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

13 “THE GREAT TESTING PLACE”

^{THE VOLKSKAMMER (PEOPLE’S CHAMBER), EAST BERLIN}

^{THURSDAY, JULY 6, 1961}

Mikhail Pervukhin, the Soviet ambassador to East Germany, ordered his aide Yuli Kvitsinsky to track down Ulbricht immediately. “We have a yes from Moscow,” Pervukhin said.

At age twenty-nine, Kvitsinsky was a rising star in the Soviet foreign ministry who had made himself invaluable to Pervukhin with his sound judgment and flawless German. He sensed the historic moment. After Khrushchev had scrutinized a much-improved map of Berlin from General Yakubovsky, the commander of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, the Soviet leader had concluded that Ulbricht was right: it would be possible to barricade Berlin.

Years later, Khrushchev would take full credit for the decision to build the Berlin Wall. “I had been the one,” he would write in his memoirs, “who thought up the solution to the problem which faced us as a consequence of our unsatisfactory negotiations with Kennedy in Vienna.” Yet the truth was that Khrushchev was merely giving Ulbricht the green light to proceed with a solution that the East German leader had sought as early as 1952 from Stalin. The Soviets would help shape, refine, and provide the crucial military guarantees for the operation’s success, but it was Ulbricht who had driven the outcome with his constant badgering, and it would be Ulbricht’s team that would work out all the details.

Khrushchev would tell the West German ambassador to Moscow, Hans Kroll, “I don’t want to conceal from you that it was I who in the end gave the order. Ulbricht had pressured me for a long time and in the last months with increasing vehemence, but I don’t want to hide myself behind Ulbricht’s back.” Khrushchev then joked with Kroll that Ulbricht was far too thin anyway for that purpose. “The wall will disappear again someday, but only when the reasons for its construction disappear,” Khrushchev told Kroll.

Khrushchev had agonized over the decision; he knew the cost would be great to socialism’s global reputation. “What should I have done?” he had asked himself. “You can easily calculate when the East German economy would have collapsed if we hadn’t done something soon against the mass flight. There were, though, only two kinds of countermeasures: cutting off air traffic or the Wall. The former would have brought us to a serious conflict with the United States which possibly could have led to war. I could not and did not want to risk that. So the Wall was the only remaining option.”

After Khrushchev relayed his decision to East Berlin, Kvitsinsky tracked down Ulbricht at the People’s Chamber, where he had been attending a session of East Germany’s rubber-stamp unicameral parliament, whose decisions, like most everything else in the country, followed his dictate.

Pervukhin told a satisfied Ulbricht that he had Khrushchev’s green light to begin practical preparations for closing the Berlin border, but that he must operate under the greatest of secrecy. “For the West, the action must be carried out quickly and unexpectedly,” Pervukhin said.

In stunned silence, the two Soviets listened to Ulbricht as he recited without emotion each minute detail of what was already a meticulously constructed plan.

The only way to close such a border rapidly enough, Ulbricht said, and with sufficient surprise, was to use barbed wire and fencing—and a massive amount of it. He knew precisely where he would get it and how he would bring it to Berlin without alerting Western intelligence agencies. Just before he shut the border, he would bring the metro and the elevated trains to a complete stop, he said. He would put up an unbreakable glass wall at the main Friedrichstrasse train station, through which the greatest amount of cross-Berlin traffic passed, so that East Berliners could not board West Berlin–bound trains to escape the shutdown.

The Soviets should not underestimate the difficulty of the border closing, Ulbricht told Pervukhin. He would act in the early hours of a Sunday morning, when traffic across the border would be far less and many Berliners would be outside the city. The 50,000 East Berliners who worked in West Berlin during the week as so-called Grenzgänger, or “border crossers,” would be home for the weekend and thus caught in Ulbricht’s trap.

Ulbricht said he would share the details with only a handful of his most trusted lieutenants: Politburo security chief Erich Honecker, who would direct the operation; State Security chief and thus secret police chief Erich Mielke; Interior Minister Karl Maron; Defense Minister Heinz Hoffmann, and Transportation Minister Erwin Kramer. Ulbricht said he would entrust only one individual, his chief bodyguard, to hand-deliver regular updates on preparations to Pervukhin and Kvitsinsky.

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

^{FRIDAY, JULY 7, 1961}

Just one day after Ulbricht received Khrushchev’s go-ahead for his bold plan, Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger was scheming to slow adviser Dean Acheson’s own rush to action.

Having won the Pulitzer Prize at age twenty-seven for his book The Age of Jackson, Schlesinger was the Kennedy court historian who also engaged in random troubleshooting. His sudden focus on Berlin came as a response to what he considered his own poor performance during the run-up to the Bay of Pigs operation. Schlesinger had been alone among the president’s closest advisers in opposing the invasion, but he reproached himself for failing “to do more than raise a few timid questions” while military commanders and the CIA lobbied Kennedy to approve action. Schlesinger had limited his dissent to a private memo that had warned Kennedy: “At one stroke you would dissipate all the extraordinary goodwill which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world.”

Schlesinger was determined not to make the same mistake twice. He considered the Acheson plan for Berlin to be every bit as foolhardy as the Bay of Pigs blueprint. So Schlesinger asked two people who had significant influence with Kennedy to draft an alternative. One was State Department legal adviser Abram Chayes, a thirty-nine-year-old law scholar who had led the team that drafted Kennedy’s 1960 Democratic Convention platform. The other was thirty-eight-year-old White House consultant Henry Kissinger, a rising star who had shaped Kennedy’s thinking on nuclear issues with his book The Necessity of Choice: Prospects of American Foreign Policy. Kissinger had supported New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s effort to win the Republican nomination for president in 1960, but he was working through Harvard colleagues to gain influence in the Kennedy White House.

When Kennedy first drafted Acheson into service the previous February, Schlesinger had concluded that the president was merely trying to get a broader mixture of views. Now Schlesinger feared that Kennedy would adopt Acheson’s hard-line approach to Berlin as policy if no one provided him with an alternative. UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was equally troubled by Acheson’s growing influence. “Maybe Dean is right,” Stevenson told Schlesinger. “But his position should be the conclusion of a process of investigation, not the beginning.”

Schlesinger wanted to combat Acheson’s effort to convince the president that “West Berlin was not a problem but a pretext” for Khrushchev to test the general will of the U.S. and its new president to resist Soviet encroachment.

Schlesinger worried that “the thrust of Acheson’s rhetoric, and especially of his brilliant and imperious oral presentations,” would fix the debate around the idea that the Soviets had “unlimited objectives” in reigniting the Berlin Crisis. Yet those who knew Moscow best, Thompson and Averell Harriman, a former ambassador to Moscow, felt Khrushchev’s game might be limited to Berlin alone and thus should be played quite differently. Although the State Department was divided over Acheson’s tough approach, Schlesinger was distraught that no one was framing the other side of the debate because Rusk “was circumspect, and no one quite knew where he stood.”

The British government had leaked its softer line to the Economist magazine, which had reported, “Unless Mr. Kennedy takes a decisive grip on the wheel, the West is in danger of bypassing one possible line of compromise after another until it reaches a dead end, where neither it nor Russia has any choice except between ignominious retreat and nuclear devastation.”

Schlesinger felt he had to move fast or lose all influence, as “talk of war mobilization under the proclamation of national emergency contained the risk of pushing the crisis beyond the point of no return.” He worried about repeating the prelude to the Bay of Pigs crisis, where a bad plan had gained unstoppable momentum because no one had opposed it or presented an alternative choice.

He was determined to prompt a showdown on Berlin before it was too late.

On July 7, just after a lunch meeting with Kennedy on another issue, Schlesinger handed the president his Berlin memo and asked that he look it over en route to Hyannis Port that afternoon. The timing was good, as the president would meet with senior officials there the next day on Berlin. Kennedy said he preferred to read Schlesinger’s thoughts right away, because Berlin was his most urgent problem.

Schlesinger had calculated correctly that nothing would get Kennedy’s attention faster than a credible warning that the president was in danger of repeating his mistakes in Cuba. Kennedy had joked after the debacle that Schlesinger’s cautionary memo on Cuba would “look pretty good” when the historian got around to writing his book on the administration. He then added a word of warning: “Only he’d better not publish that memorandum while I’m still alive.” In his anti-Acheson memo, Schlesinger reminded Kennedy that the Cuban fiasco was a result of “excessive concentration on military and operational problems” in the preparatory stage while underestimating the political issues.

Though Schlesinger’s paper praised Acheson for “analyzing the issues of last resort,” he worried that the former secretary of state was defining the issue “to put it crudely as: are you chicken or not? When someone proposes something which seems tough, hard, put-up-or-shut-up, it is difficult to oppose it without seeming soft, idealistic, mushy….” He reminded the president that his Soviet expert Chip Bohlen believed that nothing could help discussion of the Soviets more than eliminating the adjectives “hard” and “soft” from the language of the debate.

“People who had doubts about Cuba,” said Schlesinger, in a clear reference to himself, “suppressed those doubts lest they seem ‘soft.’ It is obviously important such fears not constrain free discussion of Berlin.”

The president read the memo carefully. He then looked at his friend with concern. He agreed that Acheson’s paper was too narrow and that “Berlin planning had to be brought back into balance.” He tasked Schlesinger to expand on his memorandum immediately for use the following day in Hyannis Port.

Schlesinger worked against the clock, since Kennedy’s helicopter would lift off from the White House lawn at five p.m. With only two hours remaining before the president’s departure, Chayes and Kissinger, the lawyer and the political scientist, dictated as Schlesinger edited while typing furiously. By the time Schlesinger ripped the final version from his typewriter, he had something that raised a series of questions about the Acheson paper and suggested new approaches. It said:

The three men then listed the issues that they believed Acheson had overlooked.

• “What political moves do we make until the crisis develops?” The memo argued, “If we sit silent or confine ourselves to rebutting Soviet contentions,” Khrushchev would keep the initiative and put Kennedy on the defensive, making him look rigid and unreasonable.

• “The [Acheson] paper indicates no relationship between the proposed military action and larger political objectives.” The memo argued, in language intended to shock, that Acheson “does not state any political objective other than [preserving] present access procedures for which we are prepared to incinerate the world.” It thus argued, “It is essential to elaborate the cause for which we are prepared to go to nuclear war.”

• “The paper covers only one eventuality… the Communist interruption of military access to West Berlin.” Yet, the memo argues, “actually, there is a whole spectrum of harassments, of which a full-scale blockade may well be one of the least likely.”

• “The paper hinges on our willingness to face nuclear war. But this option is undefined.” The three men counsel Kennedy, whom they already knew was troubled by his war options: “Before you are asked to make the decision to go to nuclear war, you are entitled to know what concretely nuclear war is likely to mean. The Pentagon should be required to make an analysis of the possible levels and implications of nuclear warfare and the possible gradations of our own nuclear response.”

• The memo attacked Acheson for addressing himself “almost exclusively to the problem of military access” to Berlin. However, military traffic was only 5 percent of the whole, while 95 percent consisted of supplies for the civilian population. It noted that East Germany was already in full control of this civilian traffic, which it “has gone to surprising lengths to facilitate.” It noted that civilian traffic was most essential to the U.S. objective of preserving West Berlin’s freedom.

• The memo argued that Acheson ignored sensitivities inside NATO. “What happens if our allies decline to go along?” It was unlikely the Allies would support Acheson’s idea of sending troops up the Autobahn to break a blockade through a ground probe, which de Gaulle had already opposed. “What about the United Nations? Whatever happens, this issue will go into the UN. For better or for worse, we have to have a convincing UN position.”

Seldom had such an important document been composed so rapidly. Schlesinger typed quickly to keep up with the unfolding thoughts of his brilliant co-conspirators. With an eye on the clock, he created a section called “Random thoughts about unexplored alternatives.” It listed in rat-a-tat fashion what questions the president should be exploring beyond those Acheson had provided.

Most of all, the men wanted to ensure that all questions and alternatives were “systematically brought to the surface and canvassed” before rushing forward with the Acheson plan. The unsigned Schlesinger paper suggested that the president consider withdrawing the Acheson paper from circulation altogether. The danger of Acheson’s thoughts leaking, the memo argued, was greater than the danger to full discussion from a more limited distribution.

Oblivious to the fact that Khrushchev had already decided his course on Berlin, U.S. officials in Washington were engaged in a behind-the-scenes bureaucratic war against Dean Acheson. Although written quickly, the Schlesinger-inspired memo was thorough, even including ideas about which new individuals should be brought into the process to dilute the power of Acheson. It suggested, among others, Averell Harriman and Adlai Stevenson.

It was the revenge of the so-called SLOBs—the Soft-Liners on Berlin.

The Schlesinger memo concluded by suggesting that one of its authors drive the process. “In particular, Henry Kissinger should be brought into the center of Berlin planning,” it said. It would be one of the opening acts for a man who would over time become one of the most effective foreign policy infighters in U.S. history.

At the same time, Kennedy was also hearing doubts about existing nuclear war planning regarding Berlin from Defense Secretary McNamara and National Security Advisor Bundy. In his own memo ahead of the Hyannis Port meeting, Bundy complained about the “dangerous rigidity” of the strategic war plan. It had left the president little choice between an all-out attack on the Soviet Union or no response at all. Bundy suggested that McNamara review and revise it.

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

^{FRIDAY, JULY 7, 1961}

Henry Kissinger spent only a day or two each week in Washington working as a White House consultant, commuting from his post at Harvard University, but that had proved sufficient to put him at the center of the struggle to shape Kennedy’s thinking on Berlin. The ambitious young professor would happily have worked full-time for the president; that, however, had been blocked by his former dean and now D.C. boss, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.

Though Kissinger had mastered the art of flattering his superiors, Bundy was more immune to it than most. Along with the president, Bundy regarded Kissinger as brilliant but also tiresome. Bundy imitated Kissinger’s long, German-accented discourses and the rolling of the president’s eyes that accompanied them. For his part, Kissinger would complain that Bundy had put his considerable intellectual talents to “the service of ideas that were more fashionable than substantial.” Kissinger biographer Walter Isaacson concluded that their differences were a matter of class and style: the tactful, upper-class Bostonian condescending to the brash German Jew.

Still, being so near the center of American power was a new and heady experience for Kissinger, and an early introduction to the White House infighting that would be such a part of his extraordinary life. Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Bavaria, in 1923, he had fled Nazi persecution with his family, arriving in New York when he was fifteen. Now he was advising America’s commander in chief. While Bundy had labored to keep him at arm’s length from Kennedy, Kissinger was now reaching him through another Harvard professor, Arthur Schlesinger, who was deploying him against Acheson.

Kissinger had none of Acheson’s historic place or access to the Oval Office—and at age thirty-eight was thirty years Acheson’s junior—but his thirty-two-page “Memorandum for the President” on Berlin was an audacious attempt to one-up the former secretary of state. It landed on Kennedy’s desk just before he departed for Hyannis Port to work on developing his approach to Berlin. Though Kissinger was much more hard-line on Moscow than Schlesinger, he felt it would be foolhardy for Kennedy to embrace Acheson’s complete dismissal of diplomacy as one available avenue.

Kissinger worried that Kennedy’s aides, and perhaps the president himself, might be naive enough to be tempted by Khrushchev’s “free city” idea, under which West Berlin would fall under United Nations control. Kissinger was also concerned about Kennedy’s distaste for the great Adenauer, and the president’s belief that the West’s long-standing commitment to eventual German unification, through free elections, was fanciful, and should be negotiable. Kennedy, Kissinger feared, didn’t sufficiently realize that inattention to Berlin could breed a crisis for the Atlantic Alliance that would hurt U.S. security interests far more than any deal with Moscow could justify.

So Kissinger put his warning to Kennedy in unmistakable terms:

Regarding unification, Kissinger warned Kennedy that abandoning traditional U.S. support would demoralize West Germans, making them doubt their place in the West. It would at the same time encourage the Soviets to increase their pressure on Berlin, as they would conclude that Kennedy already was “cutting [his] losses.” Instead, Kissinger suggested that Kennedy’s response to Khrushchev’s increasing of Berlin tensions “with respect to German unification should be offensive and not defensive. We should use every opportunity to insist on the principle of free elections and take our stand before the United Nations on this ground.” He warned Kennedy that he should not take West Berlin morale for granted, as U.S. leaders had done since the beginning of the Berlin Crisis in November 1959. “We should give them some tangible demonstration of our confidence to maintain their hope and courage,” he wrote.

It concerned Kissinger all the more that Kennedy didn’t have a credible military contingency plan for a Berlin crisis. In any conventional conflict, Kissinger argued, the U.S. would be overrun by Soviet superiority, and he doubted that Kennedy would ever engage in a nuclear war over Berlin’s freedom. His paper captured all of those ideas in clearer, more strategic form than any other document that had reached the White House until that time.

A cover note for the Kissinger memo, written by Bundy, said: “He and [White House officials Henry] Owen and [Carl] Kaysen and I all agree the current strategic war plan is dangerously rigid and, if continued without amendment, may leave you very little choice as to how you face the moment of thermonuclear truth. In essence, the current plan calls for shooting off everything we have in one shot, and it is so constructed as to make any more flexible course very difficult.”

Kissinger advised Kennedy that his only course in the tense days ahead, should the Soviets maintain their aggressive post-Vienna position on Berlin, would be to make any unilateral Soviet action appear too hazardous to the risk-averse Khrushchev. “In other words, we must be prepared to face a showdown,” he said. Kissinger dismissed the arguments of some in the administration that Kennedy should make Berlin concessions to help Khrushchev in his domestic struggles against more dangerous hard-liners ahead of his October Party Congress. “Khrushchev’s domestic position is his problem, not ours,” he said, adding that only a strong Khrushchev could be conciliatory, and that was not what Kennedy was facing.

What concerned Kissinger most was the apparent Kennedy course of doing nothing about Berlin and waiting for a Soviet move, which, he argued, was the riskiest approach. “What may seem watchful waiting to us may appear as insecurity [to Khrushchev],” Kissinger said. Prophetically, he indicated that such an approach would tempt Moscow to prompt a crisis at the moment of “maximum difficulty” for the U.S., causing a situation in which the world would come to doubt Kennedy’s determination.

In a separate note to Schlesinger, Kissinger later said, “I am in the position of a man sitting next to a driver heading for a precipice who is being asked to make sure the gas tank is full and the oil pressure adequate.” Frustrated with being at the fringes of decision making, he worried that Kennedy’s White House wanted him only for brainstorming purposes, not as someone whose advice would be taken. He eventually resigned in October, having concluded that his ideas would not be taken seriously.

^{HYANNIS PORT, MASSACHUSETTS}

^{SATURDAY, JULY 8, 1961}

President Kennedy was displeased.

It was fine to drop the ball on Laos or even Cuba. Neither was decisive for the United States or his place in history. But this was Berlin—the central stage for the world’s defining struggle! He repeated this fact several times to advisers as he expressed his dismay that while Moscow was charging ahead on Berlin, they had yet to respond even to Khrushchev’s aide-mémoire delivered in Vienna—even though it had been more than a month since the summit. The news from the Soviet Union that morning was bad. Khrushchev had announced he would rescind plans to reduce the Soviet Army by 1.2 million men and would enlarge his defense budget by a third, to 12.399 billion rubles—an increase of roughly $3.4 billion. Speaking before graduates of Soviet military academies, Khrushchev said that he believed a new world war over Berlin was not inevitable, but he nevertheless told his country’s soldiers to prepare for the worst.

Soviet troops roared their approval.

Khrushchev told them his measures were in response to news reports that President Kennedy would ask for an additional $3.5 billion for his defense budget. With that, the Soviet leader was abandoning his insistence on putting general economic investments ahead of the military budget and increasing missile forces at the expense of troop numbers. “These are forced measures, comrades,” he said. “We take them because we cannot neglect the Soviet people’s security.”

Kennedy was livid that Newsweek had published details of the Pentagon’s top-secret Berlin contingency planning, which apparently had been the basis for Khrushchev’s response. Kennedy was so upset by the leak that he ordered the FBI to investigate its source.

Khrushchev had responded to the Newsweek article as if it were a declaration of Kennedy’s policy. Realizing that London was the weakest Allied link on Berlin, Khrushchev had summoned British Ambassador Frank Roberts to his box at the Bolshoi Ballet for a dressing-down during a break in a performance by the famous British prima ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn. Khrushchev scorned British resistance to Soviet goals in Berlin as futile. He told Roberts that six hydrogen bombs would be “quite enough” to destroy the British Isles, that nine would annihilate France, and that the Kremlin could respond a hundredfold to any new division that the West could scrape up. Knowing he was singing from Prime Minister Macmillan’s song sheet, he said, “Why should two hundred million people die for two million Berliners?”

In Hyannis Port, Kennedy scolded Secretary Rusk, who sat in his usual business suit on the fantail of the Kennedys’ fifty-two-foot speedboat, the Marlin, for having failed to come up with an answer to Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum. While the president fumed, the First Lady dropped into the ocean to water-ski, and Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor joined Kennedy’s friends Charles Spalding and his wife for hot dogs and chowder.

When Rusk explained that the text had been delayed by the need to clear it with the Allies, Kennedy exploded that it wasn’t the Allies but the U.S. president who carried the burden on Berlin. Inspired by the Schlesinger memo, he ordered Rusk to give him a plan for negotiations on Berlin within ten days. The president then turned on the State Department’s Soviet expert, Chip Bohlen, a former ambassador to Moscow: “Chip, what’s wrong with the goddamned department of yours? I can never get a quick answer, no matter what question I put to them.”

Martin Hillenbrand, head of the State Department’s German desk, would later insist that a draft of the reply to the Soviet aide-mémoire had actually been produced promptly. But after ten days, State had discovered that the White House had misplaced it. So special assistant Ralph Dungan had the State Department send over a new draft. However, a White House official locked it up in a safe before going on a two-week leave, and he had not left behind the combination. At the same time, NATO allies were also stuck in the slow grinding of their own response.

While fingers assessing blame were pointing in various directions, an agitated Kennedy demanded that the Pentagon give him a plan for non-nuclear resistance in the case of a Berlin confrontation. It should be significant enough, he said, to prevent a Soviet advance and give the president time to talk to Khrushchev and avoid the rush to nuclear exchange. “I want the damn thing in ten days,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy told his advisers to provide him with new options beyond the current choice between “holocaust or humiliation.”

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

^{TUESDAY, JULY 25, 1961}

In the late afternoon, President Kennedy retreated to his bedroom to read through the speech he would give at ten o’clock that evening to a national television audience. It was the first time Kennedy would use the Oval Office for such a purpose, and workmen had been there all day, laying cables and wires.

Kennedy knew how high the stakes had become. At home, he had to reverse a growing impression of foreign policy weakness, which made him politically vulnerable. After mishandling Cuba and Vienna, he also had to convince Khrushchev that he was willing to defend West Berlin at any cost. His problem: Khrushchev had stopped believing Kennedy would fight for Berlin, as Soviet Ambassador Menshikov was telling anyone in Washington who would listen. At the same time, however, Kennedy wanted Khrushchev to know he remained open to reasonable compromise.

Kennedy soaked in a hot bath to ease his inescapable back pain. He then ate his supper alone from a tray, as he often did. Midway through the meal, he phoned his secretary Evelyn Lincoln and said, “Will you take this down. I want to add it to the speech I am giving tonight.” He then began dictating:

Lincoln scribbled furiously in shorthand as Kennedy continued to dictate, the words falling into perfect sentences and paragraphs.

Knowing the gravity of the president’s words, Lincoln concentrated on getting each one of them right. She felt the moment of history, and heard the pain in the voice of the man carrying its burden—a word he used several times in the speech and increasingly each day.

Evelyn Lincoln couldn’t remember when the president had ever added so much to the end of a speech just a couple of hours before its delivery.

Kennedy said to his secretary, “Will you type this up and give it to me when I come over?”

The president arrived at the Oval Office at 9:30 p.m. to test the height of the chair behind his desk and the lighting. He asked Evelyn Lincoln if he could inspect his dictation and then took it into the Cabinet Room, where he sat and scribbled revisions and made cuts, tightening it but not removing any of its anguish. When it was time to go before the cameras, he came into Lincoln’s office and asked for a hairbrush and went into her washroom to make certain every strand was in place.

Despite these preparations, the speech would be given by a perspiring and tense president in an overheated office. To improve the sound quality, technicians had shut down the air-conditioning, although temperatures that day had hit a high of 94 degrees. The office would be made all the more uncomfortable by the lights of seven news cameras and the body heat of some sixty people who jammed in to witness the historic moment.

Kennedy stepped briefly outside to mop his face and lip before returning to his desk just seconds before he spoke to a national and global audience. Under lights that made reading his recently altered text difficult, he would trip over a few lines and deliver others less eloquently than usual. But few listeners noticed. His stirring, tough rhetoric masked the series of compromises he had agreed to in the previous days that had considerably weakened the Acheson plan.

Kennedy had pulled back from Acheson’s call for a declaration of national emergency, he had decided against immediate mobilization of troops, and he had reduced the increase in defense spending. In the seventeen days between his Hyannis Port meetings and the July 25 speech, the SLOBs had methodically chipped away at the Acheson approach as the workings of the U.S. foreign policy structure turned almost entirely to Berlin, including two crucial National Security Council meetings on July 13 and 19.

On July 13 in the Cabinet Room, Secretary Rusk used Acheson’s own words to soften the approach, quoting a part of his friend’s paper that spoke of keeping early steps as low-key as possible. “We should try to avoid actions which are not needed for sound military purposes and which would be considered provocative,” he said.

With Vice President Johnson’s backing, Acheson had pushed back. He believed that if, as his friend Rusk argued, one left the call-up of reserves to the end, “we would not affect Khrushchev’s judgment of the shape of the crisis any more than we could do so by dropping bombs after he had forced the issue to the limit.”

Bundy had left those in the room four alternatives: (1) Proceed with all possible speed with a substantial reinforcement of U.S. forces; (2) Proceed with all measures not requiring the declaration of a national emergency; (3) Proceed with a declaration of national emergency and all preparation, except a call-up of reserves or guard units; or (4) Avoid any significant military buildup for the present on the grounds that this was a crisis more of political unity and will than of military imperative.

The president listened as his senior officials debated the options. But the first time he showed his own hand was before the TV audience. In a meeting of the National Security Council’s smaller Steering Group, he had said there were only two things that mattered to him: “Our presence in Berlin, and our access to Berlin.”

Acheson had grown so frustrated with what he considered the drift in policy during July that he told a small working group on Berlin, “Gentlemen, you might as well face it. This nation is without leadership.”

At the second key NSC meeting, at four p.m. on July 19, the Acheson plan died a quiet death after an exchange between its author and Defense Secretary McNamara. Acheson wanted a definite decision of the group to declare a national emergency and begin the call-up of reserves no later than September. McNamara preferred not to commit yet, but wanted it understood that Kennedy could declare an emergency later and call up larger ground reserves “when the situation required.”

Acheson had held his ground, arguing McNamara’s course wasn’t sufficiently energetic or concrete.

Kennedy had kept the discussion going until it gradually became clear to Acheson that the commander in chief didn’t have the stomach for a full mobilization. Acheson eventually approved the McNamara approach, which would give the secretary of defense the more flexible timetable he wanted so as not “to have a large reserve force on hand with no mission.” However, deployment would be rapid in the event of a deepening crisis.

Ambassador Thompson wasn’t in the room, but he had helped win the day with cables from Moscow that argued Kennedy would impress the Soviets more by keeping the Allies together around substantial military moves than by dividing them over excessive ones. Thompson’s logic was that a longer-term buildup in readiness would have more impact than dramatic, immediate, publicity-getting gestures. Kennedy’s intelligence advisers also argued that too strong a public posture would only prompt Khrushchev to become even more rigid and more likely to take military countermeasures of his own.

The outcome was that on July 25 the president did not declare a national emergency but said he would seek congressional standby authority to triple the draft, call up reserves, and impose economic sanctions against Warsaw Pact countries in the case of a Berlin blockade. Kennedy told the NSC meeting that a national emergency was “an alarm bell which could only be rung once,” and that taking the Acheson course would only convince the Soviets not of U.S. determination but of “our panic.”

Acheson had argued in favor of a national emergency because it would have impressed both the Soviets and his U.S. opponents of the gravity of the situation while enabling the president to call up one million reserves and extend terms of service.

Kennedy, however, was determined not to overreact, partly because he wished to rebuild Allied confidence in his leadership after he had so badly botched the Bay of Pigs. He also reckoned that he was in for a long series of confrontations with the Soviets and thus worried about a premature escalation to address what he thought might be “a false climax” in the confrontation. The president wanted to keep some powder dry.

So Kennedy called for $3.454 billion in new spending for the armed forces, almost exactly equal to Khrushchev’s announcement, though lower than the $4.3 billion Acheson had originally sought. The increase would nevertheless bring the combined defense spending increase under Kennedy to $6 billion. He wanted an increase in the Army’s authorized strength from 875,000 to 1 million. The U.S. would prepare a new Berlin airlift capability and a further capacity to move six additional divisions to Europe by Khrushchev’s December deadline for a peace treaty.

Most striking, but entirely unnoticed by the media, was the speech’s mention seventeen times of West Berlin, continuing the president’s regular addition of the qualifier “West.” Kennedy was repeating his message to Khrushchev in Vienna that the Soviets were free to do what they wanted with the city’s eastern portion as long as they didn’t touch the western part.

Just the previous day at lunch, one of the top officials of the U.S. Information Agency, James O’Donnell, had complained to speechwriter Ted Sorensen about the emphasis on “West” Berlin in a final draft of the speech. O’Donnell’s opinion mattered, since he was a Kennedy family friend and veteran Berlin hand who as a conquering soldier had been the first non-Soviet to examine the interior of Hitler’s bunker. He had written a book about Hitler’s final days and had then lived through the Berlin blockade as a Newsweek correspondent. His standing was such that he had written a memo for candidate Kennedy on the four-power agreements regarding Berlin.

Sorensen had proudly shown the draft of the July 25 speech to O’Donnell, arguing that “even hard-liners” like him would like it. Yet the more closely O’Donnell scrutinized it, the more he was taken aback by the unilateral concessions it contained. The speech spoke of Kennedy’s willingness to remove “actual irritants” in West Berlin while declaring that “the freedom of that city is not negotiable.” According to Ulbricht, those “irritants” included West Berlin’s lively and free media, the American radio station RIAS, the freedom with which Western militaries and intelligence agencies were operating, and—most important—the ability of East Germans to cross the open border and seek refuge.

Another paragraph recognized “the Soviet Union’s historical concern about their security in Central and Eastern Europe, after a series of ravaging invasions, and we believe arrangements can be worked out which will help to meet those concerns, and make it possible for both security and freedom to exist in this troubled area.”

What could Kennedy have meant by that? O’Donnell wondered, not knowing that this built on similar language Kennedy had privately used in Vienna. Was he buying into Moscow’s complaints about resurgent German militarism? Was he ceding forever to the Soviets the captive countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary?

But nothing troubled O’Donnell more than repetitive references exclusively to “West” Berlin’s security. That could only have been an intentional message that, in O’Donnell’s view, gave the Soviets a free hand in East Berlin, though the city technically remained under four-power rule.

Kennedy’s speech told Americans, “The immediate threat to free men is in West Berlin.” He used the visual teaching aid of a map for the American people to show West Berlin as an island of white in a sea of communist black. Said Kennedy:

Kennedy returned to West Berlin at the end of the thirty-one-minute speech.

Sorensen was upset that O’Donnell was underestimating the importance of the speech’s emotive commitment to defend Berlin. As for its disregard for captive East Berlin and Eastern Europeans generally, Sorensen argued to O’Donnell that the speech was merely recognizing reality. The Russians did what they wanted anyway in their sector. Americans would be reluctant enough to accept a military buildup to safeguard two million West Berliners, but it would be expecting far too much of Americans to risk their lives for the lot of a million East Berliners caught on the wrong side of history.

O’Donnell suggested an easy fix. The president could simply omit the word “West” in most of the places where it appeared before the word “Berlin.” After an hour of argument, Sorensen protested: “I can’t monkey around anymore with the text of this speech…this speech has been churned through the mills of six branches of government. We have had copies back and forth for ten days. This is the final version. This is the policy line.

“This is it.”

The lunch ended on that note.

Sorensen had also pushed back similar protests from elsewhere inside the government. The so-called Berlin Mafia, the group of senior officials who had been following every comma and semicolon of the fragile Berlin standoff for years, felt that the president was committing heresy, essentially telling the Soviets they could ignore four-power agreements and do anything they wanted with their part of the city.

“There was an ‘Oh, my God!’ feeling as one saw the language,” said the Austrian-born Karl Mautner, who served in the intelligence and research bureau of the State Department after having been posted to the American Mission in Berlin. Having fought during World War II with the 82nd Airborne at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, he was outraged at Kennedy’s backsliding. “We knew immediately what it meant…. We were undercutting our own position.”

The emphasis on West Berlin appeared all the more intentional to the Soviets five days after the speech when, on July 30, Senator William Fulbright said on the ABC Sunday-morning television talk show Issues and Answers that the Soviets could reduce tensions in the Berlin Crisis best by closing the West Berlin escape hatch for refugees. “The truth of the matter is, I think, the Russians have the power to close it in any case,” said Fulbright. “Next week, if they chose to close their borders, they could, without violating any treaty. I don’t understand why the East Germans don’t close their border because I think they have a right to close it.”

Fulbright’s interpretation of the treaty was wrong, and he corrected himself in a statement to the Senate on August 4, saying that freedom of movement across Berlin was guaranteed by postwar agreements and that his TV interview had given “an unfortunate and erroneous impression.” That said, Kennedy never repudiated him, and McGeorge Bundy reported favorably to the president on Fulbright’s TV appearance by writing about “a variety of comment from Bonn and Berlin, including reference to the helpful impact of Senator Fulbright’s remarks.”

The truth was that West Germans despaired at the comments, while East Germans were delighted at Fulbright’s suggestion. West Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel newspaper complained that the senator’s comment was potentially as encouraging for enemy action as Acheson’s words had been before the Korean War, when he had declared that South Korea was outside America’s defense perimeter. The Communist Party paper Neues Deutschland called Fulbright’s ideas “realistic.”

Early in August, Kennedy mused about what was likely to happen next in Berlin during a stroll along the colonnade by the Rose Garden with Walt Rostow, an economist who was advising Kennedy. “Khrushchev is losing East Germany,” he said. “He cannot let that happen. If East Germany goes, so will Poland and all of Eastern Europe. He will have to do something to stop the flow of refugees. Perhaps a wall. And we won’t be able to prevent it. I can hold the Alliance together to defend West Berlin, but I cannot act to keep East Berlin open.”

^MOSCOW

^{THURSDAY, AUGUST 3, 1961}

On a sweltering Moscow morning, Ulbricht drove to his meeting with Khrushchev in a limousine whose windows were closed and curtained. Ulbricht had not announced his departure from Berlin for the emergency Warsaw Pact summit that day, and if he could avoid it, he did not want to be seen in public.

Moscow seemed serene compared with what Ulbricht faced back home. Tourist groups walked behind guides around Red Square. The day’s first sightseeing boats rode up the Moskva River beside men in kayaks out for morning exercise. Giant swimming pools were opening up in public parks. With school out, the city was filled with parents and their children.

Khrushchev and Ulbricht met to work out the final details for the border closure before approaching members of the Warsaw Pact for their approval. Ulbricht also wanted his allies to consider emergency economic support should the West respond with sanctions.

The two men had been closely tracking the preparatory work of their security services and military forces for most of the previous month, so there was no need to review each detail. Khrushchev said they together would “encircle Berlin with an iron ring…. Our forces must create such a ring, but your troops must control it.” The Soviets were sending an additional 4,000 soldiers to Berlin even as the two men talked. Khrushchev told Ulbricht he was also putting tanks on the border with West Germany, behind East German soldiers’ positions.

The purpose of their meeting that morning was to finalize the timing. Khrushchev said he wanted to put off the signing of any peace treaty with Ulbricht until after the border closure. He was also unwilling to let Ulbricht take any action against access routes or air routes to West Berlin. Ulbricht agreed that although he still wished to sign a war-ending peace treaty with Moscow, that had become secondary to stopping the refugees and saving his country. Ulbricht told the Soviet leader he needed only two weeks to be ready to stop movement between East and West Berlin.

“When would it be best for you to do this?” asked Khrushchev. “Do it when you want. We can do it at any time.”

Because of both the urgency of his refugee problems and the danger that plans could leak, Ulbricht wanted to move quickly. He suggested the night between Saturday, August 12, and Sunday, August 13.

Noting that the thirteenth is considered an unlucky day in the West, Khrushchev joked that “for us and for the whole socialist camp it would be a very lucky day indeed.”

Khrushchev, the builder of the Moscow Metro, wanted to hear more of the logistical details. How would Ulbricht deal with streets, which he had seen on his detailed map, where one side was East Berlin and the other West?

“In those homes which have an exit to West Berlin, we will brick up the exit,” Ulbricht said. “In other places, we will erect barriers of barbed wire. The wire has already been assembled. All of this can be done very quickly.”

