war, which he knew so well. He could not believe Kennedy would bring on such a catastrophe because of Berlin.

Thompson countered that it was Khrushchev, not Kennedy, who was creating the danger by threatening to alter the Berlin situation.

Though that might be true, Khrushchev said, if hostilities were to break out, it would be the Americans and not the Soviets who would have to cross the frontier of Eastern Germany to defend Berlin and thus begin the war.

Time and again during their dinner, Khrushchev said that it had been sixteen years since the Great War had been won, and that it was time to put an end to Berlin’s occupation. Khrushchev reminded Thompson that in his original 1958 Berlin ultimatum he had demanded satisfaction within six months. “Thirty months have now passed,” he said, fuming at Thompson’s suggestion that matters could be left as they currently stood in Berlin. The U.S. was trying to damage Soviet prestige, and this could not be allowed to continue, Khrushchev said.

Thompson conceded that the U.S. could not stop Khrushchev from signing a peace treaty with East Germany, but the important question was whether the Soviet leader would use that moment to interfere with the U.S. right-of-access to Berlin. While Khrushchev was floating a trial balloon for the Vienna Summit of a tougher approach on Berlin, Thompson as well was testing what was likely to be Kennedy’s response.

Thompson also said U.S. prestige everywhere in the world was at stake in its commitments to Berliners. Moreover, Washington feared that if it gave in to Soviet pressure and sacrificed Berlin, West Germany and Western Europe would be the next to fall. “The psychological effect would be disastrous to our position,” he told Khrushchev.

Khrushchev scoffed at Thompson’s words, repeating what had become his frequent refrain: Berlin was really of little importance to either America or the Soviet Union, so why should they get so worked up about changing the city’s status?

If Berlin were of such little significance, retorted Thompson, he doubted that Khrushchev would take such an enormous risk to gain the upper hand in the city.

Khrushchev then put forward the proposal that he planned to present in Vienna: Nothing would prevent the U.S. from continuing to have troops in the “free city” of West Berlin. All that would change was that Washington in the future would have to negotiate those rights with East Germany, he said.

Thompson probed, asking what elements of the problem troubled Khrushchev most, suggesting it might be the refugee problem. Khrushchev brushed aside that notion and said simply, “Berlin is a festering sore which has to be eliminated.”

Khrushchev told Thompson that German reunification was impossible and that in fact no one really wanted it, including de Gaulle, Macmillan, and Adenauer. He said de Gaulle had told him not only that Germany should remain divided, but that it would be even better if it were divided into three parts.

The soft-spoken Thompson saw no option but to return Khrushchev’s threat or be misinterpreted as giving him the green light on Berlin. “Well, if you use force,” said Thompson, “if you want to cut off our access and connections by force, then we will use force against force.”

Khrushchev responded calmly and with a smile. Thompson had misunderstood him, he said. The mercurial Soviet said he didn’t plan to use force. He would simply sign the treaty and put an end to the rights the United States had won as “the conditions of capitulation.”

Thompson’s later cable to Washington on his ice rink face-off reflected little of the importance of what he had just heard. For Khrushchev, it had been a dress rehearsal for what would follow. Thompson, however, played down Khrushchev’s bluster. He wrote that the Soviet leader was outlining in detail for the first time how a permanent division of the city might take place without violating American rights. Thompson repeated his conviction that Khrushchev would not force the Berlin issue until after his October Party Congress. In Vienna, Thompson reckoned, Khrushchev would “slide over the Berlin problem in a sweetness-and-light atmosphere.”

Thompson nevertheless suggested that Kennedy in Vienna offer Khrushchev a Berlin formula that would enable both sides to save face, as the problem would likely come to a head later in the year. Otherwise, he wrote, “war would hang in the balance.”

On the same day, Kennedy was getting a different reading from Berlin. The head of the U.S. Mission there, diplomat E. Allan Lightner Jr., said Moscow could “live with Berlin status quo for some time,” and that Khrushchev had no timetable for action. Thus, argued Lightner, Kennedy could deter Khrushchev in Vienna by sending a sharp message that the U.S. was determined to defend the city’s freedom, and that “the Soviets should keep their hands off Berlin.”

Lightner wanted to ensure that Kennedy knew the consequences of showing weakness in Vienna. “Any indication the President is willing to discuss interim solutions, compromises, or a modus vivendi,” he said, “would reduce the impact of warning Khrushchev of the dire consequences of his miscalculating our resolve.”

^{WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{THURSDAY, MAY 25, 1961}

Like an author seeing the first unsatisfying drafts of his presidency, Kennedy opted to deliver a second State of the Union speech on May 25—“a Special Address to the Nation on Urgent National Needs”—just twelve weeks after the first. It reflected his recognition that before Vienna and after the Bay of Pigs, he needed to set the stage by sending Khrushchev an unmistakable message of resolve.

Bobby Kennedy had used one of his Bolshakov meetings to forewarn Khrushchev that although the president’s rhetoric in the speech would be harsh, this didn’t lessen his brother’s desire to cooperate. However, the Bolshakov channel was not a sufficient means to convey a message of strength that was intended as much for a domestic audience as for Khrushchev.

Standing before a joint session of Congress and a national television audience, Kennedy explained that American presidents had on occasion during “extraordinary times” provided a second State of the Union during a single year. These were such times, he said. As the United States was responsible for freedom’s cause in the world, he declared that he was going to unveil “a freedom doctrine.”

The president’s forty-eight-minute midday speech was interrupted by applause seventeen times. He stressed the need to maintain a healthy American economy, and he celebrated the end of the recession and beginning of recovery. He spoke of the world’s southern hemisphere as the “lands of the rising peoples”—Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Mideast—where the adversaries of freedom had to be countered on “the world’s great battleground.”

Kennedy called for a defense spending increase of some $700 million to expand and modernize the military, to overtake the Soviets in the arms race, and to reorganize civil defense with a threefold increase in money for fallout shelters. He wanted to enlist 15,000 more Marines and put a greater focus on fighting guerrilla wars in the Third World by expanding the supply of howitzers, helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and battle-ready reserve units. Most important, he declared that the United States by the end of the decade would put a man on the moon and return him to Earth. It was a race he was determined to win against the Soviets, who had put the first satellite and man into space.

With the Vienna Summit just nine days off, his message to the American people was that the world was growing more dangerous by the hour, that America had a global responsibility as freedom’s champion, and that it thus must accept the sacrifices required. He set the bar low for what could be achieved with so difficult an adversary, saving just one paragraph for discussion of the Vienna meeting.

“No formal agenda is planned and no negotiations will be undertaken,” he said.

^MOSCOW

^{FRIDAY, MAY 26, 1961}

Directly responding to what he perceived as Kennedy’s shot across his bow, Khrushchev called together his most critical constituency, the Communist Party’s ruling Presidium. As usual, his decision to bring the stenographer to the meeting was a sign to its attendees that he intended to say something significant.

He told his Presidium colleagues that Kennedy was “a son of a bitch.” Despite that, he attached great significance to the Vienna Summit because he would use it to bring to a head what he referred to as “the German question.” He outlined the solution that he would propose, using much the same description that he had employed with Ambassador Thompson.

Could the steps he was proposing to change Berlin’s status prompt nuclear war? he asked his fellow Soviet leaders. Yes, he answered, and then he outlined why he considered such a conflict to be 95 percent unlikely.

Only Anastas Mikoyan among his party chieftains dared differ with the Soviet leader. He argued that Khrushchev underestimated the American willingness and ability to engage in conventional war over Berlin. Shifting from previous attacks that focused more on West Germany and Adenauer as the threat, Khrushchev told those gathered that the United States was the most dangerous of all countries to the Soviets. In his love-hate relationship with America, he had turned the needle back to loathing in preparation for the Vienna Summit, a clear indication to his leadership of what outcome he expected.

Khrushchev repeated his increasingly obsessive view that although he was meeting with Kennedy, it was the Pentagon and the CIA that ran the United States, something he said that he had already experienced during his dealings with Eisenhower. He said it was for this reason one could not trust that American leaders could make decisions based on logical principles. “That’s why certain forces could emerge and find a pretext to go to war against us,” he said.

Khrushchev told his comrades that he was prepared to risk war and that he also knew how best to avoid it. He said America’s European allies and world public opinion would restrain Kennedy from responding with nuclear weapons to any change in Berlin’s status. He said de Gaulle and Macmillan would never support an American lurch toward war because they understood that the Soviets’ primary nuclear targets, given the range of Moscow’s missiles, would be in Europe.

“They are intelligent people, and they understand this,” he said.

Khrushchev then laid out exactly how the Berlin situation would unfold after the six-month ultimatum he would issue in Vienna. He would sign a peace treaty unilaterally with the East German government, and then he would turn over to it all the access routes to West Berlin. “We do not encroach on West Berlin, we do not declare a blockade,” he said, thus providing no pretext for military action. “We show that we are ready to permit air traffic but on the condition that Western planes land at airports in the GDR [not West Berlin]. We do not demand a withdrawal of troops. However, we consider them illegal, though we won’t use any strong-arm methods for their removal. We will not cut off delivery of foodstuffs and will not sever any other lifelines. We will adhere to a policy of noninfringement and noninvolvement in the affairs of West Berlin. Therefore, I don’t believe that because the state of war and the occupational regime are coming to an end it would unleash a war.”

Mikoyan was alone in warning Khrushchev that the probability of war was higher than the Soviet leader estimated. Out of respect for Khrushchev, however, he put it at only a slightly greater 10 percent rather than Khrushchev’s 5 percent. “In my opinion, they could initiate military action without atomic weapons,” he said.

Khrushchev shot back that Kennedy so feared war that he would not react militarily. He told the Presidium they perhaps would have to compromise in Laos, Cuba, or the Congo, where the conventional balance was less clear, but around Berlin the Kremlin’s superiority was unquestionable.

To ensure this became even more so, Khrushchev ordered Defense Secretary Rodion Malinovsky, Soviet Army Chief of Staff Matvei Zakharov, and Warsaw Pact Commander Andrei Grechko—who sat before him—“to thoroughly examine the correlation of forces in Germany and to see what is needed.” He was willing to spend the rubles required, he told them. Their first move had to be increasing artillery and basic weapons, and then they had to be ready to reposition more weaponry if the Soviet Union was provoked further. He wanted a report from his commanders in two weeks’ time about how they would plan to execute a Berlin operation, and he expected within six months to be able to match his tough words in Vienna with an improved military capability.

Mikoyan countered that Khrushchev was backing Kennedy into a dangerous position where he would have no option but to respond militarily. Mikoyan suggested that Khrushchev continue to allow air traffic to arrive in West Berlin, which might make his Berlin solution more palatable to Kennedy.

Khrushchev disagreed. He reminded his comrades that East Germany was imploding. Thousands of professionals were fleeing the country each week. A failure to take firm action to stop this would not only make Ulbricht anxious but raise doubts among its Warsaw Pact allies, who would “sense in this action our inconsistency and uncertainty.”

Not only would Khrushchev be willing to shut down the air corridor, he said, looking toward Mikoyan, but he would also shoot down any Allied plane that tried to land in West Berlin. “Our position is very strong, but we will have, of course, to really intimidate them now. For example, if there is any flying around, we will have to bring aircraft down. Could they respond with provocative acts? They could…. If we want to carry out our policy, and if we want it to be acknowledged, respected and feared, it is necessary to be firm.”

Khrushchev ended his war council with a discussion of whether he should exchange gifts with Kennedy in Vienna, according to the usual protocol.

Foreign Ministry officials suggested he give President Kennedy twelve cans of the finest black caviar and phonographic records of Soviet and Russian music. Among other gifts, his aides had a silver coffee service in mind for Mrs. Kennedy. They wanted Khrushchev’s approval.

“One can exchange presents even before a war,” Khrushchev responded.

^{HYANNIS PORT, MASSACHUSETTS}

^{SATURDAY, MAY 27, 1961}

Kennedy lifted off in a rainstorm aboard Air Force One from Andrews Air Force Base, bound for Hyannis Port. In just three days he would land in Paris and meet de Gaulle, and in just one week’s time he would be in Vienna with Khrushchev. His father had decorated the president’s sleeping quarters with pictures of voluptuous women—a practical joke from a fellow womanizer just before his son’s forty-fourth birthday.

Kennedy was retreating to the family compound to briefly celebrate and bury himself in his briefing books on issues ranging from the nuclear balance to Khrushchev’s psychological makeup. What U.S. intelligence services painted was a picture of a man who would try to charm him one moment and bully him the next; a gambler who would test him; a true-believing Marxist who wanted to coexist but compete; a crude and insecure leader of peasant upbringing and cunning who above all was unpredictable.

The president could only hope that Khrushchev’s background briefings on U.S. leadership were less revealing. His back pain was as bad as at any time in his administration, made worse by an injury he had suffered during the ceremonial planting of a tree in Canada a few days earlier. Alongside his paperwork, he would pack anesthetic procaine for his back, cortisone for his Addison’s disease, and a cocktail of vitamins, enzymes, and amphetamines for flagging energy and other maladies.

He was using crutches, though never in public, limping around like an already injured athlete preparing for a championship match.

10 VIENNA: LITTLE BOY BLUE MEETS AL CAPONE

^PARIS

^{WEDNESDAY, MAY 31, 1961}

For all the adoring French crowds, grand Gallic meals, and media hype generated by a thousand correspondents covering his trip, President Kennedy’s favorite moments in Paris were spent submerged in a giant, gold-plated bathtub in the “King’s Chamber” of a nineteenth-century palace on the Quai d’Orsay.

“God, we ought to have a tub like this in the White House,” the president said to his troubleshooter Kenny O’Donnell, as he soaked himself in the deep, steaming waters to relieve his excruciating back pain. O’Donnell reckoned the vessel was about as long and wide as a Ping-Pong table. Aide David Powers suggested that if the president “played his cards right,” de Gaulle might give it to him as a souvenir.

So began what the three men would come to refer to as their “tub talks” in the vast suite of rooms of the Palais des Affaires étrangères, where de Gaulle had put up Kennedy for his three-day stay in Paris en route to Vienna. During the breaks in the president’s packed schedule, Kennedy would soak and share his latest experiences with his two closest friends in the White House, veterans both of World War II and his political campaigns. By title, O’Donnell was White House appointments secretary, but his long relationship with the Kennedys had begun when he was Bobby’s roommate at Harvard. Powers was Kennedy’s affable man Friday who kept him amused, on schedule, and well supplied with sexual partners.

Between 500,000 and 1 million people had lined the streets to welcome the world’s most famous couple that morning, depending on who was counting the crowd (the French police being more conservative than the White House press office). Considering de Gaulle’s frosty relationship with Kennedy’s predecessors Eisenhower and Roosevelt, his warm reception for Kennedy was a departure. De Gaulle suspected that all U.S. leaders wanted to undermine French leadership of Europe and supplant it with their own. That said, he was happy to bask in the celebrity of the First Couple, whose images adorned the covers of all the major French magazines. The difference in age also helped, allowing de Gaulle to play his preferred role of the wise, legendary man of history taking this young, promising American under his wing.

At Orly Airport at ten that morning, de Gaulle had welcomed Kennedy on a giant scarlet carpet, flanked by fifty black Citroëns and a mounted honor guard of Republican Guards. All six feet, four inches of Le Général rose from his car in his double-breasted business suit as the band played “The Marseillaise.”

“Side by side,” reported the New York Times, “the two men moved all day through Paris—age beside youth, grandeur beside informality, mysticism beside pragmatism, serenity beside eagerness.”

The cheers grew so loud as the two men drove along Boulevard Saint-Michel on the Left Bank of the Seine that de Gaulle persuaded the U.S. president to rise in the rear seat of their open-top limo, eliciting an even greater roar. Despite a chill wind, Kennedy rode bareheaded and with only a light topcoat. He dressed no more warmly that afternoon as rain drenched the two men in their sweep up the Champs-Élysées, an indignity de Gaulle bore without complaint.

Behind all that misleading theater was a U.S. president who was entering the most important week of his presidency as a weary, wounded commander in chief who was inadequately prepared and insufficiently fit for what would face him in Vienna. Khrushchev would be scanning for Kennedy’s vulnerabilities after the Bay of Pigs, and there were plenty for the picking.

At home, Kennedy was facing violent racial confrontations that had broken out in the American South as African Americans grew more determined to end two centuries of oppression. The immediate problem revolved around the “Freedom Riders,” whose efforts to desegregate interstate transportation had won only tepid support from the Kennedy administration and were opposed by nearly two-thirds of Americans.

Abroad, Kennedy’s failure in Cuba, unresolved conflict in Laos, and tensions building around Berlin made his Paris–Vienna trip all the more fraught with risk. Kennedy was making the mental connection to Berlin even while wrestling with racial affairs at home. When Father Theodore Hesburgh, a member of his Civil Rights Commission, questioned the president’s reluctance to take bolder steps to desegregate the United States, Kennedy said, “Look, Father, I may have to send the Alabama National Guard to Berlin tomorrow, and I don’t want to do it in the middle of a revolution at home.”

It seemed just another of his presidency’s early misfortunes that Kennedy had seriously reinjured his back muscles while planting a ceremonial tree in Ottawa, and the pain had grown worse on the long flight to Europe. It had been the first time since his spinal fusion surgery in 1954 that he was hobbling around on crutches. To protect his image, he refused to use the props in public, but that only aroused more pain when he was in France, by putting even greater pressure on his back.

