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

Epilogue AFTERSHOCKS

^{BERLIN AND HAVANA}

^{MID-AUGUST 1962}

A year after President John F. Kennedy acquiesced to the communist construction of the Berlin Wall, two dramas occurring five thousand miles apart illustrated the high cost of one of the worst inaugural-year performances of any modern U.S. president.

The first scene unfolded on August 17 under the spotlight of a Berlin summer sun just minutes after two in the afternoon, when eighteen-year-old bricklayer Peter Fechter and his friend Helmut Kulbeik began their sprint toward freedom across the so-called death strip, the no-man’s-land that lay before the Wall. The first of thirty-five police shots came after the two had squirmed through an intermediary barrier of barbed wire. Two bullets pierced Fechter’s back and stomach as he watched his more agile friend leap to freedom over strands of barbed wire that adorned the barrier’s crown. Fechter collapsed at the base of the wall, where he lay in a quivering fetal position with his arms folded across his chest, his left shoe half off and the white of his ankle showing. For most of an hour, his failing voice cried out for help as his life bled out through multiple wounds.

At the same time and more than an ocean away, Soviet ships had begun landing secretly at eleven different Cuban ports with the makings of a Soviet nuclear missile force of sufficient range and potency to obliterate New York City or Washington, D.C. On July 26, the Soviet freighter Maria Ulyanova, named for Lenin’s mother, had docked in the port city of Cabañas as the first of eighty-five Soviet ships that would make 150 round-trips in the following ninety days. They were transporting combat forces and the components for some twenty-four medium-range and sixteen longer-range launchers, each of which would be equipped with a nuclear warhead and two ballistic missiles.

Back in West Berlin, police and news reporters—standing atop ladders to get a better view over the Wall—tracked and photographed Fechter’s bitter end. U.S. troops in battle dress stood by, following orders that they not assist would-be refugees unless they had already escaped communist territory. A gathering crowd of West Berliners screamed their protests, condemning the East Germans as murderers and the Americans as cowards. A U.S. military police lieutenant told one of the onlookers, “It’s not my problem,” an expression of resignation that would spread among outraged West Berliners through the next day’s newspapers.

For their part, East German border guards balked at hauling away the dying victim, needlessly fearful that they would be shot by American troops. Only after Fechter’s body went limp and the East Germans exploded smoke bombs to cover their work did a border patrol carry away the corpse. Still, a photographer captured a tableau oddly reminiscent of the removal of Jesus from the cross. Appearing the following day on the front page of the Berliner Morgenpost, it showed three helmeted police, two of them with tommy guns, holding Fechter aloft with his arms splayed and his wrists bloodstained.

Fechter’s murder snapped something inside West Berliners. The following day, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, protesting American impotence as angrily as they did communist inhumanity. Their accumulated feelings of anger and frustration produced what New York Times correspondent Sydney Gruson called an “almost unbelievable scene” of West Berlin police firing water cannons and tear gas to prevent their own people from storming the Wall. Wrote Gruson: “More than any single event since the wall was built, Peter Fechter’s lonely and brutal death has made the West Berliners feel a sense of helplessness in the face of the creeping encroachment being worked so subtly by the Communists.”

Meanwhile, over Cuba, CIA aerial photography by mid-August had captured the intensive Soviet maritime activity, given the volume of the deliveries and the sloppiness of execution. Soldiers unloaded vessels at night with streetlights doused and then forwarded shipments over dirt roads in camouflaged vehicles that were so long, troops had to knock down peasant homes to negotiate the turns. Frontline commanders—when not waging war on mosquitoes, heat, or monsoons—communicated their steady progress back to Moscow through couriers to avoid U.S. electronic intercepts.

On August 22, the CIA alerted the White House that as many as 5,000 Soviet personnel had arrived on more than twenty vessels with large quantities of transport, communication, and construction equipment. CIA analysts said the speed and magnitude of this influx of Soviet personnel and matériel to a non–Soviet bloc country was “unprecedented in Soviet military aid activities; clearly something new and different is taking place.” The missiles themselves would not arrive for another two months, however, and America’s spy services for the moment concluded that Moscow was likely augmenting Cuba’s air defense system.