Khrushchev refused Ulbricht’s request that he call for an emergency economic conference to prepare necessary support for the East German economy. The Soviet leader feared that merely scheduling such a meeting might tip off the West to their plans—and accelerate the refugee flow even further. Ulbricht would simply have to do his best to prepare.

He also wanted Ulbricht to be certain that all operations remained strictly within his own territory, “and not a millimeter more” into West Berlin. Every signal Kennedy had sent Khrushchev, from the Vienna Summit to his July 25 speech to Fulbright’s television statement, had been that he was on safe ground as long as all Soviet and East German actions were limited to Soviet bloc territory and in no way interrupted Allied rights of access to Berlin. In fact, his most recent conversation with U.S. Ambassador Thompson had convinced him that Kennedy and Adenauer might even welcome the outcome. In a meeting two days earlier, he had told Ulbricht:

Without referring to the notion of a Berlin wall by name, Khrushchev asked the Warsaw Pact group to approve a border closure as impermeable as the one that had existed between East and West German territories since 1952. “We propose that the Warsaw Pact states agree, in the interests of the cessation of the subversive activity, to implement control along the GDR borders, including the borders in Berlin, comparable to that existing along the state borders of the Western Powers.”

The three-day Warsaw Pact meeting that followed gave Ulbricht some but not all of what he wanted. His socialist neighbors accepted the border closure without dissent, and they agreed to reposition their troops to back up the Soviet military. What Ulbricht’s allies would not provide, much to Khrushchev’s consternation, was economic insurance. One Communist Party leader after the other—Wladyslaw Gomulka of Poland, Antonín Novotný of Czechoslovakia, and János Kádár of Hungary—worried about how the West might retaliate economically against the whole bloc and spoke of their limited resources. Gomulka even wanted Ulbricht to consider helping him should there be a Western boycott of the entire bloc by redirecting goods that might normally be sold to the West. He worried about how exposed Poland would be to any Berlin blowback because of its large debt and trade with the West.

Novotný warned Ulbricht that he should not count on him for foodstuffs, because of his country’s problems with agricultural production. As Czechoslovakia had a greater share of its trade with the West than any other Warsaw Pact country, he feared his country would suffer most in the aftermath of any Berlin action. Kádár complained that the potential economic impact of an East German border closure had not been discussed among Soviet allies earlier, particularly as his country relied on trade with the West for nearly a third of its economy—and a quarter of that amount was with West Germany.

Khrushchev fumed:

“What would it mean if the GDR was liquidated?” Khrushchev demanded to know from the leaders sitting before him. Did they want the West German army on their borders? By strengthening East Germany’s position, “we strengthen our position,” he said, frustrated at seeing how little solidarity existed within his bloc. In an alliance where most members felt little threatened by the West but were increasingly dependent upon it economically, Khrushchev’s arguments did not convince them.

When fellow communist leaders asked Khrushchev why he didn’t worry more about American military response, Khrushchev told them the West had reacted far less resolutely than he had feared thus far to his escalating pressures and rhetoric. The U.S., he said, had “proved to be less tough than we assumed” regarding Berlin. Khrushchev said it was true the adversary still “could show himself, but we can already say now that we expected more pressure, but so far the strongest intimidation has been Kennedy’s speech.”

Khrushchev told his allies it was his view that the U.S. was “barely governed,” and that the U.S. Senate reminded him of the medieval Russian principality of Novgorod, where the boyars “shouted, yelled and pulled at each other’s beards; that’s how they decided who was right.”

He even spoke nostalgically of the time when the American secretary of state was John Foster Dulles, who although anticommunist provided “more stability” for the U.S.–Soviet relationship. As for Kennedy, Khrushchev said he “felt for him…he is too much of a lightweight for both Republicans and Democrats.” Khrushchev was confident his weak and indecisive adversary would not respond in any meaningful way.

Ulbricht returned home as the countdown began for the most important day of his life—and that of his country. But first he would have to weather a final skirmish with the East German proletariat.

Ulbricht and Kurt Wismach Lock Horns

^{OBERSPREE CABLE WORKS, EAST BERLIN}

^{THURSDAY, AUGUST 10, 1961}

With less than forty-eight hours to go before launching his operation, Walter Ulbricht nevertheless kept a routine appointment with laborers of the Oberspree Cable Works in the southern part of East Berlin. Some 1,500 laborers gathered in a giant hall, wearing work overalls and wooden shoes that protected them against electrocution and molten metal. Some climbed up the struts of cranes for a better view; others sat atop twelve-foot-high cable rollers.

Reporting that he had just returned from Moscow, Ulbricht told his crowd, “It is imperative that a peace treaty be signed without delay [between East Germany] and our glorious comrade and ally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” In a combative voice, he said, “Nobody can stop socialism…. Not even those who have fallen into the clutches of the slave-traders.” He said the cost to the East German economy of the refugee flight, which he called “flesh trade and kidnappings,” was two and a half billion marks a year. “Every citizen of our State will agree with me that we must put a stop to such conditions.”

Kurt Wismach, who at first appeared to Ulbricht to be just another one of the workers, boiled inside as he listened to what he considered the usual communist double-talk. Imbued with a false sense of strength as he sat far above Ulbricht on a roll of cables, he began to applaud derisively and at length after each of Ulbricht’s statements. It seemed that nothing could stop Wismach’s hands from clapping nor his voice from shouting into the silence of the hall around him.

“Even if I am the only one to say it: Free elections!” he screamed.

Ulbricht looked up at the worker and snapped back. “Now just a moment!” he shouted. “We’re going to clear this up right away!”

Wismach shouted back at the leader whom millions so feared: “Yes, and we’ll see which is the right way!”

Ulbricht shouted up at him and then turned to take in all those seated and standing in the hall around him. “Free elections! What is it you want to elect freely?…The question is put to you by the people!”

By then Wismach spoke with the courage of a man who had gone too far to reverse himself. “Have you the slightest idea what the people really think?” he yelled, seeing that most of his coworkers’ hands were frozen at their sides. No one was coming to his support.

Ulbricht waved his hands and barked back that it had been Germany’s free elections in the 1920s and 1930s that had brought the country Hitler and World War II. “Now I ask you: Do you want to travel along this same road?”

“Nein, nein,” shouted a vocal minority of party loyalists in the crowd. With each additional rebuttal from Ulbricht and his request for the crowd to support him, this group shouted more encouragement to the communist leader.

Other workers who might have sided with Wismach—likely the majority—remained silent. They realized that to do otherwise would expose them to whatever retribution their vocal fellow laborer would assuredly face.

“The one lonely heckler thinks he shows special courage!” Ulbricht bellowed. “Have the courage to fight against German militarism!”

The party faithful cheered their leader again.

“Whoever supports free elections supports Hitler’s generals!” a red-faced Ulbricht shouted.

The crowd applauded one last time as Ulbricht stormed out.

The next day, party disciplinarians interrogated Wismach on, among other matters, his possible membership in Western flesh-trading and spy agencies. He was required to write a statement retracting his outburst, and he had to accept a pay cut and a demotion that could only be reversed through hard work and “political awareness.”

Wismach left East Berlin as a refugee a few days later with his wife and child. He would be among the last to pass so easily.

14 THE WALL: SETTING THE TRAP

^{COMMUNIST PARTY HEADQUARTERS, EAST BERLIN}

^{WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 9, 1961}

Like a veteran stage producer preparing for the performance of a lifetime, Walter Ulbricht rehearsed every scene with his lieutenants in the last crucial hours before his August 13 curtain call. His drama, code-named “Operation Rose,” would play for one night only. He would have no second chance to get it right.

No detail was too small for Ulbricht’s attention nor that of the man he had deputized to direct the show, Erich Honecker, the Central Committee’s chief for security matters. At age forty-eight, Honecker had two qualities that had recommended him: unquestioned loyalty and unmatched organizational capability.

With his combed-back, graying hair and Mona Lisa smile, Honecker had come a long way from his days as the young, handsome communist rabble-rouser who had spent a decade in Hitler’s jails during the 1930s. He knew his operation could catapult him past rivals to become the front-runner for Ulbricht’s eventual succession. It also could save German socialism. Failure would cost him his career and perhaps his country.

Honecker’s final checklist was as long as it was precise.

He needed to know whether his people had purchased sufficient quantities of barbed wire to wrap around West Berlin’s entire ninety-six-mile circumference. To avoid suspicion, Honecker’s team had distributed the barbed-wire orders among a number of innocuous East German purchasers and they, in turn, had negotiated with several different manufacturers in both Great Britain and West Germany.

Thus far, none of their Western business partners had sounded an alarm. Honecker saw no evidence that Western intelligence agencies had any clue about what was about to transpire. A sales order was a sales order. Lenin’s prediction came to mind: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” In this case, the capitalists were peddling at bulk discounts barbed wire with which the communists would enclose their own people. To avoid any diplomatic backlash, Honecker’s people had removed hundreds of British and West German manufacturer labels from the barbed wire and burned them.

East German teams and their Soviet advisers had mapped every meter of the twenty-seven-mile-long internal border that ran through the city center between West and East Berlin and the remaining sixty-nine miles that separated West Berlin and the East German countryside. They noted precisely what peculiarities faced them on each stretch of the border.

On July 24, Honecker’s deputy, Bruno Wansierski, a fifty-six-year-old party technocrat and trained carpenter, had updated his boss on the massive construction project it was his job to oversee. To conceal its purpose, Wansierski’s report was innocuously labeled: “Overview of the Scope of the Engineering Operations on the Western Outer Ring of Berlin.” Those who would read the documents later would compare their precision to Nazi blueprints for building and operating concentration camps. Though Ulbricht’s project was less murderous, its execution would be no less cynically exacting.

With only three weeks until the target date, Wansierski—director of the Department for Security Questions of the Socialist Unity Party’s Central Committee—complained that he still lacked sufficient supplies for nearly two-thirds of the task. After taking inventory of “all available materials,” he reported that he was short some 2,100 concrete pillars, 1,100 kilograms of metal cramps, 95 fathoms of timber, 1,700 kilograms of connecting wire, and 31.9 tons of mesh wire. Most problematic, he lacked 303 tons of barbed wire, the project’s most essential raw material.

Furious activity had filled all the supply gaps in the two weeks since Wansierski’s report. By August 9, Ulbricht was satisfied that everything was in place. Dozens of trucks had already transported hundreds of concrete uprights secretly from Eisenhüttenstadt, an industrial town on the Oder River near the Polish border, to a stockpile at a police barracks in the Berlin district of Pankow and several other locations.

Several hundred police from across East Germany had assembled at the vast State Security Directorate compound at Hohenschönhausen on East Berlin’s outskirts. Many were constructing wooden sawhorses, known in German as “Spanish riders,” that would form the first physical street barriers. They hammered in nails and hooks from which others would string the barbed wire while wearing thousands of pairs of specially ordered protective gloves.

Ulbricht was equally painstaking in determining which army and police units would be deployed. Beginning at 1:30 a.m., their first task would be to form a human chain around West Berlin to stop any spontaneous escape attempts or other acts of resistance until construction brigades could raise the first physical barriers. For this, Ulbricht would deploy only his most trusted forces: border police, reserve police, police school cadets, and crack troops known as factory fighting militia, organized around workplaces.

Plans for each small section of the border detailed how they would operate. For example, Border Police Commander Erich Peter planned to deploy precisely ninety-seven officers at the city’s most important crossing point on East Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse. That would produce the required density for that point of one man per square meter. His plan dictated that a further thirty-nine officers there would construct the initial barrier of barbed wire, concrete posts, and sawhorses.

Regular army soldiers would form the second line of defense and would, in an emergency, move up to fill in any breaches in the forward line. The mighty fail-safe power of the Soviet military would stand back in a third ring, which would advance only if Allied forces disrupted the operation or East German units collapsed.

Ulbricht’s lieutenants were just as meticulous in how they planned ammunition allocations, distributing it in sufficient quantities for the task but in a manner that was designed to avoid any reckless shooting. At the most sensitive border points, police units would be issued two five-bullet clips of blanks that would be loaded into their carbines in advance. They would have instructions to shoot the blanks as a warning should East Berliners or West Berliners rush them in a rage. Should the blanks fail in their purpose, police would have a further three clips of live ammunition in reserve. These they would load and fire only with the approval of commanding officers.

On the second line of defense, soldiers of the National People’s Army would be armed with submachine guns and limited quantities of live ammunition. To avoid accidents, the soldiers would not preload their guns but instead keep the ammo inside satchels attached to their belts. Ulbricht’s insurance policy was that the most trusted units would be fully armed from the outset: the First Motorized Rifle Division, some factory militia, and two elite Wachregimenten—guard units that specialized in internal security—one from the army and the other attached to the Stasi (Staatssicherheit), the State Security Ministry.

From the moment that police and military units received their first orders at 1:00 a.m., all East Berlin streetlights would be doused and they would have thirty minutes under the moonlight to close the border with their human chain. They would have a further 180 minutes to put up barriers around the city, including the complete closure of sixty-eight of the existing eighty-one crossing points to West Berlin. That would leave only a manageable thirteen checkpoints for East German police to monitor the following morning.

At precisely 1:30 a.m., East German authorities would shut down all public transportation. They would prevent all trains arriving from West Berlin from unloading passengers at Friedrichstrasse, the main East–West station. At key crossings that would never reopen, teams equipped with special tools would split train tracks. Still other units would unroll and place the barbed wire while an additional eight hundred transport police beyond the usual staffing would man stations to dissuade unrest.

If all went well, the whole job would be done by six a.m.

Ulbricht cleared the final language for the official statement that he would circulate in the early hours of August 13 to all corners of East Germany and throughout the world. He would blame his action on the West German government’s “systematic plans for a civil war” that were being executed by “revenge-seeking and militaristic forces.” The statement said the “sole purpose” of the border closure was to provide East German citizens security from these nefarious forces.

From that point forward, East Germans would be allowed to enter West Berlin only with special passes issued by the Interior Ministry. After ten days’ time, West Berliners again would be allowed to visit East Berlin.

Ulbricht had not overlooked a single detail. Those who knew him best had seldom seen him so calm and content.

^{SOVIET EMBASSY, EAST BERLIN}

^{WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 9, 1961}

Without emotion, Ulbricht walked Soviet Ambassador Pervukhin through his final preparations. “Comrade Cell” Ulbricht, so nicknamed in his younger years for his organizational skill, was in his element. He spoke without notes, as he had committed every aspect to his legendary memory. Despite the operation’s many moving parts, he still saw no sign that Western intelligence services either suspected what was about to happen or were planning countermeasures. Pervukhin would report to Khrushchev that the operation could proceed on the agreed-upon timetable.

Khrushchev received the news with resignation and determination. The refugee exodus had reached the monstrous proportions of 10,000 refugees weekly and more than 2,000 on many individual days. The Soviet leader would recall later how he had agonized about the decision to go ahead. “The GDR had to cope with an enemy who was economically very powerful and therefore very appealing to the GDR’s own citizens. West Germany was all the more enticing to East Germans because they all spoke the same language…. The resulting drain of workers was creating a simply disastrous situation in the GDR, which was already suffering from a shortage of manual labor, not to mention specialized labor. If things had continued like this much longer, I don’t know what would have happened.”

Khrushchev had been forced to choose between an action that said nothing good about communism and a failure to act that might have prompted the crumbling of his western front. “I spent a great deal of time trying to think of a way out. How could we introduce incentives in the GDR to counteract the force behind the exodus of East German youths to West Germany? How could we create conditions in the GDR which would enable the state to regulate the steady attrition of its working force?”

He knew that critics, “especially in bourgeois societies,” would say the Soviets had locked down East German citizens against their will. People would claim that “the gates of the Socialist paradise are guarded by armed troops.” But Khrushchev had concluded the border closing was “a necessary and only temporary defect.” Still, the Soviet leader remained certain none of this trouble would have been necessary if Ulbricht had more effectively tapped “the moral and material potential that would someday be harnessed by the dictatorship of the working classes.”

But that was Utopia, and Khrushchev had to deal with the real world.

He knew that East Germany, along with the Soviet Union’s other Eastern European satellites, had “yet to reach a level of moral and material development where competition with the West is possible.” He had to be honest with himself: There was no way to improve the East German economy rapidly enough to stem the flow of refugees and stop the collapse of East Germany in the face of such overwhelming West German material superiority.

The only option was containment.

^{EAST BERLIN}

^{FRIDAY, AUGUST 11, 1961}

Less than thirty-six hours before the operation was to begin, Soviet war hero Marshal Ivan Konev sat down for his first meeting with Ulbricht. To ensure discipline and success, Khrushchev had dispatched him to lead all Soviet forces in Germany, replacing General Ivan Yakubovsky, who he would slot in as his deputy. Khrushchev’s move was rich in symbolism. One of the great men of Soviet history was heading to Berlin for a return engagement.

At age sixty-three, Konev was a tall, brutal, energetic man with a cleanly shaven bald head and wicked blue eyes with a knowing twinkle. During World War II, after having liberated Eastern Europe, his troops had swooped into the German capital from the south and conquered the Nazis, together with the soldiers of Marshal Zhukov, in the bloody Battle of Berlin of May 1945. For his heroics, he had won six Orders of Lenin, was twice recognized as “Hero of the Soviet Union,” and had then served as the Warsaw Pact’s first commander.

Most appropriate for the task at hand, he had led the Soviet military crackdown in Budapest in 1956 that resulted in deaths of 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops. Some 200,000 Hungarians had fled the country as refugees. Given Konev’s past behavior toward Germans, Khrushchev also knew he would not shrink from the bloodiest decisions.

Near World War II’s end, Konev had pursued a German division in retreat to the small Soviet town of Shanderovka. After surrounding the town to prevent the escape of German soldiers who had taken shelter there in a blizzard, he’d firebombed his enemies. His T-34 tanks then crushed under their tracks the evacuating German troops that his soldiers had failed to machine-gun down. The story went that his Cossack cavalry had then butchered the last survivors with their sabers, even cutting off arms that had been raised in surrender. His men killed some 20,000 Germans.

Khrushchev had taken a risk in sending such a high-profile military commander to East Germany just a few days before an ostensibly secret operation. On the previous afternoon, General Yakubovsky had contributed to the provocative move by inviting the military liaison officers representing the three Western Allies in Berlin to meet his previously unannounced successor.

“Gentlemen, my name is Konev,” the general had said to them in a gravelly voice. “You may perhaps have heard of me.”

Konev savored the surprised look on the Western Allies’ faces as his statement was translated into their three languages by their three interpreters. “You are of course accredited to the commander in chief of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany,” he said. “Well, I am now the commander in chief, and it is to me that you will be accredited from here on out.” He asked the liaison officers to inform their commanders of the change and the fact that his friend General Yakubovsky would serve as his deputy.

He asked if any of the three had questions. Initially speechless, the U.S. and British officers awkwardly conveyed the greetings of their commanders. The French officer, however, said he could not do the same because his commander was unaware either of Konev’s presence or his assumption of command.

“As one soldier to another,” Konev said, smiling to the French officer, “let me tell you this, so that you can repeat it to your general. I have always reminded my officers that a commander should never be taken by surprise.”

Given what would follow, the theater was rich.

Konev lacked specific orders on how to respond should Western powers respond more aggressively than expected to the border closure. Khrushchev trusted his ruthless commander to make the right decision. Acting as Ulbricht’s direct superior, Konev reminded the East German leader that success required two nonnegotiable aspects. While closing the border, he said, East German units at no point could be allowed to disrupt the ability of West Berliners or the Western Allies to move by air, road, or rail to and from West Germany.

Second, said Konev, the operation had to be as fast as the wind.

Khrushchev had constructed the plan so that “our establishing of the border control in the GDR didn’t give the West either the right or the pretext to resolve our dispute by war.” To achieve that, Konev considered speed essential to create a fait accompli, to ensure the loyalty of East German forces, and to dissuade any trigger-happy American commander from improvising. A rapidly executed operation could also demonstrate to the West the impossibility of reversing the facts that communist troops would establish on the ground.

^{THE VOLKSKAMMER, EAST BERLIN}

^{10:00 A.M., FRIDAY, AUGUST 11, 1961}

At age twenty-six, Adam Kellett-Long of Reuters was the only Western news correspondent based in communist East Berlin, and that suited him just fine. A gaggle of reporters fought over each shred of news in West Berlin, but he had the communist side to himself under an arrangement through which the East German government paid its bills to the news agency through supplying his office and accreditation. Ulbricht called Kellett-Long “my little shadow,” acknowledging his frequent presence.

Still, the East German press office’s telephone call that morning was unusual, urging the young reporter to cover an emergency session of the Volkskammer, the country’s parliament, on Luisenstrasse at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, August 11. The British reporter usually skipped the Volkskammer’s mundane meetings, as his editors were unlikely ever to print a report on them. But if his East German minders were so eager for him to attend, there must be a reason.

The council that day passed what Kellett-Long regarded as an “enigmatic resolution,” saying that its members approved whatever measures the East German government wished to undertake to address the “revanchist” situation in Berlin. It was an all-purpose rubber stamp for Ulbricht.

Outside the meeting hall, Kellett-Long buttonholed his most reliable source, Horst Sindermann, who ran the Communist Party’s propaganda operations. “What is all this about?” asked Kellett-Long.

Sindermann was less talkative than usual. He studied the young Brit through thick glasses, strands of dark hair combed across his balding head, then spoke in a measured, businesslike manner. “If I were you, and were planning to leave Berlin this weekend, I would not do so,” he said.

The East German then disappeared into the crowd.

Kellett-Long would later recall, “You could not have a stronger tip in a communist country that whatever was going to happen was going to happen that weekend.”

The British reporter checked out news reports, but found no further clues. Sender Freies Berlin, the U.S.-funded West Berlin radio station, had that morning reported yet another record number of East Germans arriving at the Marienfelde emergency refugee camp. Kellett-Long had joked to his wife that, by his calculations, East Germany would be entirely empty by 1980 or so.

The official East Berlin radio station Deutschlandsender didn’t report on refugees at all that day—or anything else that would help Kellett-Long. It was running a feature on the second human to orbit the Earth, Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, who had circled the globe seventeen times in twenty-five hours and eighteen minutes before safely returning to Earth. The accomplishment was “unprecedented in human history,” the radio station said, noting that it further proved the socialist superiority that the refugee flood so stubbornly contradicted.

In a further effort to follow up Sindermann’s tip, the British reporter drove to the Ostbahnhof, East Berlin’s main station for those arriving from elsewhere in East Germany, where he often tried to monitor the refugee flow. The number of travelers seemed greater than usual, but what struck Kellett-Long even more was the larger presence of uniformed and plain-clothes police.

The police were aggressively working the crowd, fishing out dozens of travelers seemingly at random, arresting some and turning back others. The Brit scribbled in his notebook: “an escalated police operation.” However, it seemed to Kellett-Long that East German authorities were losing the battle, trying to hold back the sea with outstretched palms. He could see the tension in their eyes.

Kellett-Long returned to his office and wrote a story that rang bells in editorial rooms around the world. “Berlin is holding its breath this sunny weekend,” he wrote, “waiting for drastic measures to stem the refugee flow to West Berlin.” Based on the Sindermann steer, he said authorities would be responding “imminently.”

It was strong and pessimistic language, just the sort of brash report that had made Kellett-Long so unpopular with his superiors. But he was confident of it. Kellett-Long reckoned there were now several possibilities as to what could happen next. He listed them for his readers: East German authorities could tighten their controls on travelers. They could impose stiffer penalties on those apprehended while trying to flee. A far bigger story, of course, would be if the East Germans shut off transit routes altogether.

Kellett-Long couldn’t imagine that alternative. Then he would be writing about a potential war.

^{STASI HEADQUARTERS, NORMANNENSTRASSE, EAST BERLIN}

^{LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 11, 1961}

In the first briefing for his lieutenants ahead of their weekend work, Stasi chief Erich Mielke gave the historic moment its code name. “The name of this operation will herewith be known as ‘Rose,’” he said. He did not explain the reasoning behind the name, though the suggestion was that behind the tens of thousands of barbed-wire thorns was a plan of organizational beauty.

Mielke exuded self-confidence. Though he was only five feet, five inches tall—about the same height as Ulbricht and Honecker—he was more powerfully built, more athletic, and more handsome than either of them. He wore a permanent five-o’clock shadow on his jowls and had bags under his dark eyes.

Back in 1931, at only twenty-four years of age, Mielke had begun his thuggish communist career with the murder of two Berlin police officers who had been lured to a political rally for the planned hit in front of the Babylon Cinema. After the killings, Mielke crowed among comrades at a local pub, “Today we celebrate an act that I have staged!” (“Heute wird ein Ding gefeiert, das ich gedreht habe!”) Party comrades smuggled Mielke out of Germany, where he was convicted in absentia. He then began his education and training in Moscow as a Soviet political intelligence officer.

Mielke had run East German state security since 1957, but the coming hours would be the most crucial test yet for his elaborate apparatus of 85,000 full-time domestic spies and 170,000 informants. Most of his senior officers, gathered in the canteen at secret police headquarters, had known nothing about the operation until that moment.

“Today we begin a new chapter of our Chekist work,” he told them, with one of his frequent references to the Cheka, the original state security arm of the Bolshevik revolution. “This new chapter demands the mobilization of each individual member of the State Security Forces. In this period we are entering, it will be shown whether we know everything and whether we are firmly anchored everywhere. Now we must prove whether we understand the politics of the party and are capable of carrying out its orders.”

Mielke kept fit, drank little, and didn’t smoke, but he had three indulgences: a passion for Prussian marching music, hunting on private grounds he kept for top communist officials, and the success of the security forces’ soccer team, Sportsvereinigung Dynamo, which would regularly win championships with the help of his manipulation of matches and players. Yet none of that compared with the game he was fixing now.

He told his officers that the work they were about to perform would “demonstrate the strength of our republic…. What is the main thing to remember: always be watchful, demonstrate extreme efficiency and eliminate all negative occurrences. No enemy must be allowed to become active; no conglomeration of enemies must be permitted.”

He then issued instructions for the weekend ahead. They ranged from how to control individual factories to assessing precisely the “enemy forces” on a district-by-district level. He wanted secret police present within the armed forces to ensure combat readiness and political loyalty through the closest possible contact to officers. “Whoever may confront us with antagonistic actions will be arrested,” he said. “Enemies must be seized outright. Our goal is to prevent all negative phenomena. Enemy forces must be immediately and discreetly arrested… if they become active.”

Mielke had taken leadership after the June 1953 failure of his mentor Wilhelm Zaisser to stop worker protests from spreading. Back then, soldiers and police had in many cases joined ranks with the protesters. Strikes had spread like waves across the country, and it had taken Soviet tanks and troops to restore order.

Mielke was determined to preclude all such problems by anticipating them and dousing dissent before it gained momentum.

^{EAST AND WEST BERLIN}

^{SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1961}

It was like any other summer weekend for most Berliners.

The weather was a pleasant 75 degrees (24 degrees Celsius), with just enough cloud cover to provide relief from the sun. After the downpours of the previous week, Berliners gathered at sidewalk cafés, in parks, and at lakeside beaches.

One neighborhood near Berlin’s East–West border had been closed to traffic, but it was for the annual Kreuzberg Kinderfest, or children’s fair, on the Zimmerstrasse. Flags and streamers decorated the narrow street, where children from all sectors of Berlin were laughing, playing, and begging their parents for ice cream and cake. Doting adults tossed children wrapped candies from their apartment windows above the streets.

Most Allied military officers had taken the day off to be with their families. Some steered sailboats on the Wannsee and up it through the undulating Havel. Major General Albert Watson II, the U.S. commandant in Berlin, played golf at the Blue-White Club, where membership was part of occupation rights.

The Severin + Kühn company tour buses were having a bumper day showing off the Cold War’s epicenter to tourists, including stops in the Soviet sector. They instructed passengers not to photograph certain public buildings but urged them to snap as many shots as they liked of the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park, with its statue of a giant Red Army soldier cradling a German baby in one arm while crushing a swastika with his boot.

The biggest story of the day in West Berlin papers was that of the record inflow of refugees. A flat nasal voice at the Marienfelde refugee center provided the count over loudspeakers for all who were waiting in line—“seven-hundred sixty-five, seven hundred sixty-six, seven hundred sixty-seven”—to reach more than two thousand by day’s end.

Church workers, members of civic clubs, and other volunteers, including the spouses of Allied forces, had gathered to help feed hungry refugees and console weeping babies. The camp’s facilities overflowed, so refugees had been distributed around the city to sleep in church naves and in classrooms on military camp beds and hospital cots. Heinrich Albertz, Mayor Brandt’s chief of staff, telephoned George Muller, the deputy political adviser at the American Mission, to ask for field rations, as Marienfelde had run out of food. “The matter just can’t continue like this,” he said.

Muller extracted several thousand C rations from the U.S. garrison to help. They would last only a few days, but Albertz would take what he could get.

Not since 1953 had West Berlin seen such a stampede. Marienfelde’s twenty-five three-story apartment blocks were filled to bursting, as were twenty-nine other temporary camps set up to absorb the flood. Twenty-one daily charter flights were ferrying thousands of the new refugees from West Berlin to other parts of West Germany where jobs were plentiful.

Yet none of that was sufficient to manage the human tide. Processors had all but given up trying to sift out real from bogus refugees, among them certainly dozens of East German spies that Ulbricht’s foreign intelligence chief Markus Wolf was planting in the West.

As dark settled over Berlin, a fireworks display for the children’s festival illuminated the sky. Dancing couples on the rooftop terrace of the new Berlin Hilton stopped to take in the pyrotechnics. West Berlin movie houses were sold out that weekend, and more than half of the customers were East Berliners. It was no wonder, considering the hits they could see for a mark and twenty-five pfennigs in Eastern or Western currency: The Misfits, with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, at Atelier am Zoo; Ben-Hur, with Charlton Heston; or The Old Man and the Sea, with Spencer Tracy, at the Delphi Filmpalast. Or they could watch For Whom the Bell Tolls, with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, at the Studio on Kurfürstendamm, or The Third Man, with Orson Welles, at the Ufa Pavillion.

On a live stage, Leonard Bernstein’s new musical, West Side Story, was taking West Berlin by storm. East Berlin also had its stage attractions. Hundreds of West Berliners crossed each evening to see the latest Bertolt Brecht performance at the famous Berliner Ensemble, or political cabaret in the Distel. Some made the trip for cheap drinks at places like the Rialto Bar in the northeast Pankow district, which had no closing hour.

Soviet troops were restricted to barracks that night, due to nonfraternization policies. However, British, French, and American soldiers were doing the town, enjoying their considerable attraction to Berlin girls whose own German men had far less pocket money to entertain them. The First Welsh Regiment had gathered at a British sector dance hall. The French had a dance floor at the Maison du Soldat. American GIs gathered in their own service clubs and favorite pubs—and as so often on Saturdays, they would make it a long and liquid night.

^{NUREMBERG, WEST GERMANY}

^{SATURDAY EVENING, AUGUST 12, 1961}

Berlin’s mayor Willy Brandt launched the final phase of his national campaign for chancellor in Nuremberg in Bavaria, some one hundred miles north of Munich. Before 60,000 voters on the city’s cobbled market square, he attacked his opponent Adenauer for refusing to engage him in a public debate of the Nixon–Kennedy variety.

In a raspy, emotional voice, the forty-seven-year-old mayor rhetorically asked the crowd why so many refugees came to West Berlin every day. “The answer,” he said, “is because the Soviet Union is preparing a strike against our people, the seriousness of which only a very few understand.” He said East Germans fear “the Iron Curtain will be cemented shut” and they will be left “locked into a giant prison. They are agonizingly worried that they might be forgotten or sacrificed on the altar of indifference and lost opportunities.”

As prophetic as he was poetic, Brandt fired another shot across the bow of his opponent Adenauer. “Today we stand in the most serious crisis of our postwar history, and the chancellor belittles that matter….”

He called for all Germans on both sides of the divide to join in a plebiscite about their future, confident they would choose a democratic, Western course. If East Germans could not be included in such a referendum, West Germans and West Berliners should vote on their own, he said. “We also have a claim to self-determination,” he said, in reference to Germany’s wartime defeat, “not because we are better than others, but rather because we are no worse than other people.”

The crowd cheered wildly, wanting even more of Brandt when he retreated in exhaustion to the two railway carriages that had been carrying him from one campaign stop to another. The train would drive overnight to Kiel on the North Sea coast.

While Brandt was in Nuremberg, Adenauer was campaigning closer to his Bonn home in Lübeck. His less focused, more meandering speech asked East Germans to stop their westward stampede and stay home, helping to prepare East Germany for unification.

“It is our duty,” he said, employing the emotive German concept of Pflicht, “to say to our German brothers and our German sisters on the other side of the zone border: Don’t panic.” Germans together would someday overcome their difficult separation, he said, and become as one again.

^{GROSSER DÖLLNSEE, EAST GERMANY}

^{5:00 P.M., SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1961}

Walter Ulbricht appeared uncharacteristically relaxed to guests attending his garden party at Grosser Döllnsee, some twenty-five miles outside Berlin. The government guest quarters, known as “House Among the Birches,” had once served as the hunting lodge for Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring, something Ulbricht’s guests knew but did not mention.

Ulbricht’s party had a dual purpose. First, he was quarantining government officials who would later sign off on his operation in an environment that he could hermetically seal. Second, he was executing a diversionary maneuver. Any Western intelligence agency monitoring his movements would report that East Germany’s leader was throwing a summer party at his countryside retreat.

His guests speculated among themselves about why they had been summoned. Some noticed a larger-than-usual number of soldiers and military vehicles in the woods surrounding the guesthouse. But none of them had risen in Ulbricht’s hierarchy by asking too many questions.

The August sun beat down as they gathered in the shade of birch trees in the meadow beside a serene lake. For those who remained inside, Ulbricht was showing a film, the popular Soviet comedy with the German title of Rette sich wer kann! (or Each Man for Himself), about the chaos aboard a Russian freighter carrying lions and tigers.

Only a handful of Ulbricht’s guests knew that at four p.m. their boss had signed the final order that gave Honecker the green light to put Operation Rose into motion. Standing by his side had been the crucial players in that evening’s chain of command: Politburo members Willi Stoph and Paul Verner, who ran the government; Defense Minister Heinz Hoffmann; Minister of State Security Erich Mielke; Minister of Interior Karl Maron; Minister for Transport Erwin Kramer; People’s Police President Fritz Eikemeier and his chief of staff Horst Ende.

While standing before them, Honecker had briefed his senior officers on their assignments for the evening, and none had raised any questions or objections. He had then provided each of them their written instructions, having signed them as he would all the other orders for that evening: “With socialist greetings, E. Honecker.”

^{HYANNIS PORT, MASSACHUSETTS}

^{MIDDAY, SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1961 (6:00 P.M. IN BERLIN)}

Apparently unaware of what was occurring in Berlin, President Kennedy was trying to beat the 90-degree heat on Cape Cod with a midday boat outing. He had spent Saturday morning reading reports that followed up on Friday discussions about how to prepare for a possible Berlin crisis with Secretary of State Rusk and Secretary of Defense McNamara.

The day’s diplomatic traffic contained some reason for concern.

Khrushchev had given a speech at a Soviet–Romanian Friendship Rally a day earlier, and the U.S. embassy in Moscow worried about his blatant threats “of complete destruction” of NATO members Greece, Italy, and West Germany should war break out. At the same time, Khrushchev had talked more emphatically than before of Soviet willingness to provide guarantees of access to West Berlin and ensure noninterference in the city’s internal affairs.

Both could be viewed as messages to Kennedy—a stick and a carrot.

Secretary of State Rusk had sent a sharply worded cable to U.S. Ambassador to Germany Dowling that began, “The situation in East Germany is causing us increasing concern.” He warned that an “explosion along 1953 lines at this time would be highly unfortunate.”

He feared that such an uprising, in response to the danger of “the escape hatch being closed,” would come “before the military and political measures now under way for dealing with the Berlin problem have become effective.” He said, “It would be particularly unfortunate if an explosion in East Germany were based on the expectation of immediate Western military assistance.”

He wanted Dowling to report on what the West German government thought about the “likelihood of early explosion” and “what action it contemplates to prevent one, and what action by the U.S. and other Allies it would consider useful.” He reminded Dowling to tell the West Germans “that as a matter of policy, the Allies should do nothing to exacerbate the situation.”

Despite such clear worries about coming trouble, Kennedy set his papers aside at midday and, with the sun burning through the overcast sky, set off on his motorboat into Nantucket Sound with his wife, three-year-old Caroline, and Lem Billings, his longtime friend and New York advertising man. The president dropped anchor in Cotuit Harbor after the Coast Guard and police boats cleared a swimming area for the First Family. Jackie set aside her pink parasol and jumped into the water dressed in a blue-and-white bathing suit.

The latest report on Khrushchev’s activities included little of interest. The Soviet leader had left for a weekend retreat in the Crimea, where he was preparing for his October Party Congress, and the word was that he planned to be away until the first week of September. More excitement was swirling around the New York Yankees’ extraordinary baseball year. Mickey Mantle had just hit his forty-fourth homer and Roger Maris his forty-second.