Kennedy’s personal physician, Janet Travell, who accompanied him to Paris, was concerned about his heightened suffering and the impact his treatments might have on everything from mood to endurance during the trip. The president had already been taking five baths or hot showers a day to ease his pain. Though Americans didn’t know it, the real purpose of his famous Oval Office rocking chair was that it helped relieve the throbbing of his lower back, into which doctors had been shooting procaine, a potent cousin of novocaine, for nearly a decade. Travell was also treating him for chronic adrenal ailments, high fevers, elevated cholesterol levels, sleeplessness, and stomach, colon, and prostate problems.

Years later, Travell would recall that Paris was the beginning of “a very hard period.” Travell would give Kennedy two to three shots a day in Paris. White House doctor Admiral George Burkley was worried because the procaine soothed the president through only a temporary numbness that was followed by even greater soreness, requiring ever larger doses and ever stronger narcotics. Burkley had prescribed more exercise and physical therapy, but Kennedy preferred the quicker fix of the drugs.

Travell kept an ongoing “Medicine Administration Record” to track the cocktail of pills and shots she provided the president: penicillin for urinary infections and abscesses, Tuinal to help him sleep, Transentine to control diarrhea and weight loss, and assorted other remedies, including testosterone and phenobarbital. What she couldn’t log were the more unconventional administrations of a more unconventional medic who had traveled more secretly to Paris and Vienna.

Known as “Dr. Feelgood” to his celebrity patients, who included Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, Dr. Max Jacobson provided injections that contained hormones, animal organ cells, steroids, vitamins, enzymes, and—most important—amphetamines to combat fatigue and depression.

Kennedy was so pleased with Jacobson’s remedies that he had recommended them as well for Jackie after the difficult November delivery of their son John-John—and again to boost her stamina before the Paris trip. On the night of their grand state dinner with de Gaulle at Versailles, Dr. Feelgood administered Kennedy his customary shot. The diminutive, red-cheeked, dark-haired doctor then wandered through the First Couple’s suite of rooms to Jackie’s bedroom, where she was choosing an elegant French gown designed by Givenchy over a dress designed by the American Oleg Cassini, to drive home her connection to the host country.

She cleared the room when Dr. Jacobson arrived, and he put a needle in her behind and injected a fluid that would help her glow incandescently through a six-course dinner in the Hall of Mirrors. Truman Capote would later praise Jacobson’s treatments: “You feel like Superman. You’re flying. Ideas come at the speed of light. You go 722 hours straight without so much as a coffee break.”

However, the potential national security consequences of these concoctions for the commander in chief were considerable coming just before his crucial meeting with the Soviet leader. Besides the addictive nature of what Kennedy was consuming, the potential side effects included hyperactivity, hypertension, impaired judgment, and nervousness. Between doses, his mood could swing wildly from overconfidence to bouts of depression.[4]

At Bobby’s urging, the president would later provide Jacobson’s concoctions to the Food and Drug Administration for analysis. Kennedy was untroubled when the FDA said Dr. Feelgood was shooting him up with steroids and amphetamines. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” Kennedy said. “It works.”

In strategizing for Paris, Kennedy had three primary purposes, and they all had to do with Vienna and its impact on Berlin. First, he wanted de Gaulle’s advice about how best to manage Khrushchev in Vienna. Second, he wanted to know how the French leader would recommend that the Allies wrestle with the next Berlin crisis, which he was beginning to believe was likely. Finally, Kennedy wanted to use the Paris trip to burnish his public image and thus strengthen his hand for Vienna.

When Kennedy briefed de Gaulle on Khrushchev’s threats regarding Berlin as delivered to Thompson at the Ice Capades, de Gaulle dismissed them with a wave of the hand. “Mr. Khrushchev,” he declared dismissively, “has been saying and repeating that his prestige is engaged in the Berlin question and that he must have a solution within six months, and then again in six months and then still again in another six months.” The Frenchman shrugged. “If he had wanted a war over Berlin, he would have acted already.”

De Gaulle told Kennedy that he considered Berlin primarily a psychological question: “It is annoying to both sides that Berlin should be located where it is; however, it is there,” he said.

The Kennedy–de Gaulle meeting was already off to a better start than previous U.S. presidential sessions with the French leader. Eisenhower had warned Kennedy that de Gaulle endangered the entire Atlantic alliance with his nationalist disdain for the U.S. and NATO. Franklin Roosevelt had compared de Gaulle’s vicious temper to that of Joan of Arc. “The older I get,” Eisenhower told Kennedy, “the more disgusted I am with them—not the French people but their governments.”

In contrast to his predecessors, Kennedy had two advantages in dealing with the French leader: his willingness to play the role of de Gaulle’s junior and the impact of his wife’s Sorbonne education and her French-language fluency on the vain general. After she chatted amicably with de Gaulle over lunch about the Bourbons and Louis XVI, de Gaulle turned to Kennedy and enthused, “Your wife knows more French history than most French women.”

Safely back in his golden tub, Kennedy told his friends, “De Gaulle and I are hitting it off all right, probably because I have such a charming wife.”

^{KIEVSKY STATION, MOSCOW}

^{SATURDAY, MAY 27, 1961}

While Kennedy endured the Paris whirlwind, Khrushchev was making the 1,200-mile trip from Moscow to Vienna in a more leisurely fashion aboard a specially equipped six-car train. He would make barnstorming stops in Kiev, Prague, and Bratislava—and would be cheered at rural stations all along the train’s path.

Communist Party cells had gathered a crowd of thousands to see him off at Moscow’s Kievsky Station, where Khrushchev took Ambassador Thompson aside for a last exchange before departure. In a cable that would report on their brief chat, Thompson hit a strained note of optimism. “I believe Khrushchev will wish the meeting with the president to be a pleasant one,” he wrote, “and that he will desire if possible to make some proposal or take some position on some problems which have the effect of improving the atmosphere and relations. I find it extremely difficult, however, to imagine what this could be.”

As Khrushchev boarded the train, a young girl rushed forward to present him a huge bouquet of red roses. Ever impulsive, Khrushchev summoned the U.S. ambassador’s wife, Jane, and, with the crowd cheering, presented her the flowers.

Without confidence, Thompson told the press gathered there, “I hope everything will go well.” Privately, Thompson had begun to worry that Kennedy was heading for an ambush on Berlin issues. The latest clue was a stridently worded editorial in the official government newspaper Izvestia that had declared on the day of Khrushchev’s departure that the Soviet Union could not wait any longer for Western agreement before acting on Berlin.

Khrushchev swelled with pride as he waved to enthusiastic crowds gathered alongside the tracks of the countless stations the train passed, many of them decorated with welcoming flags, posters, and streamers. Khrushchev was particularly taken by a crimson banner that covered the entire front of the provincial station at Mukachevo in the Ukrainian region near his birthplace. It had been inscribed in Ukrainian: MAY YOU LIVE WELL, DEAR NIKITA SERGEYEVICH!

In Kiev, thousands cheered him as he toured the city and laid a wreath on the grave of its beloved poet Taras Shevchenko. At ierna, the first stop inside Czechoslovakia, the country’s party leader Antonín Novotný had seen to it that his giant portrait hung beside that of Khrushchev at every turn. A band played both national anthems to the crash of cymbals and blare of trumpets. Uniformed Young Pioneers, the party’s youth organization, filled Khrushchev’s arms with flowers while pretty girls with embroidered blouses offered the traditional welcome gift of bread and salt.

His hosts in Bratislava carefully choreographed his final stop before Vienna. Public buildings were draped in banners: GLORY TO KHRUSHCHEV—UNSHAKABLE CHAMPION OF PEACE. He and Novotný spoke to the crowds about finding a “final solution” to the Berlin problem, oblivious to whatever parallels there might be to Hitler’s “final solution” for the Jews. Locals celebrated the eve of the Vienna meetings with a fireworks display over the medieval castle in the ancient town of Trenín, where Soviet troops in April 1945 had captured the Gestapo headquarters.

In a final, precautionary touch, Khrushchev delayed his train’s departure to Vienna from Bratislava until two p.m., four hours later than had been planned. Having received reports of the throngs that celebrated Kennedy in Paris, Khrushchev’s people concluded they could only ensure a respectable reception in Vienna if communist worker unions could assemble their workers near the end of the workday.

^PARIS

^{WEDNESDAY, MAY 31, 1961}

Acting as a self-appointed tutor, de Gaulle recounted for Kennedy how he managed Khrushchev during his most irascible moments. He warned Kennedy that it was inevitable Khrushchev would threaten war at some point in their Vienna talks.

De Gaulle recalled how he had told the Soviet leader: You pretend that you seek détente. If such is the case, proceed with détente. If you want peace, start with general disarmament negotiations. Under the circumstances, the entire world situation may change little by little and then we will solve the question of Berlin and the entire Germany question. However, if you insist on raising the question of Berlin within the context of the Cold War, then no solution is possible. What do you want? Do you want war?

Khrushchev had then replied to de Gaulle that he did not want war.

In that case, the Frenchman had told him, do nothing that can bring it about.

Kennedy doubted dealing with Khrushchev would be that easy. Kennedy told the French leader, for example, that he knew de Gaulle wanted his own nuclear weapons capability because he doubted that the U.S. ever would risk New York for Paris—let alone for Berlin—in a nuclear exchange with Moscow. If the general himself so deeply doubted American resolve, why would Khrushchev feel otherwise? Kennedy wondered.

De Gaulle would not be drawn. This was a moment for a clear American message of resolve to Khrushchev, irrespective of whether the French leader believed it himself. “It is important to show that we do not intend to let this situation change,” de Gaulle said. “Any retreat from Berlin, any change of status, any withdrawal of troops, any new obstacles to transportation and communication, would mean defeat. It would result in an almost complete loss of Germany, and in very serious losses within France, Italy and elsewhere.” Beyond that, de Gaulle told Kennedy, “If [Khrushchev] wants war, we must make clear to him he will have it.” The French leader was confident that if Kennedy refused to retreat before Soviet dictates, Khrushchev would never risk a military confrontation.

What worried de Gaulle more was the Soviet and East German approach of slowly eroding the Western position in Berlin so that “we would have lost without seeming to have lost but in a way which would be understood by the entire world. In particular, the population of Berlin is not made up exclusively of heroes. In the face of something which they would interpret as our weakness, they might begin to leave Berlin and make it into an empty shell to be picked up by the East.”

It struck Kennedy that de Gaulle was free to speak so bravely about Berlin because France did not have to shoulder America’s security burden there. De Gaulle was being so vague about possible remedies that Kennedy tried to provoke a more detailed response. Kennedy said he was a practical man who wanted de Gaulle to be specific about the point at which the French leader would go to war over Berlin.

De Gaulle said he wouldn’t go to war over either of the issues currently in question: if the Soviets unilaterally signed a peace treaty with East Germany or changed four-power procedures in the city to give East Germans greater sovereignty over East Berlin—for example, by handing them the right to stamp travel documents at border crossings. “This is in itself no reason for a military retaliation on our part,” he said.

So Kennedy pressed the great Frenchman further: “In what way, therefore, at what moment, shall we bring pressure to bear?” The president complained that the Soviets and East Germans had a multitude of ways to complicate the Berlin situation, perhaps even causing West Berlin’s ruin, but using methods that would not trigger a Western response. “How do we answer that?” he wondered.

De Gaulle said the West should only respond militarily if the Soviets or East Germans acted militarily. “If either [Khrushchev] or his lackeys use force to cut our communications with Berlin, then we must use force,” he said.

Kennedy agreed, but he did not believe as de Gaulle did that any weakening of the Western position in Berlin would be a disaster. He said it would be a blow “which would not be mortal but would be serious” to Western Germany and all of Europe.

Kennedy sought de Gaulle’s advice on how he in Vienna could best convince Khrushchev of Western firmness, given that the Soviet leader so doubted U.S. resolve following the Bay of Pigs. He wanted to know what the French leader thought of U.S. and Allied contingency plans to respond to any new Berlin blockade with a demonstration of approximate company strength, and, if that failed, then of brigade strength.

Given Soviet conventional superiority around Berlin, de Gaulle told Kennedy he could deter the Soviets only with a willingness to use nuclear weapons, which was precisely what the president wanted to avoid.

“What we must make clear is that if there is any fighting around Berlin, this means general war,” de Gaulle said.

By the time of their grand Élysée Palace banquet that evening, Jack and Jackie, as the French press called them, had taken the country by storm. They sat down that evening with three hundred other guests in the mirrored, tapestried dining hall around an immense table covered by a single tablecloth of white organza and gold embroidery, giving rise to the Kennedys’ wonder over how one could create such an object. The Republican Guard symphony orchestra played everything from Gershwin to Ravel, each number embodying some deeper U.S.–French meaning.

In his comments, Kennedy joked about how much French influence he had in his life. “I sleep in a French bed. In the morning my breakfast is served by a French chef, I go to my office, and the bad news of the day is brought to me by my press secretary Pierre Salinger, not in his native [French] language, and I am married to a daughter of France.”

The view through long French windows was to a rainy evening outside where palace lawns and grand fountains turned emerald green in spotlights. The after-dinner reception expanded to a thousand guests, whom the Washington Post report portrayed as “indescribably elegant.” The French men were peacocking with bright sashes across shirtfronts, giant stars and crosses pinned to their tailcoats, and rows of miniature medals pinned on lapels. The women wore long gloves and jewels, and a few dowagers were richly tiaraed.

Yet the star that evening was Jackie, wearing a Directoire-styled gown of pale pink and white straw lace. Alexandre, hairdresser to the Parisian elite, whispered to the New York Times that he had cut an inch from the First Lady’s hair and trimmed her bangs for that evening, creating the look of “a Gothic Madonna.” For the next evening’s dinner at Versailles, Alexandre promised something more evocative of Louis XIV, with diamond flame clips sticking through her hair to “give her a fairy-like air.”

Kennedy’s mother, Rose, “slim as the proverbial wand,” wore a floor-length Balenciaga gown of white silk appliquéd with pink flowers that had real diamonds in their centers. Paris publications gushed at how refreshingly European all the Kennedys were.

During their “tub talk” the following day, Kennedy reflected with his friends on de Gaulle’s observation that the West could never keep West Berlin free without a willingness to use the nuclear bomb.

“So we’re stuck in a ridiculous situation,” Kennedy said through the steam. “It seems silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty preserving Berlin as the future capital of a reunified Germany when all of us know that Germany will probably never be reunified. But we’re committed to that agreement, and so are the Russians, so we can’t let them back out of it.”

^VIENNA

^{SATURDAY, JUNE 3, 1961}

Kennedy’s advance team had choreographed the president’s arrival in Vienna in a manner calculated to unsettle Khrushchev, who had expressed jealousy to his team about Kennedy’s ever-rising global popularity. The more the Soviets opposed a grand Kennedy airport arrival and motorcade, the more O’Donnell had insisted upon it. After each Soviet objection, he had added more limousines and flags.

Vienna basked in the competition for its attention. Never had a high-level meeting between heads of state attracted so much international media attention. At least 1,500 reporters with all their equipment and supporting staff would be on hand to cover the two men and their meetings.

Photographers furiously snapped shots of the two men’s historic first encounter at 12:45 p.m. on the red-carpeted steps of the U.S. ambassador’s residence, where they posed under the canopy of the gray stucco building with its brown stone columns. A small, circular graveled courtyard stood behind them, blocked from public view by thick firs and weeping willows heavy with the day’s rain.

Just minutes earlier, the Soviet premier had swung his squat legs out of his black Soviet limousine while Kennedy had bounded lightly down the steps to retrieve him. Kennedy showed no sign of his chronic pain, which was dulled by shots, pills, and a tightly strung corset. After so much anticipation, the initial Kennedy–Khrushchev encounter was unavoidably awkward.

In the practiced tone of the political campaign trail, Kennedy issued a reflexive greeting in his Boston bray, “How are you? I’m glad to see you.”

“The pleasure is mutual,” said Khrushchev through his interpreter.

The bald top of the communist world leader’s head reached only to Kennedy’s nose. O’Donnell would later recall how sorry he was that he had not brought a movie camera to record the moment. It struck him that Kennedy was studying “the stubby little Soviet leader” a little too obviously.

Kennedy stood back, one hand deep in his jacket pocket, and slowly looked Khrushchev up and down with unconcealed curiosity. Even as photographers shouted requests for more posed handshakes, Kennedy continued ogling Khrushchev as if he were a game hunter stumbling upon a rare beast after years of tracking.

Khrushchev muttered something to Foreign Minister Gromyko and then moved inside.

In chronicling the first Kennedy–Khrushchev encounter, New York Times reporter Russell Baker wondered how much the greetings had differed in Vienna 146 years earlier as Metternich, Talleyrand, and other European leaders gathered to build a century of European stability at their Congress of Vienna. “Here in the home of the waltz, schmaltz, hot dogs and Habsburgs, the two most powerful met today in a music room,” he wrote.

The Wall Street Journal introduced the two men as boxers coming into a heavyweight ring: “The American President is a younger man by a generation, highly educated, while Khrushchev was brought up in the school of hard knocks, his main political ambitions ahead of him rather than behind him. The confrontation of these two men, as powerful in their time as Napoleon and Alexander I were when they met on a raft in the river Niemen to redraw the map of Europe in 1807, against the background of old Vienna, once a power center in its own right, now the capital of a small state that only desires to be left alone in peace, clearly possesses the element of drama.”

The Journal opined that “the least worst” outcome would be if Kennedy simply stuck to his commitment that he had come only to acquaint himself with Khrushchev and would not negotiate with him over Berlin or anything else.

European newspapers rang with the historic consequence of it all. The influential Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung regretted that, against its advice, Kennedy had come unprepared to meet with an unrepentant Kremlin boss. The German intellectual paper Die Zeit reported from Vienna, “The question that the West faces is the same as the one Demosthenes described in his speech to the Athenians against Philip of Macedonia: When another man stands before you with a weapon in his hand and at the head of a great army claiming to come in peace but really intent on war, what can you do but assume a defensive position?”

