Americans reluctantly conceded that they had indeed been conducting high-altitude espionage (having first denied all knowledge of the matter). In his talks with Kennedy, Khrushchev threatened to ‘liquidate’ Western rights in Berlin if there was no settlement there by the end of the year.
In public Kennedy, like Eisenhower before him, took a hard line, insisting that the West would never abandon its commitments. Washington was standing by its rights under the Potsdam accords and increasing the national defense budget specifically to buttress the US military presence in Germany. But off the record the US was much more accommodating. The Americans—unlike their West German clients—accepted the reality of an East German state, and understood Soviet anxiety over the aggressive tone of recent speeches by Adenauer and, especially, his Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss. Something had to be done to move the German situation forward—as Eisenhower said to Macmillan on March 28th 1960, the West couldn’t ‘really afford to stand on a dime for the next fifty years.’ In a similar spirit, Kennedy assured Khrushchev at Vienna that the United States did not ‘wish to act in a way that would deprive the Soviet Union of its ties in Eastern Europe’: a veiled acknowledgement that what the Russians had, they could hold, including the eastern zone of Germany and the former German territories now in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.[89]
Shortly after Kennedy returned to Washington, the East German authorities began imposing travel restrictions on would-be emigrants. In direct response, the US President publicly re-asserted the Western commitment to
Khrushchev’s response was to cut the Gordian knot of Berlin. After the Allied foreign ministers, meeting in Paris on August 6th, rejected yet another Soviet note threatening a separate Peace Treaty with the GDR if a settlement was not reached, Moscow authorized the East Germans to draw a line, literally, separating the two sides once and for all. On August 19th 1961 the East Berlin authorities set soldiers and workmen to the task of building a partition across the city. Within three days a rough wall had been erected, sufficient to foreclose casual movement between the two halves of Berlin. Over the ensuing weeks it was raised and strengthened. Searchlights, barbed wire and guard posts were added; the doors and windows of buildings abutting the wall were first blocked off, and then bricked up. Streets and squares were cut in half and all communications across the divided city were subjected to close policing or else broken off altogether. Berlin had its Wall.
Officially the West was horrified. For three days in October 1961 Soviet and American tanks confronted one another across the checkpoint separating their respective zones—one of the last remaining links between them— as the East German authorities tested the Western powers’ willingness to affirm and assert their continuing right of access to the eastern zone in keeping with the original Four-Power Agreement. Faced with the intransigence of the local American military commander—who refused to recognize any
Behind the scenes many Western leaders were secretly relieved at the appearance of the Wall. For three years Berlin had threatened to be the flashpoint for an international confrontation, just as it had been in 1948. Kennedy and other Western leaders privately agreed that a wall across Berlin was a far better outcome than a war—whatever was said in public, few Western politicians could seriously imagine asking their soldiers to ‘die for Berlin’. As Dean Rusk (Kennedy’s Secretary of State) quietly observed, the Wall had its uses: ‘the probability is that in realistic terms it would make a Berlin settlement easier.’
The outcome of the Berlin crisis showed that the two Great Powers had more in common than they sometimes appreciated. If Moscow undertook not to raise again the question of Allied status in Berlin, Washington would accept the reality of East German government there and would resist West German pressure for nuclear weapons. Both sides had an interest in stability in central Europe; but more to the point, the US and the USSR were both tired of responding to the demands and complaints of their respective German clients. The first decade of the Cold War had given German politicians on either side of the divide unparalleled leverage over their patrons in Washington and Moscow. Afraid of losing credibility with ‘their’ Germans, the Great Powers had allowed Adenauer and Ulbricht to blackmail them into ‘hanging tough’.
Moscow, which as we have seen had never set out to establish a client state in the eastern zone of occupied Germany, but had settled for it as a second best, devoted inordinate effort to shoring up a weak and unloved Communist regime in Berlin. The East German Communists in their turn were always half-afraid that their Soviet patrons would sell them out.[90] The Wall thus offered them some reassurance, although they were disappointed by Khrushchev’s refusal to keep pressing for a Peace Treaty once the barrier had gone up. As for Bonn, the longstanding fear there was that the ‘Amis’ (Americans) would just get up and walk away. Washington had always bent over backwards to reassure Bonn that it had America’s unswerving support, but after the Wall went up and the Americans conspicuously acquiesced, West German anxiety only increased. Hence the reiterated post-Wall promises from Washington that the US would never quit their zone—the background to Kennedy’s famous ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ (
The Wall ended Berlin’s career as the crisis zone of world and European affairs. Although it took ten years to reach formal agreement on issues of access, after November 1961 Berlin ceased to matter and West Berlin began its steady descent into political irrelevance. Even the Russians lost interest in it. Curiously, this was not immediately clear to the West. When the Cuba crisis broke out the following year, Kennedy and his advisers were convinced that Khrushchev was engaged in a complex, Machiavellian ploy to achieve his longstanding German objectives. The lessons of 1948-50 had been learned too well.
Just as Truman and Acheson had seen the Korean incursion as a possible prelude to a Soviet probe across the divided frontier of Germany, so Kennedy and his colleagues saw in the missile emplacements in Cuba a Soviet device to blackmail a vulnerable America into giving way in Berlin. Hardly an hour passed during the first ten days of the Cuba crisis without American leaders reverting to the subject of West Berlin, and the need to ‘neutralize’ Khrushchev’s anticipated countermove in the divided city. As Kennedy explained on October 22nd 1962 to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan: ‘I need not point out to you the possible relation of this secret and dangerous move on the part of Khrushchev to Berlin.’
The problem was that Kennedy had taken recent Soviet bluster and propaganda all too seriously and built his understanding of US-Soviet relations around the Berlin question. This dramatically ratcheted up the apparent significance of the Cuban crisis, leading Kennedy to inform his closest advisers, on October 19th: ‘I don’t think we’ve got any satisfactory alternatives… Our problem is not merely Cuba but it is also Berlin. And when we recognize the importance of Berlin to Europe, and recognize the importance of our allies to us, that’s what has made this thing be a dilemma for these days. Otherwise, our answer would be quite easy.’ Three days earlier, as the Cuba crisis began, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had summarized his own interpretation of the Soviet actions: ‘I think also that Berlin is very much involved in this. For the first time, I’m beginning really to wonder whether maybe Mr. Khrushchev is entirely rational about Berlin.’
But Khrushchev, as it transpired, was
With Berlin and Cuba behind them, the superpowers moved with surprising alacrity to resolve the uncertainties of the first Cold War. On June 20th 1963 a ‘hotline’ was established between Washington and Moscow; a month later talks in Moscow between the US, the Soviet Union and the UK culminated in a Limited Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. This Treaty, which came into force on October 10th, had considerable significance for Europe—less because of its overt objectives than on account of the ‘sub-text’ underlying it.
Both great powers wanted to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of China and West Germany and this was the real purpose of the Treaty. The promise of a non-nuclear Germany was the