After a four-and-a-half-hour cruise, the Kennedys returned to their private dock, where they swam, joined by Caroline in an orange life jacket. The Los Angeles Times reported that although “the president did not swim vigorously…he showed no trace of his recent back ailment when he agilely climbed a ladder at the stern of the Marlin.”

While soldiers in East Germany were secretly loading trucks with tank traps, barbed wire, pillars, and sawhorses, Kennedy drove his white golf cart into Nantucket village, where he bought Caroline and four of her cousins some ice cream at a local candy store. Jackie looked like something out of a fashion magazine in her blue blouse and red shorts.

^{EAST BERLIN}

^{7:00 P.M., SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1961}

Reuters correspondent Kellett-Long had created such a stir with his Friday story, in which he had predicted an imminent Berlin event, that his news editor David Campbell had flown in that afternoon to track the story personally.

By early evening on Saturday, the two men were still searching for factual confirmation of Kellett-Long’s apparent scoop. “You put us out on a real limb here,” Campbell told his young reporter. “Something better happen.”

In rereading his story, Kellett-Long wondered whether he should have used somewhat less hyperbolic language. He and Campbell drove around East Berlin in his car, looking in vain for the crisis he had predicted. Yet all Kellett-Long saw was a beautiful day with crowded swimming pools and overflowing cafés.

Perhaps it would happen later in the evening, the reporter told his boss.

^{PEOPLE’S ARMY HEADQUARTERS, STRAUSBERG, EAST GERMANY}

^{8:00 P.M., SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1961}

General Heinz Hoffmann, who was both East German defense minister and army commander, stood proudly before his officers. At age fifty, he looked like something out of a World War II film, standing ramrod-straight in his perfectly pressed uniform with eight rows of medals, wavy blond hair with gray streaks, combed back. With his square and high cheekbones, he was almost too handsome.

Like so much of the East German leadership, he had been a rambunctious young communist in prewar Germany. Convicted of assault during anti-Nazi demonstrations, he had done hard jail time. In 1937 and 1938, Hoffmann had been seriously wounded while fighting in the Spanish Civil War, where he had served in an international brigade under the cover name Heinz Roth. After two years in an internment camp, he’d moved to the Soviet Union, where he had been educated for his future work. In 1949, he had taken charge of creating the East German armed forces that he would now deploy against their own people.

Beside him stood his most impressive workhorse officer, Ottomar Pech, a man of a quite different background who had fought in the Third Reich’s Wehrmacht before his capture by the Russians on the Eastern Front. His job was to train the most elite military units and oversee coordination between the secret police and the military, which would be so crucial that evening.

Arrayed before them were the army’s top commanders and senior border police officers at the People’s Army headquarters in Strausberg, some thirty kilometers east of Berlin. They had eaten generously from a cold buffet table groaning with the sort and quality of food that was not easily accessible to all East Germans: sausage, ham, veal, caviar, and smoked salmon. Though alcohol had been available, most of the men drank coffee, for rumors had indicated they would be involved in a secret operation that evening.

Hoffmann briefed officers on what was to come after they watched a morale-building film extolling the might of socialist combat forces. At precisely 8:00 p.m., Hoffmann handed his senior officers the first sealed orders. Successively lower-ranking officers were briefed thereafter, many by telephone. They were ready to mobilize soldiers and police, thousands of whom had been held by their superiors in their barracks and at training grounds throughout the weekend.

By 10:00 p.m., Honecker was confident his apparatus had responded exactly as planned and was ready for full mobilization. He would receive reports throughout the night from commanding officers, district party committees, and government departments. His tentacles stretched everywhere. Honecker would later reflect that the operation that he had begun “in the dawning day, Sunday” would make the world “prick up its ears.”

The little information that had leaked out to the West on the operation wasn’t resulting in any response. The head of West Germany’s Free Democratic Party, Erich Mende, had contacted Ernst Lemmer, Adenauer’s minister responsible for gesamtdeutsche Fragen, or German-German relations, after hearing reports from West German intelligence that they were picking up “indications” that showed Ulbricht was planning at some point soon to introduce Sperrmassnahmen, or measures to blockade the middle of Berlin. The intelligence had been convincing enough that Mende had come to Lemmer’s office to discuss the danger while they inspected an outspread city map together. The two men agreed that sealing the border would be impossible.

“It just wouldn’t work,” Mende concluded.

Yet at midnight on the dot, Honecker rang army headquarters and issued the order to begin the unimaginable.

“You know the assignment!” he said. “March!”

Hoffmann immediately set his units in motion: some 3,150 soldiers of the 8th Motorized Artillery Division began to roll on East Berlin from Schwerin, with 100 battle tanks and 120 armored personnel carriers. They would park in the stockyards of the Friedrichsfelde district of East Berlin. Hoffmann would dispatch a further 4,200 troops of the 1st Motorized Division from their barracks in Potsdam with 140 tanks and 200 personnel carriers. They would form the second ring of defense behind the border’s front lines, which would be made up of 10,000 men from units of the East Berlin Volkspolizei, the 1st Brigade of the Readiness Police, and the Berlin Security Command.

In all, some 8,200 People’s Police and 3,700 members of the mobile police forces—reinforced with 12,000 factory militia men and 4,500 State Security men—would move into action in the hours ahead. They would be supported by a further 40,000 East German soldiers around the country, just in case the border closure triggered anything similar to the national uprising of June 1953. Soldiers from Saxony, who were considered particularly reliable, would reinforce the 10,000 soldiers of the People’s Army stationed in Berlin.

It was a cool and clear night—perfect for the purpose.

Perhaps Mother Nature was a communist.

^{GROSSER DÖLLNSEE, EAST GERMANY}

^{10:00 P.M., SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1961}

Ulbricht looked at his watch. “We’re going to have a little meeting,” he said to his guests.

It was precisely 10:00 p.m. and thus time to assemble his garden party’s guests in a single room for the announcement. They were tired, overfed, and ready to go home, having already been with him for more than six hours. More than a few were drunk or at least tipsy. All gathered obediently.

Ulbricht then informed them that the sector border between East and West Berlin would be closed in three hours’ time. In a printed edict, which the ministers there would approve, he would authorize action by East German security forces to place “under proper control the still open border between socialist and capitalist Europe.”

“Alle einverstanden?”—All agreed?—Ulbricht asked, noting the nodding of his mostly silent guests.

He informed his guests that they, like his domestic staff, would not be able to leave Döllnsee until the operation was well under way to ensure complete security. But, he offered, there was still plenty of food and alcohol for them to enjoy.

No one protested. As Ulbricht had told Soviet Ambassador Pervukhin three days earlier: “We will eat together. I’ll share with them the decision to close the border, and I am entirely convinced that they will approve this measure. But above all else, I will not let them leave until we have completed the operation.

“Sicher ist sicher,” he had said: Better safe than sorry.

^{REUTERS NEWS AGENCY OFFICE, EAST BERLIN}

^{10:00 P.M., SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1961}

Kellett-Long was worried more about his career than about Berlin’s fate.

It was past ten o’clock, and he had no additional facts to back up his Friday story that Berlin was facing a decisive weekend. He returned to the Ostbahnhof to look for any unusual activity and seek out the vendor who regularly provided him with an early edition of Neues Deutschland, the Communist Party paper that contained any news of importance.

He hungrily scanned its pages, feeling “shattered” to read only routine stories with “nothing to suggest anything was about to happen.”

Kellett-Long’s London editors, under pressure from subscribers, were pressing him to either file a story to support his earlier report or knock it down. “I can’t just bury my head in the sand,” he thought to himself as he began to compose leads.

“Contrary to expectations…” he typed out.

“Contrary to expectations, what?” he asked himself.

“What an amateur I am,” he mumbled to himself.

He crumpled up the paper and tossed it away. In a state of nerves, he smoked one cigarette after another.

^{RÖNTGENTAL, EAST GERMANY}

^{MIDNIGHT, SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961}

Three long, penetrating wails of a siren wrenched Sergeant Rudi Thurow from his slumber. Thurow turned on his light and looked at his watch. It was a minute past midnight. Probably just another drill, he cursed to himself. There had been so many lately. Yet the slender, blond, twenty-three-year-old leader of the 4th Platoon, 1st Brigade, of the East German border police knew his job was to take each one of them seriously.[5]

Thurow had also seen enough military activity the previous afternoon to suspect something more than an exercise was in the works. Soviet T-34 and T-54 tanks had rumbled by all afternoon past his post in Röntgental, forty kilometers north of Berlin, and he had seen several trainloads of East German soldiers rolling into East Berlin.

It had been six years since Thurow had volunteered to join the border guards, attracted by the good pay and privileged access to scarce consumer goods. He had earned decorations of all sorts since then, and had distinguished himself as his brigade’s top sharpshooter.

He dressed quickly, then ran to the adjoining room, where he awakened his men, who cursed in complaint while he abruptly pulled off their blankets. Once assembled in the parade yard, First Lieutenant Witz, the company commander, told his men and dozens of others that on this night, they would undertake measures that had been forced upon them by the enemy.

For too long, said Witz, the government had tolerated the loss of its workforce to the West. He said the flesh merchants in West Berlin, who preyed on the citizens of the GDR, would be put in their place. He spoke of eighty-three espionage and terror centers in West Berlin that would be dealt a crippling blow by his men’s action that night.

Witz, who said he had been briefed only an hour earlier, carefully tore open a large brown envelope marked “Top Secret,” then took out its contents. Thurow and the others impatiently listened while Witz read for five minutes from the document before it came to the point.

Berlin was to be split in two, and Thurow’s men would help draw the dividing line. Thurow heard a fellow sergeant, a loyal communist, whisper a question: “Would the Allies simply stand by and let this happen?”

Or were they at war?

^{REUTERS NEWS AGENCY OFFICE, EAST BERLIN}

^{1:00 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961}

Shortly before 1:00 a.m., Adam Kellett-Long watched his East German news agency printer cough out its daily good-night message. He decided “to pack it up” and think about finding new employment in the morning.

Just then, his phone rang and a voice he did not recognize advised him in German not to go to bed that night. At 1:11 a.m., his teleprinter came to life. Kellett-Long read as it spat out a 10,000-word Warsaw Pact decree. The British correspondent was frustrated that the printer would not pump out the copy as quickly as he could read it. It spoke of how “deceived people,” namely the refugees, were being recruited as spies and saboteurs. In response, Warsaw Pact member states were ensuring that “reliable safeguards and effective control be established around the whole territory of West Berlin.” The declaration reassured NATO allies that the Warsaw Pact would not touch access routes to West Berlin.

Kellett-Long raced to his car and drove toward the border to see what was happening. Aside from the occasional couple embracing in a doorway, he saw only a deserted city as he steered down the Schönhauser Allee near his home and then turned on Unter den Linden toward the Brandenburg Gate.

There a policeman waved a red flare to stop his car.

“I’m afraid you can’t go any further,” the policeman said calmly. “Die Grenze ist geschlossen.” (The border is closed.)

Kellett-Long then drove up Unter den Linden on his way back to the office to file his report, but he was blocked at Marx-Engels Square, a main parade ground for East German soldiers. Another policeman with another flare stood before its empty expanse, blocking traffic so that a huge convoy of personnel vehicles could pass, carrying uniformed police and soldiers. It seemed to go on forever.

Kellett-Long rushed back to his office to file a “snap” report that would ring news agency machines around the world. It was easy to write: “The East–West border was closed early today….”

He followed that with a first-person account:

Kellett-Long then turned on East German radio and heard announcers read one decree after another about new restrictions on travel and how they would be enforced. He filed new reports as quickly as he could type. The British reporter found it curious that East German radio was playing modern, soothing jazz between the endless decrees.

“So that’s all they are doing,” he thought to himself. “They are just reading decrees and playing nice music.”

^{FRENCH SECTOR, WEST BERLIN}

^{1:50 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961}

Twenty minutes after the operation began, West Berlin police sergeant Hans Peters saw the blazing headlights of a half dozen East German army trucks as they rolled down the road he was patrolling. Strelitzer Strasse was a street like 193 others that crossed the previously unmarked boundary between two Berlins.

The trucks belched out soldiers, who scattered up both sides of the street. Each carried long, dark objects that he took to be machine guns. Peters, a Third Reich army veteran who had served on the Eastern Front, pulled his Smith & Wesson revolver from his holster. Yet even as he slipped bullets into the chamber, he knew it was an inadequate defense against such numbers. He sought cover in a doorway, from which he watched a scene that would be repeated throughout the night at dozens of other locations.

Two squads of six soldiers each sprawled and squatted on the sidewalks facing west, pointing their machine guns on tripods in his direction. They had no intention of invading the West and were merely setting up a line to deter a no-show opponent. Behind them, two other squads carried barbed wire. They uncoiled the rolls and hung the strands from wooden sawhorses they had placed across the street. Their cordon was safely within the Soviet zone and well behind the demarcation line.

Though Peters was technically in the French sector, all French soldiers remained in bed. That left only him, a lone West Berlin policeman, to observe a flawless operation. He watched the enemy seal the street so quietly and smoothly that none of the residents of Strelitzer Strasse even rose to turn on a light.

Once the border line was secure, the East German soldiers turned their guns to the East, prepared to contain their own people. Peters alerted his superiors to what he had witnessed.

^{U.S. MISSION, WEST BERLIN}

^{2:00 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961}

After receiving the first reports of the border closure at around 2:00 a.m., the top U.S. official in Berlin, E. Allan Lightner Jr., was reluctant to awaken his superiors. Washington tended to overreact, and Lightner wanted to get his story straight before reporting in. It was also a summer weekend, and his bosses would be more unhappy than usual about an unnecessary wake-up call.

Senior officials of the U.S, British, and French Allied missions in West Berlin were already burning up phone lines among themselves, piecing together what seemed to be occurring. “There seems to be something going on in East Berlin,” Lightner said with some understatement to diplomatic officer William Richard Smyser, who served in the Eastern affairs section. He wanted them to check it out.

At just past three in the morning in the early light of a northern European dawn, Smyser drove his Mercedes 190SL with his colleague Frank Trinka up to Potsdamer Platz, where East German Vopos (Volkspolizei) and factory militia were unrolling the first strands of barbed wire. When they told the Americans they could not pass, Smyser protested, “We are officials of the American forces. You have no right to stop us.”

It would be the first test of whether the Soviets and their East German clients would prevent Allied right of free passage in Berlin, a potential trigger for a U.S. military response. After an exchange by radio with superiors, the East German police rolled back the barbed wire to let the diplomats pass. They would stop any ordinary East Germans from crossing that night, but the police had clear orders not to impede the movement of Allied officials. Khrushchev’s decision to operate within Kennedy’s guidelines was now operational.

During an hour’s drive around East Berlin, Smyser and Trinka witnessed a city of frenetic police activity and private despair. All along the border, Vopos were unloading concrete posts and barbed wire and blocking all streets leading from East to West. At Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, East Berlin’s main station from the West, armed police were blocking the dimly lit platforms as anguished would-be travelers sat in the cavernous halls on their suitcases and bundles, many of them weeping. As he looked into their faces, Smyser could imagine them thinking, “Oh my God, if we’d only gone twenty-four hours earlier.”

Children were separated from parents, lover from lover, and friend from friend. One of border police sergeant Rudi Thurow’s men had been so ashamed of stopping people from continuing their lives as before that he had vaulted the barbed wire to freedom that morning.

Smyser and Trinka drove back to West Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate, cleared through again after a short delay by an East German policeman who had gained approval from a senior East German Communist Party official who was supervising the crossing.

The diplomats had gathered such a partial picture that the American Mission chose not to file a full report to Washington as the crisis was unfolding. Lightner’s team concluded that they had neither the resources nor the manpower to match news agency reports on what had become a breaking story. Due to State Department bureaucracy, it would take four to six hours anyway to send an official telegram through channels at the U.S. embassy in Bonn from Berlin and then to Washington. The border closure had also disrupted U.S. intelligence efforts to get hold of their usual contacts, thus impeding independent confirmation of what was occurring in East Berlin.

When Lightner debriefed his scouts, he was particularly keen to hear that they had not seen Soviet forces taking any direct part in the operation. On the one hand, that meant the closure was less of a military threat to the U.S., since Soviet troops weren’t massing in Berlin. On the other hand, the East German regime was violating existing four-power agreements that prohibited the presence of its troops in East Berlin at all, let alone their use to occupy the city and seal its border.

At 11:00 a.m. Berlin time, Lightner cabled Rusk his first full report, before that having only sent partial information bursts through a so-called critical channel that didn’t require the same clearances. He reported simply: “Early morning Aug 13 East German regime introduced drastic control measures which have effect of preventing entry into West Berlin of Sovzone and East Berlin residents.” He said the move was “evidently as a result of increased refugee flow with attendant economic loss to GDR and prestige loss to socialist camp.”

Lightner didn’t cable again until 10:00 p.m. that night, when he wrapped up the mission’s best knowledge of what had happened in the previous twenty-four hours. He put his emphasis on the massive military deployment, including significant backup by the Soviets, which was “designed to intimidate people from the outset and thus nip in the bud any possible resistance [by showing] civilian disobedience would be ruthlessly suppressed.”

He concluded that the sizable Soviet military mobilization throughout East Germany revealed Moscow’s doubts about the reliability of Walter Ulbricht’s military. He also noted, however, that the East German authorities were allowing Western military and civilian personnel to pass freely to and from East Berlin. Lightner reported that eight hundred new refugees had registered in West Berlin between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. on the first day of the city’s physical division, having either crossed on August 12 or “through canals and fields today.”

^{NEAR POTSDAMER PLATZ, WEST BERLIN}

^{9:00 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961}

West Berliners’ mood of disorientation and confusion shifted to rage as the morning wore on. West Berlin policeman Klaus-Detlef Brunzel, new at his job and only twenty years old, arrived for duty at Potsdamer Platz only to discover how drastically the world had changed in just a few hours.

On the previous evening, he had worked a routine shift, confiscating contraband and chitchatting with the prostitutes who loitered on the vacant, war-flattened square, which until that day had been an excellent spot for them to attract clientele from both sides of the city. Now he saw only East German border police in their place, using jackhammers to dig holes for concrete pillars, from which they were stringing barbed wire. Brunzel had only been four years old when World War II ended, but he feared a new war had begun as he watched East German tanks track him with their gun barrels as he walked back and forth in front of them.

By late morning, a crowd of angry West Berliners had gathered at the border, throwing stones at the East German police and calling them pigs and Nazis. Brunzel took cover “to avoid being hit by masonry thrown by our own people!”

Before long, the West Berlin fury turned on absent American soldiers, protectors who they felt should have saved them from this fate. All the rhetoric about American commitment to Berlin’s freedom had not produced a single U.S. rifle company.

^{U.S. MILITARY HEADQUARTERS, CLAYALLEE, WEST BERLIN}

^{SUNDAY MORNING, AUGUST 13, 1961}

General Watson, the American commandant in Berlin, had felt hamstrung by his reporting lines and instructions. He had also doubted his own judgment, having been in Berlin just three months.

He had considered Berlin a sufficiently calm place to have relocated his mother-in-law to the city. He compared the divided city’s role in the U.S.–Soviet standoff to the “quiet in the eye of the cyclone.” His time in Berlin had been spent less on military response and more on learning German, reducing his golf handicap, and playing what he called “elderly doubles” tennis with his wife.

In profiling the fifty-two-year-old commander, the Berlin press wrote of his fondness for horseback riding, bridge, light opera, and reading paperback mysteries. Watson was resigned to leading a command where he was so outnumbered by the enemy that he knew West Berlin would have been impossible to defend against a concerted Soviet conventional attack. Yet even if he had had the troops, he still lacked the independent authority to use them.

The bureaucracy of getting things done in Berlin was the worst Watson had experienced in the military, and that said a lot. He had one reporting line directly to U.S. Ambassador Walter Dowling, who sat three hundred miles away in Bonn. His second reporting line was to General Bruce Clarke, the U.S. Army Commander in Europe, headquartered in Heidelberg. Then there was a third line to NATO Commander General Lauris Norstad in Paris. Watson’s orders came from all three, and they were rarely consistent.

There were also times, like the night of August 12–13 and the following morning, when all those channels fell mostly silent. Watson’s instinct in such times of doubt was to stand whatever ground he occupied and hope for the best. For weeks, his instructions from the Pentagon had more often than not included warnings that he should not allow himself to be provoked by the East Germans or Soviets into a military action that could escalate into violent conflict, as if his superiors had known what was coming. So Watson played it safe in the early hours of August 13 and did nothing but observe the operation.

The East Germans hadn’t crossed any of his lines. They had not set a foot in any of the non-Soviet Allied zones. And for all the Soviet military activity around the city, his scouts had not reported any major movement inside Berlin. So Watson saw no reason to wake up General Clarke or General Norstad. The State Department folks would alert Ambassador Dowling in Bonn, so Watson didn’t contact him, either.

Early that morning, Watson had sent a helicopter over East Berlin airspace to monitor the situation. Yet he opted not to dispatch U.S. troops to the newly reinforced border. A show of U.S. force might have satisfied Berliners looking for a timely demonstration of American commitment, but Watson’s superiors would have considered it a reckless provocation.

Watson felt justified in showing such restraint at 7:30 a.m., when Colonel Ernest von Pawel reported in to his emergency operations center in the basement of U.S. headquarters on Clayallee. Von Pawel told Watson that four Soviet divisions had moved out of their usual garrison areas in East Germany and had surrounded Berlin.

At age forty-six, “Von” was the crucially important chief of the U.S. Military Liaison Mission to the Commander in Chief, Group of Soviet Forces, Germany. Though his name had the ring of German nobility, Von’s roots and manner were pure Laramie, Wyoming. He had won a reputation with Watson for getting things right.

Just four days earlier, Von had predicted during the regular meeting of the Berlin Watch Committee that Ulbricht was going to put up a “wall.” The committee was a secret interagency intelligence group in the city whose job it was to raise alarm bells at the first indication of hostile military action. Though no one had paid attention then, that gave Von credibility with his commander now.

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas McCord, head of the U.S. Army’s 513th Military Intelligence Group, Berlin, had been studying a number of pictures and reports of large quantities of construction material—concrete blocks, barbed wire, and other supplies—stockpiled near the city’s dividing line. But the material was in so many places and had been ordered by so many sources that his men had difficulty interpreting what they were seeing.

“Do you think they plan to build a wall, Tom?” Colonel David Goodwin, the chief of intelligence on General Watson’s staff, had asked at the meeting. McCord responded that he had three sources and they were contradictory. One “reliable” but untested source said there would be a wall and it was “imminent.” But two sources, who were judged as more reliable, had said there would be nothing of the sort.

All eyes had then turned to von Pawel. He reminded the group that during World War II the Germans had built a wall in Warsaw sealing off the Jewish ghetto, a comparison that seemed outlandish at the time. “If you think a wall is the least likely option,” he had said, “then that is where I place my bet, because we’ve never outguessed the Soviets before.” The problem was that von Pawel had lacked any hard evidence at the time to support his conviction.

The deputy chief of the CIA base, John Dimmer, dismissed von Pawel’s notion. It would be “political suicide” for Ulbricht to build a wall, he had said, and with that he had swayed the group to conclude a wall was the “least likely” of the many alternatives they were discussing.

Von Pawel’s report on the morning of August 13 left no room for doubt about what was occurring. Hiding under a bridge in East Germany from 4:00 to 6:00 a.m., one of his men had seen a whole Soviet division rumble down the Autobahn. Von himself had counted a hundred tanks while making his way to Potsdam. He reported to Watson:

It was an elaborately and perfectly organized operation, about which U.S. military intelligence had reported nothing in advance. What von Pawel’s report meant to Watson was that Soviet troops were primed to pounce in such numbers that they would overwhelm his paltry force if it dared respond.

It was 10:00 a.m. before the three Western commandants—the French, the British, and the American—and their staffs met on the Correnplatz, at Allied headquarters in the suburban Dahlem district of the American sector. All had been taken by surprise—and none had any good ideas about how to respond. Watson chaired the meeting by the coincidence of their monthly rotation. Yet for all Watson’s lack of Berlin experience, he knew how to count. His twenty-seven tanks, less than one for every mile of the West Berlin–East Berlin internal border, and six 105-millimeter howitzers were not sufficient to take on the Soviet army and their East German clients.

^{REUTERS NEWS AGENCY OFFICE, EAST BERLIN}

^{MID-MORNING, SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961}

Mary Kellett-Long looked out their East Berlin office window and saw an angry and growing crowd that had been building in size with every hour of the morning. It had never struck Mary before how close their apartment at Schönhauser Allee was to the Berlin border, just four hundred yards away, as the line had never been so clearly defined.

Most of the crowd was made up of furious East Berlin youth who saw their connection to the West cut off. Her husband, Adam, who by then had made his way into the crowd, thought they looked like angry soccer fans after a heartbreaking defeat, looking for someone to take it out on. Police and the paramilitary factory forces pushed back the line of protesters, which by then was twenty deep.

When the explosions began, Mary feared that East German units had fired on civilians and perhaps her husband. But the blasts were the sound of police firing tear-gas canisters into the protesters, who responded by running in all directions.

Adam recalled a more innocent time. Not long before August 13, a Vopo had stopped his car for a routine check as he returned from a West Berlin shopping trip. As he searched the trunk, Adam pulled a can of baked beans out of a bag and threw it in the air saying, “Das ist eine Bombe!” The police officer fell to the ground and his colleagues pulled their guns. The Vopo then dusted himself off and laughed, letting the reporter pass. Clearly, the time for practical jokes was over.

Like the few sporadic protests that had occurred across East Germany that day, the demonstration lacked the scale, determination, or reach to challenge Ulbricht’s victory. In contrast to 1953, Ulbricht was firmly in charge, well prepared, and enjoyed the full military and political support of the Soviets. He had prevented any organized opposition both through the element of surprise and the deployment of thousands of police and soldiers at every strategic point throughout the city.

Ulbricht’s lieutenants used water cannons at several key locations to keep riotous West Berliners at bay. As long as the Allied troops stayed put in West Berlin, as they seemed determined to do, Ulbricht knew he could handle anything East Berliners or West Berliners might throw at him. Khrushchev’s insurance policy—the Soviet tanks waiting in Berlin’s hinterland—would not be necessary.

Marshal Konev had won his second battle of Berlin, this time with no bloodshed.

Under four-power agreements, Kennedy would have had every right to order his military to knock down the barriers put up that morning by East German units that had no right to operate in Berlin. On July 7, 1945, the U.S., Soviet, British, and French military governors of Germany had agreed that they would ensure unrestricted movement throughout Berlin. That had been reconfirmed again by the four-power agreement that had ended the Berlin blockade.

However, Kennedy had made clear through several channels before August 13 that he would not respond if Khrushchev and the East Germans restricted their actions to their own territory. Beyond that, Konev had sent a clear message about the cost of intervention through his massive military mobilization. Not only had Soviet troops ringed Berlin in a manner the Allies could not miss, but Khrushchev had gone a step further, putting his missile forces on full alert throughout Eastern Europe.

Nonetheless, it had still been a tense night for Konev. If fighting had been necessary, he had doubted whether the East German military and police forces would have remained loyal, despite their training, indoctrination, and careful supervision. Hundreds among their ranks already had fled as refugees, and many had relatives in the West.

Konev had been confident that East German soldiers, militia, and police would put up their border barriers properly, but he had doubted how they would have responded if Allied troops had moved forward to tear down the barricades and restore free movement.

To his relief, it had never come to that. Kennedy had never tested them.

^{WEST BERLIN}

^{SUNDAY MORNING, AUGUST 13, 1961}

When he first heard the news of the border closing, RIAS radio director Robert H. Lochner had been up late, preparing for a series of meetings the next morning for his boss, the legendary U.S. television journalist Edward R. Murrow. Murrow was visiting from Washington on an inspection trip as chief of the United States Information Service.

Lochner laid his work aside and ordered RIAS to alter its program from the usual weekend rock and roll to more serious music and news bulletins every quarter hour. He knew RIAS, with the largest transmitter in Europe, would be expected to provide East Berliners a lifeline at a time of crisis, just as it had done on June 17, 1953.

Then he set off for East Berlin in his car with State Department plates, making three trips across the Soviet zone throughout the evening, recording whatever he saw on a hidden tape recorder. He told stories of families divided and of forlorn lovers, using their recorded, troubled voices to dramatize the moment. Lochner had never seen as large a group of miserable human beings as those gathered at shuttered East Berlin train stations that morning, having failed to hear or believe overnight radio reports that the Berlin border had been closed.

At 10:00 a.m. he walked through the vast waiting hall of the Friedrichstrasse station, which overflowed with thousands of people “with desperate faces, cardboard boxes, some with suitcases.” They sat on packed bags with nowhere to go.

On a staircase leading up to the elevated S-Bahn tracks stood black-suited Transportpolizei, or Trapos, blocking public access. They reminded Lochner of Hitler’s SS in their threatening uniforms and with their stony, young, obedient faces.

An old woman timidly walked up to one of the Trapos, standing about three steps above her, and asked when the next train was due for West Berlin. Lochner would never forget the sneering tone of the officer’s answer.

“That is all over,” he said. “You are all sitting in a mousetrap now.”

Lochner the next day showed the new East Berlin to Murrow, who doubted whether his friend Kennedy understood the seriousness of the situation that had been spawned by his inaction. He wrote a cable that evening telling the president that he was confronting a political and diplomatic disaster. If the president didn’t show resolve quickly, Murrow predicted a crisis of confidence that could undermine the U.S. far beyond Berlin’s borders. “What is in danger of being destroyed here is that perishable quality called hope,” he wrote.

^{POLICE HEADQUARTERS, EAST BERLIN}

^{6:00 A.M., SUNDAY, AUGUST 13, 1961}

Erich Honecker was in an agitated state of excitement throughout the night, driving along the border and relishing the near-perfect execution of his plan.

He supervised every detail: he saw police checking out entry shafts to sewer systems for would-be escapees. Boats patrolled waterways that couldn’t be closed as easily as streets. The extra troops he had ordered for the Friedrichstrasse station had been sufficient to manage the Sunday numbers.

Honecker had praised every commander he met throughout the night, occasionally suggesting changes in some finer details. At 4:00 a.m., satisfied that the most critical phase had been executed without a hitch, he returned to his office. By 6:00 a.m., all commanders had reported in that their missions had been carried out as instructed.

There was much work yet to be done to complete the job in the days ahead, but Honecker could not have been more satisfied. A few hundred East Berliners had rushed through the border in areas that had not yet been reinforced, and some had swum across lakes or canals. Other East Berliners would simply remain in the West, where by luck they had been spending the weekend. A few West Berliners would smuggle out their partners or friends in car trunks or under car seats in the first hours. A couple of more inventive East Berliners had replaced their own license plates with friends’ West Berlin plates and had driven through.

From noon on Saturday to 4:00 p.m. on Monday, Marienfelde welcomed a record 6,904 refugees, the most of any weekend in East German history. But West Berlin authorities estimated that all but 1,500 had crossed the border before communist security forces had closed it down. The numbers were acceptably small, considering the fact that the refugee exodus had been brought to an end.

Honecker phoned Ulbricht with his final report. He then told his staff, “Now we can all go home.”

Khrushchev would reflect later: “The establishment of border control restored order and discipline in the East Germans’ lives, and Germans have always appreciated discipline.”

15 THE WALL: DESPERATE DAYS

^{HUMBOLDT HARBOR, EAST BERLIN}

^{THURSDAY, AUGUST 24, 1961}

Günter Litfin, a twenty-four-year-old tailor whose boldest acts until that point had been performed with a needle and thread, summoned the courage to flee East Berlin eleven days after the communists had sealed the border.

Until August 13, Litfin had lived divided Berlin’s ideal life, taking maximum advantage of each side’s benefits as one of the city’s 50,000 Grenzgänger, or “border jumpers.” By day, he worked in West Berlin earning hard Westmark, which he exchanged on the black market at a five-to-one rate for East German money, or Ostmark. He worked out of an atelier near West Berlin’s Zoo Station, where he had already become a tailor to show-business greats: Heinz Rühmann, Ilse Werner, and Grete Weiser. Actresses in particular were drawn to his boyish manner, dark eyes, and curly black hair. At night he retreated to a comfortable East Berlin apartment in the Weissensee district, which he rented cheaply for those plentiful Ostmark.

Overnight, Litfin’s dream life became a nightmare. The border closure prevented him from traveling to West Berlin, so he lost his job and his social position. Worse yet, an East German–mandated job placement process was about to land Litfin in a mind-numbing textile factory job with longer hours and a fraction of his previous pay.

Litfin damned himself for not moving to West Berlin when he had had the chance. A few days before the border closed, he had even rented a studio apartment in West Berlin’s Charlottenburg district on the leafy Suarezstrasse. He and his brother had been slowly transporting his household goods in small loads, using two different cars, to avoid police suspicion. They had already smuggled out his most precious belonging, his modern sewing machine, by dismantling it and moving it in pieces.

Even more maddening was that Günter Litfin had been at a house-warming party in West Berlin with his brother, Jürgen, on the night the city was divided. When they’d returned home on the elevated S-Bahn at just past midnight, they had noticed nothing amiss.

It wasn’t until the next morning at 10:00 a.m., after Jürgen had heard the bad news on the radio, that he woke up his brother: “All access routes are closed and everything is shut down,” he told Günter. The two brothers then reflected on the last time Ulbricht had shut down Berlin’s border: on June 17, 1953, after Soviet tanks had put down the worker uprising. Life had returned to normal several days later, so they expected the same was likely this time. Even during the 1948 Berlin Airlift, the city’s border had remained open. The Litfins at first dismissed the notion that the Americans would allow the border closure to stand, given all that was at stake. Though the brothers distrusted the British and French commitment to Berlin’s freedom, they had little doubt that the Americans would come through.

The Litfins set off on their bicycles to size up the new landscape. They rolled to a stop at Günter’s usual border crossing at the Bornholmer Bridge, where a two-lane highway passed over multiple train tracks. Police had blocked the pavement with barbed wire and tank traps. Günter sighed to his brother, “I can’t believe this will stay.”

But with each successive day the brothers grew more convinced the Americans would not rescue them. The communists had begun replacing the temporary barriers of sawhorses and barbed wire with a ten-foot-high wall built of prefabricated concrete sections and connecting mortar. Ulbricht was rapidly closing all escape hatches. So Günter decided to risk escape before it was too late.

He closely followed the reports on RIAS radio about the many escapes that had succeeded after August 13. Since then, some 150 East Germans had swum to their liberty across the Teltow Canal, many towing children. In a single action, a dozen teenagers had made it across the waterway in a group sprint. One daring young man had driven his Volkswagen right through one border section’s barbed wire safely into the French sector. Another bold East Berliner had disarmed a border guard, taking his sub-machine gun right out of his hands so that he could not shoot, and then had run across the border with it.

Encouraged by these success stories and despite a heart condition, Litfin decided to act. At just after four in the afternoon on Thursday, August 24, in the spotlight of a 77-degree midday sun, Günter crossed a railway yard that lay between Friedrichstrasse in the east and the Lehrter train station in the West. Wearing a light brown jacket and black pants, he jumped into the warm waters of the Spree Canal at the Humboldt harbor. Günter wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer, but he reckoned that he was strong enough to make it across the thirty meters or so of water to freedom.

Standing above him on a nearby bridge, a transit policeman, or Trapo, shouted five times at Günter to stop. But the tailor only swam with more determination. The officer fired two warning shots that struck the water just beyond Günter’s head. When Litfin continued to swim, the Trapo sprayed machine-gun fire all around him. The first bullets struck the tailor when he was still ten meters short of the shore.

Wounded, Günter flailed and dived deep to avoid subsequent shots from what by then were three police. When he came up for air and raised his hands in surrender, the Trapos screamed derisively at him. A shot pierced his neck, and Günter sank like a stone.

Günter Litfin would be the first person shot dead while trying to escape East Berlin, a victim of bad timing. What he couldn’t have known was that police that morning had received their first shoot-to-kill orders to stop all those attempting the crime of “flight from the Republic.” Had Litfin fled a day earlier, he would have succeeded. Instead, two East German fireboats carrying police units searched the Spree Canal for more than two hours before three army frogmen pulled Günter’s body from the water at about seven p.m.

The day after Günter was killed, eight secret police tore apart his mother’s apartment while she wept uncontrollably. They ripped off her oven door and disassembled the oven. They slashed open mattresses and dumped out dresser drawers. An officer explained to Günter’s wailing mother, “Your son has been shot dead. He was a criminal.”

To further punish the family, authorities prohibited Günter’s mother and brother from viewing the body before its burial, not even for identification. The family lowered Günter into his grave in a closed casket at Weissensee Cemetery on a bright summer day, Wednesday, August 30. Jürgen was satisfied with the polished black granite headstone he had chosen, and he ran his fingers across its gold script: OUR UNFORGOTTEN GÜNTER.