Six years earlier, the Austrians had signed their state treaty with the four wartime Allies, which allowed them to escape the fate of neighboring Warsaw Pact states and establish a free, sovereign, democratic, and neutral country. So the Viennese were particularly taken with their newly found stage as neutral ground for a superpower powwow. Herbert von Karajan was conducting Wagner at the Staatsoper, and Viennese cafés and streets overflowed with locals out for a gossip and in hopes of a glimpse of their visitors.

Viennese teenager Monika Sommer scribbled in her diary that she and her friends regarded Kennedy as a “pop idol.” She had tacked his photograph on her bedroom wall, sorry that her country didn’t provide such role models. Teenager Veronika Seyr was more unsettled by all the hoopla surrounding the summit. Having witnessed Soviet brutality in Budapest during the crackdown just five years earlier, the increased police presence all around Vienna frightened her. Perched in a cherry tree, she watched Soviet fighter planes and helicopters circle the city as Khrushchev arrived. Terrified by the prospect of a new invasion, she fell to the ground and lay on her back for some time “like a beetle,” still watching the helicopters overhead.

Anticipating two long days of exchanges, Kennedy opened his discussions with Khrushchev with some small talk about their first meeting at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1959 during the Soviet leader’s first visit to the United States.

In an initial thrust of one-upmanship that would come to characterize their talks, Khrushchev said he remembered the meeting as well, though he had “no opportunity to say much except hello and good-bye” to Kennedy because the then senator had arrived so late. The Soviet leader reminded Kennedy that he had remarked at the time, showing his foresight, that he had heard Kennedy was a young and promising politician.

Kennedy reminded Khrushchev that he also had said at the time that Kennedy looked too young to be a senator.

The Soviet leader questioned Kennedy’s memory. Normally, Khrushchev said, he “did not say such things because young people want to look older and older people like to look younger.” Khrushchev said he also had looked younger than his age before graying prematurely at age twenty-two. Khrushchev laughed that he would “be happy to share his years with the President or change places with him.”

From that opening exchange, Khrushchev was setting the tone and pace of their conversations by answering Kennedy’s short statements and questions with his longer interventions. To gain an early upper hand, the U.S. side had wanted the first day’s talks to be at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, and the Soviets had accepted that the two men would move to Soviet territory on Day Two. However, it was Khrushchev who was making himself most at home.

In an attempt to reassert some control, Kennedy outlined his hopes for their talks. He said he wanted their two powerful countries—though “allied with other countries, having different political and social systems, and competing with each other in different parts of the world”—to find ways to avoid situations that could lead to conflict.

Khrushchev responded by detailing what he called his long-standing efforts “to develop friendly relations with the United States and its allies.” At the same time, he said, “the Soviet Union did not wish to reach agreement with the U.S. at the expense of other peoples because such agreement would not mean peace.”

The two men had agreed to leave any discussion of Berlin to their second day, so their initial talks focused on the general relationship and disarmament issues.

Khrushchev said his greatest concern was that the U.S. was trying to leverage its economic superiority over the Soviets in a way that could prompt conflict, a veiled reference to the Soviet world’s growing dependence on Western trade and credits. He said he would make the Soviet Union richer than the U.S. over time, not by acting as a predator, but by better tapping its own resources.

Khrushchev took little note of Kennedy’s brief comment on how impressed he had been by improving Soviet economic growth rates before the Soviet leader took charge of the conversation again. He complained that John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state from 1953 to 1959 and a Soviet opponent, had tried to liquidate communism. He said Dulles, whose name he spat out like a curse, resisted “both de facto and de jure” the recognition that both systems could continue to exist beside each other. Khrushchev told Kennedy that during their talks he “would not try to convince the President about the advantages of Communism, just as the President should not waste his time [trying] to convert him to capitalism.”

In pre-summit conversations, Ambassador Thompson had warned Kennedy to avoid ideological debate with Khrushchev, a course that would consume valuable time and one that he believed Kennedy could not win against a lifelong communist with years of experience in dialectical debate. However, Kennedy came to Vienna much too convinced of his own powers of persuasion to resist the temptation.

Khrushchev’s remarks raised “a very important problem,” said Kennedy. The president called it a matter of “very serious concern to us” that Khrushchev believed it was acceptable to try to eliminate free systems in countries associated with the United States but objected to any efforts by the West to roll back communism in the Soviet sphere of influence.

Employing his calmest voice, Khrushchev told Kennedy this was “an incorrect interpretation of Soviet policy.” The Soviet Union was not imposing its system on others but merely riding the wave of historic change. With that, Khrushchev launched into a history lecture on everything from feudalism to the French Revolution. He said the Soviet system would triumph on its merits, although he added that he was certain Kennedy thought just the opposite. “In any event, this is not a matter for argument, much less for war,” he said.

Continuing to disregard his experts’ advice, Kennedy decided again to lock swords with the Soviet leader on ideology. The president would later explain that he believed he had to successfully engage Khrushchev in ideological debate if he was to be taken seriously on other issues. “Our position is that people should have free choice,” Kennedy told Khrushchev. What concerned the president was that minority governments that did not express the will of the people—governed by friends of Moscow—were seizing control in places of interest to the U.S. “The USSR believes that is a historical inevitability,” Kennedy said, while the U.S. did not. Kennedy worried that such situations could bring the USSR and the U.S. into military conflict.

Khrushchev wondered whether Kennedy “wanted to build a dam preventing the development of the human mind and conscience.” If so, Khrushchev said, it “is not in man’s power. The Spanish Inquisition burned people who disagreed with it, but ideas did not burn, and eventually triumphed. Thus if we start struggling against ideas, conflicts and clashes between the two countries will be inevitable.”

The Soviet leader was savoring the exchange. In an awkward effort to find a point of agreement, Kennedy argued that communism could remain lodged where it was now, namely places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, but could not be accepted anywhere the Soviets were not already installed. American officials who would read the transcripts later would be shocked that Kennedy was going further than any president before him in his expressed willingness to accept the existing division of Europe into spheres of influence. Kennedy seemed to be suggesting that he would mortgage the future of those seeking freedom in Warsaw Pact countries if the Kremlin would abandon hope of expanding communism elsewhere.

Khrushchev challenged Kennedy’s apparent belief that the Soviet Union was responsible for all communist development in the world. If Kennedy was saying that he would oppose the advance of communist ideas anywhere they did not currently exist, Khrushchev argued, then indeed “conflicts will be inevitable.”

Initiating yet another tutorial for his wayward student, Khrushchev reminded Kennedy that it was not, after all, Russians who had originated communist ideas but rather the German-born Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He joked that even if he should renounce communism—something he made clear to Kennedy that he had no intention of doing—its concepts would continue to develop. He asked Kennedy to agree that it was “essential for the peaceful development of the world” that the president recognize communism and capitalism as being the world’s two primary ideologies. Naturally, Khrushchev said, either side would be happy if its ideology spread.

If the summit was going to be decided by which side controlled more of the conversation, Khrushchev had taken a commanding early lead. Nothing in Kennedy’s past had prepared him for Khrushchev’s immovable force. Yet Thompson, who watched with other senior U.S. officials from the sidelines, knew from previous experience that the Soviet leader was just warming up.

“Ideas should not be borne on bayonets or on missile warheads, bayonets now being obsolete,” Khrushchev said. In a war of ideas, he said, Soviet policy would triumph without violent means.

But wasn’t it true, Kennedy said, that “Mao Tse-tung had said that power was at the end of a rifle”? Kennedy had been briefed on growing Sino–Soviet disagreements, and he was probing.

“I don’t believe Mao could have said that,” Khrushchev lied, having experienced himself Mao’s lust for war with the West. He said Mao “was a Marxist, and Marxists are always against war.”

Trying to get back to his agenda of reducing tensions and securing peace, Kennedy said what he wanted to avoid was a miscalculation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that would cause both countries to “lose for a long time to come,” a reference to the long radiation afterlife following a nuclear exchange.

“Miscalculation?”

Khrushchev spat out the word like a terrible taste.

“‘Miscalculation’! ‘Miscalculation’! ‘Miscalculation’! All I ever hear from your people and your news correspondents and your friends in Europe and every place else is that damned word ‘miscalculation.’”

The word was vague, Khrushchev sputtered. What was the meaning of this word, “miscalculation”? He kept repeating the word for effect. Did the president want him “to sit like a schoolboy with hands on top of the desk”? he asked. Khrushchev protested that he could not guarantee communist ideas would stop at Soviet borders. Yet, he said, “we will not start a war by mistake…. You ought to take that word ‘miscalculation’ and bury it in cold storage and never use it again.”

A stunned Kennedy sat back and absorbed the storm.

Kennedy tried to explain what he had meant by using the word. Referring to World War II, he said, “Western Europe had suffered because of its failure to foresee with precision what other countries would do.” The U.S. had failed to foresee Chinese actions recently in Korea. What he wanted from their meeting was “to introduce precision in judgments of the two sides and to obtain a clearer understanding of where we are going.”

Before their lunch break, Khrushchev would have the last word.

He believed the purpose of their conversation was to improve and not worsen relations. If he and Kennedy should succeed in that effort, “the expenses incurred in connection with the meeting would be well justified.” If not, the money would have been wasted and the hope of the people frustrated.

As participants looked at their watches, they were surprised that it was already two p.m.

Khrushchev remained in full voice over a lunch of beef Wellington in the U.S. ambassador residence’s dining room, lubricated by his mostly vodka dry martini. He regaled the long table, at which each man had nine aides and senior officials, about matters ranging from farm technology to space travel.

Khrushchev boasted about Gagarin’s flight as the first man in space, but he conceded that Gagarin’s masters at first did not want to trust him with the spacecraft’s controls. It had seemed too much power for one individual.

Kennedy suggested that the U.S. and USSR should consider a joint moon expedition.

After an initial rejection, Khrushchev reconsidered, saying, “All right, why not?” It seemed to be the first progress of the day.

At the end of the lunch, Kennedy lit a cigar and threw the match behind Khrushchev’s chair.

The Soviet leader feigned alarm. “Are you trying to set me on fire?” he asked.

Kennedy assured him he wasn’t.

“Ah,” said Khrushchev with a smile, “a capitalist, not an incendiary.”

Khrushchev’s raw energy was overpowering Kennedy’s more subtle charms.

The two men’s after-meal toasts reflected the unbalanced nature of their earlier conversations. Kennedy was brief and complimentary of Khrushchev’s “vigor and energy,” hoping for fruitful meetings.

The Soviet leader responded at greater length. He talked about how the two countries had the combined power to stop by joint effort any war any other country might start. He spoke of his initially good relationship with Eisenhower. Although Eisenhower had taken responsibility for the U-2 spy flight incident that undermined their relationship, Khrushchev said he was “almost sure that Eisenhower had not known about the flight” but had accepted blame “in the spirit of chivalry.” Khrushchev declared the flight to have been orchestrated by those who wished to worsen U.S.–Soviet relations—and they had succeeded.

He spoke of his desire to receive Kennedy in the Soviet Union “when the time was ripe.” But he then condemned the visit of his previous guest, former Vice President Nixon, who thought “by showing the Soviet people a dream kitchen, a kitchen that did not exist nor would ever exist in the U.S., he would convert the Soviet people to capitalism.” Only Nixon, he said, “could have thought of such nonsense.”

Khrushchev told Kennedy that he took full credit for Nixon’s electoral defeat, which had been gained because he had refused to release the imprisoned American airmen whom his troops had shot down. If he had released them, Khrushchev said, Kennedy would have lost the presidency by at least 200,000 votes.

“Don’t spread that story around,” Kennedy said, laughing. “If you tell everybody that you like me better than Nixon, I’ll be ruined at home.”

Khrushchev raised his glass to the president’s health and said how he envied his youth. Yet Kennedy bore the backache of a much older man under his corset. The benefit of his morning shot from “Dr. Feelgood” was wearing thin. The procaine, vitamins, amphetamines, and enzymes could not counteract the weight of Khrushchev’s onslaught.

After lunch, Kennedy invited Khrushchev for a stroll in the garden with interpreters only. Thompson and others had advised Kennedy that Khrushchev would be more pliable when he wasn’t around other Soviet officials before whom he felt he had to perform.

Kennedy’s friends O’Donnell and Powers watched the superpower stroll from a second-floor window at the residence. Khrushchev circled around Kennedy, snapping at him like a terrier and shaking his finger, while Kennedy strolled casually on the lawn beside him, stopping now and then to say a few words, withholding any upset or anger.

O’Donnell downed an Austrian beer and condemned himself again for not having brought a camera. He was close enough to see how hard the stroll was on Kennedy’s back. The president winced as he leaned over to better hear the far shorter Khrushchev.

When the two men returned inside, Kennedy suggested that he and Khrushchev continue talking privately for a time with interpreters before their aides rejoined them. Happy with how matters were unfolding, Khrushchev agreed.

Kennedy wanted to further explain his fear of “miscalculation.” In another awkward effort to bond with the Soviet, Kennedy conceded he had made a misjudgment “with regard to the Cuba situation.”

Kennedy said he had to make judgments that would drive U.S. policy based on what the USSR would do next around the world, just as Khrushchev had to “make judgments as to the moves of the U.S.” So, Kennedy said, he wanted to use their meeting to gain “greater precision in these judgments so that our two countries could survive this period of competition without endangering their national security.”

Khrushchev countered that dangers only arose when the U.S. misunderstood the sources of revolution, which he insisted were homegrown and not invented by the Soviets. He seized upon the example of Iran, a U.S. ally, where the Soviet Union “does not want a revolution there and does not do anything in that country to promote such a development.”

Khrushchev said, however, that “the people of the country are so poor that the country has become a volcano and changes are bound to occur sooner or later. The Shah will certainly be overthrown. By supporting the Shah, the United States generates adverse feelings toward the United States among the people of Iran and, conversely, favorable feelings toward the USSR.”

He then turned to Cuba. “A mere handful of people, headed by Fidel Castro, overthrew the Batista regime because of its oppressive nature,” he said. “During Castro’s fight against Batista, U.S. capitalist circles…supported Batista, and this is why the anger of the Cuban people turned against the United States. The President’s decision to launch a landing in Cuba only strengthened the revolutionary forces and Castro’s own position.” Said Khrushchev, “Castro is not a communist, but U.S. policy can make him one.”

Referring to his own life, Khrushchev said he had not been born a communist. “It was the capitalists who made me a communist.” Khrushchev scoffed at President Kennedy’s notion that Cuba could endanger American security. Could six million people really be a threat to the mighty U.S., the Soviet leader wondered.

Khrushchev challenged Kennedy to explain to him what sort of global precedent he might be setting by arguing that the U.S. should be free to act as it wished regarding Cuba. Did that mean the USSR would be free to meddle in the internal affairs of Turkey and Iran, who were allies of the U.S. and had American bases and rockets? Through the Bay of Pigs invasion, Khrushchev argued, “the U.S. has set a precedent for intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. The USSR is stronger than Turkey and Iran, just as the U.S. is stronger than Cuba. This situation may cause ‘miscalculation,’ to use the President’s term.”

Khrushchev’s voice hung on that dreaded word for emphasis.

Turning Kennedy’s words on himself, Khrushchev agreed both sides should agree “to rule out miscalculation.” This is why he was “happy that the President had said that Cuba was a mistake.”

Kennedy attempted again to appease the growling bear. He conceded Khrushchev’s point that if Iran’s current prime minister didn’t improve his people’s lot, “there would be important changes in that country as well.” Having been challenged on Cuba, Turkey, and Iran, Kennedy felt compelled to respond. He protested that he had not been a fan of Batista, but his concern now was that Castro would transform Cuba into a base for regional trouble. Although it was true that the U.S. had military installations in Turkey and Iran, Kennedy said, “these two countries are so weak that they could be no threat to the USSR, no more than Cuba to the U.S.”

When U.S. officials read the transcripts of the two leaders’ exchanges a few days later, they were again shocked by what followed. In reference to Cuba, Kennedy wondered how Khrushchev would respond if a government friendly to the West established itself in Poland. “It was critical to have the changes occurring in the world and affecting the balance of power take place in a way that would not involve the prestige of the treaty commitments of our two countries,” he said. What Kennedy was suggesting was that because of Poland’s Warsaw Pact treaty obligations, it was off-limits for American interference.

It was once again the furthest any U.S. president ever had gone with a Soviet counterpart in recognizing the division of Europe as acceptable and permanent. To balance this apparent concession, Kennedy added that the days would be numbered for Soviet bloc leaders who failed to produce better living standards and education for their people. At the same time, Kennedy was saying that the U.S. would not meddle where the Kremlin’s prestige was in question—and Moscow ought to play by the same rules.

Khrushchev shot back that American policy was inconsistent, then apologized to the president that he wasn’t criticizing Kennedy personally, as he had only been in the White House a very short time. The Soviet leader again returned to the subject of Iran, and said that for all the U.S. emphasis on democracy, Washington supported the Shah, “who says his power was given to him by God. Everybody knows how this power was seized by the Shah’s father, who had been a sergeant in the Iranian Army and who had usurped the throne by means of murder, plunder and violence…. The United States is spending vast sums of money in Iran but that money does not go to the people; it is plundered by the Shah’s entourage.”

Hammering away further at what he condemned as American hypocrisy, Khrushchev turned to Washington’s support for Spanish dictator Franco. “The U.S. knows how he came to power and yet it supports him,” said Khrushchev. “The United States supports the most reactionary regimes and this is how the people see U.S. policy.” He conceded that Castro might indeed become a communist, though he didn’t start that way. Khrushchev felt that U.S. sanctions had turned him toward Moscow.