Upon first reflection, there would seem to be little to connect the public killing of a teenage bricklayer in East Berlin and the clandestine arrival of Soviet troops and missile launcher parts in Cuba. Yet, taken together, they dramatically symbolized the two most significant aftershocks of Kennedy’s mishandling of the events surrounding Berlin in 1961:

• The first would be longer-lasting: the freezing in place of the Cold War division of Europe for three more decades, with all of its human costs. The Wall’s construction not only stopped East Germany’s unraveling at a time when the country’s viability was in doubt; it also condemned another generation of tens of millions of East Europeans to authoritarian, Soviet-style rule with its limits on individual and national freedom.

• The second aftershock would be more immediate: the Cuban Missile Crisis in late 1962 with its threat of nuclear war. Though history would celebrate Kennedy for his management of the Cuban crisis, Khrushchev would not have risked putting nuclear weapons in Cuba at all if he had not concluded from Berlin in 1961 that Kennedy was weak and indecisive.

The world now knows what President Kennedy did not envision at the time: that the Berlin Wall would fall in November 1989, that Germany and Berlin would be unified a year later in October 1990, and that the Soviet Union itself would collapse a year after that, at the end of 1991. Given the Cold War’s happy ending, it has been tempting for historians to give Kennedy more credit than he deserves for that outcome. By avoiding undue risk to stop the Berlin Wall’s construction, their argument goes, Kennedy prevented war and set the stage for Germany’s eventual unification, for the liberation of the Soviet bloc’s captive nations, and for the enlargement of a free and democratic Europe.

However, the record—informed by new evidence and a closer examination of existing accounts and documents—demands a less generous judgment. Two-time National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft correctly notes in this book’s foreword, “History, sadly, does not reveal its alternatives.” But it does provide unmistakable clues. We will never know whether a more resolute Kennedy could have brought an earlier end to the Cold War. What’s beyond dispute, however, is that Kennedy’s actions allowed East German leaders to stop just the sort of refugee flow that would be the country’s undoing twenty-eight years later. The facts also make clear that Kennedy’s actions in 1961 were never motivated primarily by a desire to keep West Berlin free.

During his first year in office, Kennedy was not focused on rolling back communism in Europe, but instead was trying to stop its spread to the developing world. Regarding Berlin, he was most concerned about avoiding instability and miscalculations that would lead to nuclear war. Unlike his predecessors, Presidents Eisenhower and Truman, he was dismissive both of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his dreams of German unification.

Perhaps the best judge of Kennedy’s poor showing in 1961 was the president himself. He was privately candid about his mishandling of the Bay of Pigs crisis and the Vienna Summit. When, on September 22—more than a month after the border closure—Detroit News journalist Elie Abel sought Kennedy’s cooperation for a book he wished to write on Kennedy’s first year in office, the president responded, “Why would anyone want to write a book about an administration that has nothing to show for itself but a string of disasters?”

It was a refreshing expression of self-awareness about a year that had been marked by Kennedy’s inconsistency, indecision, and policy failure.

Though Kennedy’s election campaign had focused on fresh ideas and the urgent need for change, when it came to Berlin, he was more focused on maintaining the fragile status quo. He believed that one should only address the more intractable Berlin situation after a confidence-building process of negotiations on a nuclear test ban agreement and other arms control matters.

Then, in the first days of his administration, Kennedy failed to seize the best opportunity that would be available to him for a breakthrough in relations due to an amateur’s misreading of Khrushchev’s signals. The Soviet leader had demonstrated a new willingness to cooperate with the U.S. through a series of unilateral gestures that included the release of captured U.S. airmen on the morning after Kennedy’s inauguration. Instead, Kennedy decided that Khrushchev was escalating the Cold War to test him, a conclusion he had reached largely by overinterpreting the harsh rhetoric of a routine speech delivered to rally party propagandists.

