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The Wall Street Journal <http://s.wsj.net/img/wsj_print.gif> BOOKSHELF MAY 28, 2011 When Kennedy Blinked By CHARLES MCCARRY Readers skeptical of the Camelot myth may experience twinges of schadenfreude while reading this meticulously researched, elegantly written account of John F. Kennedy's mortifying encounters with the Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev during the first year of his presidency. Others, on coming to the end of Frederick Kempe's molecule-by-molecule deconstruction of the Kennedy reputation for toughness, vigor, smarts and unshakable cool, are more likely to breathe a sigh of relief that civilization somehow survived the confrontation. "Berlin 1961" revolves around the question of whether Kennedy's decision to countenance the erection of the Berlin Wall was, in Mr. Kempe's words, "a successful means of avoiding war, or . . . the unhappy result of his missing backbone." On those terms, the book is a scholarly history of the crisis that culminated on Aug. 13, 1961, when East Germany, convinced that its economic and political survival depended on stopping the hemorrhage of refugees to the West, cut the city in two with the Berlin Wall, thereby imprisoning its people for the next 26 years. Since 1945, 2.8 million, or one in every six East Germans, had fled their benighted country. View Full Image BERLIN <http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/RV-AC976_BERLIN_D_20110527012911.jpg> Time Life Pictures/Getty Images President Kennedy looks over the wall from a platform in 1963. On another level, the book is a richly detailed study of a primal scuffle for supremacy between Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev. The two men had little in common except the personal power to wage nuclear war and the realization that each had something to prove about his geopolitical manhood. The youthful, handsome and wealthy but secretly unhealthy American had attained the presidency by the hair's-breadth margin of a tenth of 1% of the popular vote but raised questions about his judgment and steadiness with his shaky handling of the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961. The Russian, an uncouth but shrewd peasant who had been illiterate into his 20s, was beset by enemies within the Soviet leadership who thought—with the encouragement of China's Mao Zedong—that he was insufficiently aggressive in his dealings with the United States. Khrushchev saw in Kennedy's weakness in Cuba an opportunity to correct this impression, solidify his leadership and advance Soviet prestige—by challenging Kennedy on the most dangerous and strategic ground of the Cold War. On Jan. 21, the day after Kennedy's inauguration, Khrushchev, looking for a "fresh start" in Soviet-American relations, summoned Llewellyn Thompson, the American ambassador to Moscow, and offered a handful of carrots. He informed Thompson that he had issued an unprecedented order to Izvestia and Pravda to publish the full text of Kennedy's inaugural speech. He offered to release two U.S. Air Force officers who had been in Soviet custody since their RB-47 aircraft was shot down the summer before. He also proposed to reduce jamming of the Voice of America, among smaller gestures. Kennedy responded with a list of U.S. moves that included lifting the ban on imports of Soviet crabmeat. By Jan. 25, whatever good feeling this exchange of concessions had created was overturned in Kennedy's mind when he learned of a recent Khrushchev speech to Party hacks that, "if taken literally," as Thompson cabled, was "a declaration of cold war." Actually it was routine communist rhetoric, but it prompted the president "to devalue and discount all of Khrushchev's conciliatory gestures." Mr. Kempe, president of the Atlantic Council and a former chief diplomatic correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, describes this as "the first mistake of the Kennedy presidency." In April, the Bay of Pigs invasion blew up in the administration's face. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, alarmed by this "crazy scheme," had urged Kennedy to abandon it and after the fiasco told an audience of Foreign Service officers that the view of Europeans was that the new president was "a gifted young amateur playing with a boomerang, when they saw, to their horror, that he had knocked himself out." As for Khrushchev, Mr. Kempe writes, "the new U.S. president had lived down to his lowest expectations. . . . Never in his fondest dreams had he anticipated such incompetence." BERLIN <http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/RV-AC975_BERLIN_D_20110527012846.jpg> Imagno/Getty Images A West German boy gazes at the newly erected Berlin Wall in January 1961 . Acheson, called in for advice on the Berlin question, attempted to take the president's diplomatic education in hand. Kennedy explained that he needed tutors because he "had spent so much time . . . knowing people who could help him become president that he knew very few . . . who could help him be president." With regard to the Soviets, Acheson advised a hard line. Berlin, he said, "was the key to power status in Europe, and thus a willingness to defend it was central to keeping the Kremlin in check elsewhere." The essential thing was to maintain the status quo. To demonstrate to Khrushchev that the U.S. was serious about doing just that, Acheson recommended a significant U.S. military buildup in Germany. As for deterring the Soviets through nuclear saber-rattling, it was unlikely that either Khrushchev or Washington's European allies could be led to believe that the U.S. would risk nuclear war to defend Berlin. Still, he told Kennedy, as others would do in the days to come, that "if a crisis is provoked, a bold and dangerous course may be the safest." George Kennan advised Kennedy to communicate privately with Khrushchev. By clandestine means, the president's brother and attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, arranged an unusual back channel, using as a go-between a mid-level agent of the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) who was a friend of one of Bobby's journalist friends and who was said to have special