Kennedy was in over his head. For all Kennedy’s willingness to debate Khrushchev, he had failed to challenge the Soviet leader where he was most vulnerable. He had not condemned the Soviet use of force in East Germany and Hungary in 1953 and 1956. Worse, he had not posed the most important question of all: Why were hundreds of thousands of East German refugees fleeing to a better life in the West?

At the end of the first day’s talks, Kennedy returned to the subject of Poland and argued that democratic elections there might well replace the current Soviet-friendly government with one that was closer to the West. Khrushchev feigned shock. It was not respectful, he said, for Kennedy “to speak that way about a government the U.S. recognizes and with which it has diplomatic relations.” He argued that Poland’s “election system is more democratic than that in the United States.”

Kennedy’s subsequent effort to differentiate between America’s multi-party system and single-party Poland was lost on Khrushchev. The two men could not agree on the definition of democracy, let alone on whether Poland had one.

Kennedy and Khrushchev circumnavigated the globe geographically and philosophically with Khrushchev thrusts and Kennedy parries on issues ranging from Angola to Laos. Khrushchev’s biggest concession of the day would be agreement to accept a neutral, independent Laos—a deal that their underlings would negotiate on the Viennese sidelines. Uncharacteristically, he demanded little from Kennedy in exchange.

Khrushchev was clearing out the underbrush for what he wanted to be the next day’s all-consuming focus: Berlin.

Kennedy declared an evening break at 6:45, after six hours of nearly uninterrupted discussion. Weary and drawn, Kennedy noted the lateness of the hour and suggested that the next agenda item, the question of a nuclear test ban, could be discussed that night over dinner with the Austrian president, so that most of the following day could be given over to Berlin. Kennedy also gave Khrushchev the option of discussing both issues the following day.

Kennedy wanted to ensure that Khrushchev didn’t stray from his pre-summit commitment to discuss a test ban, something he knew was of little interest to Moscow, before they took on Berlin.

With Kennedy glancing at his watch, Khrushchev pounced on the mention of Berlin. He said he would agree to discuss nuclear testing only in the context of general disarmament issues. That was an approach Kennedy opposed for the simple reason that a test ban could be agreed upon quickly, while concluding far-reaching arms reduction agreements could consume years of negotiation.

Regarding Berlin, Khrushchev said his demands would have to be satisfied the following day or he would move unilaterally. “The Soviet Union hopes that the U.S. will understand this question so that both countries can sign a peace treaty together,” he said. “This would improve relations. But if the United States refuses to sign a peace treaty, the Soviet Union will do so and nothing will stop it.”

After a Soviet limo drove Khrushchev away, a dazed Kennedy turned to Ambassador Thompson on the U.S. residence steps and asked, “Is it always like this?”

“Par for the course,” said Thompson.

Thompson restrained himself from telling the president how much better matters might have gone had he taken the advice he had been given to avoid ideological debate. Thompson knew the next day’s Berlin discussion was likely to be even more difficult.

It was only the halftime break at the Vienna Summit, but it was already clear that Team USA was losing.

Kennedy had reinforced Khrushchev’s impression of his weakness. “This man is very inexperienced, even immature,” Khrushchev told his interpreter Oleg Troyanovsky. “Compared to him, Eisenhower is a man of intelligence and vision.”

In the years that followed, then Vienna-based U.S. diplomat William Lloyd Stearman would teach students about the summit’s lessons in a lecture he called “Little Boy Blue Meets Al Capone.” He thought that title captured the naive, almost apologetic approach Kennedy had followed in the face of Khrushchev’s brutal assaults. He believed the Bay of Pigs had cut into the president’s confidence at the summit and had made Khrushchev feel that “Kennedy was now his pigeon.”

Stearman’s insights were better informed than most observers’ because he was regularly briefed in Vienna by his friend Martin Hillenbrand, who was the note-taker at the Kennedy–Khrushchev meeting. Stearman’s view was that the talks had gone astray partly because Kennedy had been so ill served by his key advisers.

Stearman dismissed Secretary of State Rusk as an Asia expert who lacked sufficient judgment on Soviet issues. National Security Advisor Bundy was more cerebral than decisive, Stearman believed. Missing at the heart of the administration were advisers who could bring Kennedy the sense of historic moment and accompanying strategic direction that Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles had supplied Truman and Eisenhower.

By Stearman’s account, Kennedy had also hurt his chances of success during the pre-summit planning by going around his national security staff and doing much of the planning secretly between Bolshakov and his brother Bobby. When the talks began to head in the wrong direction, Kennedy lacked backup staff with adequate knowledge of the preparations to help him change direction.

Mercifully, the U.S. embassy residence where Kennedy was staying also had a bathtub, though it was more modest than the gilded basin of Paris. As Kennedy soaked, O’Donnell asked the president about the awkward moment at the beginning of the day when he was sizing up the Soviet leader on the residence steps.

“After all the studying and talking I’ve done on him in the last few weeks, you can’t blame me for being interested in getting a look at him,” he said.

Was he different than forecast? asked O’Donnell.

“Not really,” said Kennedy, but then he corrected himself. “Maybe [he was] a little more unreasonable [than expected]…. From what I read and from what people told me, I expected him to be smart and tough. He would have to be smart and tough to work his way to the top in a government like that one.”

Dave Powers told the president that he and O’Donnell had watched from the second-floor window as the Soviet leader went after him during their walk in the garden. “You seemed pretty calm while he was giving you a hard time out there.”

Kennedy shrugged. “What did you expect me to do?” he asked. “Take off one of my shoes and hit him over the head with it?” He said Khrushchev had been battering him on Berlin in an effort to wear him down over the issue. Khrushchev had questioned how the U.S. could support the notion of German unification. The Soviet leader had said he lacked all sympathy for Germans, who had killed his son in the war.

Kennedy had reminded Khrushchev that he had lost his brother as well, but the U.S. would not turn its back on West Germany nor pull out of Berlin. “And that’s that,” Kennedy had told Khrushchev.

Kennedy told his friends about Khrushchev’s tough response to his concerns about the possibility of miscalculation on either side leading to war. “Khrushchev went berserk,” he said. He told O’Donnell that he would make a mental note to stay away from the word during the rest of their talks.

Austrian President Adolf Schärf had a protocol problem to solve before his grand gala dinner that evening at Schönbrunn Palace. Which of the two leaders’ wives should sit at his right? he wondered.

On the one hand, Khrushchev had freed Vienna from the possible fate of a divided Berlin by allowing it to embrace independence and neutrality through the Austrian state treaty of May 15, 1955. Because of that, Khrushchev’s wife, Nina, had earned pride of place. Yet the Viennese loved the Kennedys, and Austrians, despite their neutrality, felt that where they belonged was the West.

In a diplomatic compromise, Schärf would seat Madame Khrushchev to his right at the dinner, and Mrs. Kennedy would have the honored position for the second half of the evening, during performances in the music room.

It was Austria’s coming-out party. More than six thousand Viennese crowded around the floodlit gates of the 265-year-old palace to watch Kennedy and Khrushchev arrive. The palace staff had waxed the parquet floor to a perfect sheen and scrubbed the windows until they sparkled. The most valuable of the antiques were removed from the museum’s display rooms and positioned for use. Staff collected flowers from the palace gardens and arranged them so generously on the tables that they perfumed the entire hall. The tables were set with the “Gold Eagle Service,” a priceless porcelain collection with the Austrian double-headed eagle embossed on a white background that had been used by Emperor Franz Joseph.

Aside from the fact that the meals were served cold, the Austrians patted themselves on the back on an evening well done. The evening’s guests noticed how Jackie and Nina had hit it off. Jackie wore a floor-length pink sheath dress. Designed by Oleg Cassini, the gown was sleeveless and low-waisted. Nina dressed in a dark silk dress laced with a faint golden thread—a more proletariat choice.

Their husbands struck the same contrast. Kennedy was in black tie and Khrushchev in a plain dark suit and checkered gray tie. Waiters in white gloves, knee breeches, and gold braid moved through the corridors and across the spacious rooms bearing silver trays laden with drinks.

“Mr. Khrushchev,” a photographer asked, “won’t you shake hands with Mr. Kennedy for us?”

“I’d like to shake her hand first.” Khrushchev grinned and nodded to the president’s wife.

Associated Press reporter Eddy Gilmore scribbled that beside Jackie “the tough and often belligerent Communist leader looked like a smitten schoolboy when the ice thaws along the Volga in springtime.” Khrushchev went out of his way to sit beside Jackie while the chamber ensemble of the Vienna Philharmonic played Mozart and then the Vienna State Opera’s dance company performed the “Blue Danube” waltz.

Kennedy’s performance was not nearly as graceful. Just before the music began, he lowered himself onto a chair, only to find that it already held Khrushchev’s wife. He stopped just short of landing in her lap.

He smiled an apology. The Vienna Summit wasn’t going well at all.

11 VIENNA: THE THREAT OF WAR

^{SOVIET EMBASSY, VIENNA}

^{10:15 A.M., SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1961}

Standing before the Soviet embassy, Nikita Khrushchev shifted from side to side like a boxer eager to come back out of his corner after having won the opening rounds. A wide grin revealed the gap in his front teeth as he thrust out his small, plump hand to greet Kennedy.

For all the Soviet state’s working-class pretensions, Moscow’s embassy was unashamedly imperial. Acquired by Tsarist Russia in the late nineteenth century, its neo-Renaissance facade opened up to a grand entry hall of natural granite and marble. “I greet you on a small piece of Soviet territory,” said Khrushchev to Kennedy. He then threw out a Russian proverb whose meaning escaped Kennedy: “Sometimes we drink out of a small glass but we speak with great feelings.”

After some nine minutes of small talk, none of it memorable, Khrushchev took his American guests through a pillared corridor to a wide staircase that led to the second floor. There they sat on sofas in a twenty-foot-square conference room with red damask walls.

The manner in which the two men had spent the morning ahead of their second day’s meeting spoke to their differences. The Catholic Kennedys had listened to the Vienna Boys’ Choir and had taken Mass from Cardinal Franz König in the Gothic magnificence of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The First Lady’s eyes had welled up as she fell to her knees to pray. When the Kennedys emerged from worship, a throng cheered on the cobblestoned square outside. At about the same time, a far smaller and less enthusiastic crowd watched with curiosity as the leader of the atheist Soviet Union laid a wreath at the Soviet war memorial at the Schwarzenbergplatz. Locals knew it bitterly as the “monument to the unknown rapist.”

In the conference room where the two delegations gathered, the matching red curtains were pulled shut. They concealed the embassy’s tall and broad windows and created an atmosphere of gloom, keeping out the day’s bright sun. Kennedy began with the same sort of small talk he had employed the first day, asking the Soviet premier about his childhood. Khrushchev had no interest in discussing his peasant origins with this child of privilege. So he was curt, saying only that he was born in a Russian village near Kursk, less than ten kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

Shifting quickly to the present, he said the Soviet Union had recently found very large deposits of iron ore near Kursk, estimated at 30 billion tons. He said total reserves were likely to be ten times greater than that. By comparison, he reminded Kennedy, total iron ore deposits of the U.S. were only a fraction of that, at 5 billion tons. “Soviet deposits will be sufficient to cover the needs of the entire world for a long time to come,” he said.

In the first minutes of Day Two in Vienna, Khrushchev had turned what might have been a personal exchange about family matters into a boast about his country’s superior resource base. He did not ask about the president’s upbringing, about which he knew quite enough. Impatiently, he suggested they move on to the day’s purpose: discussing Berlin and its future.

In its edition of that morning, the London Times had quoted a British diplomat on his concerns about the Vienna Summit. “We hope the lad will be able to get out of the bear cage without being too badly mauled,” he had said. And Khrushchev had come out at the beginning of the second day with his claws bared. Despite progress their delegations had made overnight on Laos, he was unwilling to seize upon the issue as an example of how the two sides could reduce tensions.

U.S. and Soviet foreign secretaries and their staffs had reached agreement that they would accept a neutral Laos. It was a concession that could be politically costly to Khrushchev, as it would be opposed by the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and the Pathet Lao, the Laotian communist movement. Instead of embracing Kennedy over the accord, however, Khrushchev accused him of “megalomania and delusions of grandeur” for insisting that the U.S. would continue to safeguard its commitments in Asia.

Beyond that, Khrushchev resisted all of Kennedy’s efforts to steer talks toward nuclear test ban issues. He rejected the president’s logic that only an overall improvement of relations could open the way to an eventual Berlin settlement. For Khrushchev, Berlin had to come first.

Pushing for the test ban, Kennedy drew upon a Chinese proverb: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

“You seem to know the Chinese very well,” Khrushchev said.

“We may both get to know them better,” responded Kennedy.

Khrushchev smiled. “I know them well enough now,” he said. It was an unusual slip for the Soviet, a brief glimpse into his frustration with Mao.

However, the Soviets would doctor the final transcript, which would be provided to Beijing, adding another sentence that Khrushchev actually had never said to Kennedy: “China is our neighbor, our friend, and our ally.”

The most important exchange of the summit began with a Khrushchev warning. The Soviet leader prefaced his statement by saying Moscow had waited as long as it could for a Berlin solution. He said the position he was about to outline regarding Berlin would “affect the relations between our two countries to a great extent and even more so if the U.S. were to misunderstand the Soviet position.”

At that point, both men’s advisers sat forward, knowing that everything else had been foreplay for this moment. “Sixteen years have passed since World War II,” said Khrushchev. “The USSR lost twenty million people in that war and much of its territory was devastated. Now Germany, the country which unleashed World War II, has again acquired military power and has assumed a predominant position in NATO. Its generals hold high offices in that organization. This constitutes a threat of World War III, which would be even more devastating than World War II.”

For that reason, he told Kennedy, Moscow refused to tolerate any further delay regarding Berlin, because only West German militarists would gain from it. He said German unification was not a practical possibility and that even Germans didn’t want it. So the Soviets would begin to act from the “actual state of affairs, namely, that two German States exist.”

Khrushchev told Kennedy that it was his preference to reach agreement personally with him on a war-ending treaty that would alter Berlin’s status. If that wasn’t possible, however, he would act alone and end all postwar commitments made by the Soviets. He said thereafter West Berlin would be a “free city” where U.S. troops could remain, but only coexisting with Soviet troops. The Soviets would then join the U.S. in ensuring “what the West calls West Berlin’s freedom.” Moscow would also be “agreeable” to the presence of neutral troops or UN guarantees.

Kennedy began his response by thanking Khrushchev for “setting forth his views in such a frank manner.” Shot up with painkillers and amphetamines and snug in his corset, Kennedy realized Khrushchev had just delivered what amounted to a new ultimatum on Berlin. That required a clear and sharp response. It was a moment Kennedy had prepared for, and he measured each word carefully.

He stressed that the two men were talking no longer about lesser issues such as Laos but rather about the far more crucial topic of Berlin. This place was “of greatest interest to the U.S. We are in Berlin not because of someone’s sufferance. We fought our way there.” And though the U.S. casualties in World War II had not been as high as those of the Soviet Union, Kennedy said, “we are in Berlin not by agreement of East Germans but by contractual rights….

“This is an area,” said Kennedy, “where every President of the U.S. since World War II has been committed by treaty and other contractual rights and where every President has reaffirmed his faithfulness to those obligations. If we were expelled from that area, and if we accepted the loss of our rights, no one would have any confidence in U.S. commitments and pledges. U.S. national security is involved in this matter, because if we were to accept the Soviet proposal, U.S. commitments would be regarded as a mere scrap of paper.”

At the Vienna Summit until that point, words had tumbled over each other without consequence. Yet now note-takers sat forward, precisely scribbling their leaders’ verbatim comments. The world’s two most powerful men were facing off over their most intractable and explosive issue.

It was the stuff of history.

“West Europe is vital to our national security and we have supported it in two wars,” Kennedy said. “If we were to leave West Berlin, Europe would be abandoned as well. So when we are talking about West Berlin, we are also talking about West Europe.”

What was new for the Soviets was Kennedy’s repeated emphasis on the qualifying word of “West” in front of Berlin. No U.S. president had previously differentiated so clearly between his commitment to all of Berlin and to West Berlin. In perhaps the most important manhood moment of his presidency, Kennedy had made a unilateral concession. He reminded Khrushchev that the Soviet leader in their first day’s talks had agreed that “the ratios of [military] power today are equal.” So he thought it “difficult to understand” why a country like the Soviet Union, with such considerable achievements in space and economy, should suggest that the U.S. leave a place of such vital interest where it was already established. He said the U.S. would never be willing to agree to give up rights it had “won by war.”

Khrushchev’s face reddened, as if it were a thermometer measuring a rise in his internal temperature. He interrupted to say that he understood Kennedy’s words to mean the president did not want a peace treaty. He spat derisively that Kennedy’s statement on U.S. national security sounded like “the U.S. might wish to go to Moscow [with its troops] because that too would, of course, improve its position.”

“The U.S. is not asking to go anywhere,” Kennedy responded. “We are not talking about the U.S. going to Moscow or of the USSR going to New York. What we are talking about is that we are in Berlin and have been there for fifteen years. We suggest that we stay there.”

Returning to a course he had tried a day earlier without success, Kennedy explored a more conciliatory path. He said that he knew the situation in Berlin “is not a satisfactory one.” That said, added Kennedy, “conditions in many parts of the world are not satisfactory,” and it was not the right time to change the balance in Berlin or in the world more generally. “If this balance should change, the situation in West Europe as a whole would change, and this would be a most serious blow to the U.S.,” he said. “Mr. Khrushchev would not accept similar loss and we cannot accept it either.”