What followed was Kennedy’s alarmist State of the Union speech. With considerable hyperbole, Kennedy told the nation what he had learned in less than two weeks in office that had prompted him to alter the far more cautious tone of his inaugural speech:

The iconic moment for Kennedy’s first-year indecisiveness came with the Bay of Pigs debacle in April, when the president neither canceled an operation that had been spawned in the Eisenhower administration nor gave it the resources required for success. From that point forward, Kennedy rightly worried that Khrushchev had concluded he was weak, particularly given the Soviet leader’s more resolute response to the Hungarian uprising of 1956. As Kennedy told columnist James Reston after the Soviet leader had mauled him at the Vienna Summit, Khrushchev “thought anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken. And anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts. He just beat the hell out of me,” he told Reston. “I’ve got a terrible problem.”

After Khrushchev’s threat in Vienna to unilaterally change Berlin’s status by year’s end, Kennedy countered with escalated rhetoric, increased defense spending, greater troop readiness, and a review of military contingencies, including the U.S. nuclear response plan. Yet he was always a step behind the Soviets. When East German forces with Soviet backing closed the Berlin border on August 13 with such remarkable speed and efficiency, the U.S. and its allies seemed to have been caught flat-footed.

Accounts from the period suggest Kennedy was caught entirely by surprise. However, upon closer scrutiny, it is clear not only that Kennedy anticipated some Soviet action similar to what followed, but also that he helped write the script for it. Kennedy privately responded with relief rather than outrage, opting neither to disrupt the border closure when he had the chance nor punish his communist rivals with sanctions. He famously told aides, “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

The consistent message he had sent Khrushchev—directly in Vienna and indirectly thereafter through public speeches and back-channel messages—was that the Soviet leader could do whatever he wished on the territory he controlled as long as he didn’t touch West Berlin or Allied access to the city.

As Kennedy told White House economic adviser Walter Rostow several days before the border closure, “Khrushchev is losing East Germany. He cannot let that happen. If East Germany goes, so will Poland and all of Eastern Europe. He will have to do something to slow 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.”

On August 13, 1961, Khrushchev and Ulbricht could act with relative confidence that Kennedy would not respond as long as they remained within the guardrails he himself had established. Probably for that reason they constructed the Wall in its entirety not directly on the border but safely a few paces back in East Berlin. Disdainful of German unification aspirations and willing to accept the existing European balance of power, Kennedy was driven by the mistaken hope that by making the Soviets feel more secure in Berlin, he would increase the chances for fruitful negotiations on a wider range of issues. Instead, as the Cuban crisis would later show, Kennedy’s inaction in Berlin only encouraged greater Soviet misbehavior.

Scholars have long wondered whether Kennedy provided even more explicit approval in advance for the Berlin Wall’s construction. If such communication occurred, it likely would have come during the regular meetings of the president’s brother Robert and Soviet intermediary Georgi Bolshakov, the Soviet military intelligence agent who had established himself as the secret conduit between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Bobby would later apologize for failing to keep a record of those conversations. Bolshakov’s own available account sheds no light on his talks with Bobby just before or after the border closure, and Kremlin and Soviet intelligence archives that could provide clues remain closed.

In spite of that, however, the resemblance is so striking between the course Kennedy had endorsed and what the Soviets and East Germans executed as to be more than coincidental. Kennedy provided Khrushchev greater latitude for action in Berlin than any of his predecessors had done. The declassified transcripts of their Vienna Summit detail the de facto deal Kennedy was willing to strike: He would give Khrushchev a free hand to seal Berlin’s border in exchange for a guarantee that the Soviets would not disrupt West Berlin’s continued freedom or Allied access to the city. Senior U.S. officials who would read the Vienna transcripts later would be shocked by Kennedy’s unprecedented willingness to recognize the postwar division of Europe as permanent in the interest of achieving stability. As Kennedy told Khrushchev on the first day of their Vienna talks, “It was crucial to have the changes occurring in the world and affecting the balance of power take place in a way that would not involve the prestige of the treaty commitments of our two countries.”