Hundreds of Berliners gathered at the graveside: school friends, family members, and dozens of others who didn’t know Günter at all but had come to make a statement by their presence.

Even with so many watching, Jürgen could not let his brother disappear without confirming it was really him. So he jumped down into the grave site and broke open the coffin with a crowbar that he had concealed until that moment. Though Günter’s skin had blackened and a bandage covered a broad area beneath his mouth and over his neck, concealing the large exit wound from the shot that had killed him, Jürgen had no doubt about the identity.

He looked up and nodded to his mother that it was her son.

Berlin was in shock in the days following August 13. The city passed through stages of grief: denial, disbelief, rage, frustration, depression, and ultimately resignation. How Berliners responded depended on where they sat, in the East or the West.

For West Berliners, initial anger at the communists was now accompanied by a growing fury over American betrayal. The talk around town was all about how the Americans had not sent a single platoon on August 13 to demonstrate solidarity, nor had they imposed a single sanction on the East Germans or Soviets to punish them for their action.

By comparison, the East Berliner response was one of self-loathing for having missed the opportunity to escape mixed with disgust for the cynical communist leaders who had imprisoned them. Mielke’s omnipresent Stasi agents had succeeded in their mission. Those who might have considered rebellion were deterred by the constant watch kept by Stasi agents at every factory, school, and apartment building.

^{AT THE BORDER, BERNAUER STRASSE, EAST BERLIN}

^{TUESDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 15, 1961}

A little more than two days after the border closure, East German workmen operating giant cranes began to lower prefabricated concrete segments onto Bernauer Strasse. Each block was precisely 1.25 meters square and 20 centimeters thick. Hundreds more sat nearby on a flatbed truck. Satisfied that the U.S. and its allies were unlikely to do anything to upset his project, Ulbricht was taking the next step. He had issued orders for construction crews to begin replacing the temporary border barriers in several sensitive locations with something more lasting.

CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr rushed to Bernauer Strasse to tell the story. “We noticed slabs of concrete being moved into place as though to build a wall,” he said tentatively, among the first to employ the term “wall” to describe what eventually would divide Berliners. With his distinctive baritone laced with disbelieving emotion, he compared it to what Germans had built in Warsaw to contain Jews.

Schorr tried to explain to his American listeners why the U.S. military was watching passively while the communists made the figurative Iron Curtain a physical reality of concrete and mortar. “We might have been willing to go to war to defend our right to stay in Berlin,” he said, “but can we go to war to defend the right of East Germans to get out of their own country?”

Construction crews had also begun operating at Potsdamer Platz, laboring under huge floodlights that allowed round-the-clock work. However, it was Bernauer Strasse that would become both the focus and the symbol of Ulbricht’s intention to make Berlin’s divide both permanent and impermeable.

A fluke of prewar planning had put Bernauer Strasse directly on the dividing line between the East Berlin district of Mitte, in the Soviet zone, and the West Berlin borough of Wedding, in the French sector. Until 1938, the demarcation line had been down the middle of the cobblestoned, kilometer-long Bernauer Strasse, but in that year Wedding’s street cleaners protested. To simplify their job, Berlin’s Third Reich authorities expanded Wedding’s territory to the edge of the four-story apartment buildings on the street’s eastern side so that their cleaners could rule over the entire thoroughfare.

As a result, Berlin’s Cold War division left Bernauer Strasse’s pavement and the apartment buildings on its northern side in West Berlin, and all the homes on the southern side in East Berlin. So in the first two days after August 13, these East Berlin residents could escape to the West—depending on their apartments’ locations in their buildings—either by walking out the front door or climbing down a rope or sheet through an open window.

Like many of the soldiers dispatched to East Berlin for Operation Rose, nineteen-year-old Hans Conrad Schumann was born in rural Saxony, where his father had raised sheep in the village of Leutewitz. These were roots that authorities knew from experience would make young Schumann less politically susceptible. Yet as Schumann patrolled the East German side of the border along Bernauer Strasse on August 15, he failed to see the threat to his socialist homeland that he had been instructed to resist. Instead, all he saw were justifiably angry, unarmed protesters shaking their fists and shouting that he was a pig, a traitor, or—more hurtful, given the German past—a concentration camp guard.

It had been a confusing experience, as Schumann had felt greater sympathy for the crowd than for the soldiers who then dispersed them with smoke bombs and water cannons. It was then that Schumann began to consider his own escape. At the fast pace the construction crews were working, Schumann thought to himself, within days a concrete wall would replace all the barbed-wire fencing that still marked most of the border on Bernauer Strasse. Within weeks, all of East Berlin would be enclosed, and his chance would be gone.

As he visualized his flight, Schumann pressed down on the top of the coiled wire where he was standing watch and tested how much it would give against what amount of pressure.

“What are you doing there?” asked a colleague.

Though Schumann’s heart beat wildly, he responded calmly.

“The wire is rusting already,” he responded. It had the benefit of truth.

A young photographer began to watch Schumann from a few paces away in West Berlin. Peter Leibing, working on behalf of the photo agency Conti-Press in Hamburg, had rushed the 160 miles to Berlin to capture history as it unfolded. The images were powerful: East German soldiers cradling submachine guns, crying women, angry and sad faces, all framed through strands of barbed wire. When Leibing arrived at the epicenter of this drama, Bernauer Strasse, he joined a large crowd of West Berliners who had already gathered to watch the wall’s construction. Standing on a corner of Ruppinerstrasse in the West, Leibing looked through his lens at Conrad Schumann as he stood against a building in the East, smoking a cigarette. Some in the crowd told Leibing they had watched Schumann return to the barbed-wire coil on several occasions, always pushing the wire down a little farther to test its resistance to pressure.

The larger his audience, Schumann thought to himself, the greater the chance of a safe escape, since his colleagues would be less likely to shoot him as he fled. Schumann shouted at a young West Berliner who was approaching the border that he should get back. But then he confided to the same individual under his breath, “Ich werde springen” (I’m going to jump).

The young man raced off, and before long a police van pulled up as closely as possible without attracting the suspicion of the other East German soldiers. Leibing trained his lens on the spot in the barbed wire that Schumann had been testing. It struck him as ironic that he was using an East German camera, an Exakta. The longer he waited, the more it seemed to Leibing that Schumann had lost his courage or never intended to jump.

At about 4:00 p.m., Schumann saw his two colleagues disappear around a corner and out of sight. He tossed away his cigarette, raced forward, and jumped onto the top of the coil with his right boot, pressing down just hard enough to propel himself forward but not to sink into the concertina wire. As he soared, he released his Kalashnikov submachine gun with his right hand while extending his left arm for balance. It looked to the cheering crowd as if he were extending his wings for flight. His flat steel helmet remained steady on his head as he pulled his neck into his shoulder. Like a champion hurdler, he landed on his left boot and then ran without shortening his stride up to and then through the Opel Blitz police van’s open door.

Drawing upon his previous experience photographing horse jumps in Hamburg, Leibing snapped a photo that perfectly captured the soldier in flight over the obstacle beneath him. His manual shutter would give him only one shot, but that was enough to produce an iconic photo.

“Welcome to the West, young man,” said a West Berlin police officer to a shaking, silent Schumann, and he collapsed in the van.[6] The door slammed shut and the vehicle sped away. It was but a brief triumph.

Within a week, Ulbricht had grown so confident that Kennedy would not intervene that on August 22, he began to expand his wall construction to multiple sites. Though history would record August 13 as the Berlin Wall’s birthdate, the truth was that it rose only gradually in the days that followed, once the communists could be certain they would face no resistance.

^{RATHAUS SCHÖNEBERG, CITY HALL OF WEST BERLIN}

^{4:00 P.M., WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 16, 1961}

Willy Brandt had never been so worried before a speech.

As he stood before the Rathaus Schöneberg, he looked down on 250,000 angry Berliners and knew it would be difficult to strike the right tone. He had to channel the crowd’s rage, but not so ferociously that it incited them to storm across the border, only to be shot down.

He also knew this crucial moment was a campaign opportunity. Elections were only one month off, and Brandt wanted to show Germans that he could more effectively defend their interests than the aging Chancellor Adenauer, who with his American friends had done nothing to stop the border closure nor reverse it. Adenauer had turned down Brandt’s invitation to join him at the rally, and he had not set foot in Berlin since August 13.

Thus far, Adenauer had resisted pressure from his party and the public to visit the city because, he said, his appearance might incite political unrest and encourage false expectations. What he didn’t say was that it would also underscore his impotence. Adenauer was also eager to avoid giving the Soviets any excuse to expand on their success and threaten West Berlin or West German freedoms—a line Moscow had been careful not to cross.

So while Brandt prepared for his speech, Adenauer met in Bonn with the Soviet ambassador to West Germany, Andrei Smirnov. He agreed to sign a communiqué the Soviet had brought to the meeting: “The Federal Republic would not undertake any step that could damage its relationship with the Soviet Union or endanger the international situation.”

It reeked of appeasement.

Within forty-eight hours of the border closure, Adenauer had announced that he would not cut trade ties with East Germany, reversing his initial threats. Even his hawkish defense minister Franz Josef Strauss had appealed for calm. “If shooting starts,” he told a West German crowd, “no one knows with what kind of weapons it will end.”

British Prime Minister Macmillan, the ally so reluctant to provoke the Russian bear, had praised Adenauer for having responded with a “heated heart and cool head.” It seemed as though, after all his concern about Kennedy’s leadership, Adenauer was now adopting the U.S. president’s position on the wall.

However, Adenauer’s response was one more of resignation than conviction. He had seen his worst fears realized regarding Kennedy’s indecisive leadership. Heinrich Krone, the chairman of Adenauer’s party faction in the Bundestag, wrote in his diary, “This was the hour of our greatest disillusionment.” The building of the wall ended whatever residual confidence Adenauer had that membership in “the strongest alliance in the world” could guarantee absolute security.

He was also taking the long view. His West Germany remained intact and anchored in NATO. There was no advantage in denying the reality that East Berlin had landed ever more securely in communist hands. Therefore, his most important purpose was to win the September 17 elections and keep his country out of socialist control.

Smirnov wooed and threatened Adenauer along the usual Soviet lines. He spoke of how constructively Moscow had worked with Adenauer while reminding him of his country’s certain destruction should he forget Germany’s role in the last two world wars and pursue what he called warlike activities and escalation now.

During his meeting with Smirnov, Adenauer chose not to condemn the Soviets or Khrushchev. Instead, he extended thanks to the Soviet leader for his greetings, warmly recalled his last meeting with Khrushchev, and spoke of his focus on winning the September 17 elections.

Only at that point did he mention Berlin. “We’re dealing in my view here with an aggravating and unpleasant matter, which has been played up way beyond the necessary,” he told Smirnov. “I would be grateful if the Soviet government could calm the situation.” Adenauer said he worried and “quite openly feared” that developments in Berlin and the Soviet zone “under some conditions could lead to bloodshed.” He said plaintively, “I would be grateful if the Soviet government could prevent such an occurrence.”

If his approach to the Soviets was one of restraint, it was quite the opposite when it came to his political opponent, Willy Brandt. Adenauer knew the border closure would hurt him with voters. He also knew an increasing number of them were questioning whether the old man was still fit enough to lead, and that Brandt had moved his Social Democrats to the more acceptable political center. He hoped voters would weigh all that against West Germany’s thriving economy and the stability he had achieved for his country within the Western alliance.

Less than forty-eight hours after the communists had closed the border, Adenauer had campaigned in the Bavarian city of Regensburg rather than rushing to Berlin. He told the crowd he did not wish to inflame the situation by grandstanding in Berlin. Instead of attacking the communists, he took a nasty swipe at Brandt’s character, for the first time referring publicly to his illegitimate birth. “If ever anyone has been treated with the greatest consideration by his political opponents,” said Adenauer, “it is Herr Brandt, alias Frahm,” a reference to his unwed mother’s maiden name, which Brandt had discarded while in wartime exile.

At an August 29 campaign speech that followed in Hagen, Westphalia, Adenauer told a partisan crowd that Khrushchev had shut down the Berlin border so as to help the socialist Brandt in the upcoming elections. The German press attacked Adenauer for turning so viciously on Brandt, but among voters Adenauer was effectively sowing doubts about his opponent.

Brandt, who until then had responded with restraint, lashed back. “The old gentleman really cannot grasp what’s going on anymore.” He advised Adenauer to seek “ein friedliches Lebensabend”—a peaceful retirement. Brandt calculated that his best strategy was to announce that he was abandoning electioneering altogether. “For me all that matters is the struggle for Berlin,” he said, announcing that he would reduce his election work to one day each week and otherwise focus on “Germany’s destiny.”

Brandt realized that perhaps the most important factor with voters was how he handled the Americans. On the day of his rally, West Germany’s most-read newspaper, Bild-Zeitung, with its circulation of 3.7 million, covered the entire top half of its front page with a headline that captured the public mood: THE EAST ACTS—AND THE WEST? THE WEST DOES NOTHING.

The editors had placed large photographs of the three Allied leaders under the story with derisive cutlines: “President Kennedy remains silent / Macmillan goes hunting / And Adenauer insults Brandt.”

In an accompanying front-page editorial, Bild said:

The more sober Berlin broadsheet Der Tagesspiegel captured the spirit of the day in a giant four-panel cartoon that was so popular it was being passed from person to person around Berlin.

The primary character in each panel, labeled THE WEST, is portrayed as an aging, bald American man in a dark suit and a bow tie and with a raised, lecturing finger.

In the first frame, the West winces from Stalin’s blows to his head with a club labeled GERMANY’S VISION. He says only, “[Hit me] Once more and I’ll take out my big stick.” The second panel shows the West with two bumps, the new one marked HUNGARY. The third frame has a diminutive Ulbricht bashing the West with a club stamped CLOSING OF THE INTERCITY BORDER. The final panel shows a bruised and beaten West, standing by himself pathetically above the caption UND SO WEITER—“And so on.”

After wiping the sweat from his brow, Brandt told the 250,000 Berliners standing before him that through the border closure the Soviets had “given their pet dog Ulbricht a little extra leash” with his “regime of injustice.” Brandt captured the frustration of the crowd, saying, “We cannot help our fellow citizens in the sector and our countrymen in the Zone bear this burden, and that is for us the bitterest pill to swallow! We can only help them bear it in showing them that we will rise to stand with them in this desperate hour!”

The crowd exploded with relief that Brandt had finally expressed their dismay.

Brandt drew parallels between the Ulbricht dictatorship and the Third Reich. He called the border closure “a new version of the occupation of the Rhineland by Hitler. Only today the man is named Ulbricht.” He had to shout above the crowd’s deafening cheers in a raspy voice made hoarse from the campaign trail and his chain-smoking.

Brandt paused before the most sensitive part of the speech, during which he directly addressed the U.S. and Kennedy. He began by defending the Americans, to the displeasure of many of his listeners. “Without them,” he said, “the tanks would have rolled on.”

The crowd only began to applaud when he voiced their own disappointment with Kennedy.

“[But] Berlin expects more than words,” he said. “It expects political action.” The crowd erupted in cheers when he told them that he had written to President Kennedy with that opinion. “I told him our views in all frankness,” he said to roars of approval. Brandt saw in their eyes the political appeal of an attack on the Americans even as they knew how powerless they were to take on the Soviets alone.

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

^{WEDNESDAY MORNING, AUGUST 16, 1961}

President Kennedy was enraged.

He considered the letter from Mayor Brandt, which rested atop his morning correspondence, to be insulting and impertinent. Even given Berlin’s situation, it overstepped the sort of language any city mayor should use with the American president. With each line that he read, Kennedy grew more certain that the letter’s primary purpose was to serve Brandt’s electoral campaign.

Brandt called the border closure an encroachment that was “the most serious in the postwar history of this city since the blockade.” In a surprisingly direct rebuke of the Kennedy administration, he wrote, “While in the past Allied Commandants have even protested against parades by the so-called National People’s Army in East Berlin, this time, after military occupation of the East Sector by the People’s Army, they have limited themselves to delayed and not very vigorous steps.” He charged that the Allies had thus endorsed the “illegal sovereignty of the East Berlin government.”

Brandt protested, “We now have a state of accomplished extortion.”

He told Kennedy that although this had not weakened West Berliners’ will to resist, “it has tended to arouse doubts as to the determination of the three powers and their ability to react.” He conceded Kennedy’s argument that existing four-power guarantees applied only to West Berlin and its people, the presence of troops there, and their access routes. “However,” he stressed, “this is a matter of a deep wound in the life of the German people.”

Brandt warned Kennedy that Berlin could become “like a ghetto” and lose “its function as a refuge of freedom and a symbol of hope for unification. Worse,” he said, “instead of flight to Berlin, we might then experience the beginning of flight from Berlin” as its citizens lost confidence in the city’s future.

Brandt’s letter then set out a series of proposals, again ignoring the fact that he was only a city mayor or that this was a level of bilateral exchange that belonged more properly to the chancellor. He called upon Kennedy to introduce a new, three-power status for West Berlin that would exclude the Soviets but include the French and British. He wanted Kennedy to bring the Berlin question before the United Nations, as the Soviet Union “has violated the Declaration of Human Rights in most flagrant manner.” Finally, he said, “It would be welcomed if the American garrison were to be demonstratively strengthened.”

Brandt closed with the line “I consider the situation serious enough, Mr. President, to write to you in all frankness as is possible only between friends who trust each other completely.” Then he signed it “Your Willy Brandt.”

Kennedy fumed. The letter was political dynamite. Already stung by charges that he had demonstrated weakness in Cuba, Laos, and Vienna, Kennedy considered it salt on an open wound. The final line, in which Brandt referred to his relationship of trust with the president, irked Kennedy most.

“Trust?” Kennedy spat as he angrily waved the letter at his press secretary, Pierre Salinger. “I don’t trust this man at all. He’s in the middle of a campaign against old Adenauer and wants to drag me in. Where does he get off calling me a friend?”

The State Department and the White House were furious that Brandt had revealed the existence of the letter at a rally before Kennedy had even received it—driving home its electoral purpose. Administration officials briefed the press in that fashion, setting off a storm of negative U.S. media comment. The Daily News called Brandt’s letter “rude and presumptuous.” The Washington Evening Star’s commentator William S. White condemned Brandt as a “mere mayor” trying to “take over the foreign policy, not only of his own country, but of all the West by addressing personal notes to the President of the United States…. It is easy for demagogues to whip up excited crowds, as Mr. Brandt is doing, to pour scorn on the West for inaction.”

Brandt would later take credit for his letter shifting Kennedy to a more active defense of Berlin, yet perhaps more decisive was the journalist Marguerite Higgins, to whom Kennedy had shown the letter with disgust while sitting in his rocking chair in the Oval Office. The well-known U.S. war reporter, who had covered both World War II and the Korean conflict, was at age forty-one a personal friend of the president. “Mr. President, I must tell you quite openly,” she said, “that in Berlin the suspicion is growing that you want to sell out the West Berliners.”

Kennedy came to accept that he had to take some action quickly to reassure Berliners, Americans, and Soviets alike that he remained ready to stand up to the Kremlin. Two days after receiving the Brandt letter, Kennedy wrote back to the mayor that he planned to dispatch to Berlin both Vice President Johnson and General Lucius Clay, the hero of the Berlin Airlift in 1948 and a friend of Marguerite Higgins.

He would take Brandt’s advice that he send more troops to Berlin, but his letter would make clear it wasn’t a lowly mayor who had prompted the decision. “On careful consideration,” he wrote to Brandt, “I myself have decided that the best immediate response is a significant reinforcement of the Western garrisons.”

He said that what was important wasn’t the number of troops, which would be small, but that the reinforcements would be seen as the U.S. response to Moscow’s demand that Allied soldiers leave Berlin altogether. “We believe that even a modest reinforcement will underline our rejection of this concept,” he said.

However, Kennedy rejected Brandt’s other suggestions. He said the mayor’s notion of three-power status for West Berlin would weaken the four-power basis for an Allied protest of the border closing. He would also not pursue Brandt’s idea of an appeal to the United Nations, as it was “unlikely to be fruitful.” “Grave as the matter is,” he wrote, “there are, as you say, no steps available to us which can force a significant material change in this present situation. Since it represents a resounding confession of failure and of political weakness, this brutal border closing evidently represents a basic Soviet decision which only war could reverse. Neither you nor we, nor any of our Allies, have ever supposed that we should go to war on this point.”

Kennedy’s logic was that the Soviet action was “too serious for inadequate responses.” By that measure, any action short of war seemed inadequate to him, and thus he objected to all the remedies he had heard thus far, including “most of the suggestions in your own letter.”

Tossing the mayor a bone that would cost Kennedy nothing, he supported Brandt’s notion of “an appropriate plebiscite demonstrating the continuing conviction of West Berlin that its destiny is freedom in connection with the West.”

Kennedy didn’t like rewarding Brandt for pulling him into his messy, petty German politics. On the other hand, he had his own domestic political reasons for a demonstration of strength. If anyone understood how deeply intertwined America’s domestic and foreign policies were, it was Kennedy.

Brandt read Kennedy’s response with disappointment, believing the U.S. president had “thrown us in the frying pan.” American reporters were writing with the confidence of the well-briefed that the border closure had shocked and depressed Kennedy. But the truth was quite different.

Among those who were closest to him, Kennedy did not hide his relief. He considered the border closure a potentially positive turning point that could help lead to the end of the Berlin Crisis that had been hanging over him like a Damoclean nuclear sword. He thought the fact that West Berlin had remained untouched illustrated the limits of Khrushchev’s ambitions—and the relative caution with which he would execute them.

“Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” Kennedy said to his friend and aide Kenny O’Donnell. “There wouldn’t be any need of a wall if he planned to occupy the whole city. This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

The communist move also allowed Kennedy to score public opinion points for the U.S. across the world. The communist enemy had been forced to build a barrier around its people to lock them in. Nothing could have been more damning. One couldn’t buy a better argument in favor of the free world, even if the cost was the freedom of East Berliners, and, more broadly, Eastern Europeans.

Kennedy thought of himself as a pragmatic man, and the Eastern Europeans were beyond any reasonable hope of liberation anyway.

Kennedy had little sympathy for the East Germans, and told journalist James “Scotty” Reston that the U.S. had given them ample time to break out of their jail, as the Berlin border had been open from the establishment of the Soviet zone after World War II to August 13, 1961.

In the first days after the Wall went up, a similar Kennedy remark reached an alarmed West German ambassador, Wilhelm Grewe, and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer: “After all, the East Germans have had more than fifteen years to reflect on whether they wanted to stay in East Germany or go to the West.” Grewe watched and worried as this callous statement further poisoned the already toxic atmosphere with Adenauer.

“Also,” Grewe would later recall of Kennedy, “I got the feeling that sometimes he was not absolutely sure himself whether it was appropriate to preserve a completely passive attitude at that time, or whether he should have tried a more active policy to prevent the erection of the wall.” Kennedy expressed his self-doubt with the sort of question he posed to Grewe: “Well, do you feel we should have handled this business otherwise?” The matter would occupy the president more with each day’s distance from August 13 and the greater realization that the border closure was not making relations with Khrushchev any easier.

^{THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW}

^{MID-AUGUST, 1961}

Khrushchev congratulated himself on having outmaneuvered the U.S., the British, and the French without military conflict, political backlash, or even the most modest of economic sanctions.

His son Sergei saw him initially sigh with relief after August 13, and then grow more delighted over time as he reflected upon his achievement. Had Khrushchev not acted at all, the Soviet bloc might have begun to unravel with the implosion of its westernmost outpost. With refugees bleeding out of Berlin, his enemies would have sought his head on a platter at the Party Congress, egged on by Mao.

Khrushchev also reflected later on how “war could have broken out” if he had miscalculated. He had read Kennedy’s signals perfectly, which had provided a road map for his action. The only interest Kennedy had professed was in preserving West Berlin’s status and access to the city, which Khrushchev had been careful not to touch. He had been confident that Kennedy would do nothing to help liberate East Germans or contest whatever the Soviets chose to do within their own zone.

Khrushchev believed he had achieved even more than he could have expected from a peace treaty. In a treaty, Kennedy would have forced him to accept language recognizing the need for German unification over time through free elections. Now he had every reason to hope that the Western commitment to the city would continue to erode, along with the morale of West Berliners, who might decide to abandon their city in droves, doubting that the Allies would continue to defend their freedoms and connection to West Germany.

Khrushchev concluded beyond any doubt that the Vienna talks had “represented a defeat” for Kennedy. The Kremlin had decided to act and “there was nothing he could do—short of military action—to stop us. Kennedy was intelligent enough to know that a military clash would be senseless. Therefore the United States and its Western Allies had no choice but to swallow a bitter pill as we began to take certain unilateral steps.”

In a nod to his country’s national sport, Khrushchev spoke of himself as a skilled chess player. When the U.S. ratcheted up military pressure in Berlin, he moved in Marshal Konev. “To use the language of chess,” he said, “the Americans had advanced a pawn, so we protected our position by moving a knight.” Khrushchev enjoyed this turn of phrase, because he was also employing a play on words, as the Russian word for a knight in chess is kon, or horse, which was the root of Konev’s surname. The pawn referred to Kennedy’s later decision to bring Clay to Berlin.

What he was telling Kennedy, he said, was that “if you insist on holding up the shield of war against us and thwarting us in our intentions, then we’re ready to meet you on your own terms.”

In Vienna, Khrushchev recalled, the president had argued that under the Potsdam Agreement there was only one Germany, which a peace treaty would have to recognize. Yet now he had brought about a de facto Western recognition of two Germanys in as dramatic a manner as he could have imagined.

But Khrushchev was not done yet. Throughout August, encouraged by Kennedy’s inaction, the Soviet leader reinforced East German troop positions and took other actions to hammer home his victory and solidify his position ahead of his Party Congress. He launched Soviet military maneuvers on August 16 that for the first time included nuclear-tipped battlefield missiles in tactical exercises that simulated a potential war over Berlin access. So that the Kennedy administration would not miss his point, for the first time since 1936 the Soviets invited Western military attachés to observe their ground exercises.

The tactical maneuver involved a mobilized battalion of the sort operating around the Berlin Autobahn. The Soviet guide for the attachés told them the rockets were equipped with nuclear warheads. The Soviets even simulated a nuclear cloud over a hypothetical enemy position in the village of Kubinka, west of Moscow.

More dramatic yet, at the end of August, Khrushchev announced that he would break his three-year self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing. Then, two days later, the Soviet Union began new atmospheric blasts that were heard around the world from Semipalatinsk in Central Asia.

“Fucked again,” President Kennedy groaned when he received the news after an afternoon nap.

On August 30, the president met with his military advisers to discuss a potential response. In a gloomy mood, his brother Bobby worried that the Russians “feel strongly that if they can break our will in Berlin that we will never be good for anything else and they will have won the battle in 1961…. Their plan is obviously not to be most popular but to be the most fearsome and terrorize the world into submission.”

Bobby recalled what Chip Bohlen had said at the outset of 1961: “This was the year that the Russians were going to come the closest to nuclear war. I don’t think there is any question but that that is true.” After the meeting, when President Kennedy asked for his brother’s further thoughts, Bobby said, “I want to get off.”

The president didn’t understand him at first.

“Get off what?”

“Get off the planet,” Bobby said.

Bobby joked he was going to discard adviser Paul Corbin’s suggestion that he run against his brother in the 1964 elections. He didn’t want the job.

^{WEST BERLIN}

^{WEEKEND OF AUGUST 18–20, 1961}

It was not the first time Vice President Johnson had been displeased about an assignment from the president. The mission Kennedy wanted him to accept was to lead a morale-building trip to West Berlin with General Lucius Clay. Coming just five days after the border closure, Johnson immediately saw that what the mission lacked in substance it made up for in danger.

Just a few months earlier, Kennedy had made Johnson Chancellor Adenauer’s hand-holder at the LBJ ranch during the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. So when Kennedy phoned during his dinner on August 17 to make the Berlin request, Johnson had responded, “Is that necessary?”

“Yes, it’s necessary,” Kennedy had insisted. It would send the wrong message for the president himself to rush so quickly to Berlin. He had to send a message to the world that the U.S. would not abandon West Berlin, but at the same time he didn’t want to provoke a Soviet response. Kennedy could not publicly express his genuine relief that the communists had closed the border, but at the same time he didn’t want to express false outrage too loudly.

Johnson grew all the more reluctant to make the trip when he learned that part of his mission would be to receive a battle group of 1,500 soldiers in West Berlin, troops who would storm up the Autobahn from Helmstedt, West Germany, to reinforce the 12,000 Allied troops who were already there. Though their paltry numbers might do little to defend Berliners, LBJ knew their arrival would be fraught with risk.

“Why me?” he asked Kennedy’s aide Kenny O’Donnell. “There’ll be a lot of shooting and I’ll be in the middle of it.”

After some coaxing, the vice president took on the mission with a more willing Clay.

During their overnight flight on August 18 on an Air Force Boeing 707, Clay regaled Johnson with stories of his own Berlin heroics back in 1948. He told Johnson he had converted President Truman to that operation, which Clay had begun single-handedly. What he had learned, Clay told Johnson, was that the only way to deal with the Soviets was to stand up to them.

He would tear down the Wall if he were president, he told Johnson. He believed the Korean War might have been avoided if the U.S. had shown the Soviets it was willing to be more aggressive even earlier in Berlin, when Truman had at first refused to allow Clay to bring an armored column down the Autobahn to demonstrate American commitment.

Nothing could have demonstrated just how eager West Berliners were for U.S. reassurance than Johnson and Clay’s joyous reception at Tempelhof Airport, once the stage for the Berlin Airlift. Here they were, a largely powerless vice president and a retired general who commanded no troops, but a police band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” seven U.S. tanks fired a salute, and 100,000 Berliners shouted their approval.

To keep Johnson on message, the White House had scripted every word he would speak publicly with the usual Kennedy poetry. “Divided, you have never been dismayed,” Johnson told Berliners. “Threatened, you have never faltered. Challenged, you have never weakened. Today, in a new crisis, your courage brings hope to all who cherish freedom and is a massive and majestic barrier to the ambitions of tyrants.”

Speaking to the West Berlin city Senate later in the day, Johnson said, “To the survival and creative future of this city we Americans have pledged, in effect, what our ancestors pledged in forming the United States: ‘Our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.’ These are the final words of our Declaration of Independence.”

His words electrified a city that had been drained of its energy since August 13. The crowd of 300,000 gathered on the square before City Hall were the same Berliners who had stood depressed and angry just three days earlier before Brandt. Now many of them wept for joy. Even Clay could not hold back tears.

As Johnson made his way from appointment to appointment, he turned from reluctant traveler to eager campaigner, often climbing out of his car to bathe in the glow of an adoring crowd. The intermittent rain could not dissuade him or tens of thousands of West Berliners, whose mood reminded New York Times correspondent Sydney Gruson of what he had witnessed during the triumphant liberation of Paris at the end of World War II.

“The city was like a boxer who had thrown off a heavy punch and was gathering stamina for another round….” he wrote. “The Vice President said nothing essentially new. That did not seem to matter. The West Berliners wanted the words said at this time in their city and, above all, they wanted his presence as a tangible expression of the link that sustains them.”

Johnson elicited a huge roar from the crowd when he said the men of the 18th Infantry, 1st Battle Group, were already rolling up the Autobahn to reinforce West Berlin’s garrison.

For Kennedy, the troop deployment was the first moment during the Berlin Crisis when he feared a violent exchange. Though the U.S. contingent was small, he had told White House special counsel Ted Sorensen that he saw the troops as “our hostage to that intent” of U.S. commitment to defend West Berlin.

Kennedy had postponed his usual weekend retreat to Hyannis Port in order to receive reports every twenty minutes during the night as the troops rolled toward Berlin. The Pentagon demanded to have every detail of the planned mission in advance, including each and every rest stop the soldiers would use to relieve themselves on the Autobahn as they drove through East German territory to West Berlin.

Kennedy’s military advisers, Joint Chiefs chairman Lyman Lemnitzer and White House military aide Maxwell Taylor, had opposed sending the reinforcements. British Prime Minister Macmillan considered the gesture politically provocative and military “nonsense.” General Bruce C. Clarke, the sixty-year-old commander of U.S. forces in Europe, who had helped swing World War II’s Battle of the Bulge in America’s favor, also didn’t like the looks of it.

The operation’s commander, Colonel Glover S. Johns Jr., was a proud Texan himself, a former commandant of the Virginia Military Institute and decorated World War II combat commander. Tall, blond, German-speaking, and with a flair for the theatrical, Johns knew his mission had no military value and posed considerable risk. Kennedy had handpicked him because he had heard this was a man who would not lose his cool commanding a small battle group of 1,500 through hostile terrain surrounded by at least a quarter of a million Soviet soldiers.

For all the details his superiors had demanded, none of them had said how Johns should respond if he was fired upon. Without any specific instructions about what weaponry to carry, he had decided himself what to put in the ammunition boxes of each vehicle. As was his habit, Johns also carried his own antique Colt pistol. If hostilities did start, Johns knew, “we were in for certain destruction.” If the Soviets didn’t want them heading up the Autobahn, they would be like lambs heading for slaughter.

While Johns was working out his defense plan, Johnson was working on his footwear. Johnson looked down at Brandt’s fashionable loafers and issued a challenge to the mayor while the two men toured Berlin in an open Mercedes convertible, standing and waving at crowds. “You’ve been asking us for action instead of words,” he said. “I’d like to see whether you can act, too.”

He pointed to the shoes. “Where do you get a pair like that?” he asked.

“I can get a pair like that for you right here in Berlin,” said Brandt, reckoning Berlin’s defense was worth a pair of shoes for America’s vice president.

Shortly after noon on Saturday, August 19, the U.S. embassy in Bonn reached General Bruce Clarke in Heidelberg and informed him that Vice President Johnson would be leaving for home from Berlin at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, whether or not U.S. troop reinforcements had arrived in the city. Clarke protested angrily through his Berlin commander to Washington that Johns and his men could not risk so much if Johnson would not even stay in place to greet them.

National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy phoned Clarke on Saturday night at 7:00 p.m. “General, I understand you’re chewing out everybody in sight because you’re not happy with the vice president leaving before the troops get in.”

“That puts it mildly, Mr. Bundy,” replied Clarke. “The men will go all-out to get there to be received by the vice president.” He couldn’t imagine anything Johnson had to do in Washington that was more important “than to be receiving the troops with all the world watching.” Clarke knew nothing of Johnson’s concerns about the possible dangers.

“What time are you going to have all the men in Berlin?” asked Bundy.

Clarke shot back, “If I could guarantee that, we wouldn’t be having a crisis, would we? Who can say where we may get stopped?”

Bundy replied, “General, I’ll see what we can do.”

At 12:30 p.m. on Sunday, August 20—6:30 a.m. in the White House—and just a week after the border was closed, the first sixty trucks carrying the American soldiers crossed into Berlin without incident. Khrushchev had stood by his commitment not to impede Allied access, aside from a three-hour delay at a checkpoint while Soviet troops head-counted the number of troops who were entering Berlin.

West Berliners greeted Johns’s men like conquering gladiators; thousands waited along bridges and roads. A few hundred Berliners stood with Vice President Johnson, who had opted to delay his departure, at the U.S. checkpoint at Dreilinden, where the Autobahn entered West Berlin. Flowers rained upon them from all directions, surprising and delighting the weary soldiers in their soiled vehicles and battle dress.

Colonel Johns had never seen anything like it, “with the possible exception of the liberation of France.” Johns’s men had been on the road for four days without relief, having been pulled from field maneuvers in West Germany since they were the only fully equipped battle group that was capable of getting to Berlin with such speed. Even as they cruised through a city of cheers, many slept off their exhaustion.

The Soviet response was muted. The Kremlin dismissed the reinforcement as being of “no military significance,” and said it merely put more men “in West Berlin’s mousetrap.” An article in Pravda signed “Observer”—which denoted a commentary reflecting Soviet government opinion—said it was “a provocation that cannot be ignored.”

Among the troops stationed in Berlin who watched the show, Military Police Lieutenant Vern Pike was displeased, but for another reason. Like most U.S. soldiers in Berlin, he thought Kennedy and Johnson could have simply pushed the Wall down before it was built without the Soviets’ doing much more than whimpering in retreat.

“Johnson was a joke, a total joke,” he said. “All he wanted was to see the crowd.”

As for the arriving battle group, Pike considered it “a rotten lousy outfit” that was little fit for battle but acted arrogantly toward the troops who had been in place for so long. When the new arrivals came to stay in Roosevelt Barracks, they rubbed the long-resident soldiers the wrong way, claiming they had been sent to rescue them after their failure to stop the border closure.

“We took offense to that,” said Pike, “as they were only going to be here for ninety days, then they would be rotated out. We didn’t need saving, and we knew they were only in Berlin for symbolic reasons.” Worse, Johns’s unit was “drunk and disorderly, caught fighting, resisting arrest.”

However, Berliners knew only that America had finally shown its colors. Seldom had so many so loudly celebrated so little rescue. Pike thought it was a measure of Berliners’ despair that they would so loudly cheer so modest a gesture.