Until that point, Khrushchev had largely held his usual bombast in check. Yet now his arms were waving, his face turned crimson, and his voice rose to a truculent pitch as his words tumbled out in staccato spurts like angry machine-gun fire. “The U.S. is unwilling to normalize the situation in the most dangerous spot in the world,” he said. “The USSR wants to perform an operation on this sore spot—to eliminate this thorn, this ulcer—without prejudicing the interests of any side, but rather to the satisfaction of all peoples of the world.”

The Soviet Union was not going to change Berlin by “intrigue or threat” but by “solemnly signing a peace treaty. Now the President says that this action is directed against the interests of the U.S. Such a statement is difficult to understand indeed.” The Soviets did not want to change existing boundaries, he argued, but were only trying to formalize them so as to “impede those people who want a new war.”

Khrushchev spoke derisively of Adenauer’s desire to revise Germany’s borders and regain territory it had lost after World War II. “Hitler spoke of Germany’s need for Lebensraum to the Urals,” he said. “Hitler’s generals, who had helped him in his designs to execute his plans, are [now] high commanders in NATO.”

He said the logic of the U.S. needing to protect its interests in Berlin “cannot be understood and the USSR cannot accept it.” He told the president he was sorry, but that “no force in the world” would stop Moscow from moving forward on its peace treaty.

He repeated again that sixteen years had passed since the war. How much longer did Kennedy want Moscow to wait? Another sixteen years? Perhaps thirty years?

Khrushchev looked around the room at his colleagues and then said with a wave of his arm that he had lost a son in the last war, that Gromyko had lost two brothers, and that Mikoyan had also lost a son. “There is not a single family in the USSR or the leadership of the USSR that did not lose at least one of its members in the war.” He conceded that American mothers mourn their sons just as deeply as do Soviet mothers, but that while the U.S. had lost thousands, the USSR had lost millions.

He then declared: “The USSR will sign a peace treaty and the sovereignty of the GDR will be observed. Any violation of that sovereignty will be regarded by the USSR as an act of open aggression” with all its attendant consequences.

Khrushchev was threatening war, just as de Gaulle had predicted. The American delegation sat in stunned silence as they awaited Kennedy’s response.

The president calmly asked whether access routes to Berlin would remain open after the Soviets had agreed to such a peace treaty. Kennedy had already decided he could accept an outcome under which the Soviets concluded a treaty with the East Germans but did nothing to impede Western rights in West Berlin or Allied access to the city.

Khrushchev, however, said the new treaty would alter freedom of access.

That crossed Kennedy’s red line.

“This presents us with a most serious challenge and no one can foresee how serious the consequences might be,” said Kennedy. He said it was not his wish to come to Vienna only to “be denied our position in West Berlin and our access to that city.” He said he had hoped relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could be improved through the Vienna Summit, but instead they were worsening. Kennedy said it was Moscow’s business if it wanted to transfer its rights in Berlin to the East Germans, but the president could not allow Moscow to give away American rights.

Khrushchev began to probe the U.S. position. He wanted to know if an interim arrangement still might be possible along the lines that Eisenhower had discussed with him—something that protected the prestige of both countries. All sides could set a time limit of six months for the two Germanys to negotiate a unification arrangement. If they failed during that time—and Khrushchev was convinced they would—“anyone would be free to conclude a peace treaty.”

Khrushchev said that even if the U.S. disagreed with the Soviet proposal, it should understand “the USSR can no longer delay” and would take action by year’s end that would make all access to West Berlin subject to East German control. He based his right to act on a statistical analysis of the difference in the price the two sides had paid to defeat the Germans—the 20 million–plus people the Soviets had lost in World War II, compared to only 143,000 U.S. military dead.

Kennedy said it was those losses that motivated him to avoid a new war.

Repeating the word that he so hated, the Soviet leader reminded Kennedy of his worry that the Soviets might “miscalculate.” It seemed to Khrushchev it was the Americans who were in danger of miscalculation. “If the U.S. should start a war over Berlin, let it be so,” he said. “That is what the Pentagon has been wanting. However, Adenauer and Macmillan know very well what war means. If there is any madman who wants war, he should be put in a straitjacket!”

Kennedy’s team was stunned again. Now Khrushchev had used the word “war,” and he had done so three times. That was unheard-of in diplomatic discussions at every level.

As if to close the matter, Khrushchev flatly stated that the USSR would sign a peace treaty by the end of the year, altering Western rights in Berlin for all time, but that he was confident common sense and peace would prevail.

The Soviet leader had not yet responded to what amounted to a Kennedy proposal, so the president probed again. Kennedy stressed that he would not regard a peace treaty in itself as a belligerent act if Khrushchev left West Berlin untouched. “However, a peace treaty denying us our contractual rights is a belligerent act,” he said. “What is belligerent is transfer of our rights to East Germany.”

It was increasingly clear what Kennedy was saying: Do what you want to with what is yours, but do not touch what is ours. If the U.S. ceded anything on West Berlin, the world “would not regard [the U.S.] as a serious country.” But as East Berlin was Soviet territory, he was suggesting that the USSR would be free to do as it pleased there.

Khrushchev did not acknowledge at the time what would later look like the makings of a deal that had been offered by Kennedy. Instead, the Soviet leader replied that the USSR “would never, under any conditions, accept U.S. rights in West Berlin after a peace treaty had been signed.”

He then lashed out at what he considered U.S. mistreatment of the Soviet Union after the war. Khrushchev said the U.S. had deprived the USSR of reparations, rights, and interests in West Germany. Beyond that, he said the U.S. practiced a double standard by refusing to negotiate a war-ending peace treaty with East Germany although it had signed just such an agreement with the Japanese in 1951—without consulting with Moscow in preparing the document. Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had led the Soviet delegation at the conference, where it had tried to stall the treaty and then refused to sign while complaining that the U.S. had not invited the Chinese and was creating an anti-Soviet, militaristic Japan.

Kennedy countered that Khrushchev had publicly declared he would have signed the Japan treaty if he had been in power at the time.

For Khrushchev, however, the point wasn’t what he might have done but rather that the U.S. had not even sought Soviet agreement. Khrushchev called Kennedy’s approach regarding Berlin a similar one of “I do what I want.”

Khrushchev said he had seen enough of that sort of U.S. behavior. Moscow would sign its treaty with East Germany, he said, and the price would be great if the U.S. thereafter violated East German sovereignty over access to Berlin.

What he wanted, Kennedy countered, was not a conflict over Berlin but an overall mending of East–West German relations and of U.S.–Soviet relations, so as to permit over time a solution to the whole German problem. He said he did not wish “to act in a way that would deprive the Soviet Union of its ties in Eastern Europe,” again reassuring Khrushchev, as he had done the first day, that he would do nothing to upset the balance of power in Europe.

Kennedy noted that the Soviet leader had called him a young man, and the president suggested that Khrushchev was trying to take advantage of his relative inexperience. However, Kennedy said, he had “not assumed office to accept arrangements totally inimical to U.S. interests.” Khrushchev repeated that the only alternative to unilateral action would be an interim agreement under which the two Germanys could negotiate and after which all Allied rights would disappear. That would “give the semblance of responsibility for the problem having been turned over to the Germans themselves.” But as they would not agree to unification, Khrushchev was certain the outcome would be the same.

With an actor’s sense of dramatic timing, Khrushchev then presented Kennedy a document, an aide-mémoire on the Berlin question, whose purpose was to give his ultimatum official force. No one on Kennedy’s team had prepared the president for such a written Kremlin initiative. Bolshakov had not even hinted at such a move. Khrushchev said the Soviet side had prepared it so that the U.S. could study the Soviet position and “perhaps return to this question at a later date, if it wished to do so.”

With that bold move, Khrushchev had put himself on a collision course with Kennedy over Berlin. He had acted in part because Kennedy, in clinging to the status quo, had not shown even Eisenhower’s willingness to negotiate the issue. That was difficult enough for Khrushchev to accept under Eisenhower, and before the U-2 incident. But now it was impossible.

The morning had passed quickly.

While Khrushchev and Kennedy retreated to a tense lunch, their wives were out doing the town. In front of the Pallavicini Palace on the sun-bathed Josefsplatz, a crowd of a thousand had gathered to get a glimpse of the two women heading for lunch. A slight murmur greeted the Soviet, followed by an outburst of cheers for Jackie. Two American reporters felt sorry for the crowd’s inattention to Nina, so as the Viennese shouted, “Ja-kee! Ja-kee!” they countered with their own chant of “Nina!” But it gained no following.

Reuters correspondent Adam Kellett-Long, who had been sent from Berlin to cover the summit, was horrified as he heard photographers shout at Jackie to stick out her breasts for more alluring shots. “And she did!” he recalled later. “She behaved like Marilyn Monroe or a film star. She was lapping it up.”

From the upstairs window of the restaurant, the two women looked down on the crowd. Jackie appeared very much like a fashion magazine illustration in her navy blue suit, black pillbox hat, and four strands of pearls and white gloves. Soviet press spokesmen didn’t release what Nina was wearing, but the New York Times described her as looking like the housewife for whom Jackie’s fashion magazines were produced. None of that disturbed Nina Petrovna, who found Jackie’s conversation intelligent and who thought she “looked like a work of art.” She held Jackie’s gloved hand aloft standing before the crowd in the window frame of their restaurant—a warmth that was absent from their husbands’ last supper.

The two men conversed about weapons manufacturing and arms policies. Khrushchev said he had scrutinized the president’s May message to Congress in which he had dramatically increased defense spending. He said that he understood the U.S. could not disarm, controlled as it was by monopolists. However, he said, the U.S. buildup would force him also to increase the size of Soviet armed forces.

In that context, Khrushchev returned to their chat over lunch a day earlier at which he said he would consider a joint moon project. He regretted that such cooperation would be impossible as long as there was no disarmament. Khrushchev would not leave even this thin strand of new cooperation on the table.

Kennedy said perhaps they could at least coordinate the timing of their space projects.

Lacking conviction, Khrushchev shrugged that such a course might be possible. He then lifted a glass of sweet Soviet champagne to Kennedy.

He joked that “natural love is better than love through intermediaries,” and that it was good the two men had now talked directly to each other.

He wanted the president to understand that the new Soviet ultimatum on Berlin “would not be directed against the U.S. or its allies.” He compared what Moscow was doing to a surgical operation, which was painful to the patient but necessary for survival. Mixing his metaphors, he said Moscow “wants to cross that bridge and it will cross it.”

Khrushchev conceded that U.S.–Soviet relations would sustain “great tensions” but that he was certain “the sun will come out again and will shine brightly. The U.S. does not want Berlin, neither does the Soviet Union…. The only party really interested in Berlin as such is Adenauer. He is an intelligent man but old. The Soviet Union cannot agree to having the old and moribund hold back the young and vigorous.”

As he toasted Kennedy, Khrushchev conceded that he had put the president in a difficult position, as allies would question his decisions on Berlin. He then dismissed the influence and interests of allies, noting that Luxembourg should cause Kennedy no problem, just as the Soviet Union’s own unnamed allies “would not frighten anyone.”

Khrushchev then raised his glass and noted that Kennedy as a religious man would say, “God should help us in this endeavor.” Khrushchev said he would rather raise his own drink to common sense rather than to God.

Kennedy’s return toast focused on the two men’s obligations in a nuclear age when the effects of a conflict “would go from generation to generation.” He stressed that each side “should recognize the interests and the responsibilities of the other side.”

The gift Kennedy had brought the Soviet leader rested before them on the table, a model of the USS Constitution, whose guns, the president said, had a range of only a half-mile. In the nuclear age, where guns were intercontinental and the devastation would be far more horrible, Kennedy said leaders could not allow war to happen.

Kennedy referred to their setting in neutral Vienna, and he said that he hoped they would not leave a place that so symbolized the possibility of finding equitable solutions after having increased dangers to both sides’ security and prestige. “This goal can be achieved only if each is wise and stays in his own area,” he said.

There it was again: Kennedy’s solution to the Berlin Crisis. He was once more suggesting the Soviet could do whatever he wished on his own ground. It was a negotiating point he had repeated several times during the day in different forms—and now he had employed it within his closing toast.

To take some of the sting out of that as a final word, Kennedy recalled that he had asked Khrushchev what job he had had when he was forty-four, the president’s current age. The Kremlin boss had said he was head of the Moscow Planning Commission. Kennedy joked that he would like to head the Boston Planning Commission at age sixty-seven.

“Perhaps the President would like to become head of the planning commission of the whole world,” Khrushchev sneered.

No, said the president. Just Boston.

With their two days of talks ending so badly, Kennedy took a last stab at a more positive outcome. He asked Khrushchev for one more post-lunch meeting alone with their interpreters.

“I can’t leave here without giving it one more try,” Kennedy told Kenny O’Donnell.

When the president’s staff told him that that would throw them off their scheduled departure, Kennedy barked that nothing in the world could be more important at the moment than getting matters right with Khrushchev. “No, we’re not going on time! I’m not going to leave until I know more.” Throughout his life, Kennedy had depended on his charm and personality to overcome obstacles. Yet none of that had broken through Khrushchev’s force field.

Kennedy opened their last, short exchange by acknowledging the importance of Berlin. However, he hoped that Khrushchev, in the interest of relations between their two countries, “would not present him with a situation so deeply involving our national interest.” He underscored yet again “the difference between a peace treaty and the rights of access to Berlin.” He hoped relations would unfold in a way that would avoid direct confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Yet with Kennedy already in his chokehold, Khrushchev squeezed harder. If the U.S. insisted on its rights, thus violating East German borders after the signing of a peace treaty, “force would be met by force,” he declared. “The U.S. should prepare for that, and the Soviet Union will do the same.”

Before leaving Vienna, Kennedy wanted to understand clearly the options the Soviet was leaving him. Under the interim arrangement that Khrushchev had suggested, would U.S. military forces in Berlin remain, along with free access to the city? Kennedy asked.

Yes, for six months’ time, responded Khrushchev.

And then the forces would have to be withdrawn? Kennedy asked.

Khrushchev said that was so.

The president said that either Khrushchev did not believe the U.S. was serious or the situation was so “unsatisfactory” to him that he believed he needed this “drastic action.” Kennedy said he would see British Prime Minister Macmillan in London on his way home and would have to tell him that he was faced with the unhappy alternative of accepting a Soviet fait accompli on Berlin or confrontation. Kennedy said he had the impression that Khrushchev was leaving him with the only alternatives of conflict or capitulation.

Khrushchev suggested that in order for Kennedy to save face, U.S. and Soviet troops could be maintained in Berlin not as occupation forces but subject to East German control and registered with the United Nations. “I want peace,” Khrushchev said. “But if you want war, that is your problem. It is not the USSR that threatens with war, it is the U.S.”

Kennedy’s extension of their meeting wasn’t going well. “It is you, and not I, who wants to force a change,” the president protested, avoiding Khrushchev’s provocative use of the word “war.”

It was as if two teenage boys with nuclear sticks were arguing over who was trying to pick a fight with whom.

“In any event,” said Khrushchev, “the USSR will have no choice but to accept the challenge. It must respond and it will respond. The calamities of a war will be shared equally…. It is up to the U.S. to decide whether there will be war or peace.” Kennedy, he said, could tell this to Macmillan, de Gaulle, and Adenauer.

Khrushchev said his decision on Berlin was “irrevocable” and “firm”: a peace treaty with East Germany by December with all its consequences on Allied control of West Berlin, or an interim agreement that would lead to the same outcome.

“If that is true, it’s going to be a cold winter,” said Kennedy.

For all the power of Kennedy’s single-sentence summation, he got even that wrong. His troubles would come much earlier.

^BERLIN

^{SUNDAY AFTERNOON, JUNE 4, 1961}

While Khrushchev and Kennedy engaged in angry exchanges about the possibility of war in Berlin, Berliners themselves were out in droves on the first sunny, dry weekend after a month of rain. They were riding in cars and on motor scooters, in the elevated train and subway, heading for Berlin’s many parks and lakesides to swim, sail, play, and enjoy the sun.

The Berlin newspapers were calling it “beautiful summit weather,” and the consensus was that a meeting of the two leaders controlling their fate was more likely than not to reduce tensions. Berliners from both sides of the city filled West Berlin’s cinemas in the evening to see the latest releases: Spartacus, with its four Oscars; Ben-Hur, with Charlton Heston; and The Marriage-Go-Round, with James Mason and Susan Hayward. The film ads reminded East Berliners that their soft East marks would be accepted in a one-to-one exchange for entrance—the best bargain in town.

In the East, Walter Ulbricht was weathering a bread shortage and was out with the people celebrating the communist youth organization’s Children’s Day. With little news from the Vienna Summit, the papers were filled with photographs and accounts of the two wives’ joint Vienna outings.

Fewer refugees registered during the Vienna Summit weekend than at any time for the last many years, because East Germans were holding out hope that the Vienna talks would bring a change for the better.

When asked what he expected from the talks, Ulbricht said he was adopting a wait-and-see attitude. Mayor Willy Brandt told his citizens, “Our good cause is in good hands with President Kennedy…. The best we can hope for is that some of the misunderstandings that might give rise to new threats and dangers in the future are cleared up.”

^VIENNA

^{SUNDAY AFTERNOON, JUNE 4, 1961}

Having just threatened him with war, Khrushchev smiled broadly as he bid farewell to a frowning, shell-shocked Kennedy on the Soviet embassy’s steps. Photographers caught their contrasting moods for the next day’s papers.