The next day Kennedy would extend this line of argument more explicitly to Berlin, repetitively restricting America’s commitment to “West Berlin” and not to all of Berlin as his predecessors had. Kennedy drove home that distinction publicly on July 25 in a live, televised speech whose message of retreat to Khrushchev over Berlin was so clear that it unsettled U.S. policy-makers who had so carefully crafted the language of diplomacy since World War II.

Two weeks before the Berlin border closure, on July 30, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman William Fulbright said of the Berlin border on national television: “The truth of the matter is, I think, the Russians have the power to close it in any case…. 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.”

With that, the Arkansas senator had said publicly what Kennedy was thinking privately. The president did nothing to repudiate him, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy privately told Kennedy that he considered Fulbright’s words “helpful.” Without any countervailing presidential statement, Khrushchev concluded that Fulbright had delivered a deliberate signal, and he said as much both to East German leader Walter Ulbricht and visiting Italian President Amintore Fanfani. “When the border is closed,” Khrushchev told Ulbricht, “the Americans and West Germans will be happy. [U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Llewellyn] Thompson told me that this [refugee] flight is causing the West Germans a lot of trouble. So when we institute these controls, everyone will be satisfied. And beyond that, they will feel your power.”

“Yes,” replied Ulbricht, “and we will have achieved stability.” It was the one thing that unified Ulbricht, Khrushchev, and Kennedy: the desire for East German stability.

Throughout 1961, Berlin was an unwanted, inherited problem for Kennedy, and never a cause that he wished to champion. Speaking from the steaming waters of his giant golden bathtub in Paris during a break in his talks with de Gaulle, Kennedy complained to aides Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, “It seems silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty preserving Berlin as the future capital of a unified Germany when all of us know that Germany will probably never be reunified.” On the plane to London after the Vienna Summit, Kennedy again complained to O’Donnell, “We didn’t cause the disunity in Germany. We aren’t really responsible for the four-power occupation of Berlin, a mistake neither we nor the Russians should have agreed to in the first place.”

If establishing the Cold War’s terms for another three decades was the powerful long-term outcome of Berlin 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the most significant short-term aftershock. In the minds of Kennedy and Khrushchev, the Cuban and Berlin situations were inextricably linked.

Critics called Khrushchev’s scheme to put nuclear missiles in Cuba a reckless gamble, but from the Soviet leader’s perspective it was a calculated risk based on what he knew of Kennedy. At the end of 1961, he told a group of Soviet officials that he had learned Kennedy would do almost anything to avoid nuclear war. “I know for certain,” he had said, “that Kennedy doesn’t have a strong background, nor, generally speaking, does he have the courage to stand up to a serious challenge.” Regarding Cuba, he told his son Sergei that Kennedy “would make a fuss, make more of a fuss, and then agree.”

Despite all his first-year setbacks, Kennedy remained so willing to provide Khrushchev concessions to reach a Berlin deal that a proposal he made in April 1962 triggered a significant clash with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. What Kennedy called a “Principles Paper” proposed an “International Access Authority” that would transfer control of access to Berlin from the four powers to a newly created body through which the Soviets and East Germans could block entry by anyone they wished. All Kennedy sought in return was Kremlin acceptance of continued Allied military presence and rights in West Berlin.

The document so directly lifted Soviet language that in a copy passed by Washington to Moscow, the drafters had underscored sections to show what they had borrowed. Beyond that, the paper dropped any mention of German reunification as an eventual goal to be achieved through free elections, which had previously been a nonnegotiable point with Moscow. Never had U.S. proposals so closely resembled Soviet positions or strayed so far from those of Adenauer. At first, Kennedy provided Adenauer only one day for response to a draft. He extended that to forty-eight hours only after angry West German protests.