access to Khrushchev. Only the Kennedy brothers, Khrushchev and the astounded GRU hierarchy knew of this arrangement, but in a short time it produced an agreement for a summit meeting in early June in Vienna. "No formal agenda is planned and no negotiations will take place," Kennedy told a joint session of Congress. Berlin 1961 By Frederick Kempe Putnam, 579 pages, $29.95 Khrushchev's intention at Vienna was to test Kennedy's nerve and to put on record the Soviet Union's intentions in Berlin and East Germany as a whole. Four days after the summit was announced, he called in Ambassador Thompson and laid down a marker. Whether Kennedy liked it or not, "he would take unilateral action in the fall or winter to give control of the city to the East Germans and end all occupation rights." This breathtaking maneuver would provide Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, with the authority to truncate Berlin and stop the stampede of refugees. Khrushchev believed that he could accomplish this with impunity, telling his inner circle, in Mr. Kempe's paraphrase, "that Kennedy so feared war that he would not react militarily." Others, at home and abroad, thought that the president had no other option but to meet bluster with strength. Charles de Gaulle, speaking to Kennedy in Paris hours before the summit, told him that "any retreat from Berlin, any change of status. . . would mean defeat," adding: "If [Khrushchev] wants war, we must make it clear that he will have it." In Vienna, however, Kennedy took a persistently conciliatory line. Early on, he told Khrushchev that communism could remain where it was already established in the world but could not occupy new territory. Startled American diplomats regarded this as a signal of the president's willingness, contrary to longstanding U.S. policy, to accept the existing division of Europe into Soviet and Western spheres of influence. Khrushchev said that it was beyond his powers to guarantee that communist ideas would not proliferate beyond present borders. Kennedy attempted to raise the question of a nuclear-test-ban treaty, his first priority, but Khrushchev pounced instead on the Berlin question. "If the United States refuses to sign a peace treaty [with Germany]," he said, "the Soviet Union will do so and nothing will stop it." After one day of talks, he was more certain than ever that Kennedy was hopelessly weak. "This man is very inexperienced, even immature," Khrushchev told his interpreter. Kennedy was exhausted. On ordinary days he took five hot baths or showers to ease excruciating lower back pain. He wore a tight corset. In private he often used crutches. From his personal doctor he received two or three daily injections of procaine, a stronger version of Novocain, and several other drugs. A medical hanger-on, Dr. Max Jacobson ("Dr. Feelgood" to his celebrity patients), administered injections that contained hormones, steroids, vitamins, enzymes, animal cells and amphetamines. Warned after laboratory analysis that Jacobson's nostrums were dangerous, the agonized Kennedy said: "I don't care if it's horse piss. It works." "Between doses," Mr. Kempe writes, pondering what effect the injections might have had on Kennedy's behavior in Vienna, "his mood could swing violently from overconfidence to bouts of depression." On the second and final day of the summit, Kennedy continued his attempts to establish empathy and introduced more new terminology, repeatedly referring to the allied zones of Berlin as "West" Berlin. This provocative usage, which implied that Berlin could become two separate cities without American objection, did not pass unnoticed. As Mr. Kempe puts it: "In perhaps the most important manhood moment of his presidency, Kennedy had made a unilateral concession." The message was clear: The Soviet Union, as long as it did not touch "West" Berlin, could do as it liked in its own part of Berlin and Germany, or deputize East Germany to do it under Soviet protection, and the U.S. would passively stand aside. "The USSR will sign a peace treaty and the sovereignty of East Germany will be observed," Khrushchev said. "Any violation of that sovereignty will be regarded as an open act of aggression." Famously, if tardily, Kennedy replied that it was going to be a long, cold winter. But he admitted to James Reston of the New York Times, while the wounds of the summit were still fresh: "He savaged me . . . just beat the hell out of me." The president began to resist. He signed National Security Action Memorandum No. 109, a plan for a four-stage escalation of U.S. reactions to a blockade of Berlin. The first stage called for sanctions; the second, for a large American military buildup in Europe; the third, for sending a three-division probe up the Autobahn to Berlin, air strikes on non-Soviet targets in East Germany and a possible naval blockade; the fourth, for "selective nuclear strikes to demonstrate the will to use [such weapons] . . . and finally, general war." Somehow worse never came to worst, and surely the bottom line is that there was no war and that West Berlin remained intact to become the capital of a re-united, democratic Germany. Whether this was achieved by good luck or good management or faint-heartedness is moot and likely to remain so. Mr. Kempe's point is that Kennedy's indecisiveness in the early stages of the crisis produced the wall itself, an exponential increase in East-West tension, and, in the half-century that followed, other fateful consequences that included the Cuban missile crisis—and, though Mr. Kempe doesn't say so, the Vietnam War, along with social and strategic spores that lodged in the American psyche and darkened world opinion with results yet to be revealed. It also provided, as Mr. Kempe puts it in the final sentence of this mind-shaking work of investigative history, an example "of what unfree systems can impose when free leaders fail to resist." —Mr. McCarry's new novel, "Ark," his 21st book, will be published this year. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [email protected]. -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [email protected] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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