Khrushchev knew he had won the day, even if he could not yet know the consequences. He would recall later that Kennedy “looked not only anxious, but deeply upset…Looking at him, I couldn’t help feeling sorry and a little bit upset myself. I hadn’t meant to upset him. I would have liked very much for us to part in a different mood. But there was nothing I could do to help him…. As one human being toward another, I felt bad about his disappointment….

“Politics is a merciless business,” Khrushchev concluded.

The Soviet leader could guess what U.S. hard-liners would argue when they discovered how poorly Kennedy had performed. “We’ve always said the Bolsheviks don’t understand the soft language of negotiations,” Khrushchev reckoned they would say. “They understand only power politics. They tricked you; they gave your nose a good pull. You got a good going-over from them, and now you’ve come back empty-handed and disgraced.”

After seeing off Kennedy at the airport, Austrian Foreign Minister Bruno Kreisky visited with Khrushchev. “The President was very gloomy at the airport,” said Kreisky. “He seemed upset, and his face had changed. Obviously the meeting did not go well for him.”

Khrushchev said he had also noticed Kennedy’s sour mood and told Kreisky that Kennedy’s problem was that he “still doesn’t quite understand the realignment of forces, and he still lives by the policies of his predecessors—especially as far as the German question is concerned. He’s not ready to lift the threat of world war which hangs over Berlin. Our talks were helpful in that they gave us a chance to sound each other out and get to know each other. But that’s all, and it’s not enough.”

With the two days of meetings so fresh in his mind, Khrushchev recounted for Kreisky much of his dialogue with Kennedy—knowing Kreisky would pass word of his triumph to other European leftists, including Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt.

In contrast to Kennedy, Khrushchev left Vienna in as unhurried a manner as he had arrived. While the Soviet leader joined a dinner given in his honor by the Austrian government, Kennedy licked his wounds en route to London.

Kennedy was brutally honest about his poor performance.

As he drove away from the Soviet embassy with Secretary Rusk in his black limo, with presidential and American flags fluttering on its wings, he banged the flat of his hand against the shelf beneath the rear window. Rusk in particular had been shocked Khrushchev had used the word “war” during their acrimonious exchange, a term diplomats avoided and invariably replaced with any number of less alarming synonyms.

Despite all the president’s pre-summit briefings, Rusk felt Kennedy had been unprepared for Khrushchev’s bullying brutality. The extent of Vienna’s failure would not be as easy to measure as the Bay of Pigs fiasco. There would be no dead exile combatants in a misbegotten landing area who had risked their lives in the expectation that Kennedy and the United States would not abandon them. However, the consequences could be even bloodier. Confirmed in his suspicions of Kennedy’s weakness, Khrushchev might engage in just the sort of “miscalculation” that could lead to nuclear war.

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

Kennedy wanted to vent, but how did he play the outcome of the meeting to a media entourage that had become such an extension of himself? Did he spin it as an amiable exchange, as he had instructed his Soviet expert Bohlen to do in his planned press briefings?

No. Kennedy decided to leave behind in Vienna his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to brief the journalism industry’s top reporters about the summit’s “somber” outcome. Before leaving, the president would meet privately in a room at the ambassador’s residence with New York Times writer James “Scotty” Reston. He told O’Donnell he wanted to get across to Americans “the seriousness of the situation, and the New York Times would be the place to do it. I’ll give Scotty a grim picture.”

Still, he was not yet convinced Khrushchev would deliver on his Berlin threat. Perhaps de Gaulle was right when he said Khrushchev would bluff and bluster and continue to delay on Berlin as he had thus far. “Anybody who talks the way he did today and really means it would be crazy, and I’m sure he’s not crazy,” Kennedy told O’Donnell, not feeling very certain about that at all.

At age fifty-two, the Scottish-born Reston had already won two Pulitzer Prizes and was perhaps the most influential and most broadly read journalist in Washington. He was dressed in his usual tweed and bow tie and was chewing his briar pipe while Kennedy debriefed him under ground rules that he would neither quote the president nor mention their private meeting.

Kennedy wore a hat pulled low on his forehead as he sunk into the sofa. It would be one of the most candid sessions ever between a reporter and a commander in chief.

Having an exclusive from Kennedy on the Vienna Summit with 1,500 other reporters out jockeying for access was a coup of some significance for Reston in the new TV age that he so despised. It would be made all the more meaningful by what Kennedy would tell him in a darkened room behind closed blinds so as to conceal their meeting from other reporters.

“How was it?” asked Reston.

“Worst thing in my life,” said Kennedy. “He savaged me.”

Reston jotted in his notebook: “Not the usual bullshit. There is a look a man has when he has to tell the truth.”

Kennedy, deep in the sofa next to Reston, said Khrushchev had violently attacked him on American imperialism—and that he’d turned particularly aggressive on Berlin. “I’ve got two problems,” he told Reston. “First, to figure out why he did it, and in such a hostile way. And second, to figure out what we can do about it.”

Reston rightly concluded in his New York Times report, which carefully protected the confidentiality of his Kennedy meeting, that the president “was astonished by the rigidity and toughness of the Soviet leader.” He called the meeting acrimonious, and rightly said that Kennedy left Vienna pessimistic on issues across the board. In particular, the president “definitely got the impression that the German question was going to be a very near thing.”

Kennedy told Reston that, because of the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev “thought that anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken. And anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts. So he just beat the hell out of me…. I’ve got a terrible problem.”

Kennedy had conjured up a quick analysis of the dangers this posed and how he had to deal with them. “If he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts, until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.” He told Reston that among other things he would increase the military budget and send another division to Germany.

On the flight to London, Kennedy called O’Donnell to his cabin, wanting to vent some more but out of hearing range of Rusk, Bohlen, and the others on Air Force One. Despair had already darkened the mood so much throughout the plane that Kennedy’s Air Force liaison Godfrey McHugh compared it to “riding with the losing baseball team after the World Series. Nobody said very much.”

Kennedy had started his presidency determined to put Berlin on a back burner. Yet now it threatened to blow up in his face. He was overwhelmed by fear that the matter of preserving certain West German and Allied rights in West Berlin could start a nuclear war.

“All wars start from stupidity,” Kennedy said to O’Donnell. “God knows I’m not an isolationist, but it seems particularly stupid to risk killing a million Americans over an argument about access rights on an Autobahn in the Soviet zone of Germany, or because the Germans want Germany reunified. If I’m going to treat Russia with a nuclear war, it will have to be for much bigger and more important reasons than that. Before I back Khrushchev against the wall and put him to a final test, the freedom of all Western Europe will have to be at stake.”

Those who had worked so hard to brief Kennedy ahead of the summit were most disappointed of all, particularly members of Ambassador Thompson’s staff, who saw that most of their advice had been ignored. One of them, Kempton Jenkins, would reflect later that it had been “the golden opportunity for [Kennedy] to be charming, to have Jackie charm Khrushchev, and then have Kennedy come in and say, ‘Now look, I want to say this perfectly straight. Get your bloody hands off Berlin or we’ll destroy you.’”

They were terms Khrushchev would have understood. The U.S. had such nuclear superiority that Kennedy did not need to take the Vienna beating. Jenkins, who closely examined the transcripts later, regretted Kennedy “never did” deliver a tough message to Khrushchev: “He was constantly talking about: We’ve got to find a way out. What can we do to reassure you? We don’t want you to distrust our motives. We’re not aggressive.” The president had further confirmed Khrushchev’s growing impression he could be easily outmaneuvered, and from that point forward Khrushchev would act more aggressively in the conviction that there would be little price to pay.

Kennedy’s predecessors had defended West Berlin so resolutely partly in hopes of eventually breaking communist control of East Germany, and to support the West German government’s claim to the city as the future capital of a unified country. Kennedy believed in none of that and wanted to avoid failure in Berlin because he thought that withdrawal there could turn West Germany against the U.S. and Britain, and would likely lead to a breakup of NATO.

Speaking with O’Donnell en route to London, Kennedy expressed a surprising sympathy for Khrushchev’s predicament in Berlin. He knew that the Soviet problem was an economic one, and that West Berlin’s thriving capitalism was draining East Germany of its talent.

“You can’t blame Khrushchev for being sore about that,” he told O’Donnell.

Though he had just been beaten up by Khrushchev, Kennedy directed his venom against Adenauer and his Germans, who continually complained he wasn’t tough enough with the Soviets. He was not about to go to war over Berlin—though that was precisely what postwar agreements obligated him to do. “We didn’t cause the disunity in Germany,” he told O’Donnell. “We aren’t really responsible for the four-power occupation of Berlin, a mistake neither we nor the Russians should have agreed to in the first place. But now the West Germans would like us to drive the Russians out of East Germany.”

Kennedy complained, “It’s not enough for us to be spending a tremendous amount of money on the military defense of Western Europe, and particularly on the defense of West Germany, while West Germany becomes the fastest-growing industrial power in the world. Well, if they think we are rushing into a war over Berlin, except as a last desperate move to save the NATO alliance, they’ve got another thing coming!”

As their plane descended to London, the president told O’Donnell that he doubted Khrushchev, “for all his shouting,” would actually do what he threatened. But Kennedy was also going to be careful not to provoke the Soviet into a rash countermove in response to a sudden U.S. military action. “If we’re going to have to start a nuclear war,” he said, “we’ll have to fix things so it will be started by the President of the United States, and nobody else. Not by a trigger-happy sergeant on a truck convoy at a checkpoint in East Germany.”

^LONDON

^{MONDAY MORNING, JUNE 5, 1961}

British Prime Minister Macmillan immediately sensed Kennedy’s anguish—both the physical pain in his back and the psychological torment from his meeting with Khrushchev.

While they talked, U.S. officials in crisis mode fanned out across Europe to brief key allies on what amounted to a new Soviet ultimatum. Rusk in Paris visited with de Gaulle and NATO. State Department officials Foy Kohler and Martin Hillenbrand flew to Bonn to brief Adenauer.

The British prime minister called off the formal morning meeting planned with the president—“Foreign Office and all that”—and instead invited him up to his private quarters at Admiralty House, as 10 Downing Street was closed for repairs. They sat for nearly three hours on their own, from 10:30 a.m. to 1:25 p.m., an hour longer than had been scheduled, during which Macmillan mostly listened while feeding Kennedy sandwiches and whiskey. They then reconvened with Foreign Secretary Lord Home until 3:00 p.m. Their talks that day would help shape Kennedy’s closest, most trusting relationship with a foreign leader. He liked the elder Brit’s dry wit, deep intelligence, and nonchalance about the most serious matters.

“For the first time in his life,” Macmillan would recall later, regarding the Vienna Summit, “Kennedy met a man who was impervious to his charm.” The president appeared to him “rather stunned—‘baffled’ would perhaps be fairer…impressed and shocked.” Macmillan saw that Kennedy had been overwhelmed by Khrushchev’s ruthlessness and barbarity—rather like meeting Napoleon “at the height of his power for the first time,” or like Neville Chamberlain “trying to hold a conversation with Herr Hitler.”

Macmillan told Kennedy that the simple position for the West to take “would be to say that the Russians could do what they liked about a treaty with the DDR [East Germany], but the West stood on their rights and would meet any attack on these with all the force at their command.”

Kennedy said it was precisely that threat which had stopped Soviet action to that point. Unfortunately, he said, Khrushchev perceived the West as weaker after recent events in Laos and “elsewhere”—a euphemism for Cuba. After all, even in 1949 when the West had a nuclear monopoly, it had not been prepared to force its way into West Berlin, and the Russians knew that they were now relatively stronger than they were twelve years earlier, said Kennedy.

Lord Home feared Khrushchev was being forced into action over Berlin due to his difficulties with the East German refugees and related problems with other satellites. Khrushchev “might feel that he had to find a way of stopping this,” he said. Once Khrushchev’s new aide-mémoire on Berlin was made public, Lord Home said it would put the West in an uncomfortable position, “as on the face of it, it appears fairly reasonable.”

Kennedy wanted help from the British in composing a speech that he would deliver the next day in Washington. It would need to state Khrushchev’s views, strongly reaffirm Western commitment to West Berlin, and restate Berliners’ right of free choice about their future. The truth, said Macmillan, was that “whatever might be happening in other parts of the world, in Berlin the West was winning. It was a very poor advertisement for the Soviet system that so many people should seek to leave the Communist paradise.”

Kennedy and Macmillan agreed to step up military and other contingency planning on Berlin with an emphasis on what the West should do (1) if the Russians signed a treaty with East Germany, (2) if after the signing of a treaty, civilian supplies were interrupted, and/or (3) Western military supplies were interfered with. Home wanted Kennedy to present counterproposals to the Soviets on their aide-mémoire. Kennedy disagreed, fearing a proposal for Berlin negotiations might appear yet another “sign of weakness.”

While flying back to the U.S., Kennedy sat in his shorts with his top aides sitting around him. His eyes were red and watery, betraying how dead tired he felt. His back was throbbing in pain—though even Kennedy would never know how much his illnesses and the concoctions he took against them had impaired his Vienna performance. He shook his head, stared down at his feet, and at one point hugged his bare legs, muttering about Khrushchev’s unbending manner and what dangers might follow.

Kennedy told his secretary Evelyn Lincoln that he wanted to get some rest to prepare himself for a busy day in Washington. He asked her to file away safely the classified documents that he had been scouring. As she worked, she came upon a slip of paper on which Kennedy had scrawled two lines:

Lincoln did not know what to make of the paper, but it worried her. She could not know that Kennedy had written down from memory a partial quote from Abraham Lincoln, speaking to an Illinois educator in the spring of 1860 regarding his determination to halt slavery. The note was likely not about inviting death—Evelyn Lincoln’s interpretation—but rather about recognizing a calling.

Bobby sat with his brother upon his return. Tears were running down the president’s cheeks, produced by a mixture of the stress he was feeling and the decisions ahead. Bobby would recall later that he had “never seen my brother cry before about something like this. I was up in my bedroom with him and he looked at me and said, ‘Bobby, if nuclear exchange comes, it doesn’t matter about us. We’ve had a good life, we’re adults. We bring these things on ourselves. The thought, though, of women and children perishing in a nuclear exchange. I can’t adjust to that.’”

Journalist Stewart Alsop, a longtime friend of the president, had seen Kennedy on his London visit at Westminster Cathedral during the christening of the newborn child of Stanislaw Radziwill, whose third wife was Jacqueline Kennedy’s younger sister, Lee Bouvier. It was a grand affair, attended by the prime minister and all the Kennedy family. The president coaxed Alsop into a corner and talked to him for fifteen minutes about all he had just been through. “I had the sense that the thing had come to him as a very great shock, which he was beginning to adjust to.”

Alsop had considered the Bay of Pigs to be the moment that had “cured any illusions that Kennedy had about the certainty of success” after a life in which he had experienced very few failures. Alsop considered Vienna a more serious moment because of the difference between Cuba’s lesson that one can fail at a very big thing and the prospect of another failure that could lead to nuclear war.

Kennedy had been in office four months and sixteen days, but Alsop believed it was in Vienna that he truly became the American commander in chief. He had confronted there the brutal nature of his enemy and the reality that Berlin would be their battleground.

“After that was when he really began to be president in the full sense of the word,” Alsop believed.

^{EAST BERLIN}

^{WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7, 1961}

East German leader Walter Ulbricht could hardly believe his good fortune as he was briefed on the Vienna talks by Mikhail Pervukhin, the Soviet ambassador to East Germany. He grew all the more satisfied as he received further details from leading officers of the Soviet High Commission in Karlshorst, with whom he spoke at the end of almost every day.

The previous three days and nights of military exercises—bringing together his National People’s Army with their Soviet counterparts—had demonstrated that Ulbricht was ready militarily for whatever the West might throw at him when Khrushchev finally acted on Berlin. Ulbricht’s soldiers had impressed Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky and Andrei Grechko, commander of all Warsaw Pact forces, who considered the exercise sufficiently important to oversee it themselves. East German soldiers had proved themselves to be far more disciplined in the field than Soviet officers had anticipated.

As Ulbricht ended one of his routine twelve-hour days, he was satisfied as his chauffeur drove him to his new home at Wandlitz, some twenty miles northeast of Berlin on the edge of a thick forest. Ulbricht had not felt so optimistic in months, perhaps years, as his chauffeur drove him past the neat gardens and stuccoed villas of the Pankow district.

Pervukhin had delivered to him a copy of the Soviet aide-mémoire that Khrushchev had passed to Kennedy in Vienna. Many of Ulbricht’s ideas regarding Berlin’s future, stubbornly repeated in numerous letters over many months, had made it into Khrushchev’s official language. Pervukhin told Ulbricht that Moscow would go public with the document in two days.

Ulbricht was confident this time that Khrushchev would not be able to walk away from his Berlin ultimatum. Khrushchev was also getting tougher on Germany in other respects. Foreign Minister Gromyko had lodged an angry protest with the British, French, and U.S. embassies in Moscow about Chancellor Adenauer’s decision for the first time to schedule a plenary meeting in West Berlin of the Bundesrat, the upper house of the West Berlin parliament, on June 16. He called the move a “major new provocation” against all socialist states.

After badgering Khrushchev for so long, Ulbricht wrote a letter that day to the Soviet leader that dripped with ingratiating sentiment. “We warmly thank the [Communist Party] Presidium and you, dear friend,” he said, “for the great efforts which you are undertaking for the achievement of a peace treaty and the resolution of the West Berlin issue.”

Ulbricht wrote that he not only fully agreed with the wording of the ultimatum, but that he also embraced Khrushchev’s summit performance and his representation of the Communist Party, the Soviet government, and the socialist camp.

“This was a great political accomplishment,” he wrote.