Adenauer no longer could conceal his disgust with Kennedy. He protested to Paul Nitze, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense who visited him in Bonn, that if Kennedy’s principles went forward, West Berlin would not have sufficient moving vans for all those who wished to flee the city. He then shot off a brusque note to Kennedy that said, “I have considerable objections against some of these proposals. I ask you most urgently, my dear Mr. President, to call an immediate pause to these proceedings….”

A leak of the paper, almost certainly blessed by Adenauer, created such an uproar that commentators on both sides of the Atlantic attacked Kennedy for engaging in retreat while his adversaries continued to gun down would-be refugees, harass Allied soldiers, and further reinforce their Wall. Kennedy was forced to withdraw his proposal. Most humiliating of all, an emboldened Khrushchev was in the process of rejecting Kennedy’s principles anyway because they did not include a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Khrushchev was playing for larger stakes.

Even as he put in place his Cuban operation, on July 5, 1962, he countered with his most detailed proposal yet to Kennedy to end what he labeled the “West Berlin occupation regime.” Under his plan, United Nations police forces would replace Allied troops. They would be drawn from the existing three Western powers but also from neutral states and two Warsaw Pact countries. Through gradual cuts to this contingent of 25 percent per year, after four years West Berlin would have no remaining foreign forces of any kind. Kennedy rejected that proposal two weeks later, on July 17, but every step of the way Khrushchev continued to move his Berlin strategy forward even as he secretly finalized his Cuban plans.

The Soviet military’s high-seas operation to Cuba was so large in scale that Khrushchev had to have assumed that Kennedy and his intelligence services would discover it, but that the president would lack the will to stop the missile deployments.

On September 4, Kennedy told select members of Congress that the CIA had determined the Soviets were helping Castro build up his defense capabilities. That evening, Kennedy issued a press statement that said much the same, and warned Khrushchev “the gravest issues would arise” if the U.S. found evidence of Soviet combat troops or offensive capability. The tone and commitment to respond was far more resolute than Khrushchev had anticipated.

Two days later, on September 6, Khrushchev flew a surprised Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, who had been in Russia visiting electrical plants, to meet with him at his Black Sea retreat at Pitsunda. He explored with Udall what shift in domestic politics might be providing Kennedy a new backbone even while he repeated his conviction that Kennedy was fundamentally weak. “As a president he has understanding,” Khrushchev told Udall, “but what he does not have is courage—courage to solve the German question.” With his Cuban operation far advanced, Khrushchev told Udall, “So we will help him solve the problem. We will put him in a situation where it is necessary to solve it…. We will not allow your troops to be in Berlin.”

Khrushchev told Udall that to avoid damaging Kennedy in the November elections, he would not press the issue until afterward. Without any reference to Cuba, he told Udall that the Soviets’ enhanced position of strength had already changed the balance of power: “It’s been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy—now we can swat your ass.” War over Berlin, Khrushchev said, would mean that with “the space of an hour” there would be “no Paris and no France.”

On October 16, 1962, with most of the Cuban launchers already in place, Khrushchev told Foy Kohler, who was Thompson’s successor as ambassador to the USSR, that he wanted to meet with the president at the UN General Assembly session in New York during the second half of November to talk about Berlin and other issues. By then, the Soviet leader would have significantly shifted the strategic balance, giving Moscow for the first time a capability of reliably hitting the U.S. with nuclear weapons. That, in turn, would leave him in a better position either to negotiate or impose the Berlin solution he wanted. Khrushchev told his new ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, that Berlin remained “the primary issue in Soviet–American relations.”

As Khrushchev would recall later:

Of all Khrushchev’s moves linking Cuba and Berlin during this period, perhaps none was as telling as the Soviet construction of an aboveground oil pipeline across East Germany to fuel Soviet troop deployments to the West German border. The pipelines would send an unmistakable message to Kennedy that Khrushchev would be willing to go to war in Berlin over any Cuban pushback. Said Khrushchev: “The Americans knew that if Russian blood were shed in Cuba, American blood would surely be shed in Germany.”