Johnson stayed clear of East Berlin during his stay, wanting to avoid either provoking Moscow or inciting a crowd. But after General Clay quietly toured the amputated Soviet part of the city, Clay declared East Berlin to be “an armed camp” with a population that looked “totally oppressed.”

For all the historic moment, Johnson didn’t lose sight of his mission’s other purpose: shopping.

At 5:30 on Sunday morning, his State Department escort Lucian Heichler woke Johnson’s valet to get the vice president’s shoe size so that Brandt could produce the shoes that he had wanted. Because Johnson had feet of two different sizes, which required him to wear handmade shoes, Brandt’s people had a Leiser shoe-shop owner send twenty different pairs over to Johnson. From them, he picked two pairs that fit the bill.

On Sunday afternoon, a famous Berlin porcelain maker, the Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur, opened its showroom at Johnson’s request because he had admired the china at Willy Brandt’s official City Hall dinner the night before. He had told the mayor he wanted a set for his new vice presidential residence, a mansion called “the Elms” that he had purchased in Washington, D.C.

They showed the vice president one set after another, but he protested that they were all too expensive for him. He wondered whether they had any “seconds.” With his American escort, Heichler, looking for a hole to crawl into, Deputy Mayor Franz Amrehn saved the day by announcing, “The Senate and people of Berlin want to give you this as a present.”

Replied Johnson, “Oh, well, in that case…”

The vice president then picked the fanciest china he could find, thirty-six place settings in all, and then arranged for his office to send the vice presidential insignia to be painted on every plate, saucer, cup, and bowl.

Shopping aside, Johnson had been infected by Berlin’s spirit. In a report marked SECRET, he wrote to Kennedy:

With that, an order for thirty-six place settings of china, and two pairs of shoes, and having safely seen 1,500 more troops land in Berlin, Johnson returned home.

^{EAST BERLIN}

^{TUESDAY, AUGUST 22, 1961}

Ulbricht was too busy consolidating his victory to engage in self-congratulation.

His determination to change Berlin’s status, which at the beginning of 1961 had neither Soviet approval nor means of execution, had been accomplished more successfully than he could have hoped. He had played a bad hand with enormous skill, and now he hoped to press his advantage.

On August 22, Ulbricht announced publicly that he would establish a no-man’s-land that would stretch for a hundred meters on both sides of the Berlin Wall. East German authorities, without Soviet approval, declared they would shoot West Berliners if they strayed into the buffer zone that very soon would be known to them as “the death strip.”

Swelling with confidence, the following day Ulbricht shrugged off objections from Soviet Ambassador Pervukhin and also reduced crossing points that Westerners could use from seven to only one, Checkpoint Charlie at Friedrichstrasse.

Two days later, Pervukhin and Konev summoned Ulbricht to reprimand him for these unilateral measures. The Soviets, Pervukhin said, could not accept the concept of a no-man’s-land running into West Berlin territory, which “could lead to a clash between the GDR police and the forces of the Western powers.”

So Ulbricht reversed those orders, protesting to his Soviet counterparts that he had “no intention of interfering” in West Berlin affairs. It was an easy compromise to make, as he had won more rights over Berlin than he had dared imagine at the beginning of the year. However, he refused to back off his decision to reduce the Western crossing points to just one.

As would happen so often in 1961, the Soviets ceded the point to Ulbricht.

^{TEMPELHOF AIRPORT, WEST BERLIN}

^{WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 23, 1961}

Chancellor Adenauer finally surfaced in Berlin, but only ten days after the communists had shut down the Berlin border, and after Vice President Johnson and General Clay had safely left town. Only a few hundred people cheered Adenauer when he landed at Tempelhof Airport, and perhaps only another 2,000 awaited him when he arrived for a visit to the Marienfelde refugee camp.

Many West Berliners demonstratively turned away from him as he drove through the city. Others held signs that criticized how he had handled the crisis. One typical placard read SIE KOMMEN ZU SPÄT—“You’ve come too late.” Another said sarcastically, HURRAH, THE SAVIOR HAS COME. At Marienfelde and elsewhere, the signs suggested voters would punish him for his weak response to the border closure.

When he viewed the wall at spots along the border, the Ulbricht regime taunted him from the eastern side from a loudspeaker truck, comparing him to Adolf Hitler while pointing a high-pressure water hose in his direction. At another spot along the way, however, older East Germans wept and cheered as they waved white handkerchiefs by way of greeting.

Adenauer visited the king of West German media, Axel Springer, who had built his headquarters beside the Berlin border, and whose BildZeitung, West Germany’s largest-circulation newspaper, had been most critical of Adenauer and American impotence during the border closing. “Herr Springer, I don’t understand you,” said the chancellor. “Nothing has changed here in Berlin” except that the media was stirring the pot more.

He warned Springer that his newspaper’s antics might revive National Socialism.

Springer stormed from the room in anger.

^{BERNAUER STRASSE, EAST BERLIN}

^{WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1961}

Berliners grew accustomed to their post-Wall reality with surprising speed. The refugee outflow came to an almost complete halt as escape attempts became riskier and border controls tightened. In increasing numbers, West Berliners were relocating to West Germany rather than taking a chance that the Soviets might not be done quite yet.

At Bernauer Strasse, tour buses visited and dozens of Berliners continually loitered on the Western side of the border, observing their street’s post–August 13 phases: the initial border closure, the removal of Bernauer Strasse’s East Berlin residents, the bricking up of windows and doors, and the construction of the Berlin Wall.

West Berlin police officer Hans-Joachim Lazai and his colleagues had strung a rope between trees near Bernauer Strasse beyond which they would not allow spectators to pass. But on some days the crowd grew so angry that it was difficult to restrain them. Guilt overcame Lazai on the occasions when the hard stream of the police water cannons was required to keep back West Berlin crowds. Far worse were the times when Lazai had to stand by and watch East German border police arrest and cart away those who tried to escape. Following his orders to remain in place and provoke no one, he felt “a sense of helplessness as I stood across from complete injustice.”

Worst of all were the tragic deaths of those desperate days. The first one that Lazai witnessed was that of Ida Siekmann, who on August 21, just one day before her fifty-ninth birthday, became the first fatality at Bernauer Strasse. Lazai had been turning left onto the street on his way to work when he saw a dark ball descend from one of the buildings. Siekmann had thrown her mattress from the third-floor window ahead of herself in a vain hope that it would absorb her fall.

She had died instantly.

After that, West Berlin police used reinforced, sheetlike fireman nets in which they could catch jumpers. Nevertheless, would-be refugees had to jump with great accuracy, as the sixteen men who typically gripped the nets’ edges could not move quickly enough in any direction to compensate for an errant leap.

It was nearly eight on the evening of October 4 when Lazai first shouted through the dark at Bernd Lünser, a twenty-two-year-old East Berlin engineering student, to jump into just such a net from the roof of a four-story apartment building at Bernauer Strasse 44.

For some time, Lünser and two friends had been trying to summon the nerve to rappel down to West Berlin from the rooftop, using a clothesline they had brought with them. By shouting their encouragement, a growing crowd of West Berliners below alerted nearby East German police to their flight attempt.

Gerhard Peters, a nineteen-year-old member of the East German border police contingent, led the pursuit after gaining access to the roof through a trapdoor. Lünser pulled off roof tiles and threw them at Peters, who, after a short time, was joined by three other officers. After a dramatic chase, Lünser’s two friends were taken into custody by police after falling and sliding down the roof into a protective rail.

When one of the East German police shot at the would-be refugees, West German officers below pulled their pistols and exchanged twenty-eight shots with the East Germans. Under orders only to use their guns defensively, the West German police later argued that they had only acted once they had been fired upon.

Given a last chance to escape after a West Berlin policeman’s bullet struck the pursuing East German officer in the leg, Lünser broke free and ran. Some in the crowd shouted for him to throw the policeman off the roof. Others, including Lazai, shouted for him to jump into the outstretched net. When the student finally leapt, he caught a foot on a rain gutter and fell headfirst to the ground some twelve feet from where the men held out their net.

He landed with a deathly splat.

Lazai would later condemn his own role in the incident: “Man, you drew him out into his own death.”

On the following day, East German authorities sent roses to the border policeman Peters. East German Interior Minister Karl Maron decorated him for his sacrifice in fulfilling his duty. A headline in the West Berlin newspaper BZ sneered, DECORATION FOR MURDER.

Regine Hildebrandt, who lived nearby at Bernauer Strasse 44, had seen many failed and successful escape attempts by the time Lünser died that day.

As she wrote in her diary, she smoked a cigarette from a pack that had been pulled up by rope to her window in a basket given to her from West Berlin friends, a basket that also contained oranges, bananas, and other goods: “some small condolence for a ruined life.”

“Two huge West German tourist buses just drove by,” she wrote. “Yes, we’ve become Berlin’s number-one tourist attraction. Oh how gladly we’d just be ignored! How gladly we’d turn back the wheels of time and leave things the way they were! Oh, not again! Another bus. This is a ghastly time in which we live. Our lives have lost their spirit. Nobody enjoys work or life anymore. A petulant feeling of resignation hangs over all of us. There is no point. They will do with us as they like, and we can do nothing to stop them.

“Bow your heads, friends, we are all become sheep. Two more buses. Countless faces looking our way, while we sit with balled fists in our pockets.”

Berlin had some unlikely heroes in the days that followed, but their efforts failed as often as they succeeded.

Eberhard Bolle Lands in Prison

Eberhard Bolle was so focused on the potential danger he faced that he glanced only briefly at the news kiosk front pages at West Berlin’s Zoo train station. They reported on the arrival of Vice President Johnson, General Clay, and the U.S. troop reinforcements. But Bolle had other concerns: the philosophy student was about to take the biggest risk of his life.

Before buttoning closed his light blue jacket, Bolle felt to confirm that the two identity cards were in its inside pocket. Though it was not a particularly warm day, he was sweating uncontrollably. His mother adored his disarming smile, but at the moment Bolle wore only a troubled frown.

The first of the two identity cards in his pocket was his own, and he would show it if asked when he crossed into East Berlin. Under the rules after the border closing six days earlier, West Berliners could still cross freely into the Soviet zone with ID. What Bolle planned to do with the second West Berlin identity card was to help the escape to the West of his friend and fellow Free University student Winfried Kastner,[7] with whom he shared a love of American jazz music. Like most other Berlin students that summer, they had also spent a great deal of their vacation time listening to Ricky Nelson’s latest hit, “Hello Mary Lou,” which had taken West Berlin by storm.

Though the Free University was in West Berlin, about a third of all its 15,000 students before August 13 had been East Berlin residents. Overnight, the border closure had ended their studies. For Kastner it was a particular disappointment, as he was in his last year of history studies and would not be accepted into an East German school because his family was considered politically unreliable. So Bolle was bringing him the ID of a West Berlin friend who closely resembled Kastner, and their simple plan was that he would use it to show border police as he crossed into West Berlin.

Bolle was an apolitical, conservative student who lacked any natural taste for danger, and on the day after the border closure he had refused to help another classmate escape. What had changed his mind since then was Willy Brandt’s speech before City Hall on August 16, which had so impressed him that he had written its call to action in his diary. “We now have to stand tall,” Brandt had said, “so that the enemy does not celebrate while our countrymen sink into despair. We have to show ourselves worthy of the ideals that are symbolized in the Freedom Bell that hangs above our heads.”

Two days later, Kastner’s mother had been in tears as she appealed to Bolle to help her son during a visit he had made to their apartment in the East Berlin district of Köpenick. Rumors were flying that the border controls would grow gradually tougher, she said, and so anyone who wanted to leave East Berlin had to do so immediately. Though she and her husband did not want to be separated from their son, she said they had to think first about how to best satisfy his dream of becoming a history professor, which he would never fulfill in the East.

Bolle had suggested that his friend swim across one of the canals, but Kastner protested that he was too poor a swimmer for that. Kastner insisted the safest way of escape was by getting access to a West Berlin ID, so he provided Bolle a photo of himself and the name and contact details of a Catholic priest who was said to be producing such documents.

After the priest refused Bolle, the philosophy student turned to a friend who looked like Kastner. He was happy to part with his ID, which he would replace after reporting it lost. However, he refused to make the delivery to East Berlin himself, since it would be too risky to try to return west without it. Speaking with false confidence, Bolle declared he would transport the ID himself. “They don’t hang people they can’t catch,” he boasted.

On the evening before his risky mission, Bolle had asked his mother if she would help someone escape if she were in his position. Only if it were a family member or a close friend, she had replied. His father admired his son’s good intentions, but he worried that his boy Eberhard had too panicky a nature to succeed.

“Now eat something,” said his father. “Who knows when your next meal will be?” Bolle forced down a few bites while his father tested him on how he would respond if East German police discovered the second ID. His responses were unconvincing, so they both hoped it would not come to that.

Bolle got out of the commuter train at Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, where all travelers heading for East Berlin disembarked. Perspiring and trembling, he sighed with relief as border guards waved him through. He was on the last couple of stairs out of the station when a border guard appeared from his right and took him firmly by the arm.

Several years later, after interrogation, trial, conviction, and imprisonment, Bolle would still wonder why the guard had been able to pick him from the crowd for arrest. Sadly, he knew the answer.

Fear had given him away.

It would take the return of a retired U.S. general to help restore West Berliners’ courage.

16 A HERO’S HOMECOMING

^{TEMPELHOF AIRPORT, WEST BERLIN}

^{TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1961}

General Lucius D. Clay’s triumphal return to Berlin came on an unseasonably warm and sunny September afternoon.

Berlin’s myriad outdoor cafés, often closed by late September, overflowed their sidewalks. The Berlin Zoo reported record business. A gentle breeze blew a flotilla of sailboats across the Wannsee, Berlin’s broad city lake, and the several waterways to which it was connected. The war years, the city’s division, and now the Wall had only heightened Berliners’ penchant for savoring pleasurable moments.

That said, it was more General Clay’s arrival than the weather that buoyed West Berlin spirits that day. Locals regarded President Kennedy’s decision to appoint Clay as his “personal representative” to their city as the most convincing proof yet that America remained determined to defend West Berlin’s freedoms. Certainly, Berliners concluded, a man of Clay’s pedigree would never have accepted the job unless he was convinced that Kennedy was finally ready to stand up to the Soviets.

In 1948, as Military Governor for the U.S. Zone in Germany, Clay became a German folk hero for ordering and executing, with the British, the airlift that ultimately rescued West Berlin’s two million residents from the choice between starvation and communist domination. His 324-day operation was all the more remarkable because it came only three years after the U.S. and its allies had defeated Nazi Germany. At the time, it was still uncertain if Americans would risk their lives and treasure for European security, let alone for the western half of Hitler’s former capital, floating as it did as an indefensible island inside communist territory.

Berliners still spoke with astonishment about Clay’s “bonbon bombers”—the American pilots who had parachuted sweets to the city’s children while breaking the Soviet blockade. Seldom had history seen such a risky and successful humanitarian action on behalf of a vanquished foe. City fathers named one of their broadest and longest boulevards, the Clayallee of the Dahlem district, for the man who had made it happen.

Clay’s determination to keep West Berlin free grew out of a conviction that had only grown over time, relayed to superiors as early as April 1948, that no location on the planet was more important to America’s standing in the world. “We have lost Czechoslovakia. Norway is threatened,” he said. “If we mean…to hold Europe against Communism, we must not budge.” His view was that if America did not grasp the importance of West Berlin, then communism would run rampant. “I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay….”

There was only one flaw in Clay’s inspiring sense of mission: His motivations for accepting the new job were nobler than Kennedy’s reasons for offering it to him.

For Clay, it was a chance to return to the Cold War’s central battleground at another historic moment when his actions could again be decisive. For Kennedy, dispatching Clay had more to do with domestic politics and public relations.

Clay’s appointment would help neutralize Kennedy’s conservative critics, for the retired general was not just a Berlin hero but also an American and Republican one. He had been instrumental in persuading Eisenhower to run for president and then had helped manage his campaign. Getting Clay under the Kennedy administration tent would also minimize the damage he could do sniping at the president from the outside.

That said, Kennedy’s indecision about just how much power he should give Clay in Berlin underscored his ambivalence about how best to counter Khrushchev. Although Kennedy had made Clay the only American in Berlin with a direct reporting line to the president, he had at the same time failed to give the general formal command over anyone or anything.

Kennedy had even rewritten his original letter of instruction for Clay to water down the broad authority he had initially offered him, to be “fully and completely responsible for all decisions on Berlin.” The president apologized to Clay for the change: “I’m sorry this letter is not the way I wanted it, the way I originally wrote it, but this is the way the State Department feels it will have to be without cutting across all kinds of channels.”

Clay had little choice but to accept the downgraded terms, as he had already left his well-paying job as chief executive of the Continental Can Company. Ever the loyal soldier, he had told the president, “As the situation exists in Berlin it is going to be very difficult no matter how it is done…. If it is easier for you for the letter to be written this way, it is all right with me.” The two men agreed Clay would phone the president on any matter of significance.

The manner of Clay’s appointment spoke again to Kennedy’s greater comfort at appearing tough than at actually being so. Kennedy increasingly feared Khrushchev might push him to the precipice of unleashing atomic weapons to defend Berlin, but he had not yet determined under what circumstances and in what manner he might be willing to do so. He had no idea what role, if any, Clay would play in the decision-making process.

Whatever his dilemmas, Kennedy’s popularity remained impregnable. A Gallup poll showed most Americans considered the string of Kennedy setbacks in 1961 to have been bad breaks rather than poor leadership. Kennedy’s approval rating would rise to 77 percent in October after hovering above 70 percent all year, having hit a high of 83 percent as the public circled its wagons around him following the Bay of Pigs. In the quarter century since Gallup had begun polling, only Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor and Harry Truman after Roosevelt’s death had enjoyed comparable popularity—and they had not sustained it nearly as long.

Kennedy was a keen reader of public opinion polls, which showed that a remarkable 64 percent of Americans would approve U.S. military intervention should the Soviets or the East Germans block access to West Berlin, while only 19 percent would be opposed. And more than 60 percent of Americans accepted that there would be war if the Soviets were determined to control Berlin.

With such a hawkish American electorate, Kennedy’s choice of Clay was a popular one. It was even more so for Berliners, who celebrated Clay’s arrival like that of a homecoming gladiator. From the tarmac of Tempelhof Airport, the site of his 1948 heroics, American tanks greeted him with a nineteen-gun salute. The West Berlin elite gathered to receive him in a hangar beneath a giant American flag flanked by two Berlin city banners. Unlike Kennedy, Clay spoke to all Berliners and not just to those of the West. He spoke of “our determination that Berlin and its people will always be free…. I came here with complete faith in our cause and with confidence in the courage and steadfastness of the people of Berlin.”

Licking the wounds from his election defeat two days earlier, West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt met Clay in Frankfurt and escorted him to Berlin on a Pan American Airlines flight. His defeat by Chancellor Adenauer was a bitter disappointment after an ugly campaign, during which his opponent had so sullied his character. However, Brandt had inflicted considerable damage on Adenauer as well, whom voters had punished due to worries about his age and his tepid response to the Berlin border closure. Adenauer’s Christian Democrats had remained the country’s largest political party, but the chancellor had lost his absolute majority and was left to bargain for his political survival with new coalition partners, the Free Democrats.

The Christian Democrats and their Bavarian partners, the Christian Social Union, had lost 5 percent of the vote from the previous election, for a total of just 45.3 percent. Brandt’s Social Democrats had gained 4.5 percent to achieve 36.2 percent of the vote. The liberal Free Democrats had become the third force in German politics, expanding their share of the vote by 4 percent to some 12.8 percent. The Berlin border closure had realigned German politics, and Adenauer would never fully recover.[8]

Brandt had appealed publicly to Berliners to provide Clay with a warm homecoming, but they had required little encouragement. Hundreds of thousands of Berliners stood two to three deep along Clay’s ten-mile motor route. Children waved small U.S. flags while sitting atop the shoulders of parents who had lived through the airlift. So many well-wishers showered bouquets on Clay that he was soon bathing in flowers in the back of his black Mercedes sedan.

Clay’s limited job description was to “report, recommend and advise.” Yet his intention from the beginning was to define his mandate more broadly and take full charge of American policy in the city in the manner of a military governor. That would put him on a collision course with men who had strongly opposed his appointment and whose authority was threatened by his arrival: General Lauris Norstad, NATO Supreme Commander, in Paris; General Bruce Clarke, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, in Heidelberg; and the U.S. ambassador to Germany, Walter Dowling, in Bonn.

Clay trumpeted that his new role would be to “demonstrate United States strength and determination” and to force the Soviets to acknowledge responsibility for their sector. He was determined to make clear that the four powers still ran Berlin and not East Germany, which he would expose as the puppet state that it was. Clay was distraught that the U.S. and its allies had allowed so many of their rights in Berlin to erode since his earlier days there, and he was determined to reverse that trend by the force of his will.

The State Department’s Martin Hillenbrand worried that Clay didn’t realize how much less freedom to maneuver he would have in Berlin now that the U.S. had lost its nuclear monopoly. Yet it was just that sort of defeatist thinking that Clay had rejected his entire career. Clay had launched the 1948 airlift on his own authority after President Truman had turned down his initial plan to send a full brigade storming up the Autobahn to reopen Berlin access. At the airlift’s peak operations, one cargo plane was landing every three minutes—shiny new C-54s and war-battered C-47s—filled with food and supplies.

Clay’s unexpected initial success had convinced President Truman to support the operation’s continuation, against resistance from Pentagon and State Department officials who complained that Clay was risking a new war just three years after the last one had ended. The so-called military experts of that time had told Clay that two million Berliners could not be sustained by air, which would require 4,000 tons of supplies per day. That was more than ten times the size of the Nazi airlift to the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad, an operation which had failed in the end.

Clay had defied the naysayers and won. It had been his life’s defining moment, and it would inform every decision he would make from the minute he landed in Berlin in September 1961.

^{WEST BERLIN}

^{MID-SEPTEMBER, 1961}

A month after the August 13 border closure, construction crews along the entire border zone were replacing temporary barriers with a more formidable and permanent Todesstreifen, or death strips. East German authorities each day were dispatching brigades of so-called volunteers to help dig the trenches and clear the trees and shrubbery from a broad no-man’s-land that would contain the quickly expanding Wall.

The East German newspaper Sonntag bragged that construction teams included scientists, philologists, historians, doctors, filmmakers, street builders, journalists, and retail sales staff. “An entire people are working at the wall,” it declared proudly. The inmates were laying the foundation for their own prison. Each week, a handful of these “volunteers” used their proximity to the wall to jump over or slip through one of its vanishing weak spots. The more dramatic stories became legend.

At age twenty-one, agricultural engineering student Albrecht Peter Roos began to plot his escape while working on just such a construction crew near the Brandenburg Gate. His two sisters already lived in West Germany, and he wanted to join them rather than build a better barrier to make that impossible. When the workers took a break for lunch, Roos sought his police minder’s permission to relieve himself.

The guard shrugged. “Just be quick,” he replied.

So Roos retreated to the adjacent woods, only to stumble over two other students hiding in the underbrush who had the same hope of escape. Leading their westward sprint, Roos scrambled through a ditch and under a fence and then rushed to a barbed-wire coil just beyond the fence that ensnared him. With the help of the two others, he negotiated his way out and then helped them through. Bleeding from dozens of cuts through their shredded clothes, the three then ran in a furious zigzag course to the West, fearing guards that had come up from behind would fire upon them.

A West Berlin policeman embraced them on free ground with the reward of a bottle of wine and the first banana Roos had ever seen or eaten.

Each day, West Berlin newspapers splashed across their pages similarly harrowing stories of escape. There was the tale of the twenty-four-year-old ambulance driver who drove his vehicle through the barbed wire at Prinzenstrasse in a hail of machine-gun fire. Photos showed him smiling and unscratched beside his bullet-pierced vehicle. There were the three East Berliners who crashed through the barrier at Bouchestrasse in their 6.5-ton truck, only to be stranded atop the curb that marked the borderline. They scampered the rest of the way to freedom, eluding police shots. A West Berlin policeman triumphantly threw their keys back over the barrier to the Vopos.

What the border closure altered most for Berliners was Sunday afternoon, the traditional German gathering time for family and friends. With phone connections cut off, East and West Berliners communicated with each other from opposite sides of the barrier from platforms and ladders, some holding up newborn babies for viewing by grandparents, some bearing placards with loving messages in big, bold letters that could be read from afar.

Quickly, the bizarre had become routine. West Berlin brides and grooms in wedding costume made their way to the Wall so that family members could wave congratulations from the East. At designated times, children came to the Wall to climb ladders and visit from afar with parents and grandparents. East German police who had wearied of West Berlin hecklers dispersed them across the divide with water cannons and tear gas at border points in the districts of Neukölln, Kreuzberg, and Zehlendorf.

Tour buses showed off the city’s newest attractions: a bricked-up church on the border, blocked cemetery gates, sad people behind barbed wire—strange animals in a surreal zoo. One tour guide told a busload from the Netherlands that another handful of refugees would escape that night—another aspect of Berliners’ new way of life.

^{STEINSTÜCKEN ENCLAVE, WEST BERLIN}

^{THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1961}

General Clay acted immediately to ensure that the East Germans and Soviets didn’t miss his arrival.

Within forty-eight hours of landing in Berlin, he directed his irresistible focus on the curious drama of some 190 stranded residents of Steinstücken, some 42 families in all. Through an accident of geography, the tiny exclave of West Berlin’s Zehlendorf district—located in the southwest corner of the U.S. sector of Berlin—was separated from West Berlin by a sliver of Soviet zone. The only access was a short winding road, which since 1945 had been controlled by East German police.

As a result of August 13, the secluded hamlet became the most vulnerable part of West Berlin and thus the West. East German police had surrounded Steinstücken with barbed wire and barriers, later reinforcing them with watch towers and a hundred-meter-wide no-man’s-land. They denied access to all nonresidents, and with each day those inside the landlocked community lived in growing despair about their future.

East German authorities threatened to storm the village to recover an East German who had taken refuge there, only to discover that he had no way out. Widespread rumor had it that Ulbricht would claim the community as his own by year’s end if the West continued to show no intention of protecting it. East Germany had done the same with other, similarly precarious pieces of West Berlin territory, but those areas were less sensitive, since they were uninhabited garden plots or forestland.

Without divulging his plans to U.S. superiors or communist authorities, on September 21, at a few minutes before eleven a.m., Clay flew to Steinstücken aboard a military helicopter, with two other helicopters protecting his flanks. He delivered the community two things it lacked: a TV set and hope. A large crowd quickly surrounded his chopper as it landed in a grassy field. At Clay’s request, the mayor met with him at Restaurant Steinstücken, the village’s only dining establishment, bar, and grocery store. They broke open a bottle of wine and drank generously from it while discussing the village’s fears and what could be done about them.

General Clay spent only fifty minutes in Steinstücken, but it was enough to prompt East Berlin’s Neues Deutschland newspaper to brand his action as a “war-like move in an otherwise calm situation.” The British embassy protested in Washington that Clay was taking too much risk for too little gain.

To show he would not be bullied, the following day Clay helicoptered in a three-man detachment from the 278th Military Police Company to establish Steinstücken’s first U.S. outpost, and it would remain for the next decade. Military Police Lieutenant Vern Pike flew in to help set up command in the mayor’s basement, running the communications antennas up his chimney. Clay then ordered General Watson, the local commander, to organize a ground offensive scheduled for three days later, on September 24, to “liberate” Steinstücken by using two companies to punch a corridor through Berlin’s new barrier to the community.

By coincidence, European Commander General Bruce C. Clarke arrived by train that morning from Heidelberg to inspect his Berlin operation. Over breakfast, Watson and Brigadier General Frederick O. Hartel happily told their direct superior he had arrived on “an interesting morning” because three hours later they would begin the Steinstücken operation.

“Who told you to do that?” Clarke protested to Watson.

“General Clay,” Watson responded.

“Al,” Clarke complained, “don’t you know who you work for? Don’t you know who writes your efficiency report?”

Clarke instructed his underlings to take no further orders from Clay and to withdraw their troops from the woods and send them back to their barracks. He then found Clay in his office and, pointing to a red phone on his desk, angrily challenged him to call Kennedy, or to “take your cotton-picking fingers off my troops.”

Responded Clay, “Well, Bruce, I can see that we are not going to get along.”

Clay was convinced he knew how far to push the Soviets and that he was on safe ground because Moscow “could not allow a minor issue [like Steinstücken] to become an international incident through mishandling by their East German puppets.”

A few days later, U.S. troops evacuated seven East Germans who had driven their truck through the mayor’s backyard fence while seeking refuge. Military police cut their hair short so they looked like GIs, put them in MP uniforms and helmets, and then evacuated them in a U.S. military helicopter. Although East German authorities threatened to shoot down the helicopter, Clay had gambled right that Moscow would not let them risk it.

The flights to and from Steinstücken became routine practice, usually ferrying MPs back and forth from their base but sometimes ushering out refugees. Clay not only felt he had proved a point to Berliners and his own superiors, but that he had also reinforced his own conviction, born in 1948, that the Soviets would back down when confronted by a determined West.

Emboldened, Clay pressed on. He announced that the U.S. military would resume patrols that Washington had stopped six years earlier along the Autobahn. It was his answer to new East German police harassment of American vehicles, which were sometimes held up for hours for inspections. The patrols would intervene in any incident involving an American car. Within a short time, the problems ended.

West Berliners were elated. The Berliner Morgenpost splashed a photo on its front page of General Clay kissing his wife, Marjorie, as she arrived in Tempelhof Airport. The caption read: “Every Berlin child knows the accomplishments of this American for our city’s freedom. His latest actions warm the hearts of Berliners: the stationing of a U.S. commando in Steinstücken and the resumption of military patrols of the Autobahn.”

What they couldn’t know was that Clay’s most dangerous enemies were already planning a counterattack—in Washington. The last time Clay had exceeded orders in Berlin, President Truman had covered his back. Clay had no way of knowing whether Kennedy would do the same now, but he was about to find out.

^{HYANNIS PORT, MASSACHUSETTS}

^{SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1961}

The usual ilk of weekend guests were gathering at the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port compound, where President Kennedy was working on a speech that he would deliver to the United Nations General Assembly the next day.

They included the president’s brother Teddy; their brother-in-law, the actor Peter Lawford; Frank Sinatra; and the Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa and his latest wife. Sinatra had arrived with what father Joseph Kennedy’s chauffeur Frank Saunders called “a crowd of jet-setters and beautiful people,” among them women who looked liked prostitutes to him. The maids were abuzz about it all.

Saunders would later claim that he heard party noises during the night and wandered to the main house from his cabin to return Joe Kennedy’s riding boots to him. He said he had stumbled upon the old man in the back hallway fondling a giggling, buxom female.

“My riding boots!” Saunders heard him exclaim. “Just in time!”

It was all part of the raucous background noise of the Kennedy administration and the barely controlled chaos of Kennedy’s personal life and that of those around him. The public image of the workaholic, speed-reading, family-man president was in stark contrast to the reality that would emerge only years later through the eyewitness reports from, among others, his Secret Service agents. They were men who lacked the single-minded motivation of his closest aides and family to burnish the Kennedy image—and they worried about the security dangers of Kennedy’s womanizing.

Larry Newman, who had joined the Secret Service in 1960, was less worried about the morality issues involved than he was that the president’s chief procurer of women, Dave Powers, would not allow security checks or searches of any of the women who were escorted past bodyguards. This was at a time when all the agents around the president had been warned that Fidel Castro might be planning a revenge hit over the Bay of Pigs. “We didn’t know if the President the next morning would be dead or alive,” Newman recalled later to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Newman said agents only half jokingly debated among themselves who would draw the black bean to testify before the appropriate House subcommittee should the president be harmed.

Tony Sherman, a member of the Kennedy security detail from Salt Lake City, would later recall days when Kennedy “would not work at all.” Sherman had not liked the fact that his job responsibilities included alerting Kennedy’s aides when his wife’s sudden arrival might uncover his philandering. Agent William T. McIntyre of Phoenix worried that as a sworn law enforcer, he was being asked to look the other way at illegal procurement of prostitutes. Agent Joseph Paolella of Los Angeles adored Kennedy and the fact that he always remembered his security men’s names, but he worried that the U.S. president could be blackmailed by an enemy over his in-fidelities. He and other agents referred to one of Kennedy’s guests that weekend, Peter Lawford, as “Rancid Ass,” for his overdrinking and aggressiveness with women.

With all that revelry in the background, Kennedy was putting the final touches on one of the most important speeches of his presidency, and his first important signal to the world of how he intended to handle Moscow and nuclear arms control after the Berlin border closure. It would also come just four days after an airplane crash in Africa had killed United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. The Soviets were campaigning to have Hammarskjöld replaced by a three-person directorate that would represent the West, the communist world, and “neutrals.”

Kennedy’s public approval ratings defied gravity, but the president knew that beneath them lay a string of foreign policy setbacks and festering domestic problems that over time could undermine his leadership. Before he left Washington that Friday for Hyannis Port, he had met briefly with Detroit News Washington bureau chief Elie Abel, who had been asked by a New York publisher to write a book on the president’s first term and was seeking Kennedy’s cooperation. Sitting together in the White House living quarters, with Marine One’s engines roaring in the background, Abel drank a Bloody Mary while Kennedy tried to dissuade him from the project. “Why would anyone write a book about an administration that has nothing to show for itself but a string of disasters?” he asked.

Abel found himself in the curious position of trying to convince Kennedy that, despite his rough start, in the end he would do great things, and he and his friends would all be proud of his administration.

On Sunday, Kennedy landed with Lawford at the Marine Air Terminal of New York’s La Guardia Airport at 6:35 p.m., where they were greeted by Mayor Robert Wagner, Secretary of State Rusk, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson. Pierre Salinger, the president’s portly, bon vivant press secretary, had arrived ahead of them in response to an urgent call from Soviet spy Georgi Bolshakov, who had continued to play his role as unofficial conduit to Khrushchev. Bolshakov had said it was urgent that Salinger meet with Mikhail Kharlamov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry press director, who had an urgent message for the president.

Bolshakov had grown increasingly comfortable in his role, having operated without a leak and to the satisfaction of his superiors for several months. Though he remained a mid-ranking military intelligence agent, he was now custodian of a well-established and frequently employed direct line to Khrushchev. Salinger considered Bolshakov to be “a one-man troika in himself…interpreter, editor and spy.”

Following Salinger’s instructions, at 7:15 p.m. on Sunday Bolshakov brought Kharlamov through a little-watched side entrance into the Carlyle, the hotel that served as the president’s residence in New York. Reporters constantly loitered in the lobby, hoping for presidential sightings, so a Secret Service agent took the two Soviets up a back elevator.

Salinger was taken aback by Kharlamov’s opening words: “The storm in Berlin is over.”

By his reckoning, Salinger had told Kharlamov, the Berlin situation couldn’t be much worse.

“Just wait, my friend,” he said.

Kharlamov asked whether the president had received a message that Khrushchev had sent to him through New York Times Paris correspondent Cyrus L. Sulzberger, who had conducted an interview with the Soviet leader in early September.

Salinger said he hadn’t. The fact was, however, that on September 10 Sulzberger had relayed to Kennedy a personal note that Khrushchev had given him during an interview just five days earlier, although Kennedy had not yet responded.

Khrushchev had told Sulzberger, “If you are personally able to meet with President Kennedy, I wish you would tell him I would not be loath to establishing some sort of informal contact with him to find a means of settling the [Berlin] crisis without damaging the prestige of the United States—on the basis of a German peace treaty and [the establishment of the] Free City of West Berlin.” He had suggested Kennedy use informal contacts to relay his view on Khrushchev’s ideas, and “to figure out various forms and stages and how to prepare public opinion and not endanger the prestige of the United States.”

Kharlamov repeated for Salinger the essence of the Khrushchev message, speaking faster and more excitedly than Bolshakov could translate. So Salinger asked him to slow down, explaining that they had time. The president was out for dinner and a Broadway play, he said, and he wouldn’t be back at the hotel until past midnight.

Taking a deep breath, Kharlamov said the situation was urgent. Khrushchev considered Kennedy’s plans for a U.S. military buildup in Europe to be an imminent danger. That was why the Soviet leader had told Sulzberger about his eagerness to establish a private channel to Kennedy to reach a German settlement.

Khrushchev wanted another summit with Kennedy to consider American proposals on Berlin, Kharlamov said. He would leave the timing to Kennedy because of the president’s “obvious political difficulties.” But he was in a hurry. Kharlamov talked of the continuing “intense pressure” within the communist bloc on Khrushchev to conclude a peace treaty with East Germany. Beyond that, he said, the danger of a major military incident in Berlin remained far too great to delay a settlement.

Khrushchev also wanted to influence or at least know the content of Kennedy’s Monday speech because he wished to avoid anything, at a time of rising tensions, that might give new hope to his opponents ahead of the Party Congress at the end of October. Kharlamov told Salinger that the Soviet leader “hopes your president’s speech to the UN won’t be another warlike ultimatum like the one on July 25…. He didn’t like that at all.”