Yet Ulbricht also realized much of what had been accomplished had come due to his pressure, and he was not about to let up now. He spent much of the letter complaining about growing West German “revanchism” that threatened them both. The West German Economics Ministry had threatened to repeal its trade treaty with East Germany should a peace treaty be concluded. The cost to the East German economy would be great, as it would then be treated “as a foreign state, which would have to pay for its daily purchases in West Germany in foreign currency” it did not have.

Ulbricht told Khrushchev that Adenauer and other West German officials were lobbying neutral countries to reduce the rights of East German consulates and trade offices. Adenauer was also trying to prevent East German participation in the next Olympic Games.

Ulbricht was most concerned with preventing any further procrastination now that Khrushchev seemed fully focused on Berlin. “Comrade Pervukhin informed us here that you would find it useful if a consultation of the first secretaries [of Communist Parties of the Soviet bloc] would take place as soon as possible.” Ulbricht said he thus had taken the liberty of appealing to leaders of Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to gather on July 20 and 21 to “discuss preparations for a peace treaty.”

Ulbricht wanted the entire socialist bloc to circle around him. “The goal of this meeting,” he said by way of instruction to Khrushchev, “should be an agreement on the political, diplomatic, economic and organizational preparation, and also measures for the coordination of radio and press agitation.”

^MOSCOW

^{WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7, 1961}

Upon Khrushchev’s return to Moscow from Vienna, he ordered multiple copies of the summit minutes to be produced and distributed among friends and allies. He wanted his proficient handling of Kennedy to be known far and wide—particularly among his critics at home and abroad. He had the papers marked “Top Secret,” but he circulated them to a broader audience than was usual for such documents. One copy went to Castro in Cuba, though he was not yet considered a member of the socialist camp. Among the eighteen nations for distribution were also the noncommunist countries of Egypt, Iraq, India, Brazil, Cambodia, and Mexico. A senior Soviet would brief Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito.

Khrushchev was acting like the victor, wanting everyone to relive the championship match with him. He followed his tough line in Vienna with a harder and more dictatorial line at home, blaming rising Soviet civil discontent, vagrancy, crime, and unemployment on too much liberalization, sounding increasingly like his own neo-Stalinist critics. He also reversed reforms of the judicial system associated with his de-Stalinization.

“What liberals you’ve become!” he shot at Roman Rudenko, chief public prosecutor, as he criticized laws that were too soft on thieves, whom he thought should be shot.

“No matter how you scold me,” said Rudenko, “if the law does not provide for the death penalty, we can’t apply it.”

“The peasants have a saying: ‘Get rid of the bad seeds,’” Khrushchev responded. “Stalin had the correct position on these issues. He went too far, but we never had any mercy on criminals. Our fight with enemies should be merciless and well directed.”

Khrushchev pushed through changes that increased the use of the death penalty, grew the size of police units in the KGB, and reversed many of the liberalizing trends he himself had introduced.

While Kennedy headed home, worrying about what to tell America, Khrushchev was at the Indonesian embassy celebrating the sixtieth birthday of the country’s visiting leader, Sukarno.

The band struck up dance tunes out on the embassy’s lawn as various party leaders, including President Leonid Brezhnev and First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, at Khrushchev’s urging, got up to join a folk dance. Diplomats and prominent Russians kept time with rhythmic hand-clapping. Among the dancers was Prince Souvanna Phouma of Laos.

Sukarno himself took Khrushchev’s wife, Nina, onto the dance floor. Khrushchev’s post-Vienna high was infecting everyone. The Soviet leader took a baton at one point to lead the orchestra and told jokes throughout the evening. When Sukarno said he would want new Soviet loans in exchange for letting Khrushchev direct the band, the Soviet leader opened his coat, pulled out his pockets, and showed they were empty.

“Look, he robs me of everything,” he said to the crowd’s laughter.

Watching Mikoyan sway expertly, Khrushchev joked that his number two only kept his job because the party Central Committee had ruled that he was such a fine dancer. No one had seen Khrushchev so carefree since before the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the 1957 coup attempt against him.

When Sukarno said he wanted to kiss a pretty girl, Khrushchev’s wife searched the crowd before settling on a reluctant partner, whose husband was at first unwilling to make her available.

“Oh, please come,” said Nina. “You only have to kiss him once, not twice.”

So the girl gave the Indonesian leader his kiss.

Yet the enduring memory of the evening was when Sukarno drew Khrushchev to the dance floor for an awkward pas de deux. They danced a bit hand in hand before the euphoric Khrushchev performed solo. Khrushchev described his dance style as that of “a cow on ice,” heavy, uncertain, and with unsteady feet.

But on this occasion Khrushchev bent down and kicked his legs out, Cossack style. The heavyset Soviet leader looked unusually light on his feet.

12 ANGRY SUMMER

^{HOUSE OF MINISTRIES, EAST BERLIN}

^{THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 1961}

Walter Ulbricht’s decision to summon West Berlin–based correspondents to a press conference on his communist side of the border was so unprecedented that his propagandists did not even know how to go about inviting the reporters.

The problem was that Ulbricht had cut off all telephone trunk lines between the city’s two parts in 1952. So Ulbricht’s people had to dispatch a special operations team across the border, armed with rolls of West German ten-pfennig coins and a West Berlin press association membership list. Working from public telephone booths, they called Western correspondents one by one with a terse message: “Press conference. Chairman of the State Council of the German Democratic Republic Ulbricht. House of Ministries. Thursday. Eleven o’clock. You are invited.”

Three days later, some three hundred correspondents—roughly half of them representing each side of the city—crowded into a huge banquet hall where Hermann Göring had once entertained officers of the Third Reich’s Air Ministry. A huge hammer and compass, the East German national symbol, rose triumphantly behind the stage where the Nazi eagle and swastika had once stood.

By the time Ulbricht marched in, the room was already uncomfortably warm and stuffy from the combination of reporters’ body warmth, the hot day outside, and the lack of air-conditioning. Beside him was Gerhard Eisler, the legendary communist who ran East Germany’s broadcasting operations. Known to correspondents as East Germany’s Goebbels, he looked out at the crowd through small eyes magnified by thick bifocals. Though convicted as a Soviet spy in the U.S., he had jumped bail in 1950 and dramatically escaped New York aboard a Polish steamer before making his way to the newly created East Germany. Western reporters whispered to each other what they knew about Eisler.

Mutual Broadcasting Network correspondent Norman Gelb soaked in the atmosphere. He had never seen Ulbricht so close up, and he wondered how this short, unassuming, tight-lipped gray man with the shrill voice and rimless glasses had survived so many Soviet and East German power struggles. Though his neatly trimmed goatee gave him an intended resemblance to Lenin, Gelb thought Ulbricht looked more like an aging office manager than a dictator.

Timed to coincide with Khrushchev’s first public report on the Vienna Summit in Moscow, Ulbricht’s long opening statement disappointed correspondents who had come expecting something of historic consequence. Ulbricht’s purpose in organizing the extraordinary meeting only grew clearer after he began taking questions, two or three at a time, which he answered with long lectures that made follow-ups impossible.

Correspondents scribbled furiously as Ulbricht declared that West Berlin’s character would change dramatically after East Germany signed its peace treaty with the Soviets, with or without Western agreement. As a “free city,” he said, it was “self-evident that so-called refugee camps in West Berlin will be closed and persons who occupy themselves with traffic in mankind will leave Berlin.” He said that would also mean the shuttering of U.S., British, French, and West German “espionage centers” operating in West Berlin. Ulbricht said East German travel thereafter would be more strictly regulated and that only those who obtained permission from the Interior Ministry would be able to leave the country.

Annamarie Doherr, a correspondent for the left-leaning Frankfurter Rundschau, pressed Ulbricht for more details. She wondered how Ulbricht would achieve control over travel, given the open East Berlin border. “Mr. Chairman,” she said, “does the creation of a ‘free city,’ as you term it, mean the state boundaries of the German Democratic Republic will be erected at the Brandenburg Gate?” She wanted to know whether he was committed to carrying through his plan “with all of its consequences,” which included a potential war.

Ulbricht’s face was passive, and his cold eyes remained unchanged. He answered without emotion: “I understand your question as implying that there are people in West Germany who would like to see us mobilize the construction workers of the capital of the GDR for the purpose of building a wall.” He paused, looked down on the short, plump Frau Doherr from the rostrum, and then continued. “I am not aware of any such intention. The construction workers of our capital are for the most part busy building apartment houses, and their working capacities are fully employed to that end. Nobody intends to put up a wall.”

It was Ulbricht’s first public mention ever of a “wall,” though the reporter had not mentioned such a barrier herself. He had shown his hand, yet none of the media would pick up on it in their reports that would follow. It sounded to them like more of Ulbricht’s usual obfuscation.

At six o’clock that evening, East Germans could watch Khrushchev’s own report about the Vienna Summit’s outcome on state television. The Soviet leader bluntly declared: “A peace treaty with Germany cannot be postponed any longer.” By design, the edited replay of Ulbricht’s press conference followed the Soviet leader’s statement at eight p.m.

The chilling effect was immediate. Despite increased monitoring of borders by security officers, the following day would bring the biggest one-day outflow of refugees of the year: a record 4,770, which would have amounted to 1.74 million people on an annualized basis from a population of just 17 million. The term increasingly used to describe the flight, Torschlusspanik—the fear of the door’s closing before you can pass through it—described the panicked mood that was spreading like a rash across East Germany after Ulbricht’s speech.

Some commentators at the time believed the rapid increase in refugees showed that Ulbricht had miscalculated the potential impact of the press conference. More likely, it was all part of the East German’s endgame. For all of Khrushchev’s increased public expressions of determination regarding Berlin, Ulbricht knew the Soviet leader had not entirely thought through his next step after Vienna.

Yet each of Ulbricht’s moves was carefully calibrated. By making matters worse for himself over the short term, he would make Khrushchev digest ever more deeply the unacceptable cost of further inaction.

Ulbricht was determined not to lose the post-Vienna momentum.

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

^{FRIDAY, JUNE 16, 1961}

Given his well-known criticism of Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs performance, Dean Acheson was flattered and a little surprised that Kennedy was turning to him again for advice. The president’s questions to him were as simple as they were difficult to answer: How did he counter Khrushchev after his Vienna ultimatum? How seriously should the president take the Soviet leader’s Berlin threat—and what should he do about it?

The Acheson relationship to Kennedy had become an increasingly complex one. The two men had grown acquainted with each other in the late 1950s, when then Senator Kennedy had occasionally driven his Georgetown neighbor home from meetings on Capitol Hill. What the young Kennedy didn’t know was how much Acheson detested Kennedy’s father, not only for his support for an American foreign policy of isolationism, but also for the dishonest way in which Acheson believed he had come about his riches. Acheson believed it was those ill-gotten gains that had then bought the White House for his son.

For President Kennedy, however, Acheson provided perhaps his best option for clear answers to urgent questions. Acheson regarded his job that day as cutting through the mush of administration decision-making represented by the “Interdepartmental Coordinating Group on Berlin Contingency Planning,” better known as the Berlin Task Force. Acheson assured the men in the room that his purpose “was not to interfere with any present operation but rather to stimulate further thought and activity.”

He said the task force had to take Khrushchev’s threats in Vienna at face value, and thus their Berlin contingency planning was no longer a theoretical exercise. Decisions had to be made, he said. The cost of inaction was enormous, as was the danger of failing to reverse Khrushchev’s growing perception of American weakness. The issue of Berlin involved “deeply the prestige of the United States and perhaps its very survival.”

Because he didn’t believe a political solution was available, he said the question was now whether they had the political will to make difficult decisions, “regardless of the opinions of our allies.” Khrushchev was “now willing to do what he [has] not been willing to do before,” said Acheson, “undoubtedly due to the feeling that the U.S. [will] not oppose him with nuclear weapons.”

If the U.S. was unwilling to do that, Acheson continued, it could not oppose Russian advances. Acheson was little interested in hearing the views of others in the room. He was there to convert them to his own thinking. He believed that the Kennedy administration was entering the worst of all worlds. The more Khrushchev doubted the U.S. willingness to use nuclear weapons, the more he might test Kennedy to the point that the president would have no other choice but to use them. “Nuclear weapons should not be looked upon as the last and largest weapon to be used,” he said, “but as the first step in a new policy in protecting the United States from the failure of a policy of deterrence.”

Acheson’s hard line had won him many enemies in the Democratic Party and among the senior officials gathered in the room. He told them that inaction now regarding Berlin would have a ripple effect far beyond the city that would endanger U.S. interests around the world. “Berlin is vital to the power position of the U.S.,” he said. “Withdrawal would destroy our power position.” Thus, they had “to act so as neither to invite a series of defeats nor precipitate ourselves into the ultimate catastrophe.”

With apologies to the Joint Chiefs and the secretary of defense, who he conceded would in the end decide the military issues, Acheson then outlined what he would propose to President Kennedy. Acheson wanted a more intensive training of U.S. reserves than their usual summer routine so that they would be in battle-ready condition. He wanted the U.S. to fly “STRAC units”—Strategic Army Corps operations—to Europe, and, after their exercises, leave part of them behind to increase Allied strength near the front. He envisioned crash programs for Polaris and other missile systems and submarines to improve nuclear capability. He wanted the U.S. to resume nuclear testing and, in violation of Kennedy’s promise to Khrushchev, also restart the sort of reconnaissance flights that had triggered the capture of the U-2 and RB-47 airmen and the breakdown of U.S.–Soviet relations. He wanted aircraft carriers deployed in positions that better helped defend Berlin.

The men in the room were stunned. Acheson was proposing nothing less than a full military mobilization that would place the United States on a war footing. If Acheson reflected Kennedy’s thinking in any way, they were witnessing a historic turning point in the confrontation with Moscow over Berlin.

Acheson continued in a similar vein. He wanted a substantial increase in the military budget and a proclamation of a national emergency so that Americans got the point, supported by congressional resolutions. All this would, of course, require preparing the American people and Congress psychologically. For that, Acheson suggested a large program of air raid shelter construction as a means of galvanizing the population.

He wanted a general alert of the Strategic Air Command and a movement of troops to Europe. If none of this had any impact on the Soviets, he wanted a garrison airlift for Berlin and a continued testing of checkpoints through increased ground traffic to ensure access remained open. That might be followed “by a military movement indicating the eventual use of tactical nuclear weapons and then strategic nuclear weapons.”

Acheson anticipated Allied protests, particularly from the British. “It would be important to bring our allies along,” he said, “but we should be prepared to go without them unless the Germans buckled.” Acheson was convinced his friend Adenauer would support his plan, and that was most crucial, as it would be German troops and interests that would be most at stake. “We should be prepared to go to the bitter end if the Germans go along with us,” he said.

Though the men in the room did not know to what extent Acheson spoke for Kennedy, he no doubt reflected the president’s growing sense of urgency. The president had been frustrated throughout the year with the lethargic decision-making process of the State Department, which he called “a bowl of jelly,” and of the Pentagon, which often took days or weeks to answer his questions. He wanted his apparatus to deal more quickly with a world where he would have only minutes to decide matters that could cost millions of lives.

Acheson gave the group just two weeks to explore his ideas. He said a decision should then be made on his proposals, and action should then begin on implementation. Gauging the surprised faces around the room, Acheson said he knew he was outlining a very risky course, but it was not foolhardy if the U.S. government was really prepared to use nuclear weapons for the protection of Berlin, on which it had staked its entire prestige. “If we [are] not prepared to go all the way, we should not start. Once having started, backing down would be devastating. If we [are] not prepared to take all the risks, then we had better begin by attempting to mitigate the eventual disastrous results of our failure to fulfill our commitments.”

After Acheson ended his presentation, the room fell silent. Acheson knew that those who drove policy in Washington were those who were most determined to do so, and none among Kennedy’s top foreign policy team offered a dissenting view. The State Department’s Foy Kohler, an Acheson ally and the meeting’s chair, broke the ice by expressing his general agreement. He added, however, that the British opposed Acheson’s idea of demonstrably sending troops up the Autobahn to protest any communist restriction of access to Berlin. Macmillan had argued they would be “chewed up” by the Soviets.

The Pentagon’s Paul Nitze added that Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh, who headed the British policy planning staff for Berlin and Germany, had said “it was essential not to scare people to death with our buildup.”

If the NATO allies opposed actions to defend Berlin, Acheson argued, the U.S. needed to know now. “We should proceed not by asking them if they would be afraid if we said ‘Boo!’ We should instead say ‘Boo!’ and see how far they jump.”

Ambassador Thompson, a known Acheson opponent who had flown in from Moscow for the meeting, warned, “We must not corner [Khrushchev] completely.” As it was important for the Russians not to think the U.S. was isolated from its allies, “it would perhaps be best not to say ‘Boo!’ first before getting the British leaders with us.”

Acheson fired back that it would be quite a problem to convince Khrushchev they were serious while, at the same time, letting the British know they were not.

Unlike Acheson, Thompson was convinced the Soviet leader did not want a military confrontation and would do much to avoid it. He believed lower-profile actions would be more effective and less likely to provoke Khrushchev into his irrational worst behavior and perhaps provoke just the war that the U.S. hoped to avoid.

Nitze, however, doubted that lower-profile actions could be effective, since it would be difficult to engage in contingency planning without introducing initiatives that would require high-profile presidential declarations and justifications to Congress.

Acheson interjected that they might be able to avoid some of that sort of noise, since Congress might be convinced to go along with many measures on the basis of existing emergency legislation, which could be followed later with a supporting resolution.

Acheson seemed to have thought through everything.

Asked about the president’s timeline, Acheson said the basis for decision should come before the secretaries of state and defense by the end of the following week. It had to be done within ten days at the very outside. Acheson was issuing deadlines, and everyone was saluting smartly.