Kennedy’s words and actions during the thirteen days of the Cuban crisis, from October 16 to 29, underscored his conviction that Khrushchev’s Cuba and Berlin strategies were interlinked. From the beginning, he suspected that Khrushchev’s Cuban strategy was ultimately aimed at winning Berlin, the Soviet leader’s greater priority. Thus, Kennedy told the Joint Chiefs:

Kennedy’s decision to take a harder line with the Soviets over Cuba in 1962 than he had done regarding Berlin in 1961 had at least three motivations. First, the perils were greater to the U.S., as the danger was closer to home. Second, the domestic politics of mishandling Cuba were more dangerous to Kennedy’s reelection chances than they had been regarding faraway Berlin. Finally, Kennedy had at long last learned that his demonstrations of weakness had only encouraged Khrushchev to test him further. The Soviet leader had brazenly misled him, saying that he was postponing Berlin talks in deference to U.S. elections when he was merely buying time to put his missiles in place.

Kennedy drove home the Berlin connection again when he informed British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of the photographic proof of the missiles in a secret teletype message that was received in London on October 21 at 10:00 p.m. He wrote:

Kennedy repeated his Berlin concern to Macmillan in a second message a day later, just a few hours before his historic television address informing Americans of the danger, demanding the Soviets remove the missiles, and introducing a naval quarantine of Cuba. “I need not point out to you the possible relation of this secret and dangerous move on the part of Khrushchev to Berlin,” he said.

In 1962, Kennedy also rejected the advice of the so-called SLOBs, the Soft-Liners on Berlin. Ambassador Thompson, who had returned from Moscow to the State Department, wanted Kennedy to stop military traffic to Berlin during the Cuban showdown so as not to provoke the Kremlin, a notion the president rejected. National Security Advisor Bundy wondered whether some deal was possible under which one could trade Berlin for the missiles. Kennedy refused that as well, not wanting to be the president who lost Berlin.

For all his newfound resolve, however, Kennedy opposed his military’s suggestion of an attack on the Cuban bases, in no small part due to concern about a Soviet tit-for-tat military retaliation in Berlin. At one point General Curtis E. LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, protested Kennedy’s unwillingness to strike by saying, “This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” LeMay’s argument: “If we don’t do anything to Cuba, they’re going to push on Berlin and push real hard because they’ve got us on the run.”

Kennedy told the Executive Committee, the body he had created from his National Security Council to handle the crisis, that he worried even a quarantine could prompt a corresponding Soviet blockade of Berlin. The president appointed a subcommittee of that group, chaired by Paul Nitze, to wrestle with Berlin-related issues. He even lined up General Lucius Clay to return to Berlin if needed to coordinate U.S. actions.

In his October 22 speech to the nation, Kennedy publicly warned Khrushchev on Berlin: “Any hostile move anywhere in the world against the safety and freedom of peoples to whom we are committed—including in particular the brave people of West Berlin—will be met by whatever action is needed.”

With that, Kennedy’s Berlin Crisis had moved to Cuba.

In his meeting with U.S. Ambassador to London David Bruce on the evening of Kennedy’s speech, Prime Minister Macmillan worried: “Was it not likely that Khrushchev’s real purpose was to trade Cuba for Berlin? If he were stopped, with great loss of face, in Cuba, would he not be tempted to recover himself in Berlin? Indeed, might not this be the whole purpose of the exercise—to move forward one pawn in order to exchange it for another?” For his part, Kennedy worried to Macmillan that Khrushchev might preemptively take military action in Berlin that would require a proportionate U.S. response against Cuba. “That’s really the choice we now have,” he wrote. “If [Khrushchev] takes Berlin, then we will take Cuba.”