Salinger left a message for Kennedy to call as soon as he returned to his room. He then poured scotch and soda for his Russian guests. When they left nearly two hours later, Salinger promised he’d give them the president’s response the next morning at 11:30, ahead of Kennedy’s UN speech.

Kennedy called Salinger at 1:00 a.m. and invited him to his thirty-fourth-floor duplex at the Carlyle. It was his New York “home,” rented by his father and furnished with fine French antiques. With the draperies open as they were that night, the apartment offered a glittering view of New York’s skyline. Salinger found Kennedy in bed in white pajamas, chewing on an unlit cigar and reading. At the president’s request, Salinger repeated the key points of his conversation with Kharlamov several times.

The president told Salinger that Sulzberger had communicated nothing to him from his Khrushchev meeting, so the message had likely not reached Kennedy. Kennedy rose from his bed and looked out over Manhattan. He told Salinger that it was good news “if Khrushchev is ready to listen to our views on Germany,” and it probably meant that he would not unilaterally sign a peace treaty with the Ulbricht regime that year and prompt yet another crisis. Yet Kennedy believed Moscow’s continued insistence on a peace treaty recognizing East Germany still raised the specter of war if Khrushchev endangered West Berlin access.

The president called Secretary Rusk at 1:30 a.m., and together they settled on a message that Salinger would deliver to the Soviets the next morning. Salinger scribbled on hotel stationery as the president dictated. He would tell the Soviets that Kennedy was “cautiously receptive” to the proposal for an early summit on Berlin, but he wanted the Soviets to demonstrate good faith in achieving Laotian neutrality. Only then would a summit on the more difficult question of Germany be likely to produce “significant agreement.”

The tone was to be cordial but cautious. Though Kennedy and Khrushchev had agreed on a unified, neutral Laos in Vienna, the Soviets had stood by as North Vietnam added to the military capability of the communist Pathet Lao, and Moscow was contributing two-thirds of the cost to maintaining its expanding secret army. Salinger would repeat the president’s exact words to Kharlamov: “We would be watching and waiting,” was the message Kennedy wanted Salinger to pass to the Soviets.

Kennedy reviewed his UN speech with Salinger until 3:00 a.m. The final text was more moderate than the Soviets might have anticipated. The language was particularly cautious regarding Berlin.

The president had been agonizing over the speech for weeks. Though the next election was not for another three years, Kennedy’s domestic opponents had begun to sense his weakness. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and leading Republican, had abandoned his previous restraint on attacking Kennedy over Berlin and said West German fears of abandonment were “perfectly justified.” Said Goldwater, “Anytime diplomats begin talking of negotiations in a Soviet-created situation where there is nothing to negotiate, it is time for the defenders of freedom to become wary.” He told a conference of Republicans on September 28 that if elections were held the next day, they would win with the largest Republican landslide ever.

Kennedy needed to retake the initiative. Khrushchev “had spit in our eye three times,” Kennedy complained to his ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson. “He has had a succession of apparent victories—space, Cuba, the thirteenth of August…. He wants to give out the feeling that he has us on the run.”

Vice President Lyndon Johnson argued to the president that he couldn’t demand disarmament in New York and then return to Washington and call out more divisions and restart underground nuclear testing, which is exactly what Kennedy planned to do. The president had learned from ten months of dealing with Khrushchev that one could combat the man only in contradictions.

Kennedy’s performance at the UN was formidable, fed by his increasing fixation on the prospect of nuclear conflict. That, in turn, had been shaped by secret meetings spent determining with his top advisers the rich detail of exactly how he would execute a nuclear war plan, right down to specific Soviet body counts. Every word of his speech reflected his increasing preoccupation with that burden.

“A nuclear disaster,” Kennedy told the General Assembly, “spread by wind and water and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to mankind.”

He outlined his proposal for “general and complete disarmament” under effective international control. “Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable,” he said. “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

Buried within the speech was a conciliatory message for Moscow on Berlin. Noticed by only the initiated, it suggested Soviet concerns over East Germany had been justified and repeated Kennedy’s view, one that had so distressed veteran diplomats, that U.S. interests in Europe did not stretch beyond West Berlin. Though Salinger would later insist Kennedy had not altered his speech that night, the language would satisfy Khrushchev.

“We are committed to no rigid formulas,” he said. “We see no perfect solution. We recognize that troops and tanks can, for a time, keep a nation divided against its will, however unwise that policy might seem to us. But we believe a peaceful agreement is possible which protects the freedom of West Berlin and Allied presence and access, while recognizing the historic and legitimate interests of others in assuring European security.”

Kennedy closed with his growing sense of historic moment: “The events and the decisions of the next ten months may well decide the fate of man for the next ten thousand years…. And we in this hall shall be remembered either as part of the generation that turned this planet into a flaming funeral pyre or the generation that met its vow to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’”

Though put in poetic terms, he closed again with an offer of talks, without using a word of his speech to reproach Moscow over the August border closure. “We shall never negotiate out of fear, and we shall never fear to negotiate…. For together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames.”

The speech’s soaring rhetoric would help establish Kennedy’s reputation as a world leader. U.S. Senator Mike Mansfield called it “one of the great speeches of our generation.” Yet those hearing the speech in West Berlin could not miss Kennedy’s willingness to compromise further at their expense or his lack of resolve to remove the barrier that divided them.

Perhaps most telling was East German praise for the speech. The Ulbricht regime hailed it as a milestone toward peaceful coexistence. The party newspaper Neues Deutschland called it “remarkable; remarkable because it showed American willingness to negotiate.”

West German editorialists focused not on the speech’s flourishes but on its wishy-washy language. Bild-Zeitung wondered bitterly whether Kennedy’s reference to “the historic and legitimate interests of others” was suggesting that Moscow had the right “to split Germany or renounce reunification.”

West German Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano told a party caucus of his Christian Democratic Union that the country must “brace itself with all its strength against tendencies to get a Berlin settlement at West Germany’s expense.”

West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer complained to friends that the president didn’t mention German unification once at the United Nations. Kennedy also left out the ritual call for all-German free elections. He seemed to be retreating on all questions of principle regarding Berlin. Kennedy had not even done the bare minimum: demand that free circulation of people return to Berlin. Adenauer set in motion a trip to Washington in hopes of getting Kennedy back on message, if it wasn’t already too late.

Adenauer’s fears that Kennedy might abandon West Germany had grown so great that on August 29 he had reached out to Khrushchev with a secret message through West German Ambassador Kroll. Despite his public stance against any talks with Moscow, privately he was urging the Soviet to join new negotiations. “The two greatest dangers,” he said, “are when tanks stand opposite tanks, at a distance of just some meters, as is the case now in Berlin, and the even greater danger of an incorrect assessment of the situation.”

In the Berliner Morgenpost, a readers’ debate raged over whether or not one could still trust the Americans to defend Berlin’s freedom. One contributor from the city district of Steglitz asked whether the West was writing the Soviet Union a blank check to do what it wanted in West Berlin by the end of that year. Another writer said Marxists had it right that U.S. capitalism’s abundance had created an indecisive and indifferent society—“although it is five minutes before midnight.”

Beside these letters was one from Raymond Aron, the famous French philosopher, echoing French leader Charles de Gaulle’s warning in a television appearance that week. “What is at stake,” wrote Aron, “isn’t just the fate of two million Berliners. It is the capability of the United States to convince Khrushchev that it has the tenacity not to give in to horse trading.”

West Berliners were confused by their guarantor’s mixed messages. One day General Clay had landed in Steinstücken and flexed U.S. muscle through his patrols on their Autobahn. The next day Kennedy gave a speech that continued the American retreat. Kennedy had not even mentioned the Wall’s existence or the fact that East Germans were further fortifying it every day.

New York Times columnist James “Scotty” Reston wrote that Kennedy “has talked like Churchill but acted like Chamberlain.” In the same column, Reston reported on a leaked Kennedy memo regarding Clay’s confrontational Berlin measures in which the president asked senior officials why his policy of seeking negotiations on Berlin was being misunderstood.

Reading the tea leaves and intelligence reports, Khrushchev was beginning to sense that Clay’s hard line in Berlin was nothing more than a retired general’s bold improvisation that lacked presidential blessing. There was sufficient sign of disagreement in U.S. policy circles that it was time to probe the differences.

So Marshal Konev dispatched a sharp note to General Watson demanding that Clay’s “illegal” Autobahn patrols end. His letter, he stressed, wasn’t a “protest but a warning.” The Kennedy administration ordered Clay’s Autobahn patrols to stop after a week of successful operations. General Konev’s allies had been Clay’s American enemies.

On September 27, General Clarke flew to Berlin to reprimand his commander again. After a ceremonial lunch with Clay for press purposes, General Clarke again advised General Watson, his Berlin commander, that U.S. forces could no longer be used to counteract Soviet or East German actions without his approval. The East German press got wind of Clay’s differences with the Kennedy administration and made much of it.

Clarke then got wind of another secret Clay operation.

Clay had ordered army engineers to construct barriers in a secluded forest on the outskirts of Berlin that would replicate the Wall as closely as possible. U.S. troops then mounted bulldozer attachments on their tanks, and Clay supervised as they crashed through the barriers, using different speeds and height placements for the shovels to achieve maximum efficiency. Clay’s purpose was to determine the best way to punch a hole through the barrier should the opportunity or necessity present itself.

“As soon as I learned of it,” General Clarke would later write in a private correspondence, “I stopped it and got rid of what had been done.”

Clarke didn’t report the Clay operation or his action against it to Washington, hoping the whole matter would simply disappear.

Kennedy would never know about it—but Khrushchev would. A Soviet agent hiding in the forest had snapped photos. Khrushchev had no way of knowing that General Clarke had shut down the exercise. He now had what he considered concrete evidence that the Americans might well be planning an operation in Berlin that would challenge or humiliate him during his Party Congress.

17 NUCLEAR POKER

^{CARLYLE HOTEL, NEW YORK}

^{SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1961}

Carrying two folded newspapers under his arm, Georgi Bolshakov appeared as arranged at Pierre Salinger’s door at the Carlyle at 3:30 p.m., having been escorted up the back elevator by a Secret Service agent.

Concealed inside one of the papers was a thick manila envelope, from which Bolshakov removed a bundle of pages. With conspiratorial flamboyance, the Soviet spy announced that he held before him a personal twenty-six-page letter from Khrushchev to Kennedy, a manuscript he said he had spent the entire night translating. The bags under Bolshakov’s eyes were such a permanent fixture that Salinger could not know if that was true.

“You may read this,” Bolshakov told Salinger. “Then it is for the eyes of the president only.” It had been only a week since Bolshakov and Salinger had last met in the same room ahead of Kennedy’s United Nations speech. Khrushchev was impatient to test Kennedy’s conciliatory words and his expressed willingness to open new talks on Berlin, despite French and West German opposition. Bolshakov handed Salinger both the English and Russian versions of the letter so that U.S. government translators could compare them for accuracy.

Thus began what National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy would dub the “pen pal letters,” uniquely direct and private correspondence between the two leading adversaries of their time. Over the next two years, Khrushchev would continue to use the cloak-and-dagger means of having Bolshakov and others slip his letters to Salinger, to Robert Kennedy, or to Ted Sorensen on street corners, in a bar, or elsewhere, often in unmarked envelopes slipped out from folded newspapers.

Khrushchev considered the matter of such urgency that Bolshakov had phoned Salinger a day earlier with an offer to charter a plane to deliver the letter to Newport, Rhode Island, where Kennedy had been on a week’s autumn vacation at the home of Jacqueline’s mother, Janet Lee Bouvier, and stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss. However, Kennedy and Rusk wanted to avoid a potential “media sensation” in the event that one of two dozen reporters with the president spotted the Russian agent. So they dispatched Salinger to New York the next day.

“If you knew the importance of what I have, you wouldn’t keep me waiting that long,” Bolshakov had replied.

Salinger would later paraphrase the message in Khrushchev’s 6,000-word letter: You and I, Mr. President, are leaders of two nations that are on a collision course…. We have no choice but to put our heads together and find ways to live in peace.

The man who had so battered Kennedy in Vienna opened on a warm and personal note, explaining that he was resting with his family at his Black Sea retreat in Pitsunda. In the secretive Soviet Union, not even his own citizens knew where he was. “As a former Naval officer,” Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy, “you would surely appreciate the merits of these surroundings, the beauty of the sea and the grandeur of the Caucasian mountains.” Khrushchev said it was difficult in such a setting to think that problems lacking solutions “cast a sinister shadow on peaceful life, on the future of millions of people.”

But because that was the case, Khrushchev was suggesting a confidential exchange between the two men whose actions would determine the future of the planet. If Kennedy was uninterested, the Soviet leader said the president could ignore the letter and Khrushchev would never mention it again.

Salinger was struck by the peasant simplicity of Khrushchev’s language, “in contrast to the sterile gobbledygook that passes for this level of diplomatic correspondence.” The letter had none of Khrushchev’s usual threats and instead solicited Kennedy’s alternative proposals should he differ with Khrushchev’s suggestions.

Khrushchev’s initiative had several possible motivations. Most important, his Party Congress would begin in a little more than two weeks, and engaging Kennedy in such an exchange would give him greater assurance that the U.S. would do nothing to disrupt his painstaking choreography. Second, he hoped to calm the rising tensions that had produced a much larger expansion of U.S. defense spending than he had anticipated.

Khrushchev knew the Soviet Union lacked the economic depth to match a sustained arms race with the far wealthier United States. For the first time, he had to worry that the West might challenge his conventional military dominance around Berlin. Kennedy’s defense buildup was also inflaming Soviet hard-liners’ arguments that Khrushchev was doing too little to combat the West and should have gone further to neutralize West Berlin. In his letter, Khrushchev warned Kennedy that the tit-for-tat military spending, spurred by Berlin, was further reason why Moscow was “attaching such exclusive significance to the German question.”

The Soviet leader said he was willing to reexamine positions frozen through fifteen years of cold war. Writing to the Catholic Kennedy, the atheist Soviet compared the postwar world to Noah’s Ark, aboard which all parties wanted to continue their voyage, whether they were clean or unclean. “And we have no other alternative: either we should live in peace and cooperation so that the Ark maintains its buoyancy, or else it sinks.”

Khrushchev also said he was willing to expand on the quiet contacts between Secretary of State Rusk and Foreign Minister Gromyko, whose first meeting had been in New York on September 21. In addition, he was willing to take up Kennedy’s suggestion of preparatory talks between the U.S. and Soviet ambassadors to Yugoslavia, America’s legendary diplomat George Kennan and General Alexei Yepishev, a Khrushchev confidant.

Just a day after the border closure on August 14, the State Department had authorized Kennan to open that channel, but at the time Moscow had shown no interest. Now Khrushchev was eager, though he worried that without clear instructions the ambassadors would “indulge in tea-drinking” and “mooing at each other when they should talk on the substance.” Khrushchev suggested instead the use of U.S. Ambassador Thompson, since he was a trusted and proven interlocutor, though he immediately apologized, saying he understood that this would be Kennedy’s choice.

Khrushchev protested at length about Western suspicions that Moscow still intended to seize West Berlin. “It is ridiculous to even think of that,” he said, arguing that the city was of no geopolitical importance. To show his good intentions, he suggested moving the United Nations headquarters to West Berlin, an idea he had floated earlier that month in separate meetings with Belgian Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak and former French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud.

Apart from opening his new channel to Kennedy, Khrushchev was taking other measures to avoid further escalation of tensions with the U.S. Khrushchev’s party Presidium had put on ice a far-advanced plan to provide Cuba with more advanced weaponry, including missiles that could reach the U.S. Khrushchev had also warned Ulbricht against a series of measures he was implementing to expand his hold on East Berlin, lecturing his troublesome client that he should be satisfied with his 1961 gains.

In his most important gesture, Khrushchev responded to Kennedy’s appeal of the previous week for progress on Laos. He confirmed their agreement of Vienna that Laos would become a neutral, independent state like Burma and Cambodia. However, he disagreed with Kennedy’s concern about specifically who should take which leadership positions in Laos, saying that should not be a matter for Moscow and Washington to decide.

With that, Khrushchev closed with best wishes to Kennedy’s wife and for his and his family’s health.

^{HYANNIS PORT, MASSACHUSETTS}

^{SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1961}

It would take two weeks before Kennedy was ready to respond.

Working over the weekend on Cape Cod, Kennedy wrote and rewrote a draft that would balance his heightened distrust for Khrushchev with his desire to use all means to avoid war through miscalculation. A negative reply could hasten another Kremlin move on Berlin, but too positive a reply would look naive to his domestic and Allied critics. Both Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer worried that any Kennedy–Khrushchev talks were simply a recipe for new concessions on West Berlin.

Adenauer’s concerns would have been even greater if he had known the instructions Kennedy had given Rusk to dramatically reconstruct U.S. positions for a new round of Berlin talks, with a peace conference as their goal. Kennedy had ruled out as a negotiator U.S. Ambassador to West Germany Walter Dowling, because “he reflects Bonn’s opinion too much.” He also wanted Rusk to leave on the table only issues acceptable to Moscow and remove Adenauer’s insistence on talks aimed at German and Berlin reunification through free elections. “These are not negotiable proposals,” he said. “Their emptiness in this sense is generally recognized; and we should have to fall back from them promptly.” What he was willing to consider were many of Moscow’s previously unacceptable ideas, including making West Berlin an internationalized “free city” as long as it was NATO that guaranteed its future and not a foreign troop contingent including the Soviets.

Considering how much he was willing to compromise, Kennedy was disappointed by the Soviet response. Soviet aircraft increasingly buzzed U.S. planes traveling to Berlin, Khrushchev had resumed nuclear testing, and the Soviet leader again was threatening to sign an East German peace treaty. On the other hand, Khrushchev had abandoned earlier threats of war and was promising to preserve West Berlin’s independence.

One matter was certain: after having tried to put the Berlin issue on the back burner at the beginning of his presidency, Kennedy was now overwhelmed by it. Unable to get the president to focus any attention on his land conservation agenda, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall complained, “He’s imprisoned by Berlin. That’s all he thinks about. He has a restless mind, and he likes to roam over all subjects, but ever since August, Berlin has occupied him totally.”

Kennedy considered reaching out to his allies to get their advice and buy-in on how to respond to Khrushchev, but experience had taught him that that would only produce muddle and press leaks. He would then lose Khrushchev’s trust. But what was that trust worth, anyway? Chip Bohlen, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, told Kennedy that his response to Khrushchev “may be the most important letter the President will ever write.”

In a letter dated October 16, more than two weeks after Khrushchev’s correspondence, Kennedy seized upon Khrushchev’s personal tone and wrote about the value of getting away from Washington and spending time on the shore with his children and their cousins. He embraced Khrushchev’s offer of confidential correspondence, and said he would not hint at it in public or disclose it to the press. However, Kennedy added to Khrushchev that he would share the letter with Rusk and a few other of his closest associates.

Kennedy embraced Khrushchev’s Noah’s Ark analogy. Due to the dangers of the nuclear age, he said, U.S.–Soviet collaboration to keep the peace now was even more important than their partnership during World War II. Kennedy could not have been clearer in his de facto acceptance of Berlin’s border closure. He called his attitude toward Berlin and Germany “one of reason, not belligerence. There is peace in that area now—and this government shall not initiate and shall oppose any action which upsets that peace.”

Although he had been willing to allow the construction of the Berlin Wall, he was now drawing the line he would not cross regarding Berlin. He rejected Khrushchev’s efforts to open negotiations to change Berlin’s status to a so-called “free city” where Soviet troops would join the other three Allies in ensuring the city’s freedom and the East Germans would control access. “We would be ‘buying the same horse’ twice,” he said, “conceding objectives which you seek, merely to retain what we already possess.” But Kennedy expressed willingness to begin exploratory talks through the American whom Khrushchev had suggested for the purpose, Ambassador Thompson.

Kennedy also wanted Khrushchev to give the U.S. more on Laos as a test case for Berlin. Said the president, “I do not see how we can expect to reach a settlement on so bitter and complex an issue as Berlin, where both of us have vital interests at stake, if we cannot come to a final agreement on Laos, which we have previously agreed should be neutral and independent after the fashion of Burma and Cambodia.” Now that it was clear that the neutralist Prince Souvanna Phouma would become prime minister, Kennedy said that he and Khrushchev should ensure that the prince “is assisted by the kind of men we believe necessary to meet the standard of neutrality.” He said the acceleration of communist attacks on South Vietnam, many from Laotian territory, were “a very grave threat to peace.”

However, more important to Khrushchev than the content of Kennedy’s letter was the fact that the president had taken his bait and replied at all. Now the Soviet leader could be relatively certain that Kennedy was ready to engage in new talks regarding Berlin, and thus would refrain from confrontational speeches or actions that might disrupt Khrushchev’s careful planning for his crucial, fast-approaching Party Congress. Only two months after closing the Berlin border, the Soviet was drawing Kennedy into new negotiations on the city’s status, without having suffered even the modest hand-slap of economic sanctions.

What Kennedy would get out of the exchange was less satisfying. Khrushchev’s next communication would come in the form of a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb.

^{PALACE OF CONGRESSES, MOSCOW}

^{TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1961}

Sunlight glimmered through the morning mist off the golden domes of the Kremlin’s fifteenth- and sixteenth-century churches. The red flags of the fifteen Soviet republics fluttered in front of the modern, glass-walled red and gold Palace of Congresses, just finished for the 22nd Soviet Party Congress.

The massive auditorium was filled to capacity. Not one of its red seats was vacant. Never had so many communists met in one place at the same time. Some 4,394 voting delegates and 405 nonvoting delegates—nearly 5,000 in all—had gathered from eighty communist and noncommunist countries. That was three and a half times more delegates than in the preceding three congresses.

The numbers were a reflection of the party’s growth, now reaching the 10 million mark in membership, after having added nearly 1.5 million members since the 21st Party Congress in 1959. Khrushchev wanted a record crowd for his 1961 show, so he had entitled each party organization to send additional delegates.

The Palace of Congresses was unique, if only because everything worked so much better than in most Soviet government buildings. It had escalators with nearly silent motors, the latest stereophonic sound, West German–made central air-conditioning, British-manufactured refrigerators, and hot and cold running water in marble lavatories. Western correspondents gathered for drinks and food on the seventh floor, which they called the “Top of the Marx.”

Time magazine assessed the crowd: “comrades from small Russian villages, café-sophisticated Parisians, bamboo-tough agitators from Asia.” The stars included the Viet Minh’s Ho Chi Minh; Red China’s Chou En-lai; America’s seventy-one-year-old labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; the Spanish Civil War’s famed “Pasionaria,” Dolores Ibárruri; and János Kádár, the leader who had helped put down the 1956 rebellion in Hungary. They filed in beneath a giant silver bas-relief of Lenin on a purple background.

Western reporters habitually called Khrushchev the “absolute leader” of the Soviet Union, but the truth was more complicated. After only a year in power, Khrushchev had narrowly survived a coup in 1957. After the G-2 incident and the Paris Summit failure in May 1960, Stalinist remnants began to rally against Khrushchev. In particular, they seized upon what they considered his irresponsible reduction of Soviet armed forces, his alienation of communist China, and his embracing of the imperialist Americans. Through early votes on prefabricated resolutions, Khrushchev monitored potential rivalries that could be his undoing.

Kennedy’s three leading American political opponents—Republican Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and former Vice President Richard Nixon—were meek compared with Khrushchev’s less visible and more dangerous opponents, men bred in Stalin’s bloodiest times.

Though he owed his position to Khrushchev, Presidium member Frol Kozlov personified the sort of thug that had begun to plot against Khrushchev after the Paris Summit failure. He was ill-educated, short, boorish, Stalinist, and hostile to the West. American diplomat Richard Davies described him as a nasty drunk who ate like a pig and drank like a fish. Yet Khrushchev also faced a smoother and more ruthless kind of potential enemy in Mikhail Suslov, the party’s leading ideologist and intellectual.

Khrushchev had strengthened his hold on power during 1961 through favors, factional purges, and visits throughout the country with local party leaders. The Gagarin space shot, the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna Summit, and the Berlin border closure had also neutralized would-be opponents. It seemed to party colleague Pyotr Demichev that Khrushchev was enjoying a rare “time in the sun.” Time magazine put it this way: “In 44 years and 15 Party Congresses since the October 1917 Revolution, Communism’s inner hierarchy has never seemed more stable or more successful.”

Nevertheless, Khrushchev knew better than anyone how vulnerable his position could be. For all his work to advance communism in Africa and Asia, only Cuba had joined the Soviet camp under Khrushchev’s leadership, and by luck more than design. Some party leaders would never forgive Khrushchev for having denounced Stalin, which they saw not only as an attack on an individual but also on communist history and legitimacy. China remained poised against Khrushchev, and the head of Beijing’s delegation, Chou En-lai, would leave the Congress in a huff after laying a wreath at Stalin’s tomb.

Still, Khrushchev looked leaner and fitter than he had been for months, as if he had been training for the event. “I propose we begin to work,” he told the gathering, interpreted into twenty-nine languages. “The Twenty-second Congress is now in session.”

Even Stalin would have envied Khrushchev’s choreography. The Soviet leader monopolized the first two days with his two speeches, each some six hours in length. He navigated from one topic to another with inexhaustible energy, describing richly how the Soviet economy would surpass that of the United States by 1980—increasing its gross national product five times, expanding its industrial production six times, and providing every family a rent-free apartment. By 1965, he said, the Soviet Union would produce three pairs of shoes per person per year!

He renewed his attacks on the dead Stalin, and by the end of the Congress would remove the dictator from the Red Square mausoleum, where he rested beside Lenin, and rebury him in less prominent ground beside a lower rank of communist heroes near the Kremlin wall.

What most caught the attention of delegates and the world, however, were two bombshells related to Berlin. One was figurative and the other very real.

Disappointing East Germany’s Ulbricht, Khrushchev said he would drop his insistence on signing a peace treaty by year’s end. His explanation was that Gromyko’s recent talks with Kennedy showed that the Western powers “were disposed to seek a settlement” on Berlin.

Having offered Kennedy that carrot, Khrushchev then swung the nuclear stick. He departed from his prepared text to talk about Soviet military prowess, particularly when it came to missile development. He laughed that the Soviets had come so far that American spy ships were tracking and confirming the remarkable accuracy of their rockets.

Still in a jocular tone and speaking impromptu, Khrushchev then jolted his listeners with a revelation: “Since I have already wandered from my written text, I want to say that our tests of new nuclear weapons are also coming along very well. We shall shortly complete these tests—presumably at the end of October. We shall probably wind them up by detonating a hydrogen bomb with a yield of fifty million tons of TNT.”

The delegates stood and broke into stormy applause. No one to that date had ever tested such a powerful weapon. Reporters scribbled furiously.

“We have said that we have a hundred-megaton bomb,” he added, encouraged by the crowd reaction. “This is true. But we are not going to explode it, because even if we did so at the most remote site, we might knock out all of the windows.”

Delegates roared and applauded wildly.

The atheist leader then turned his words to the Almighty. “But may God grant, as they used to say, that we are never called upon to explode these bombs over anybody’s territory. This is the greatest wish of our lives.”

It was classic Khrushchev. He had taken some pressure off Kennedy by lifting the deadline on negotiating a Berlin treaty even as he smacked him over the head with news of a coming nuclear test. On the final day of the Congress, the Soviet Union would detonate the most powerful nuclear weapon ever to be constructed. The “Tsar Bomba,” as it would later be nicknamed in the West, had the equivalent of a thousand times the explosives used in the World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Again caught flat-footed, Kennedy knew that he had to respond.

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

^{WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 1961}

During an otherwise genial White House luncheon for Texas news executives the next day, the conservative publisher of the Dallas Morning News, E. M. “Ted” Dealey, challenged the president. “We can annihilate Russia,” he said, “and should make that clear to the Soviet government.”

Reading from a five-hundred-word statement that he had extracted from his pocket, Dealey declared, “The general opinion of the grassroots thinking of this country is that you and your administration are weak sisters.” He said that what was needed was “a man on horseback,” but that “many people in Texas and the Southwest think you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”

On edge from Khrushchev’s announcement and weeks of unrelenting pressure over Berlin, Kennedy responded with irritation. “The difference between you and me, Mr. Dealey, is that I was elected president of this country and you were not. I have the responsibility for the lives of a hundred eighty million Americans, which you have not…. Wars are easier to talk about than they are to fight. I’m just as tough as you are—and I didn’t get elected President by arriving at soft judgments.”

Kennedy was facing the hardest judgment call of his life over how he would conduct a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev was making the exercise more than academic. The plan he was reviewing after weeks of intensive, highly classified meetings had as its goal the preemptive destruction of the Soviet nuclear arsenal so as not to leave a single weapon for reprisal. In rich detail, it spelled out U.S. bombers’ flight paths, altitudes they must maintain to avoid detection, and which targets they would hit with what kind of nuclear weapons.

By the time the plan had percolated through the bureaucracy, dozens of drafts had been debated and the Berlin Wall had already been up for three weeks. Blandly titled “Strategic Air Planning and Berlin,” the thirty-three-page memo reached General Maxwell Taylor, the president’s military representative, on September 5. Author Carl Kaysen, one of the administration’s young geniuses, concluded, “We have a fair probability of achieving a substantial measure of success” at a cost of “only” half a million to a million Soviet casualties. It included charts, however, showing that if surviving Soviet missiles hit the U.S., the fatalities could range between five and ten million, because of the population concentration in places like New York and Chicago. “In thermonuclear warfare,” Kaysen dryly observed, “people are easy to kill.”

For the previous month, Kaysen had been working as deputy special assistant to National Security Advisor Bundy after gaining influence inside the administration on a number of widely differing projects, ranging from international trade to the cost factors of airborne alert systems. The forty-one-year-old Harvard economics professor had served in London during World War II, picking out European bomb targets for the Office of Strategic Services, the then-new U.S. spy service.

Kaysen began his paper by noting the flaws in the so-called Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP-62, the existing blueprint determining how Kennedy would use strategic striking power in the case of war. SIOP-62 called for sending 2,258 missiles and bombers, carrying a total of 3,423 nuclear weapons, against 1,077 “military and urban-industrial targets” through the “Sino-Soviet bloc.” It estimated that the attack would kill 54 percent of the Soviet population (including 71 percent of the urban population) and destroy 82 percent of its buildings “as measured by floor space.” Kaysen thought SIOP-62 actually underestimated casualties, as it was making estimates only for the first seventy-two hours of war.

Kaysen maintained that two circumstances required that SIOP-62 be replaced or significantly altered. First, he worried about a false alarm, which could arise from a “deliberate feint” from Khrushchev or a “misinterpretation of events” by either side. He argued that “if the present state of tension over Berlin persists over a period of months, it is likely that, at some point, a Soviet action will appear to threaten an attack on the United States with sufficient likelihood and imminence” to trigger nuclear response.

Kaysen asserted that the problem would come if Kennedy, following a nuclear decision, decided he wanted to recall the force because he had either been mistaken or misled. Kaysen said the current plan left him little capability to do that. A recall would also require a stand-down of about eight hours for the part of the force that was launched, providing Moscow a “period of degradation” that it could exploit.

Kaysen believed the larger problem—reinforced by Kennedy’s August inaction over Berlin—was that the president would never accept the level of massive nuclear retaliation that would be demanded of him to repulse any Soviet conventional attack on West Germany or West Berlin. He asked bluntly: “Will the president be ready to take it? Soviet retaliation is inevitable; and most probably, it will be directed against our cities and those of our European allies.”

The clear message was that Kennedy, some ten months into his administration, was facing a Berlin crisis that threatened to worsen and a strategic plan to address it that he was unlikely to use. Kaysen was asserting that the ongoing Berlin crisis made it necessary not only to theorize but to get specific about a first-strike plan if matters turned against the U.S. on the ground.

“What is required in these circumstances is something quite different,” he said. “We should be prepared to initiate general war by our own first strike, but one planned for this occasion, rather than planned to implement a strategy of massive retaliation. We should seek the smallest possible list of targets, focusing on the long-range striking capacity of the Soviets, and avoiding, as much as possible, casualties and damage in Soviet civil society.”

The idea as well was to “maintain in reserve a considerable fraction of our own strategic striking power.” The author’s logic was that such a force would deter Khrushchev from unleashing his surviving forces against American population centers. Kaysen was wagering as well that U.S. efforts to minimize Soviet civilian casualties might also reduce the enemy’s lust for revenge that could broaden the war. Kaysen then provided in vivid detail a “more effective and less frightful” plan than SIOP-62 if the current crisis over Berlin resulted in a “major reverse on the ground in Western Europe.”

It gave the president what he had been asking for throughout most of the year: a more rational nuclear war. It would allow him to destroy the Soviet Union’s long-range nuclear capability while limiting damage to the United States and its allies.

Kaysen then laid out the details of a plan that Kennedy would read and reread before responding. U.S. strategic air forces—in small numbers, using wide dispersal and low-altitude penetration to avoid interception—would strike an estimated forty-six home bases for Soviet nuclear bombers, the bombers’ twenty-six staging bases, and up to eight intercontinental ballistic missile sites with two aiming points for each site. The total targets for the first strike would be eighty-eight.

Kaysen reckoned that the first strike could be executed by fifty-five bombers, particularly B-47s and B-52s, assuming a 25 percent attrition rate that would leave the required forty-one planes. One could succeed with so few aircraft, he said, as they would “fan out and penetrate undetected at low altitude at a number of different points on the Soviet early-warning perimeter, then bomb and withdraw at low altitude.”

Kaysen conceded the need for more studies and exercises to test his assumptions. “Two questions immediately arise about this concept,” he said. “How valid are the assumptions, and do we possess the capability and skill to execute such a raid?” He answered that the assumptions were reasonable, that the U.S. had the military means, and that “while a wide range of outcomes is possible, we have a fair probability of achieving a substantial measure of success.”

If one could avoid bombing mistakes, Kaysen figured, Soviet deaths from the initial raid could be limited to no more than a million and perhaps as few as 500,000—still horrendous, but a considerable margin less than SIOP-62’s assumption that 54 percent, or more than a hundred million, of the Soviet population would perish.

In a White House that was unaccustomed to such cavalier discussion of carnage, Kaysen’s report came as a shock. Chief Counsel Ted Sorensen shouted at Kaysen, “You’re crazy! We shouldn’t let guys like you around here.” Marcus Raskin, a friend of Kaysen’s on the NSC, never spoke to him again after he got wind of the report. “How does this make us any better than those who measured the gas ovens or the engineers who built the tracks for the death trains in Nazi Germany?” he frothed at Kaysen.

Kennedy didn’t have the same misgivings, as he had been seeking precisely the analysis that he had been given. “Berlin developments may confront us with a situation where we may desire to take the initiative in the escalation of conflict from the local to the general war level,” the president wrote in the list of questions he wanted to discuss at a meeting on September 19 with General Taylor, General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Thomas S. “Tommy” Power, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command. The level of detail in his questions underscored the president’s increasing scrutiny and understanding of nuclear strike issues. Kennedy was preparing himself to wage war.

Question #1: “Is it possible to get some alternatives into the plan soon, such as having alternative options for use in different situations?” Kennedy asked. He in particular wanted to know whether he could move away from the “optimum mix” of civilian and military targets and in certain contingencies exclude urban areas, or extract China or European satellites from the target list. “If so, at what risk?”

Question #2: If Berlin developments confronted Kennedy with a situation where he wanted to escalate from a local conflict to a general war level, the president wanted to know whether a successful surprise first strike was feasible against the Soviet long-range capability.

Question #3: Kennedy worried that a surprise attack on Soviet long-range striking power would leave “a sizable number” of medium-range missiles still poised to attack Europe. In short, he wanted to know the costs of protecting Europe as well as the U.S. He asked whether including these medium-range strike targets in the initial attack would “so enlarge the target list as to preclude tactical surprise.”

Question #4: “I am concerned,” Kennedy said, “over my ability to control our military effort once a war begins. I assume I can stop the strategic attack at any time, should I receive word the enemy has capitulated. Is that correct?”

He posed four more questions along similar lines, wondering whether he could avoid “redundant destruction” and recall subsequent weapons if the first nuke aimed at a target achieved its “desired results.” If his decision to attack turned out to have been prompted by a false alarm, he wanted to know his options for recall.

The following day’s National Security Council meeting failed to provide clear answers to many of the president’s questions. It also showed how divided Kennedy’s advisers remained over the notion of a limited nuclear war. The Strategic Air Command’s General Tommy Power said, “The time of our greatest danger of a Soviet surprise attack is now and during the coming year. If a general atomic war is inevitable, the U.S. should strike first” after identifying the essential Soviet nuclear targets.

Power had directed the firebombing raids on Tokyo in March 1945 and was deputy chief of operations for U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific during the atomic bomb strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He had assisted General Curtis E. LeMay in building up the Strategic Air Command after he joined it in 1948, and under them it had become its own fiefdom. Brutal and easily angered, Power passionately believed the only way to keep nuclear-armed communists in check was if they believed they would be annihilated if they misbehaved.