The Pentagon’s Nitze said a working group should start within three days, and that its job would be to list the steps necessary regarding Berlin. It would set a target date for getting a full set of military recommendations by June 26.

That was fast for government work.

^{THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW}

^{WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21, 1961}

To add a theatrical touch, Khrushchev wore his wartime lieutenant general’s uniform, replete with a hero’s decorations, at the military celebration for the twentieth anniversary of Hitler’s Soviet invasion. Khrushchev had not worn the uniform since he had served as political adviser on the Stalingrad front during World War II. Given his midsection growth since then, the Soviet army had to tailor him a new one.

As backdrop for the meeting, a documentary film about Khrushchev’s life as a military and political hero, called Our Nikita Sergeyevich, had just opened in Moscow theaters. The review in the newspaper Izvestia said at its opening: “Always and in all things side-by-side with the people, in the thick of events—that is how the Soviet people know Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.”

Before television cameras, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin praised Khrushchev as “the pioneer explorer of the cosmic age.” The Soviet leader received another Order of Lenin and a third golden hammer-and-sickle medal for “guiding the creation and development of the rocket industry…which opened a new era in the conquest of space.” Khrushchev decorated seven thousand others who had contributed to the flight. To consolidate personal alliances and neutralize rivals, he gave Orders of Lenin to his Politburo ally Leonid Brezhnev and to a potential rival at the October Party Congress, Frol Kozlov. Before acting on Berlin, Khrushchev was protecting his flanks like a master politician.

Khrushchev framed the Western refusal to compromise on Berlin as a threat not only to Moscow but to the entire communist world. Like the Nazis twenty years earlier, he said, the West would suffer complete failure because of the growth in military strength of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp.

One after another, the Soviet Union’s military heroes and top commanders praised Khrushchev for his leadership and sounded the alarm about Berlin. Marshal Vasily Chuikov, commander in chief of the Soviet Union’s ground forces, told the crowd, “The historic truth is that during the assault on Berlin there was not a single American, British, or French armed soldier around it, except for the prisoners of war whom we freed.” Thus, he said, the Allies’ claims to special rights in Berlin so long after surrender “are entirely unfounded.”

The crowd cheered.

General A. N. Suburov, former commander of Ukrainian partisans, bore personal witness that Khrushchev was a gifted military strategist who could evaluate a major enemy at a historic moment and prescribe the proper course of action behind an achievable plan. Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky said the Americans and their allies were creating “a gigantic military apparatus and a system of aggressive blocks” around Soviet borders that must be resisted. He said they were stockpiling nuclear arms and rockets and creating areas of tension in Algeria, the Congo, Laos, and Cuba. They were carrying out the same policy that had led to World War II, he declared, “blinded by class hatred for socialism.”

Khrushchev was developing the background story for whatever action he would order on Berlin. The Americans were Moscow’s most dangerous enemy. Berlin was the battleground to be cleared. Khrushchev was the hero of the past and the present who would lead the socialists of the world at this historic moment. It was at the same time a Berlin battle cry and a campaign event in advance of the October Party Congress. The future of Berlin and Khrushchev were inextricably linked.

Khrushchev then paid his military a substantial reward for their support. Since the mid-1950s, he’d cut defense budgets and manpower while redirecting conventional arms resources to nuclear missile forces. Now he reversed the Soviet troop drawdown, provided access to new weaponry, and increased spending to give balanced support to “all the types of troops of our armed forces,” because the military “must have everything necessary in order immediately to smash any opponent…for the liberty of our Motherland.”

The delirious crowd cheered their leader.

^{WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 1961}

Even as Dean Acheson was putting the final touches on his new Berlin assessment, he jotted a personal note to his former boss, President Harry Truman, containing concerns about his new boss. He was “worried and puzzled” by Kennedy, he told Truman. “Somehow he does succeed in being a President, but only in the appearance of one.”

Four days later, on June 28, Acheson submitted a preliminary version of his Berlin report to Kennedy in preparation for a press conference the president would hold that day, and a crucial gathering of his National Security Council and key congressional figures the day after.

The thirteenth press conference of Kennedy’s six-month-old administration was a result of rising public and media pressure. His reluctance to discuss Berlin through most of June had given rise to reporting that he was behind the curve both with the public and the Pentagon in their willingness to stand up to Khrushchev. Time magazine, the largest-circulation American weekly, said in its July 7 edition, “There is a wide and spreading feeling that the Administration has not yet provided ample leadership in guiding the U.S. along the dangerous paths of the cold war.” It called upon Kennedy to seize the Berlin challenge “unhesitatingly and with boldness.”

Kennedy complained to Salinger about such reports. “This shit has got to stop,” he said. What particularly irked him was Richard Nixon’s attack on Kennedy, that “never in American history has a man talked so big and acted so little.”

As so often in his presidency, Kennedy’s rhetoric at the press conference was tougher toward the Soviets than the reality of his policy. “No one can fail to appreciate the gravity of this threat,” Kennedy said. “It involves the peace and security of the Western world.” He denied that he had seen a proposal for military mobilization for Berlin, though he said he would be considering “a whole variety of measures.” The statement was true only in the narrowest sense, in that Acheson was due to discuss military contingencies with the president the following day.

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

^{THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 1961}

The first three paragraphs of Acheson’s report on Berlin contained an unequivocal call to action.

With that as preamble, Acheson tersely laid out his proposal. Berlin was a problem only because the Soviets had decided to make it one. Their reasons were several: They wanted to neutralize Berlin en route to taking it over; they wanted to weaken or break up the Western alliance; and they wished to discredit the United States. He said that the “real themes should be that Khrushchev is a false trustee and a war monger, and these themes should be hammered home.”

Acheson’s goal was to shift Khrushchev’s thinking, to convince him that Kennedy’s response to any test in Berlin would be so firm that Khrushchev wouldn’t risk it. He wanted the president to declare a national emergency and order a rapid buildup in American nuclear as well as conventional forces. He said American forces in Germany outside Berlin should be reinforced immediately by two or three divisions, to a total of six. The underlying message: If anyone was to back down over Berlin, it would have to be the Soviets.

The Acheson report listed three “essentials” that, if violated, would trigger a military response. The Soviets could not threaten Western garrisons in Berlin, they could not disrupt air and surface access to the city, and they could not interfere with West Berlin’s viability and place in the free world. Acheson said a 1948-style airlift should be the response to any interruption of access. If the Soviets blocked the airlift more effectively this time, given their enhanced military capability and Berlin’s larger supply needs, then Kennedy should send two American armored divisions up the Autobahn to force open West Berlin.

Acheson had thrown down the gauntlet, but Kennedy wasn’t yet prepared to pick it up. The president said little during the meeting. He doubted the American people were ready for a course as ambitious as Acheson was proposing. The Allies would be even less willing. De Gaulle had his hands full with Algeria, and Kennedy knew Macmillan had no stomach for troops storming up the Autobahn.

Thompson led the arguments against the plan. He disagreed with Acheson that Khrushchev’s motive was to humiliate the U.S., and said it was instead to stabilize his Eastern European flank. Thus, he favored a quieter Western military buildup and thought it ought to be accompanied by a diplomatic initiative for Berlin negotiations after the West German elections in September. Thompson argued that if Kennedy declared a national emergency, it would make the U.S. look “hysterical” and could force Khrushchev to make a rash countermove he would otherwise avoid.

Admiral Arleigh Burke, the U.S. Navy chief, also opposed Acheson’s plan. The veteran opposed the scale of the military “probe” recommended by Acheson, or an airlift unconnected with a probe. Burke had seen Kennedy’s reluctance to provide the military support required to succeed in Cuba, and he wasn’t about to put his neck on the line for Acheson’s Berlin scheme.

Kennedy saw his administration separating into two camps. The first was becoming known as the Hard-Liners on Berlin and the other had been disparagingly labeled by the hawks in the room as the SLOBs, or the Soft-Liners on Berlin. The hard-liners included Acheson and Assistant Secretary of State Foy Kohler, the whole of the Germany desk at the State Department, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze, and more often than not, the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon and Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

The soft-liners disliked the acronym that described them, which they saw as an attempt to discredit their greater willingness to find a negotiated Berlin solution, although they still supported a tough approach to the Soviets and some military buildup. They were a formidable group and were closer personally to Kennedy: Thompson, Kennedy Soviet affairs adviser Charles Bohlen, White House aide Arthur Schlesinger, White House consultant and Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, and special counsel Ted Sorensen. They also included Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy.

Acheson, however, had a weapon they could not match: a fully developed proposal that was specific and comprehensive down to the last soldier to be deployed. The SLOBs had provided no alternative.

After the meeting, Schlesinger organized an Acheson counterinsurgency. The forty-three-year-old historian had already served three times on Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign staff before aligning himself with Kennedy. He believed men of ideas had to collaborate with men of power to achieve noble purposes. He could recite cases from history, when Western intellectuals of their time—Turgot, Voltaire, Struensee, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—had “assumed collaboration with power as the natural order of things.” Schlesinger turned to the State Department’s legal adviser Abram Chayes to begin work on a plan that was intended to provide a thinking man’s alternative to Acheson.

Acheson warned his longtime friend Chayes that he’d already looked at softer options and they wouldn’t fly. “Abe, you’ll see. You try, but you will find it just won’t write.”

^PITSUNDA

^{EARLY JULY 1961}

From his Black Sea retreat, a frustrated Khrushchev demanded to see a better map of Berlin.

His ambassador to East Germany, Mikhail Pervukhin, had sent him a map that lacked sufficient detail to determine whether Ulbricht was right that it was possible to effectively divide the city. Khrushchev could see that in some parts of Berlin, sectors were divided by a line running down the center of a street. In other places, it seemed the border ran through buildings and canals. Khrushchev worried as he studied more closely that “one sidewalk was in one sector, the other in a different one. Cross the street and you have already crossed the border.”

In a July 4 letter, Pervukhin had reported to Foreign Minister Gromyko that shutting down the city’s border would be a logistical nightmare, as some 250,000 Berliners crossed the line each day by train, by car, and on foot. “This would necessitate building structures for the whole expanse of the border within the city and adding a large number of police posts,” he stated. That said, he conceded that closing the border “in one way or the other” might be required given “the exacerbation of the political situation.” Pervukhin worried about the negative reaction of the West to any such move, including a possible economic embargo.

Ulbricht had long since overcome any such doubts, and by the end of June had developed with his top security man in the Politburo, Erich Honecker, detailed plans about how the border could be closed. He brought the Soviet ambassador and Yuli Kvitsinsky, a young and rising diplomat, who acted as translator, to his home outside East Berlin on the Döllnsee to drive home his most compelling point. The situation in the GDR was growing visibly worse, he told Pervukhin, adding, “Soon it would lead to an explosion.” He told Pervukhin to tell Khrushchev that his country’s collapse was “inevitable” if the Soviets didn’t act.

Since Vienna, Khrushchev’s son Sergei had been struck by how his father’s “thoughts constantly reverted to Germany.” At the same time, the Soviet leader had lost interest in the notion of a war-ending peace treaty with East Germany. After lobbying for such a document since 1958, he had determined it did nothing to solve his most urgent problem: the refugees.

The fact that Kennedy cared so little about whether Khrushchev unilaterally signed such a treaty with the East Germans, a document the U.S. and its allies would have ignored, had also prompted Khrushchev to question its worth. Though Ulbricht still demanded the treaty, Khrushchev had concluded that producing such a document was not as urgent as the need to “plug up all the holes” between East and West Berlin.

Once the door to the West was closed, he told Sergei, “perhaps people would stop rushing around and begin working, the economy would take off, and it wouldn’t be long before West Germans began knocking on the GDR’s door” for better relations. Then he could negotiate a war-ending treaty with the West from a position of strength.

For now, however, Khrushchev’s problem was the map. When the four powers drew the lines among their four sectors after World War II, no one had given any thought to the possibility that those lines might someday become an impermeable border. “History had created this inconvenience,” Khrushchev would write years later, “and we had to live with it.”

Khrushchev complained that those who had marked the map were either unqualified or unthinking. “It’s hard to make sense of the map you sent me,” he told Pervukhin. He told him to summon Ivan Yakubovsky, chief military commander in Berlin and head of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, and “pass on my request that his staff make a map of Berlin with the borders marked and with comments on whether it’s possible to establish control over them.”

After that, he wanted Pervukhin to take the map to Comrade Ulbricht and then gather his comments as to the feasibility of shutting the border all along the jagged, erratic, and undefended lines that divided the world’s competing systems.

Ulbricht, as usual in 1961, was already way ahead of him.

And a world away in Miami Beach, perhaps the highest-profile East German refugee yet was providing the world with a dazzling reminder of the East German refugee problem—and Ulbricht with yet another reason to close the gate as quickly as possible.

Marlene Schmidt, the Universe’s Most Beautiful Refugee

She was Walter Ulbricht’s ultimate humiliation.

As the communist leader maneuvered behind the scenes to close his Berlin border, one of his refugees was strutting down the catwalk of a Miami Beach stage in her shimmering Miss Universe crown. Amid the flashing of cameras, Ulbricht’s most intractable problem had assumed the unmistakable shape of someone judges had declared “the world’s most beautiful girl.”

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

It had been only a year since Marlene had fled Jena, an East German industrial town that had been flattened by Allied bombing during World War II. Since then, Soviet expropriation had further gutted the city and communist central planners were rebuilding it in the colorless monotony of their bland block buildings. Though her new West German home of Stuttgart was just 220 miles away from Jena, it was a world apart.

U.S. and British air attacks had also destroyed most of Stuttgart, where German industry had grown around Gottlieb Daimler’s automobiles and combustion engines. However, West Germany’s postwar economic miracle had already transformed the city into a hilly, green boomtown of cranes, new cars, and rising aspirations—driven by West Germany’s ascent to become the world’s third-largest exporter.

Just a few weeks after landing in the West, Marlene had entered the Miss Germany contest, drawn by a local newspaper advertisement that announced that first prize would be a French Renault convertible. After winning in the luxurious spa town of Baden-Baden, West Germany, Marlene in Florida surpassed forty-eight competitors from around the world to become Germany’s first and only Miss Universe.

Time magazine couldn’t resist a dig at the communists for having let her escape. “Even allowing for the crush [of refugees],” it said, “it is hard to understand how the East German border guards failed to spot lissome, 5-ft. 8-in. Marlene…. The West had no such difficulty.”

Marlene’s triumph was projected to the world in Technicolor from a pageant organized and produced by Paramount Pictures, with then game-show host Johnny Carson as master of ceremonies and actress Jayne Meadows as color commentator. Tens of thousands of East Germans watched as well, the product of thousands of jerry-rigged antennae on rooftops that allowed most of the country to pull down the West German television signal. They hung on every detail.

Marlene, who was earning $53 a week as an electrical engineer in a Stuttgart research laboratory, spoke of her excitement over Miss Universe winnings that included $5,000 in cash, a $5,000 mink coat, a $10,000 personal appearance contract, and a full wardrobe. Newspapers reported that her victory celebration stretched until five in the morning, followed by an “American-style breakfast” of orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast, and coffee. “I’m a little tired, but so happy,” conceded Marlene through her interpreter, a doting Navy lieutenant and German linguist who escorted her through news conferences, interviews, and photo sessions.

World attention forced Ulbricht’s propaganda apparatus to react. The East German leader’s three-pronged effort to slow the refugee flood included more assertive propaganda about the virtues of socialism and the failures of capitalism; greater repressive measures, including punishment of refugees’ family members for complicity; and increased incentives for refugees who returned, ranging from jobs to housing.

Yet nothing could reverse the escalating numbers in a population awash with rumors that the opportunity to escape might vanish soon.

In the case of Marlene, the official communist youth publication, Junge Welt (Young World), accused the Americans of rigging the beauty contest to call attention to East Germany’s refugee problem. It sneered at how the West German media had falsely created “a Soviet zone Cinderella” who had been saved from half-starved communism by the Golden West. The writer countered that while East Germans valued her for her engineering and socialist education, “now all that matters are her bust, butt and hips. She is no longer to be taken seriously. She is just a display piece.”

When American journalists related such reports to her for comment, Marlene shrugged in resignation. “I had expected to hear this from them. I think it is uncomfortable for the East German government to have the world reminded of the situation in East Germany.”

Absent the Miss Universe crown, Marlene’s story had been similar to that of so many others at the time. A few weeks after helping her mother and sister escape, Marlene had chosen to follow them when she heard that authorities were investigating her for complicity in their crime of Republikflucht, or flight from the Republic. Under the 1957 Gesetz zur Änderung des Passgesetzes (Law to Change Passport Regulations), she would serve up to three years in prison if prosecuted.

Junge Welt called her Miami triumph one of those short-lived pleasures of capitalism that would quickly fade away, to be followed by a hard life in an unfriendly land. “You will only reign one year, after which the world will forget you,” it said.

In this case, East German propaganda proved partially right. In 1962, she would become the third among the eight wives of Hollywood actor Ty Hardin, star of the Western television series Bronco. She divorced him four years later, and only after that ran up eleven movie credits as an actor, writer, and producer, but they included little of note aside from female nudity. “I learned that life in Hollywood wasn’t for me,” she said, reflecting on her choice to move back home and work on electrical engines in Saarbrücken.

When she left East Germany, however, Marlene’s choice had been between freedom and prison. After release, she would have been banned from working as an engineer and would have been caught in a dreary world of limited potential. Hollywood had had its disappointments for her, but the flight to the West had been her salvation.

Marlene Schmidt would wear her Miss Universe crown for less than a month before Ulbricht moved to close the escape hatch through which she and so many others had passed.