Instead, Khrushchev backed down in Cuba once challenged by a decisive Kennedy, exactly as General Clay had predicted he would a year earlier in regard to Berlin. When Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vasili Kuznetsov suggested a diversionary strike on Berlin to Khrushchev, the Soviet leader warned him, “Keep that sort of talk to yourself. We don’t know how to get out of one predicament, and you [want to] drag us into another?” Khrushchev also rejected Ambassador Dobrynin’s idea of responding to Cuba through the “first step” of closing ground routes to Berlin. “Father considered any action in Berlin to be unduly dangerous,” Khrushchev’s son Sergei would recall later, insisting that “not for a moment” did he consider a nuclear strike on the U.S. After Kennedy’s speech, Khrushchev began to withdraw Soviet troops from the West German border so that it would be clear he had no intention of escalating the conflict.

All that said, Kennedy was never as uncompromising in Cuba as it appeared to the U.S. public. On October 27, the president’s brother Bobby and Dobrynin reached an agreement that the U.S. would withdraw its Jupiter nuclear missiles from Turkey. When Khrushchev mentioned the concession the following day in a letter to Kennedy, Bobby returned the letter to the Soviets and denied that such a trade had been made. But Khrushchev considered the Turkey retreat crucial to his agreement.

Nevertheless, Kennedy had even won over his biggest Allied critics. De Gaulle famously told Kennedy’s emissary Dean Acheson, who had been sent to brief him during the crisis, that he did not need to see the proof of spy photographs from “a great nation” in order to support Kennedy. Adenauer said he would throw his lot behind Kennedy even if the U.S. found it must bomb or invade Cuba. “Absolutely, the missiles must go,” he said, thereafter bracing his country for a Berlin blockade or even a nuclear exchange. Tellingly, Kennedy rejected the dovish Macmillan’s offer to mediate with Moscow and call a summit on Cuba, which he felt would be disastrous for Berlin. “I don’t know quite what we will discuss at the meeting,” Kennedy said, “because he’ll be back with the same old position on Berlin, probably offering to dismantle the missiles if we’ll neutralize Berlin.”

Most surprised of all by Kennedy’s demonstration of strength was Khrushchev himself, who had bet so much against it. General Clay suggested to diplomat William Smyser that the Cuban Missile Crisis never would have occurred had it not been for Khrushchev’s perception of Kennedy’s weakness, and Clay believed as well that the threat to Berlin only receded once Kennedy made it clear he would no longer tolerate Moscow’s bullying.

West Berliners celebrated the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis more enthusiastically than any others. They concluded that the Soviet threat to them had passed.

^{RATHAUS SCHÖNEBERG, CITY HALL OF WEST BERLIN}

^{WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26, 1963}

Kennedy would make his first and last presidential trip to Berlin eight months after the Cuban crisis, on June 26, 1963. After visiting Checkpoint Charlie and walking along the Wall, he came to speak before City Hall, where some 300,000 Berliners had gathered. Most would remember the moment the rest of their lives.

Perhaps another million Berliners had also lined the thirty-five-mile route from Tegel. For most of the ride, Kennedy stood up on the far right side in the backseat of his open Lincoln convertible beside Mayor Willy Brandt and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. To catch a glimpse of their American hero, Berliners were hanging from trees and lampposts and standing on rooftops and balconies. The Red Cross, which had mobilized to handle casualties in the crowd, would report that more than a thousand people fainted.

At the airport and as they rolled through Berlin in their motorcade, some in the Kennedy delegation sneered that Hitler had drawn delirious German crowds as well. Berliners’ enthusiasm for Kennedy was so extreme that it unsettled Adenauer, who whispered to Rusk, “Does this mean Germany can one day have another Hitler?” At one point Kennedy was so dismayed that he told his military aide, General Godfrey T. McHugh, “If I told them to go tear down the Berlin Wall, they would do it.”