When briefed on the long-term genetic harm done by nuclear fallout, Power once responded with perverse humor, “You know, it’s not yet been proved to me that two heads aren’t better than one.” National Security Advisor Bundy was thinking of Power when he warned Kennedy that a subordinate commander had authority “to start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative” if he couldn’t reach the president after a Soviet attack.

Power argued to Kennedy that the Soviets were concealing “many times more” missiles than CIA spy photos revealed. He complained that he lacked intelligence on Soviet ICBM sites, and added that he believed the U.S. had only 10 percent photographic coverage of the Soviet Union. He told the president that twenty ICBM pads had been located, but that many times more might be in unmonitored areas. Lacking crucial data on the extent of the Soviet missile force, Power strongly recommended to Kennedy that he resume the U-2 flights he had promised Khrushchev he would prohibit.

Kennedy brushed aside Power’s advice. Instead, he was fixated on getting the answer to his question of whether he really could launch a surprise strike on the Soviet Union without devastating retaliation. He also tasked the generals “to come up with an answer to this question: How much information does the Soviet Union need, and how long do they need to launch their missiles?”

Martin Hillenbrand, director of the Office of German Affairs at the State Department, noticed that with each additional day Kennedy lived through the Berlin Crisis, “he became more and more impressed with its complexity and its difficulties.” For previous presidents, war was a cruel but desirable alternative to matters like Nazi viciousness or Japanese aggression. But for Kennedy, in Hillenbrand’s view, war had become “almost identical with the problem of human survival.”

With that sense of moment, on October 10 Kennedy called together top administration officials and military commanders in the Cabinet Room to finalize nuclear contingency plans for Berlin. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze brought with him a document entitled Preferred Sequence of Military Actions in a Berlin Conflict.

Cool and rational, at age fifty-four Nitze had already become perhaps the most crucial U.S. player behind the scenes influencing policies that guided the development of nuclear weapons and governed their control. Reflecting on the failure of well-meaning actors to avoid conflict, he never forgot his experience as a young boy when he witnessed the beginning of World War I while traveling through his ancestral home of Germany, where he saw Munich crowds cheer the coming disaster.

Assigned by presidents Roosevelt and Truman to survey the impact of World War II strategic bombing, Nitze saw German big cities in ruins and scrutinized the impact of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, nothing shaped his views about the importance of U.S. nuclear capability more than a preoccupation with strategic vulnerability that had grown out of his study of Pearl Harbor.

As Truman’s chief of policy planning after the war, replacing the fired George Kennan, Nitze was the principal author in 1950 of the pivotal paper United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, or NSC 68. In a world where the U.S. had lost its nuclear monopoly, NSC 68 provided the rationale for significantly increased defense spending and formed the core of U.S. security policy for the next four decades, with its warning of the “Kremlin’s design for world domination.” Nitze believed that if Truman had not approved the development of the hydrogen bomb in that year, against considerable opposition, “the Soviets would have achieved unchallengeable nuclear superiority by the late 1950s.”

As two Democratic hawks, Acheson and Nitze were chairman and vice chairman of the party’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, which laid the foundation for Kennedy’s defense stance and notions of “flexible response” after his nomination.

Like Acheson, Nitze considered Berlin a proving ground for broader communist objectives to psychologically defeat the West by showing its impotence in the face of increased Soviet capabilities. Thus, he agreed with Acheson that the notion new talks could defuse the crisis was nonsense.

On August 13, Nitze had been at first furious that the U.S. had failed to respond in any way to the Berlin border closure. However, as the Pentagon further considered its response, he saw intelligence indicating that three Soviet divisions and two East German divisions had encircled Berlin. This suggested that Moscow was setting a trap in which the U.S. might knock down the barrier only to see the Soviets occupy all of Berlin. The Pentagon opted not to recommend a move against the Wall for fear it would bring a general war for which the U.S. was unready.

Now it was Nitze’s task to sketch out how the U.S. should get ready in preparation for another Berlin confrontation. After August 13, he was asked to bring together military representatives from Britain, France, and West Germany to agree on how to respond to the next Soviet provocation in Berlin.

To safeguard Berlin access, the document they produced laid out four detailed scenarios that would gradually escalate from small-scale conventional action to nuclear war. In drafting it, Nitze had seen “permutations expanded like possible successive moves in a game of chess,” until someone suggested “it would take a piece of paper the size of a horse blanket to write them all down.” It was then that the group came up with an abbreviated military response plan for Berlin that they called the “Pony Blanket.” Nitze was satisfied that he had transformed a program of mounting pressures into an organized and coherent framework that gave America and its allies greater confidence.

Kennedy arrived late at the NSC meeting to discuss the paper. Rusk had reported to the group that Moscow would withdraw its deadline on the East German peace treaty if talks with the U.S. proved promising. However, Rusk still believed a military buildup was necessary in Europe. Secretary McNamara then sketched out his recommendations.

Kennedy quickly approved them all. They included the deployment to Europe, starting on November 1, of eleven Air National Guard squadrons; the return to Europe from the U.S. of seven Air Force squadrons from the Tactical Air Command; and the pre-positioning of sufficient equipment in Europe for one armored division and one infantry division. Through rotation, Kennedy would ensure he had at least two combat-ready battle groups plus their support elements. At the same time he would deploy to Europe the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and its intelligence detachment from Fort Meade, Maryland.

The president remained most concerned with how he would manage a limited nuclear conflict. His nightmare was losing control and witnessing the “funeral pyre” he’d spoken of at the United Nations less than a month earlier. Questioning Nitze’s document, what concerned him most was whether it would really be possible to use nuclear weapons selectively without escalation to all-out war.

On that point, Nitze disagreed with his boss McNamara and believed that an initial limited use of nuclear weapons “would greatly increase the temptation” of the Soviets for a strategic strike. Thus, he argued, “it would be best for us, in moving toward the use of nuclear weapons, to consider most seriously the option of an initial strategic strike of our own.” He thought it was the only way to be victorious in a nuclear exchange, because the U.S. could lose if it allowed the Soviets the first blow.

Characteristically, Kennedy quietly absorbed the details and the gravity of their conversation, interposing occasional questions, while the men around him continued to discuss the most chilling of scenarios.

Rusk was concerned that the military strategists had forgotten the moral context: “The first side to use nuclear weapons will carry a very grave responsibility and endure heavy consequences before the rest of the world,” he said.

Kennedy did not resolve the division of opinion in the room, but the group agreed to draft new instructions from the president to General Norstad, his Supreme Allied Commander Europe, to provide “clear guidance” on U.S. intentions for military contingencies.

^{WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{FRIDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1961}

In the ten days that followed, the president was occupied by little else apart from Berlin and its related nuclear questions, his hopes for negotiations with Moscow, and his growing difficulties with his own allies.

The Washington Post reported on efforts to end racial discrimination in Maryland restaurants. A story on the front page of the New York Times reported that Supreme Court justices were hearing arguments related to antidiscrimination sit-ins in the South. Police were enforcing carefully laid school desegregation plans while white-robed-and-hooded Ku Klux Klansmen protested.

However, the president was preoccupied by thoughts of war and how he would conduct it. His concerns were infecting the American public. Time magazine ran on its cover a color portrait of Virgil Couch, head of the Office for Civil Defense. A banner headline announced: [NUCLEAR] SHELTERS: HOW SOON—HOW BIG—HOW SAFE? Couch advised Americans that planning for nuclear attack should be as normal as getting smallpox vaccinations.

With Khrushchev’s fifty-megaton announcement from three days earlier still reverberating, the president called together his top national security team to put the final touches on military instructions for NATO. It would not be an easy meeting.

His Joint Chiefs were engaged in verbal combat over Kennedy’s planned conventional military buildup in Europe and its potential impact on the credibility of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.

Already, France’s de Gaulle and Germany’s Adenauer were arguing that Kennedy was too eager to negotiate West Berlin’s future with Khrushchev while doing too little to convince Khrushchev that the president would be willing to use nuclear weapons to defend the city.

It seemed that only Macmillan agreed with Kennedy’s heightened desire for talks with Moscow. Having been so at odds with Kennedy’s hawkish approach toward the Soviets the previous spring, the prime minister saw with satisfaction that Kennedy was now embracing the more conciliatory British position toward Moscow. He was encouraged as he watched Kennedy grow increasingly “fed up” with both de Gaulle and Adenauer.

With the Allies deeply at odds over how to handle Berlin strategy, Kennedy made his move to settle differences. At the table for the 10:00 a.m. meeting in the Cabinet Room were the president’s brother Bobby, Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, and Lemnitzer. Beside him was Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, who had taken the Pentagon lead on Russian nuclear threat issues. The other major players on Berlin policy were also there: Nitze; Berlin Task Force chief Foy Kohler; the State Department’s leading German hand, Martin Hillenbrand; and—so often during crucial moments of the Berlin Crisis—the outside agitator, Dean Acheson.

Lemnitzer opened the meeting by reporting to the president on the “significant disagreement” within the Joint Chiefs about the necessity for a rapid military buildup. Air Force chief General Curtis LeMay and the Navy’s Admiral George Whelan Anderson Jr. shared General Norstad’s view that no large-scale conventional buildup was required in “the immediate future.” But Lemnitzer and General George Decker, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, agreed with McNamara that such a buildup was required right away.

Rusk laid out Norstad’s logic that a Berlin dispute would escalate so rapidly to nuclear war that a conventional buildup would be irrelevant. Beyond that, said Rusk, Norstad feared that the conventional buildup could “degrade both the credibility and capability of nuclear forces.” In representing this view, Norstad had joined ranks with both the French and Germans against the president.

As so often happened at complex times related to Berlin, Kennedy sought Acheson’s opinion. The memo summing up the meeting, drafted by Bundy, said with a tone of derision: “From that point on the meeting was dominated by Mr. Acheson’s arguments.” Bundy put it more graciously later: “As usual, Mr. Acheson was the belle of the ball.”

Acheson had no patience for Allied sensitivities. He said U.S. officials at a moment of great national urgency were spending too much time getting agreement from the French, British, West Germans, and others, when it was the U.S. that would have to shoulder the burden. Acheson argued that the U.S. needed to move new divisions to Europe by November, irrespective of what the Allies might think or say.

Acheson believed the president’s demonstration of intent by sending conventional forces to Europe would help “diplomatically and politically.” He disagreed that nuclear logic diminished the need for American conventional action. Serious military movement by the U.S. is “an ominous thing,” he said, that conveyed “the serious purpose of the American government.”

Kennedy said he worried about “the gold drain,” meaning the cost of such a move. McNamara and Gilpatric assured him that further negotiations with Allies could help spread or defray the costs.

A few hours after the meeting, Bundy would send a top-secret presidential letter to Norstad to which he attached the so-called Pony Blanket. Titled “U.S. Policy on Military Actions in a Berlin Conflict,” it would be approved by the president three days later as National Security Action Memorandum No. 109. Organized under four Roman-numeral stages, it laid out the graduated steps to be taken if the Soviets cut off access to Berlin.

• Stage I: If the Soviets and East Germans interfered with West Berlin access but didn’t block it entirely, the plan prescribed U.S., French, and British probes up the Autobahn of a platoon or less on the ground and a fighter escort in the air. The document noted that such a response was sufficiently limited to avoid any risk of war.

• Stage II: If the Soviets persisted in blocking access despite Allied actions, the West would escalate and NATO would begin supportive noncombatant activities such as economic embargoes, maritime harassment, and UN protests. The Allies would reinforce their troops and mobilize to prepare for further escalation. The document warned that without further buildup, Allied options would be limited and could create delays that could weaken nuclear credibility, threaten West Berlin’s viability, and erode Alliance resolve.

• Stage III: The West would escalate further against a continued communist blockade of West Berlin. That would include expanding ground operations on East German territory by such measures as sending three armored divisions up the Autobahn to West Berlin and establishing local air superiority through strikes on non-Soviet airfields. “Military overpowering of determined Soviet resistance is not feasible,” the report conceded, then added, “The risks rise, as do the military pressures on the Soviets.” Most controversially, Kennedy was calling at this point for global actions against Soviet interests. That would include exploiting U.S. naval superiority as part of a maritime blockade, which would further delay the moment of nuclear truth while diplomats bargained.

• That brought the report to the most ominous Stage IV: Only if the Soviets still did not respond to substantial use of Allied conventional weapons would Kennedy escalate to nuclear war. He would then have the choice of one or all of the following: selective strikes to demonstrate the will to use nuclear weapons; limited use of nuclear weapons to achieve tactical advantage; and, finally, general war.

With considerable understatement, the paper warned, “The Allies only partially control the timing and scale of nuclear weapons use. Such use might be initiated by the Soviets, at any time after the opening of small-scale hostilities. Allied initiation of limited nuclear action may elicit a reply in kind; it may also prompt unrestrained preemptive attack.”

It was a sobering document. Ten months into his presidency, Kennedy had laid out the military sequence that could result in nuclear war over Berlin.

In his accompanying letter to General Norstad, Kennedy wrote, “This requires vigor in preparation, readiness for action, and caution against going off half-cocked.” He said all contingencies required rapid additions to his forces and deployment to the central front. He told Norstad that if the Soviets deployed sufficient forces to defeat the West, then the response, for which he would receive specific directions, would be nuclear.

Kennedy argued to a skeptical Norstad—and by association, the French and Germans—that building up Allied conventional forces would not contradict the message he wished to send the Soviets that he was ready to go to nuclear war if necessary. “It seems evident to me,” Kennedy wrote Norstad, “that our nuclear deterrent will not be credible to the Soviets unless they are convinced of NATO’s readiness to become engaged on a lesser level of violence and are thereby made to realize the great risks of escalation to nuclear war.”

A flurry of diplomatic activity—memos, phone calls, meetings—accompanied Kennedy’s preparations for war. As so often at times of high stress, the president asked a wide group of experts to weigh in. Kennedy had asked them to be frank, and his trusted ambassador to the United Kingdom, David Bruce—a former ambassador to Germany—did not hold back.

Bruce said that through Kennedy’s acceptance of the Wall without any military response, the president had made the U.S. presence in Berlin more vulnerable and had eroded West Berlin and West German morale. The Soviets had always accepted the U.S. role in the city only because of the military impossibility of removing it.

Bruce warned the president that the Soviet objective wasn’t West Berlin itself but rather possession over time of “West Germany with its immense resources.” He worried as well about Kennedy’s wavering on the American commitment to the long-term goal of German unification. Bruce told Kennedy that it was those promises that had convinced Adenauer in 1953 to refuse “the tricky but tempting Soviet offer of reunification in favor of alliance with the NATO countries.” In other words, Bruce was saying, Kennedy’s willingness to depart from this commitment invited a German response that Washington might not like.

Using a captivating turn of phrase, Bruce argued that the reality of Germany’s division was not sufficient reason to give it official recognition as a permanent matter: “For no government in Western Germany could survive the open acceptance by its allies that what has at least until now been hope deferred is to be dismissed as forever hopeless” (italics added). Bruce was blunt: Kennedy had to face the historic burden of the problems he had helped to create. “We are close, I suppose, to the moment of decision,” he wrote. “I would consider it essential that we take, and make credible, the decision to engage if necessary in nuclear war rather than lose West Berlin, and consequently, West Germany.”

^{HOT SPRINGS, VIRGINIA}

^{SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1961}

Kennedy sensed that time was short.

Worried that Khrushchev might take military action soon, the president opted to launch a preemptive nuclear strike of a different sort that would reach Khrushchev as a humiliating blow at his October Party Congress.

Kennedy decided to make public previously secret details about the size, power, and superiority of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Kennedy’s satellite intelligence was making increasingly clear the extent of American nuclear dominance, but he reckoned Khrushchev lacked similar intelligence on U.S. capabilities.

President Eisenhower had never revealed what he knew about Soviet military inferiority because he did not want to accelerate Soviet efforts to arm up. It was lack of that intelligence that led Kennedy to falsely charge that Eisenhower had allowed a “missile gap” to form in Moscow’s favor. Ironically, Kennedy now argued that showing America’s hand was necessary to keep America safe. Not coincidentally, it was also smart politics.

Kennedy feared that he was looking weak to Moscow, the Allies, and Americans, when in truth he was strong enough to defeat Moscow or any other country in any military conflict. The president thought it would be too belligerent for him to send that message personally, so he picked for the job the number-two official at the Defense Department, Roswell Gilpatric, who was already scheduled to speak on October 21 to the Business Council in Hot Springs, Virginia.

It was an unlikely audience for such a significant moment, but the spokesman Kennedy had chosen was ideal. Gilpatric had become a personal friend of Jacqueline Kennedy, who called him “the second most attractive man” at the Pentagon, after McNamara. Kennedy liked and trusted the smooth, Yale-educated Wall Street lawyer. A young Pentagon strategist named Daniel Ellsberg drafted the speech, but the president himself collaborated on it with Bundy, Rusk, and McNamara.

Knowing nothing of the Bolshakov back channel or the exchange of private letters with Khrushchev, Ellsberg asked Kaysen whether it wouldn’t be more effective for Kennedy to send a more private message to the Soviet leader about U.S. superiority? Why all the noise? Couldn’t Kennedy just send him the precise coordinates of Soviet ICBMs and perhaps enclose copies of satellite photos?

However, that overlooked Kennedy’s desire for a highly public response to reassure his domestic and West European audiences. White House spokesmen invited top national reporters to Hot Springs and briefed them beforehand so that the speech’s importance wouldn’t be missed. “Berlin is the emergency of the moment because the Soviets have chosen to make it so,” Gilpatric said.

Gilpatric then provided previously undisclosed details on hundreds of intercontinental bombers, including some six hundred heavy bombers, which could devastate the Soviet Union with the help of highly developed refueling techniques. He spoke of land-based and carrier-based strike forces that “could deliver additional hundreds of megatons.” Gilpatric said the U.S. had tens of thousands of tactical and strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, with more than one warhead for each of them.

“Our forces are so deployed and protected that a sneak attack could not effectively disarm us,” he said. Even after enduring a surprise attack, Gilpatric said that U.S. destructive power would be far greater than any enemy could muster, and that America’s retaliatory force would survive better than that of the Soviets because of its concealment, its mobility, and its hardened targets.

“The Soviets’ bluster and threats of rocket attacks against the free world—aimed particularly at the European members of the NATO alliance—must be evaluated against the hard facts of United States nuclear superiority,” said Gilpatric. “The United States does not seek to resolve disputes by violence. But if forceful interference with our rights and obligations should lead to violent conflict—as it well might—the United States does not intend to be defeated” (italics added).

Finally, Kennedy had called Khrushchev’s bluff.

^{PALACE OF CONGRESSES, MOSCOW}

^{SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1961}

Given the drumbeat in Hot Springs, Virginia, Khrushchev, back in Moscow, began to worry that a Berlin conflict was coming.

During a break in the ongoing Moscow Party Congress, General Konev presented Khrushchev with evidence that the Americans were preparing for war. Though Konev remained by title the Soviet commander in Germany, Khrushchev considered much of his job to be as liaison, and the general was in Moscow as a party delegate.

Khrushchev would later recall that Konev brought him intelligence on exactly what day and hour the West would begin hostilities in Berlin. “They were preparing bulldozers to break down our border installations. The bulldozers would be followed by tanks and wave after wave of jeeps with infantry men.” Khrushchev believed that the action had been timed to coincide with the first days of his Party Congress.

Though there is no reason to doubt that Khrushchev got word of Clay’s unauthorized tank maneuvers, he could blame the timing of what followed more on his bothersome ally, Walter Ulbricht. Upset by Khrushchev’s decision in Moscow to abandon the East German peace treaty, Ulbricht decided again to take matters into his own hands in East Berlin. This time, however, he would face an America willing to push back.

The stage was set for the first and last direct U.S.–Soviet military confrontation.

18 SHOWDOWN AT CHECKPOINT CHARLIE

^{DAHLEM DISTRICT, WEST BERLIN}

^{SUNDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1961}

The evening that would trigger the year’s decisive crisis began innocently.

E. Allan Lightner Jr., America’s top diplomat in West Berlin, hurried his wife, Dorothy, so that they would not be late for a performance of an experimental Czech theater company across town in East Berlin. She had read about the show in a local paper, and it seemed an inviting diversion after two months and nine days of unrelenting pressure after the Berlin border closure.

It was crisp autumn weather in West Berlin’s smart Dahlem district, where the Lightners lived in a spacious villa that had been confiscated from a ranking Nazi after the war. Their neighbors were preparing for winter. Some had used the day to rake their lawns clean of brown and yellow leaves shed from beech and oak trees. Others were removing their heavy down comforters from storage to air them out across clotheslines and on balconies.

Though Lightner had failed to anticipate the Wall, it had done his career no harm. No posting had a higher profile than one on the Cold War’s fault line. Like many State Department wives of the time, Dorothy embraced her husband’s career and its privileges; staff considered her pushy and overly demanding of their services. The Lightners had always savored their outings in the Soviet zone, where the socialist world’s top artists performed. However, since August 13, their visits had taken on greater symbolic value. East Berliners who recognized Lightner would often thank him just for showing up.

Lightner knew there was a slim chance their journey across town would be more eventful than usual. That week, the so-called East German People’s Police, the Volkspolizei, or Vopos for short, had begun spot checking documents of Allied civilians. The move was not only in violation of the four-power procedures but it also contradicted Soviet instructions, most recently from Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, that the East Germans should change nothing at the border without Soviet sanction.

Ulbricht had apparently approved the move from his position in Moscow, where he was fuming over the content of Khrushchev’s speech to the Party Congress. Though Kennedy had considered the Soviet leader’s address to be belligerent, Ulbricht had focused instead on Khrushchev’s decision to extend his year-end deadline for a war-ending peace treaty. In Ulbricht’s view, Khrushchev was back to his old habit of dithering over Berlin at East German expense. Ulbricht’s own speech three days later had called the treaty a “task of the utmost urgency.” Ulbricht needed the treaty to consolidate his August triumph by further expanding his control of East Berlin while isolating and demoralizing West Berlin.

Yet words had never been enough with Khrushchev, so Ulbricht would unilaterally expand border inspections, figuring the West would complain but not resist after having accepted the far greater indignity of the border closure. In doing so, however, the East German leader was underestimating the determination of the newest U.S. factor on the ground: General Lucius Clay.

Together, Ulbricht and Clay would initiate a superpower confrontation that their masters in Moscow and Washington had neither wanted nor anticipated—though both adversaries would suspect the showdown was by the other side’s design.

Encouraged by Clay, that week Lightner had instructed his U.S. Mission to resist the new East German procedures. He had prohibited his staff from submitting to the checks, and his own secretary had turned back her car just a day earlier rather than show her papers. Lightner and Clay were livid that British Prime Minister Macmillan had accepted the new controls without a peep of protest, which they considered another dose of British appeasement. London’s orders to local commanders were clear: after ceding the wall, this wasn’t a battle worth fighting.

Clay disagreed. If Washington permitted the East Germans to interfere further with what had been Allied rights since 1945, Clay was convinced the U.S. would undermine already fragile West Berlin morale and erode what remained of Allied legal standing. Given his preparatory conversations in Washington, he also remained confident that Kennedy was more determined than his advisers to hold the line in Berlin. For the moment, however, his enemies had been pushing back because they sensed Clay lacked the influence with Kennedy that he had won with Truman.

So for Clay, the situation presented a triple opportunity. First, he could demonstrate renewed U.S. resolve in Berlin. Second, he could restore the self-confidence of both U.S. troops and West Berliners. Finally, he could demonstrate to his opponents in Moscow and Washington that he had President Kennedy’s backing.

There was only one problem: Clay himself was uncertain where his wavering president stood.

Unlike Clay, Lightner did not consider himself a Cold Warrior, but that’s what he was. The fifty-three-year-old Princetonian derided as “parlor pinks” his fellow Ivy League intellectuals who wrote and spoke naively about “the great Russian experiment” of communism. He grumbled to Dorothy that a couple of months in the Soviet Union would change their tune fast enough. Experience had shaped those views. Lightner had been posted as a young man to Stalin’s Russia, until 1941, when he’d evacuated wartime Moscow with the embassy’s documents. After that, he had worked with anticommunist exiles in Scandinavia, shared bomb shelters in London with intrepid Brits, and had a hand in sculpting the postwar agreements that he was sorry had ceded so much of Europe to Soviet control.

Lightner told friends that if Clay had been present on August 13, the U.S. military would have broken through the earlier barriers, and the East Germans would not have risked war to replace them. He bought into Clay’s argument that the U.S could not afford to retreat further, but he worried that Clay would not be able to overcome a far more bureaucratic U.S. structure in Berlin than the one he had faced in 1948. Lightner bridled at his own confusing, double reporting line—as the number two to both General Watson in Berlin and Ambassador Dowling in Bonn.

As that night’s script would have it, East German police stopped Lightner’s Volkswagen sedan as it snaked through the first of the checkpoint’s three low red-and-white zigzag concrete barriers—two jutting out from the curbside to the left and another reaching in from the right. Following procedure, Lightner refused to show his papers to the East Germans and insisted on seeing a Soviet representative. Most often, the East German police would then wave American diplomats through. Under the new orders, however, the East German officer refused to let Lightner pass. Given it was Sunday, he said he could not reach a Soviet representative and then repeated his demand that Lightner show his papers or turn back.

Again Lightner refused, and was now egged on by Dorothy, who lectured the East German on four-power rights from the passenger side of their car. For the next forty-five minutes, tempers flared, voices rose, and arguments raged, but still no Soviet official appeared. So Lightner concluded it was time to escalate. After sending an alert through to Clay from his special car phone, Lightner prepared to muscle through. Though he knew the Vopos had shoot-to-kill orders for countrymen trying to escape, he thought it was a safe risk that they would not shoot an American diplomat trying to enter. That would be an act of war.

“Look,” Lightner said to the policeman by his window, “I’m sorry, but I’m going to assert my Allied right for us to enter any sector of Berlin.”

He gunned his engine.

“Get out of the way! We’re coming through!”

Lightner jerked his car forward, forcing a couple of Vopos to leap aside. However, the vehicle could negotiate the tight, concrete maze only in slow motion. So an expanded group of Vopos on foot caught up to the car and stopped him again. This time they surrounded his vehicle.

One shouted angrily: “You can wait here until morning for a Russian to show up! If he shows up even then!”

In the background, Clay had begun moving the military pieces. He had ordered forward a platoon from the 2nd Battle Group to make its way the ten miles to Checkpoint Charlie from McNair Barracks in Lichterfelde with two armored personnel carriers, closely trailed by four M48 tanks mounted with bulldozers. To direct the operation, Clay and the Berlin military commander, General Watson, had retreated to the emergency operations center, known as “the bunker,” established for just such an event in the basement of the U.S. consulate on the Clayallee. Though built initially in 1936 as a subheadquarters for the Third Reich’s Luftwaffe, the building had served as Clay’s nerve center during the Berlin Airlift and it would do so again now.

As the drama unfolded, U.S. provost marshal Lieutenant Colonel Robert Sabolyk monitored the scene at Checkpoint Charlie through binoculars from his white wooden military police shack a hundred yards away from the confrontation. With orders to keep matters under control until reinforcements arrived, the former collegiate boxer jumped into his staff car and sped forward around the first barrier, then steered wide around the second, screeching to a halt directly in front of Lightner’s Volkswagen. He nearly amputated the black-booted legs of several Vopos, who jumped back and screamed in protest.

About then, four American tanks rumbled up to the thick white-painted borderline that designated the West Berlin limits. Another MP ran from the command shack to Dorothy Lightner’s door and politely suggested she leave the immobilized VW. She refused to budge from her husband’s side.

So the MP retreated to the shack, only to return several minutes later. “I’m sorry, but General Clay orders Mrs. Lightner to get out,” he said.

He added in a whisper to her husband, so as not to be overheard by the Vopos: “We have a project in which we don’t want Mrs. Lightner to be involved.”

Once the MP had cleared her from the scene, two infantry squads of four men each unsheathed the bayonets of their M14 rifles and took up positions on either side of Friedrichstrasse. With the gun barrels of four U.S. tanks pointing directly at them, the Vopos pulled back. Lightner shifted into first gear and drove his VW slowly forward, flanked by the two U.S. Army squads. Having passed the last barrier and thus successfully penetrated communist territory, the platoon leader asked Lightner whether they should stop there.

“No,” the diplomat said.

It was the first time in postwar Berlin that a fully armed infantry unit from U.S. occupying forces had marched into the Soviet sector. To further establish the continued right of Allied free passage, Lightner drove two blocks into East Berlin to the next intersection, then turned the car around and started back—all the time escorted by his armed guard. With U.S. cannons trained on them, East German police held their positions.

Safely back on American ground, Lightner prepared to drive through a second time to make his point. By this time, word of the confrontation had spread across Berlin. Reporters and photographers had gathered to track each move. With his heart beating through his chest, Albert Hemsing jumped into Lightner’s passenger seat. The German-born forty-year-old public information officer had worked for the Marshall Plan’s film unit in Paris after the war, making movies to support the European reconstruction effort. But he’d never been in this sort of action adventure. Vopos would later insist his breath smelled of alcohol.

When East German police blocked Lightner’s path again, he waved out his window for the armed units to rejoin him. They escorted him through once more, and the East Germans again stood aside. In the meantime, the U.S. Mission’s political adviser, Howard Trivers, had telephoned Soviet headquarters to request that a Russian officer come to Checkpoint Charlie and set matters straight.

By the time Lightner’s VW returned from its second round-trip, a Soviet representative had arrived. Following talks with the Vopos and the Americans, the Soviet apologized that the East Germans had failed to recognize Lightner’s seniority. So Lightner drove through a third time, on this occasion trailed by a second civilian car. The Vopos stood aside again, and it seemed that the U.S. victory was complete.

The two U.S. vehicles then engaged in something of a victory lap, driving up Friedrichstrasse to Unter den Linden, East Berlin’s broad central boulevard, then turning left at the Brandenburg Gate, and then turning left again back to Friedrichstrasse. At about 10:00 p.m., a more senior Soviet official arrived, the deputy political adviser Colonel Lazarev. He apologized for the East German behavior, blaming it on the lack of facsimiles of Allied license plates from which they could judge which vehicles were to be checked. However, at the same time he angrily protested the U.S. “armed incursion” into the Soviet zone.

Lightner and his wife had missed their theater date, but Clay congratulated them on their performance. The next morning Clay crowed to the press that the “fiction is now destroyed” that it was the East Germans who were responsible for preventing Allied access to East Berlin.

His victory, however, would be a brief one. The same morning, the East German government published an official decree that it would henceforth require all foreigners—except Allied military men in uniform—to show ID before entering “democratic” Berlin. The East German news agency ADN condemned the Sunday-evening incident as a “border provocation” prompted, it said, by an unknown civilian (Lightner) with an unknown woman (Dorothy), later to be joined by a drunk (Hemsing).

Once East German radio had the names of the Americans involved, it beamed a broadcast in English aimed at U.S. soldiers: “It will be a long time before Minister Lightner takes his girlfriend out and tries to shack up with her in East Berlin over the weekend.”

Back in Washington, Kennedy was annoyed. The president was trying to launch negotiations with the Soviets, not provoke a new confrontation. “We didn’t send [Lightner] there to go to the opera in East Berlin,” he said, getting the event wrong and overlooking the fact that Lightner had acted according to the guidelines of his own personal representative.

At the same time, Kennedy was dealing with another problem. Just four days earlier Clay had tabled an offer to resign if he wasn’t allowed to be more effective. The president could prevent a political earthquake only by providing Clay more freedom to maneuver.

^{U.S. MILITARY HEADQUARTERS, WEST BERLIN}

^{WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 1961}

Mounting frustration had prompted General Clay to include an offer to resign in the first personal letter he had written to President Kennedy since his return to Berlin.

National Security Advisor Bundy had warned Kennedy when he chose Clay that he was risking “another MacArthur–Truman affair,” recalling the politically damaging decision by President Truman to fire General MacArthur after the general had publicly disagreed with the president’s Korean War policy. MacArthur had wanted to bomb China at the time, and Bundy reckoned there was every chance Clay would want to be more aggressive in Berlin than Kennedy, at a time when his administration was considering making major Berlin concessions to Khrushchev.

Though in his letter Clay offered to step down more quietly than MacArthur had done, he must have known that the reasons for his departure from Berlin would almost certainly leak and then only further inflame Kennedy’s critics and more deeply dishearten Berliners.

Clay began by apologizing to the president for his letter’s length, 1,791 words, and for the fact that he hadn’t written earlier. He explained to Kennedy that he considered the many other incidents he had confronted since his arrival in Berlin not to have been worthy of presidential attention.

Above all, he wrote the president, “we must retain the confidence of West Berliners. Otherwise, the flight of capital and responsible citizens could destroy our position here, and the indicated loss of confidence in us would spread throughout the world.” While the Berliner cared little about French or British behavior, Clay argued, “if we fail, he is dismayed.”

Clay held no punches. He indirectly criticized the president’s handling of the August 13 border closure, which he believed could have been contested with little risk. “I do not believe we should have gone to war to stop the creation of the Wall,” he said, but he added, “At a minimum, we could have moved back and forth across selected places on the border with unarmed military trucks and this limited action might well have prevented the Wall.”

However, Clay was quick to blame not Kennedy but rather his Berlin underlings. “I was amazed to find that no specific action to this end was recommended here,” he said. He criticized what he considered a risk-averse culture that had evolved among his Berlin ranks. “It takes only a few disapprovals to discourage independent thinking and positive recommendations,” he said. He worried that Kennedy lacked access to more independent viewpoints like his own because even “as able a Commander as [NATO Supreme Commander Lauris] Norstad” was influenced by Allied reluctance.

Clay then came to the point: the “urgent need to stop the trespassing on our rights” by East German forces “while Soviet forces have been far in the background.” He did not like the fact that the European Command was “tossing aside lightly” his recommendations that the U.S. must answer minor incidents. He wanted the president to give him more personal authority to address such tests of American will as the East German border checks, because their sum total was more serious than Kennedy’s foreign policy advisers realized.

The general wrote with the self-assurance of a man who knew he had shaped history through the same sort of direct communication with a previous president. “If we are to react properly and promptly,” he said, “the local commander must have the authority in an emergency to act immediately with my advice and consent within the full range of the authority you have delegated to our Military Command in Europe.”

Clay wanted the president to free General Watson, the local Berlin commander, of the constraints being placed upon him by General Clarke in Heidelberg and General Norstad in Paris. While he acknowledged that the U.S. could not alter the Berlin situation militarily, he said, “We can lose Berlin if we are unwilling to take some risk in using force…. We could easily be backed into war by failing to make it clearly evident on the ground that we have reached the danger point.”

Clay defended the actions he had taken thus far, which he knew Kennedy’s advisers had opposed, particularly in freeing the Steinstücken refugees and running military patrols on the Autobahn. He insisted, “These few simple actions on our part have eased tension here and restored confidence in West Berlin.” He told the president it had to be a priority of the U.S. to defend its right of free passage across Checkpoint Charlie, not for its own sake but because West Berliners were watching. For that reason, Clay said, he was “pushing as many vehicles as possible through each day.”

Though the president had not asked him to do so, Clay then laid out a military contingency plan for Kennedy should the Soviets push back, much as he had done for Truman after the Soviet embargo: “If we are stopped on the highway [to Berlin], we must probe quickly and, I would think, from Berlin with light military strength to find out the depth of the intent [of the enemy]. If our probe is stopped by superior force and compelled to withdraw, we should resort to an immediate airlift concurrently and publicly apply economic sanction and blockade in an attempt to force Soviet action. If these steps are taken concurrently there will be no panic in West Berlin and we will gain the time for you to make the ultimate decision with calm and objective judgment.”

When Clay mentioned “the ultimate decision,” Kennedy would know he was speaking of nuclear conflict. Clay wrote coolly, “If our probe results in the destruction and capture of the force involved, it is of course evident that the Soviet government wants war.”

Clay closed by promising to write shorter correspondence in the future. He wrote of how honored he was to serve as Kennedy’s point man in Berlin, but added, “I realize no one knows quite what this means.” He warned Kennedy that “any failure to act positively and determinedly with me here in this capacity will be assumed to have your direct approval…. I do not believe that you sent me here to live in a vacuum and I know that I can be of no real service if it is deemed wise to be extremely cautious in Berlin” (italics added).

What followed was the general’s resignation offer. In his military career, Clay had gained something of a reputation for his occasional threats to step down, and in almost all of those cases it had achieved his purpose. Clay had found that a resignation offer was sometimes the only way to get his superiors’ attention.

Clay weighed each word carefully, expressing the loyalty of a soldier to his commander in chief, but questioning how he could continue to serve effectively under the existing circumstances. “I may add, too, that I did not come here to add to your problems and that I am gladly expendable. I do want you to know that I would never permit myself to be made into a controversial figure in these critical times and that if you decide, or if I find that I must report to you, that I serve no useful purpose here, I would withdraw only in a manner which would meet with your approval and would not add to the problem here.”

