Fifty years ago, the handsome, dynamic John F. Kennedy took the oath of office as President of the USA. I cut school that day to watch his inauguration on TV, my feigned sore throat and ear ache allowing me to bluff my mother into a rare absence. It was a tense moment between the US and Soviet Union. We had “duck and cover drills” in first grade, where we had to move quickly under our desks in the classroom in the event of an air raid. We were all panicked by the air raid sirens in the early evening in Chicago; Mayor Daley, an ardent Chicago White Sox fan had decided to set them off to celebrate their win of the American League but failed to explain what he was doing.
Fred Kempe’s new book, Berlin 1961, is a masterful recounting of the two years leading up to the erection of the barrier between East and West Berlin. Kempe was the former editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe. Disclosure: I am on the board of the Atlantic Council which Kempe now heads and am a friend.
Kempe believes that Kennedy’s weak performance in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion (Cuban exiles were crushed by Castro’s forces), followed by his tentative approach in the face of Soviet Premier Khruschev’s bullying tactics at the Vienna Summit convinced the Russians that the US would not respond to the erection of a wall. Kempe provides strong evidence of Kennedy’s preference; “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” So on August 13, 1961 the Berlin Wall was erected in the middle of the night, and stood for the next three decades.
What I had not known at all about was the showdown of American and Russian tanks across Checkpoint Charlie that happened two months after the Wall was erected. American diplomats had the right to pass unchecked through to East Berlin under the terms of the 1945 peace treaty. America’s top envoy, Allan Lightner, was going to East Berlin for theater, also to be a symbol of American resolve to East Berliners. East German police stopped Lightner, who summoned US troops to force his way through. This became the precedent, with tanks ultimately needed to ensure border crossing privileges, until the Russians countered with tanks of their own. President Kennedy stopped the cross-border adventures and stood down an idea to bulldoze the barbed wire sections of the Wall.
Even more significant is Kempe’s assertion that American lack of resolve led directly to Khruschev’s decision to play missiles into Cuba, provoking the Cuban Missile Crisis at the end of 1962. The Soviet premier is quoted as saying, “I know for certain, that Kennedy doesn’t have a strong background, nor generally speaking, does he have the courage to stand up to a serious challenge….on Cuba, he will make a fuss, make more of a fuss, and then agree.” The idea was to create the conditions for a trade; US troops (plus UK and French) leave Berlin in return for withdrawal of missiles from Cuba. Kennedy said to his military advisors, “If we attack Cuba in any way, that gives the Russians a clear line to take Berlin but we cannot have people believe that we let Berlin go because we didn’t have the guts to ensure a situation in Cuba.” Ultimately, the President stood firm and the missiles were withdrawn, with an unpublicized trade for American missiles that were in Turkey.
Kennedy is remembered for two speeches, his Inaugural (“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”) and his remarks in Berlin in 1963. Here are his words after seeing the Wall, “There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world. There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. “ Kempe gives Kennedy his due on the speech but concludes his book, “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 un-free systems can impose when free leaders fail to resist.”