Yet the more time Kennedy and his entourage spent on the ground in West Berlin, the more they were smitten by its subjects. Kennedy was both stirred by West Berliners’ courage and shocked by the sight of the Wall, whose construction he had done so little to prevent. “He looks like a man who just glimpsed Hell,” observed Time correspondent Hugh Sidey. As Kennedy drove through the city, he redrafted the most important of the three speeches he would deliver, tossing out the wishy-washy language that had been crafted back in Washington so as not to provoke the Soviets. His speech outside West Berlin’s city hall would be the most emotional and powerful he would ever deliver abroad.

At that point, Kennedy threw in a German line that had not appeared in his original text, but one that he had practiced before the event with Robert Lochner, the head of Radio in the American Sector of Berlin, or RIAS, and Adenauer’s interpreter Heinz Weber. He had written out what he wished to say phonetically on index cards. “Let them come to Berlin…Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen,” he said. “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’”

Or as Kennedy had written on his cards: “Ish bin ine Bear-LEAN-er.”

Years later, amateur linguists would argue that Kennedy had misspoken and by using the article ein in front of Berliner, which was the name of a German pastry, he had actually told the crowd, “I am a jelly doughnut.” Yet the president had debated just that point with his two tutors, who had rightly concluded that by leaving out the article he would be suggesting he was born in Berlin and perhaps confuse the crowd, and thus lose the emphasis of his symbolic point. In any case, no one in the delirious crowd had any doubt about Kennedy’s meaning.

Expressing all the outrage he had not shown in August 1961, Kennedy renounced communism. He conceded that democracy was imperfect, “but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.” Much to the delight of Adenauer, for the first time during his presidency he also talked of the right to reunification that Germans had earned through their eighteen years of good behavior. He spoke of his faith that Berlin, the German nation, and the European continent would someday be unified.

It was a new Kennedy.

The president summoned General Clay, who had traveled with him to Berlin, to stand beside him at the podium. Together they basked in the crowd’s roars—the man who had privately condemned Kennedy for lacking the will to stand up to the Soviets, and the commander in chief who now was acting so Clay-like, much to the consternation of his advisers. After the speech, Bundy told the president, “I think you went a little too far.”

With one speech Kennedy had shifted U.S. policy regarding Germany and Berlin to one that conformed to the new resolve he had shown in Cuba. For the first time in his presidency, Kennedy was treating Berlin as a place to be defended, a place where he would build his legacy, and no longer as an inherited inconvenience inhabited by a people for whom he had little sympathy. From that point forward, neither Kennedy nor any other U.S. president could retreat in Berlin.

As Kennedy told Ted Sorensen on their flight to Ireland from Berlin, “We’ll never have another day like this as long as we live.”

Less than five months later, on November 22, 1963, an assassin shot President John F. Kennedy dead in Dallas, Texas. Less than a year after that, on October 14, 1964, fellow communists ousted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. He died of heart disease in 1971 after smuggling his memoirs to the West.

In October 1963, Adenauer stepped down from office as part of the coalition deal he had reached to remain in power following the September 1961 elections. He died of natural causes in 1967, at age ninety-one, leaving as his legacy a democratic, economically buoyant West Germany and a dream—which, though it seemed unrealistic, remained U.S. policy—that it someday would be reunified. His final words to his daughter: “There is nothing to weep about.”

A little less than a decade after the Berlin border closure, in May 1971, East German leader Walter Ulbricht resigned and was replaced by Erich Honecker, the man he had assigned to lead the Berlin Wall project. Honecker resigned a month before the Wall that he had constructed collapsed. He died of cancer in 1994, exiled in Chile, having been indicted but not tried on charges that included ordering border guards to shoot his own country’s citizens if they tried to escape.

But in Berlin in 1961, their fates were cast in a city whose name would come to embody the central ideological and geopolitical struggle of the second half of the twentieth century. Ultimately, the story would end well, but only because in Cuba Kennedy would reverse the perilous course he had set the previous year in Berlin.

What Kennedy could not undo was the Wall that had risen as he passively stood by, which for three decades and perhaps for all of history would remain the iconic image of what unfree systems can impose when free leaders fail to resist.