With that, he signed off:

^PARIS

^{MONDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1961}

At Kennedy’s instruction, the U.S. ambassador to Paris, General James M. Gavin, had arranged a meeting with President Charles de Gaulle to respond to the French leader’s letter that Kennedy had read with considerable irritation just two days earlier.

At a time when Kennedy badly wanted a common Allied front behind his desire to engage Moscow in new Berlin talks, de Gaulle had become his most troublesome ally and was egging on West German Chancellor Adenauer as well. De Gaulle had refused to join even the preliminary discussions among the Americans, British, and West Germans regarding the possibility of new negotiations with the Soviets—and no amount of cajoling or wooing seemed to move him.

De Gaulle had disapproved of the Rusk–Gromyko talks that had taken place so soon after the border closure because they gave the impression that the U.S. had accepted Berlin’s permanently divided state and was willing to discuss with Moscow a recognition of that status. He worried further that Kennedy was even willing to discuss with the Soviets the future of West Germany’s alliance membership. The French leader saw no circumstances under which talks with Khrushchev could result in anything but further concessions that would negatively alter the political balance in Europe and “create a psychological demoralization, difficult to contain, in the countries that belong to our alliance, particularly in Germany, and could encourage the Soviets to undertake a further advance.”

In his letter, de Gaulle had discarded all of the fatherly warmth he had shown during Kennedy’s Paris visit ahead of Vienna. His language was clear and tough: “I must say, Mr. President, that today more than ever, I believe the policy to be pursued should be as follows: to refuse to consider changing the status quo of Berlin and the present situation in Germany, and consequently [to refuse] to negotiate concerning them, so long as the Soviet Union does not refrain from acting unilaterally and so long as it does not cease to threaten.”

As harsh as it was, de Gaulle’s letter had merely built upon a confrontational tone he had established with Kennedy immediately following August 13. As early as two weeks after that, Kennedy had asked for de Gaulle’s help in influencing Third World opinion against communism. He also had said he wanted French assistance in his efforts to reach out to Moscow for new negotiations on Berlin.

De Gaulle rejected Kennedy’s plea for help in the Third World, arguing that underdeveloped countries lacked the West’s burden of responsibility, and “for the most part have already made up their minds, and you know in what way.” De Gaulle was all the more clear in his opposition to new talks with the Soviets due to “the threats that they are hurling at us and the actual acts that they are committing in violation of agreements.”

The French president warned Kennedy that any negotiations so closely following the August border closure would be understood by the Soviets as “notice of our surrender” and thus would be a grave blow to NATO. Khrushchev, he wrote, would only use the talks to apply greater pressures to Berliners.

Despite two months of U.S. diplomatic efforts since then to win over de Gaulle, including Kennedy’s personal correspondence, the French leader had only hardened his position. On October 14, Kennedy had informed de Gaulle that he had achieved a “breakthrough” with Moscow in that Khrushchev had agreed to negotiate directly with the Allies over Berlin and not require them to deal with East Germany. Kennedy had said that he hoped to organize a mid-November meeting of Allied foreign ministers to prepare for new Berlin negotiations with Moscow. Kennedy had assured de Gaulle, “We have no intention of withdrawing from Berlin nor do we intend to give our rights away in any negotiations.” He argued, however, that the Allies should make every diplomatic effort possible before Berlin moved “to the stage of great and dramatic crisis.” Kennedy said what he wanted was Allied clarity of purpose and military preparation “before the ultimate confrontation.”

De Gaulle scoffed at Kennedy’s notion that Khrushchev had made a concession regarding East Germany. He dismissed Kennedy’s fear of war, saying Khrushchev “does not give the impression that the Kremlin is really prepared to hurl the thunderbolt. A wild beast that is going to spring does so without waiting that long.”

With that as prelude, Ambassador Gavin knew that he was in for a difficult meeting. Kennedy had chosen Gavin for the Paris job in part because his military record made him one of the few men available whom de Gaulle respected. He had been the youngest major general to command a division in World War II, and his men called him “Jumping Jim” for his willingness despite his rank to join combat drops with his paratroopers. Nevertheless, de Gaulle spoke to him with characteristic condescension.

De Gaulle told Gavin that although he would do nothing to prevent the U.S. from holding a November meeting of the Allies, Kennedy would have to do so without French participation.

Gavin asked whether de Gaulle didn’t think it would be better to participate and make clear in a common Allied front “our intent to engage in hostilities” if the Soviets pursued their current course.

De Gaulle told Gavin he believed the Soviets had only two options, and neither of them required negotiations. Either the Soviets did not want to wage a general and nuclear war, as de Gaulle believed was the case—thus there was no hurry to talk to them—or they did want to go to war, in which circumstance the Allies should refuse talks because they then “would be negotiating under direct threat.”

“One cannot make working arrangements with people who are threatening them,” de Gaulle told Gavin. Driving home his point, de Gaulle said the Allies could not negotiate with the Soviets “when they have threatened us with the atomic bomb, built the wall in Berlin, threatened to sign a treaty with East Germany with no promise to guarantee access to Berlin, and indulged in saber-rattling in general.” His recipe: “If they apply force, we will do the same and see what happens. Any other stand would be very costly for not only Germany but for all alike.”

As had been the case with his predecessors in the White House, Kennedy was losing his patience with de Gaulle, who was all too willing to risk American lives over Berlin. Kennedy’s frustrations were mounting as he wrestled with the incalculable Soviets, uncooperative allies, and a retired general in Berlin who was playing by his own rules and now even trying to interfere in diplomacy.

^{U.S. MILITARY HEADQUARTERS, WEST BERLIN}

^{MONDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1961}

Emboldened by the success of his military escorts, Clay decided it was time to provide Washington with advice about how it could couple a negotiating initiative with military muscle-flexing. He wrote down his thoughts in a cable to Secretary of State Rusk, one of his key opponents in Washington.

Clay said he agreed with Rusk’s view that the matter of showing identification papers at East German border points was not by itself a matter of “major import,” but nevertheless he insisted that the U.S. had to push back. “I do not believe,” he told Rusk, repeating the message he had sent to the president, “that we can afford to have any remaining right taken away from us prior to and without negotiation as we would then enter into negotiations with only those rights left which we are committed to maintain by force if necessary.”

Therefore he “urgently recommended” that Rusk summon the Russian ambassador and advise him that the U.S. rejected the new East German border regime and would refuse to join any talks with the Russians on Berlin until the East Germans reversed their decree. He argued that this would improve the American position in Berlin, test Khrushchev’s goodwill for negotiations, and more closely align the U.S. approach on Berlin talks with the harder-line views of the French and the West Germans.

Clay made the case to Rusk that using the border dispute for diplomatic leverage right away was a more promising track than the continuation of his armed escorts, for he realized they would ultimately run up against vast Soviet conventional superiority. Clay thus announced that he would stop his probes at Checkpoint Charlie after only one day’s execution so that Rusk could pursue the diplomatic path that Clay believed he had made possible.

“We will avoid a test at Friedrichstrasse today awaiting your consideration of this recommendation,” he said, then added, “We must probe not later than tomorrow.”

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

^{TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1961}

The White House staff considered West German Ambassador Wilhelm Grewe to be the most unpleasant member of the foreign diplomatic corps. Humorless and condescending, Grewe had been so open about his disdain for Kennedy’s so-called New Frontiersmen that Adenauer himself had reproached him.

Given Ambassador Gavin’s failure to move de Gaulle the day before, Kennedy did not look forward to his morning meeting with Grewe in the Oval Office. He was irritated by increasing leaks to the U.S. and European media about French and German opposition to his desire for a new round of Berlin negotiations, and he wanted them to stop.

Ambassador Grewe dispensed with small talk and spoke of the chancellor’s concern about Kennedy’s lack of commitment to West Berlin and to German unification more generally. Grewe had the dry, prosecutorial bearing that came with being one of his country’s leading international lawyers. He had negotiated the end of the Allied occupation of West Germany and had been instrumental in creating the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, the tough policy which dictated that West Germany would not establish or maintain diplomatic relations with any country that recognized East Germany.

Grewe said Adenauer was prepared to go to war to defend Berlin’s freedom. To prepare for that, he said, the chancellor was increasing his military budget and building up forces even as he built his new coalition government. However, Grewe said that Adenauer worried about Kennedy’s plan for a conventional buildup in Europe. He “considered that such operations would only be convincing if we were prepared to follow them with a preemptive nuclear strike if that became necessary.”

The German fear, Grewe said, was that a greater Allied reliance on conventional forces could create a situation where a lack of clearly defined or believable nuclear deterrent encouraged Soviet forces to “cross the border and occupy considerable areas” of West Germany, a potential he compared to the Chinese situation in 1947 when communist troops took the mainland. “The decision to use nuclear weapons,” said Grewe, “must be made clear to the Soviets as well as the fact that the Soviet Union itself would be a target.”

Kennedy did not betray his growing impatience with Allied lectures about what sorts of risks he should take with American lives over Berlin. He lied to Grewe that he was eager to meet with Adenauer, a meeting that was planned for mid-November, and that he hoped they could get on the same page regarding policy toward the Soviets. The president said he “deplored” press reports suggesting the two sides were at odds over opening talks with Moscow. He wanted to probe Khrushchev’s more flexible ideas about what might constitute a free West Berlin. “I personally would feel much better if we did this before we got to the nuclear stage,” he told Grewe.

Kennedy complained to Grewe that de Gaulle “apparently felt that every move toward the Soviets was a manifestation of weakness.”

Grewe knew Adenauer had the same concerns. Like de Gaulle, Adenauer was deeply displeased by the Rusk–Gromyko talks. Beyond that, Grewe said Adenauer worried that the U.S. was abandoning its traditional support of German unification through its de facto recognition of East Germany, by encouraging closer contacts between the two Germanys, and by abandoning its support for the ultimate goal of German unity through free elections.

Impatient with the same old complaints, Kennedy responded that the U.S. and West Germany “should be looking for new approaches” to the Soviets. Kennedy told Grewe that he saw no prospect of unification in the foreseeable future and did not believe the Allies should stand pat on the West Berlin situation. He was looking for ways to improve the city’s current status, and for that he wanted Adenauer’s help.

Reflecting Adenauer’s own contempt for Kennedy’s belief in “new approaches,” Grewe echoed de Gaulle’s view that there was no practical possibility of achieving any improvement with the Soviets, as Moscow’s approach for the moment was to seek further concessions that the West must resist. He detailed for Kennedy the cost thus far to Germans and Adenauer of the president’s acquiescence to the border closure.

Before August 13, Grewe said, Berlin had enjoyed a daily average of 500,000 border crossings of families, friends, and workers, which closely linked the two cities and their peoples. These had been reduced to about 500, he said. Because of Adenauer’s “reserved and moderate” response to the Berlin Wall’s construction, Grewe told Kennedy that the chancellor had lost his majority and had nearly lost the elections a little more than a month earlier.

Kennedy reminded Grewe that the alternative to talks with the Soviets on Berlin was “the real prospect of a military engagement.” The U.S. would not give Berlin away, he said, but on the other hand he wanted to be sure “when we come to the end of the road” that no one wondered whether force might have been avoided through more effort at talks. Kennedy impatiently told Grewe that instead of just shooting down U.S. ideas, Germany should provide “proposals of its own which it would regard as acceptable.”

Stung, Grewe said that the West Germans were also looking for ways to change the Berlin situation for the better but did not believe for the moment that such an outcome could be achieved. He dismissed as unattainable the notion he had heard from some Kennedy administration sources of Berlin hosting the UN headquarters. At best, he said, such a far-fetched idea could be an opening gambit in negotiations.

After a perfunctory handshake, Grewe returned to the embassy to send home another grim cable to Adenauer.

^{U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{TUESDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 24, 1961}

Secretary Rusk was irritated that General Clay was providing him with un-solicited advice on how to conduct diplomacy with Moscow, then unilaterally making deployment decisions at Berlin’s border connected to those suggestions. On Rusk’s behalf, Berlin task force chief Foy Kohler called Allan Lightner at nine in the evening German time to get him back on the State Department reservation and to pull him out from under General Clay’s seductive spell.

Speaking to Lightner, Kohler shot down Clay’s advice that Rusk should use the unfolding border dispute as leverage for negotiations with Moscow. Beyond that, he reminded a defensive Lightner that he reported to Rusk and not to Clay. In his memo to Rusk afterward that reported on his chat with Lightner, Kohler complained, “The conversation was almost entirely in double-talk.”

Lightner assured Kohler that his role in the border-crossing incident two days earlier had been “entirely unexpected and rather embarrassing.” In all his life as a diplomat, Lightner had never encountered so much media attention, ranging from sneering insinuations in the communist press that he was crossing to meet with his mistress to excessive praise in the West Berlin press that the top American in Berlin was finally demonstrating U.S. testicles.

Kohler joked that Lightner’s name had become “a household word in the U.S.” overnight, which in the publicity-shy State Department wasn’t a compliment. What bothered Kohler more, he said, was that Clay had suspended the border crossings without Washington’s clearance, which Kohler called “a serious tactical mistake.” He believed the Soviet official’s eventual appearance at the border crossing on October 22 had achieved the U.S. purpose of showing that it remained the Soviets and not the East Germans who would guarantee U.S. free passage in East Berlin.

In putting a stop to the military escorts, Lightner apologized to his superiors in Washington that he had been “overruled by a higher authority,” namely Clay. At the same time, he wanted to know what Rusk thought of Clay’s ingenious idea of calling in the Soviet ambassador and informing him that the U.S. would refuse to negotiate with Russia until the East Germans canceled their expanded border inspections.

Kohler said Clay’s proposal was being considered but that many other factors would play into the decision of when and how to talk to the Russians. Thus, Rusk wanted Clay to resume his probes with “both armed and unarmed escorts of U.S. vehicles” if the East Germans continued to refuse American rights of free passage.

With that, General Clay had clear instructions to resume his escorts. The slap on Clay’s hand, however, was just as unmistakable. Rusk wanted him to stay out of U.S.–Soviet diplomacy, which was none of his business. For whatever reason, Clay’s superiors were encouraging his more assertive course but refusing to connect it with a more assertive diplomacy.

The outcome was destined to be an unhappy one.

^{CHECKPOINT CHARLIE, WEST BERLIN}

^{FRIDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 27, 1961}

United States Army First Lieutenant Vern Pike had two concerns as he looked down the enemy tank barrels, adjusted his green army helmet with the bold white “MP” emblazoned across its front, and ensured his M14 rifle had its safety off, a bullet in its chamber, and its bayonet unsheathed.

Foremost in his mind, the twenty-four-year-old U.S. military police officer was worried for his wife, Renny, who at age twenty was increasingly pregnant with their twins. Pike had decided against sending her home for Christmas, as the young couple didn’t want to be separated for that long, but now that decision looked irresponsible.

That was due to his second fear. Pike knew from his training that the scene unfolding before him could escalate to war—perhaps even a nuclear one—and take with it him, his young bride, and their unborn twins, not to mention a good portion of the planet. All it would take was one nervous U.S. or Soviet trigger finger, he thought to himself.

It was just past nine in the evening, and ten American M48 Patton tanks were poised at the Friedrichstrasse crossing, facing an identical number of Soviet T-54 tanks about a hundred paces away. The showdown had begun to unfold several hours earlier in the afternoon when U.S. tanks had clanked up to the border as they had the two previous days to back up what were already becoming routine military escorts of American civilian cars into East Berlin.

At precisely 4:45 p.m., after another successful and uneventful operation, U.S. commanders had ordered the American tanks withdrawn to Tempelhof Air Base. Pike, whose military police platoon supervised Checkpoint Charlie, then took a cigarette break with Major Thomas Tyree, who commanded the tank group. From the warmth of a drugstore on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse, they looked out the window toward the East and turned to each other in disbelief.

“Do you see what I see?” said Tyree to Pike.

“Sir, those are tanks!” Pike responded with alarm. “And they aren’t ours.” He calculated that they were no more than seventy to a hundred yards from where they stood.

Though they looked to be newly built Soviet T-54 tanks, their national markings were obscured. All the more mysterious, the military personnel driving them and manning their guns appeared to be wearing unmarked black uniforms. If they were Soviet—and it was hard to imagine they were anything else—they were preserving deniability.

“Vern,” said Tyree, “I don’t know whose tanks those are, but get the hell to Tempelhof and get me my tanks back, quick as you can.”

“Yes, sir,” said Pike, glancing at his watch. The U.S. tanks had left ten minutes earlier, so it would not take long for him to catch them. He jumped into his military police car, a white Ford, and raced through Friday rush-hour traffic, weaving in and out with his siren blaring and his “gumball machine,” as he called his rooftop light, rotating. He caught up with the tanks just as they were arriving at their base.

Pike shouted out his window at the lead tank, which was driven by his Berlin neighbor, Captain Bob Lamphir. “Sir, we’ve got trouble at Checkpoint Charlie; follow me and let’s get back there as fast as we can go.”

“Whoopee!” yelped Lamphir as he ordered all the tanks to turn around and head back to the border. Pike later recalled how the thrill of impending danger surged through him: “Here we are at five o’clock in the afternoon rush hour on an October Friday in Berlin, racing down Mariendamm towards Checkpoint Charlie with my little MP car going bebop, bebop out in the front. And every living Berliner within eyesight gets the hell out of the way.”

Just before the American tanks had returned to the scene at 5:25 p.m., the Soviet tanks had withdrawn to parking areas on a vacant lot near East Berlin’s main boulevard of Unter den Linden. If not for all the potential peril, the scene had the atmosphere of a French farce, with the Soviet actors rumbling behind the curtain just as their American counterparts rushed onto the stage. In expectation that their opponents might return, the U.S. tanks remained and arranged themselves in defensive positions.

Some forty minutes later, at just past six in the evening, what appeared to be Russian tanks returned and assembled themselves with guns pointed across the line. A Washington Post reporter who had gathered at the crossing with dozens of other correspondents announced it was “the first time that the forces of the two wartime allies, now the world’s biggest powers, had met in direct and hostile confrontation.”

In reference to the lack of national markings, CBS Radio correspondent Daniel Schorr called them, “to borrow a term from Orwell…the un-tanks. Or we may one day hear that they were just Russian-speaking volunteers who had bought some surplus tanks and come down on their own.” Schorr reported on the curious scene: In the West, the American GIs sat atop their tanks, smoking, chatting, and eating dinner from mess kits. West Berliners, held back behind rope barriers, bought pretzel sticks from street vendors, and presented flowers to GIs. The Western scene was all lit by enormous floodlights beamed from the communist side—an effort to intimidate using superior wattage. On the Eastern side, the apparently Russian tanks sat in darkness with their black-uniformed crews. “What a picture for the history books!” Schorr exclaimed.

Clay required confirmation for his masters in Washington that they were Soviet. It was not an academic point: for the U.S., the danger of a confrontation with Soviet tanks was that it could turn into a general war. East German tanks posed another sort of difficulty, because their deployment was prohibited in East Berlin under the four-power agreements.

Under orders to ascertain the tanks’ origin, Pike and his driver Sam McCart climbed into an Army sedan and weaved through the barricades and down a side street well past the tanks, where they parked and then walked back. It was part of the surreal nature of the showdown that both sides continued to respect military freedom of movement at the border, so Pike could drive through without impediment.

Pike was surprised at the tanks’ illogical two-three-two formation, which made it impossible for the rear tanks to fire upon the enemy. Beyond that, they also were making themselves easy targets. Pike walked up to the rear tank and saw nothing to help his investigation: “no Russians, no East Germans, no one.” So he climbed onto the tank and down into the driver’s compartment. There he confirmed it was Soviet by the Cyrillic script on the controls and the Red Army newspaper by the brake handle, which Pike could identify, given his smattering of Russian. “Hey, McCart, look at this,” he said as he climbed out of the tank and showed him the newspaper that he had taken as evidence.

The tanks’ crews, about fifty men in all, were sitting on the ground a short distance away, apparently getting briefed on their mission. Pike walked up close enough to hear they were speaking Russian. When one of the Soviet officers spotted him, Pike turned to McCart and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

After driving back, they reported to Colonel Sabolyk, who was Pike’s superior, that the tanks were Soviet. When Pike explained how he had found out and showed the newspaper, Sabolyk said in shock, “You did what?”

The disbelieving colonel put Pike on the phone to the emergency operations center, which connected him with Kennedy’s special representative so he could hear for himself. “Whose tanks are they?” Clay asked.

“They are Soviet, sir,” Pike said.

“How do you know?”

When Pike told him, Clay was silent on the other end of the line. Pike felt as though he could hear him thinking, “Oh, God, a lieutenant has started World War Three.”

Pike had dared to undertake the mission partly because he felt young and invulnerable, but also because by then American soldiers thought little of Soviet discipline, morale, or military capability. Though GIs knew they were outnumbered, they also felt superior. When driving into West Berlin on the Helmstedt Autobahn from West Germany, Pike had seen Russian grunts hawking their belt buckles, caps, and even Soviet medals as souvenirs in exchange for Playboy magazines, chewing gum, ink pens, or especially cigarettes.

At less generous moments, GIs would flick burning cigarettes to the ground just to watch the Russians scramble to recover them for a few drags. Pike recalled later that their gear was of poor quality, their boots flimsy, their field jackets old; they looked to Pike like hand-me-downs from previous conscripts. He told friends that “their body odor would chase a buzzard off a shit wagon.”

Pike had little more regard for their tanks, which maneuvered badly. The drivers were often from Asian minorities, Pike had noticed, because he reckoned they were the only ones able to fit into compartments that had been built too small. He and his men chuckled when the first tanks had rolled up that day and officers standing on the road struggled to position them using exaggerated hand movements and semaphores, apparently to overcome language and handling difficulties.

But nothing was very funny about Pike’s realization that the Soviet army could “simply swat us out of the way if they ever decided to take the Western half of the city.” Pike recalled his orientation briefing when he had reported for duty in West Berlin.

“You are the first line of defense,” his commander had said. “The best way to get out of here if the balloon goes up is to put on a Strassenmeister [street cleaner] armband on your left arm, pick up a broom, and start sweeping down the Autobahn all the way to West Germany. That’s the only way you’re going to get out of Berlin alive.”

Pike had laughed then, but not now. He calculated the possible outcomes as he stamped his feet to stay warm. Either U.S. or Soviet leaders would blink and withdraw from the battlefield, or someone would shoot and a war would begin. In any case, he couldn’t imagine his wife, Renny, heavy with twins, grabbing for a broom and sweeping her way out of Berlin.

The scene before Pike varied between one of imminent threat and touching human drama.

At one point, an eighty-year-old East Berlin woman decided to take advantage of the confusion to simply walk across the border to escape as a refugee. From the West Berlin side and only thirty feet away from her, her son shouted repeatedly at her to keep walking though an East Berlin policeman blocked her path. The crowd watched in fear as her son shouted over and over again: “Mutter, komm doch, bitte!” (“Mother, come on, please!”).

The officer, whose standing orders were to shoot to kill those trying to flee, stood to the side and called off his dog in a random act of mercy. The old woman took ten more faltering steps before falling into her son’s arms as she crossed the line to freedom amid onlookers’ cheers.

Down the street from the unmarked Soviet tanks in the capitalist West, bathed in light from six high-powered searchlights mounted by the East Germans on wooden towers just the day before, four U.S. M48 Patton tanks rested, the first pair on the white painted line on Friedrichstrasse separating East and West. Two more tanks were in a lot just off Friedrichstrasse, and four more were poised for action a quarter mile away. Near them were five personnel carriers and five jeeps loaded with MPs wearing bulletproof vests and with bayonets fixed to rifles.

U.S. commanders had placed their entire 6,500-man garrison in Berlin on alert. The French command had ordered its 3,000 men held in barracks. The British had brought out two antitank guns near the Brandenburg Gate, about 600 yards away, and had sent armed patrols right up to the barbed-wire barricade at the gate. A New York Times reporter chronicled the scene for his readers: “It was like two chess players trying to come to grips in the middle of a disorganized board, with General Clay moving the American pieces and, presumably, Marshal Ivan S. Konev, the recently appointed Soviet Commander in East Germany moving the Soviet men…. As personal representative of President Kennedy, General Clay does not have a place in the regular chain of command. But…it is clear that his special position has given him the decisive voice in local decisions.”

Pike and his MPs were eager to stand up to the communists, having been frustrated that their commanders had kept them in barracks on August 13. It was three weeks after the border had been closed, and Pike and his men had been reduced to watching helplessly across the border as East German Young Pioneer construction brigades replaced the flimsy barbed-wire barrier with cinder blocks.

Pike had sought guidance from his superiors over whether he should do something to disrupt their handiwork, but he got what became a consistent message: U.S. soldiers should sit on their hands and watch the Wall rise.

On the evening of September 1, Pike would recall that one of the East Germans building the wall had glanced left and right to make sure no one was watching, and then said to him over the barbed wire, “Lieutenant, look how slowly I’m working. What are you waiting for?” He wanted the Americans to intervene.

Later, a police officer standing behind the worker said much the same: “Look, Lieutenant, my machine gun isn’t loaded. What are you waiting for?” In order to avoid an unwanted firefight, East German officers had not put bullets in the chambers of such border troops, and he was sharing that information with Pike so the U.S. would know it could strike.

Pike passed all that information to his superiors but was again told to show restraint.

The orders to begin the military escorts the previous Sunday were the biggest morale-booster of the year. Pike’s men were to hold the line, be vigilant, and fire upon communist border police should they engage. With rifles loaded and tanks protecting their rear, they had repeatedly guided Allied civilian cars and tourist buses through the border’s zigzag barriers.

Until Soviet tanks had rolled up that afternoon, the operation had worked as planned. Now all forces were frozen in place as commanders huddled in opposing headquarters on opposite sides of Berlin, awaiting instructions from Washington and Moscow.

Pike was relieved his fatigues were still dry. The paraphernalia he carried was hardly the stuff to stop Soviet tanks or infantry: an MP brassard wrapped around his upper left arm, a first-aid pouch, a canteen, handcuffs, a billy club, a .45 caliber automatic, and his rifle. Pike braced for a long and cold night. Looking through his binoculars at the young, frightened faces of his enemies, he worried “what would happen if one of those idiots took a shot at us—and then if the showdown became a shootout.”

Even as the Soviets were escalating their tank presence, Clay received new instructions from Washington to retreat. Rusk was warning Clay off the aggressive course Rusk himself had endorsed just three days earlier. Foy Kohler, the lead man at the State Department handling the Checkpoint Charlie showdown, had attached a note to Rusk’s cable that was intended to convince Clay that any appeal to Kennedy would be a waste of time. It read: “Approved by [Rusk] after consideration by the President.” Clay had seen plenty of political mushiness from Washington over the years, but nothing topped the message that followed.

“In the nature of things,” Rusk wrote, “we had long since decided that entry into Berlin is not a vital interest which would warrant determined recourse to force to protect and sustain. Having for this reason acquiesced in the building of the wall we must recognize frankly among ourselves that we thus went a long way in accepting the fact that the Soviets could, in the case of East Berlin, as they have done previously in other areas under their effective physical control, isolate their unwilling subjects.”

Rusk’s message was unmistakable: Clay should view Kennedy’s lack of resistance to the border closure as de facto acceptance that the Soviets could do whatever they wished on territory they currently controlled. Rusk said U.S. allies would not support stronger measures, “especially on the issue of showing credentials,” where the British had already caved.

Rusk conceded to Clay that Kennedy was having difficulty convincing the Allies of the “real prospect” of armed conflict over West Berlin. Consequently, while the Kennedy administration wanted to demonstrate the illegality of the East German and Soviet actions of August 13, “we have not wished this to go so far as to constitute simply a demonstration of impotence, to focus world-wide public attention on the wrong issue and to arouse hopes and expectations on the part of West Berliners and the West Germans who in the end could only be disillusioned,” Rusk explained.

Clay had never been more convinced that appeasement would only encourage the Russian bear. Because of that, earlier that same day he had sent a telegram calling for “a raid in force” to knock down portions of the Wall should the East Germans respond to ongoing U.S. actions by shutting down Friedrichstrasse altogether, which he considered possible.

He outlined how it would work: tanks with bulldozer mounts would cross legally into East Germany, which was technically allowed under four-power rights, but then they would plow demonstratively through sections of the Wall on their way back. On October 26, NATO Supreme Commander Norstad had authorized General Watson to use “the present [Clay] plan for ‘nosing’ down the Friedrichstrasse barrier” if the East Germans blocked the crossing entirely. He instructed Watson to prepare an alternative plan in which the tanks would “nose down” different portions of the Wall simultaneously, “if practicable from a military standpoint, at several [two or more] other places as well as the Friedrichstrasse.”

He had added as an unmistakable message to Clay: “This alternate plan will not under any circumstances be placed in action without specific approval from me.”

In fact, Rusk’s new cable had shot down Norstad and Clay at the same time. “I am unable to see what national purpose would be accomplished by the proposed raid in force,” wrote Rusk. He added that Clay’s lesser goal of using a tank to open up the Friedrichstrasse crossing would be discussed that afternoon with the president.

However, said Rusk, given the importance of keeping “the three principal Allies together it seems quite possible that we cannot get agreement on even this much.” Rusk expressed his appreciation for Clay’s counsel but told him that at the moment it was far more important to keep the Allies together “in the face of the grave Soviet threat while at the same time building up pressures on Soviets against further unilateral action.”

The great General Lucius Clay of the 1948 Berlin Airlift was being hog-tied by Washington while Soviet tanks were pointing their barrels down his throat.

He had never felt so powerless.

^{THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW}

^{FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1961}

Marshal Konev complained to Khrushchev that the U.S. tanks were gunning their engines at the border and seemed prepared for a major operation. Having already provided the Soviet leader with the photographic evidence of Clay’s exercises in the woods, where tanks had practiced knocking down replicas of the Wall, he believed that Khrushchev needed to take seriously the prospect that the Americans might try to undo the Soviet success of August 13.

Khrushchev, who by this time was managing the crisis personally from Moscow despite his ongoing Party Congress, had already called for an additional twenty-three Soviet tanks to be brought into Berlin. “Take our tanks to the neighboring street,” he told Konev, “but let their engines run there in the same high gear. And put the noise and the roar from the tanks through amplifiers.”

Konev warned Khrushchev that if he challenged the Americans in such a way, the U.S. tanks “may rush forward.” He worried that the impetuous Khrushchev might overplay the Soviet hand and start a war.

“I don’t think so,” Khrushchev replied, “unless, of course, the minds of the American military have been made blind with hatred.”

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

^{6:00 P.M., FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1961}

An aide handed General Clay a note informing him of the Soviet increase in armor at Checkpoint Charlie just while he was in the midst of a telephone conversation with President Kennedy, who was huddled in the Cabinet Room in an emergency session with his national security team. By that time it seemed that all of Washington had turned against Clay except Kennedy, who had not yet revealed his hand.

To counteract the concerns of the president’s advisers, Clay reassured Kennedy that matters in Berlin were under control. He insisted that the Soviet decision to move twenty more tanks forward was a message of moderation, as the Soviets were merely mathematically matching the U.S. force capability in Berlin.

That said, the Soviets were nervous enough about the Checkpoint Charlie showdown, and its potential for escalation, that Khrushchev had put his nuclear strike forces on special alert status for the first time ever over a U.S.–Soviet dispute. Khrushchev could not be sure that matters would not spin out of control, and he was preparing for all possibilities.

Clay’s view was clear: “If the Soviets don’t want war over West Berlin, we can’t start it. If they do, there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” The general was willing to gamble they didn’t want a war and believed that the U.S. should push back. However, the president was holding the dice and was unwilling to take the risk.

What Clay would never know was that Kennedy was so unnerved by the Checkpoint Charlie showdown that he had dispatched his brother to solve the crisis with his regular interlocutor of the past six months, the Soviet spy Georgi Bolshakov. At the same time he was again working a second, more traditional channel through Ambassador Thompson in Moscow, just as he had done before the Vienna Summit.

The president wasn’t turning to the Bolshakov back channel because of its proven success. Bobby’s meetings with Bolshakov before Vienna had done little to prepare him for Khrushchev’s ambush on Berlin. At a dangerous moment, however, Bolshakov was the fastest and most direct line to Khrushchev.

By late October, Bobby knew how to arrange a meeting with Bolshakov rapidly, and where the media would not find them. James Symington, Bobby’s assistant at the Office of the Attorney General, thought his boss had warmed up to “Georgi” partly due to his “predilection for harmless buffoons.” They met every fortnight or so, and Bobby discussed with him “most of the major matters dealing with the Soviet Union and the United States.”

The president’s brother made arrangements for the meetings himself, and would later regret that “unfortunately—stupidly—I didn’t write many of the things down. I just delivered the messages verbally to my brother and he’d act on them and I think sometimes he’d tell the State Department and sometimes he didn’t.”

The first Bobby Kennedy–Bolshakov meeting about the rising border tensions at Checkpoint Charlie came at 5:30 p.m. on October 26, one day before Soviet tanks rolled up to the crossing. According to the recollection of the president’s brother, the second and crucial negotiations came at 11:30 p.m. Washington time on October 27, or 5:30 in the morning on October 28 in Berlin, at a time when the two sides’ tanks and soldiers were positioned across from each other in the damp, cold autumn dawn.

Bobby Kennedy recalled that he told Bolshakov, “The situation in Berlin has become more difficult.” He complained that Foreign Minister Gromyko had rebuffed Ambassador Thompson’s efforts that day to defuse the crisis. “It is our opinion that such an attitude is not helpful at a time when efforts are being made to find a way to resolve this problem,” said Kennedy. He appealed for a “period of relative moderation and calm over the course of the next four to six weeks.”

The attorney general would later recall that he then told Bolshakov, “The President would like them to take their tanks out of there in twenty-four hours.” And that’s precisely what Khrushchev would do. Bobby would later say that their exchange on the tank showdown at Checkpoint Charlie demonstrated that Bolshakov “delivered effectively when it was a matter of importance.”

What no one recorded were the details of the agreement. However, from that point forward, the U.S. stopped its military escorts of civilians, and Clay no longer challenged East German authority at the border points. Whatever contingencies Clay had scripted to knock through portions of the Wall were shelved, and the shovels mounted to tanks to knock portions of the Wall were removed and put in storage.

Absent any resistance, East Germany further reinforced and expanded its Wall.

^{WASHINGTON, D.C.}

^{10:00 P.M., FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1961}

On Friday night, October 27, Secretary of State Rusk sent a telegram to the U.S. Mission in Berlin that declared victory while engaging in retreat. The cable noted that the crucial decision ending the Berlin Crisis had been taken at a meeting at the White House at 5:00 p.m. attended by the president, Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, Kohler, and Hillenbrand. It would be sent to NATO and all the U.S. embassies in the three chief Allied capitals. Almost as an afterthought, Clay was copied as well.

“Probes to date have accomplished their purpose,” Rusk lied. Kennedy and Clay could argue that Soviet tanks’ appearance at the border was their victory, proving their point that it was Moscow and not East Berlin that still controlled events in the city.

Yet it was clear Rusk was waving the white flag. The cable declared, “Further probes by U.S. personnel wearing civilian clothes and riding in official U.S. vehicles or privately owned vehicles bearing plates of U.S. Armed Forces and using armed guards or military escort will be deferred.”

Just in case his point was missed, Rusk’s next instruction made clear that the president wanted Clay to avoid any further confrontation with the East Germans or the Soviets. “U.S. civilian officials,” it said, “will for the time being refrain from going into East Berlin except that one civilian official will attempt daily to enter East Berlin in a privately owned vehicle without armed escort.”

Clay would stay for another several months, but his enemies had won. Rusk drove home that reality further, saying, “For the time being nothing further can be done on the spot since the matter has now moved to the highest government levels…. Instructions have been issued to defer any further civilian probes with armed escorts into East Berlin.”

Even as stubborn a man as Clay knew he had to stand down.

^{PALACE OF CONGRESSES, MOSCOW}

^{SATURDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 28, 1961}

After an evening of tension at the Berlin border, Marshal Konev met with Khrushchev in Moscow as his long Party Congress entered its final two days. Konev reported to Khrushchev that the situation at the border in Berlin was unchanged. No one was moving, he told the Soviet leader, “except when the tank operators on both sides would climb out and walk around to warm up.”

Khrushchev instructed Konev to withdraw Soviet tanks first. “I’m sure that within twenty minutes or however long it takes them to get their instructions, the American tanks will pull back, too,” he said, speaking with the confidence of a man who had made a deal.

“They can’t turn their tanks around and pull them back as long as our guns are pointing at them,” Khrushchev said. “They’ve gotten themselves into a difficult situation, and they don’t know how to get out of it…. So let’s give them one.”

Shortly after 10:30 on Saturday morning, the first Soviet tanks retreated from Checkpoint Charlie. Some of them were covered by flowers, garlands put on them that morning by members of the Freie Deutsche Jugend, the party’s youth organization.

After a half hour’s wait, the U.S. tanks pulled back as well.

With that, the Cold War’s most perilous moment ended with a whimper. However, the aftershocks of Berlin 1961 would be dramatic and long-lasting. They would shake the world a year later in Cuba—and they would shape the world for three decades to come.