He had boasted somewhat earlier of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), though in that — rather fatefully — there was less substance to the boast (only in the 1960s were they operational and even then there were only four of them). Khrushchev, who had sneered back at critics that he had no education beyond some lessons that the local priest had given in return for a present of a sack of potatoes, had done far better than any of them. Foreigners might look down their noses at his armpit scratching and his gobbling, spluttering table manners, but he was the leader of what would soon be the most powerful country on earth. At any rate, Khrushchev’s ascendancy was now beyond challenge, and he looked to foreign affairs. Here was pabulum for megalomania, as the world trumpeted the ‘Soviet achievement’ and wondered how to emulate it. Had the time come to get the perennial German problem out of the way? Stalin had tried force. Khrushchev applied the Leninist tactic, first used in 1922, of pretending to be just another ruler of just another state. ‘Dictatorship of the proletariat’ could be passed off as just a piece of picturesque titling, on the lines of ‘King of Kings’.
Late in 1957 the Americans had placed limited-range nuclear weapons in Europe but there were evident disagreements in the West. True, it had a Cold War to fight, but each country fought its own version. The British were by now rapidly losing the substance of their power and could be expected to play up the shadow of it at international gatherings: classically ripe for flattery, and in any case not really willing to fight for, of all things, West Berlin. The Germans might be isolated, and might even come to terms, which, for Moscow, was the great prize. Adenauer had been shaken by the Americans’ abandonment of their allies over Suez, and there were fears in Germany that the Americans would not even reply with a nuclear strike to a land invasion of Central Europe: why should they risk an attack on their own cities? Adenauer approached Moscow with a vague suggestion that there might conceivably be an Austrian solution for East Germany. Khrushchev aired the possibility of a nuclear-free Europe and there was a Geneva conference as to the ending of nuclear tests, in October 1958. Meanwhile other tensions developed. The Middle East had been boiling since Suez, and Nasser was showing off. He proposed an Egyptian-Syrian union, then inspired a coup in the Lebanon, and then another, particularly gruesome, one in Baghdad. Finally there was another and rather strange trouble, the emergence of a sinisterly independent-minded Red China.
Khrushchev was not the only Communist leader to be showing off: Mao Tse-tung had his own remarks to pass. This time round, he had encouraged the intellectuals to criticize and promised to tolerate this (an episode known as ‘a hundred flowers bloom’). Nationalism was thus encouraged and the Chinese attacked India, a friendly country, over a trivial frontier dispute in the high mountains. Khrushchev had not supported this. Late in August 1958 there was a further crisis in the Far East, when Red Chinese artillery pounded the islands of Quemoy and Matsu — quite insignificant in themselves, but close to the Chinese shore and still occupied by the Kuomintang forces of Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan. Eisenhower responded, had his navy escort supply ships and even threatened to use nuclear arms (though he also made Chiang Kai-shek promise not to attack Red China). The crisis then ebbed away. However, this crisis created much more trouble than it appeared to. There were under-the-surface disagreements between Khrushchev and the Chinese because he told them not to invade Taiwan: there were to be no more Koreas. In 1959 he refused them a prototype bomb. Thereupon the Chinese started denouncing what they called ‘revisionism’. They were angry at the vilification of Stalin, whose statue still stood in the middle of Peking, and they especially resented, or claimed to resent, Khrushchev’s doctrine that nuclear war would be too destructive to be contemplated (‘peaceful coexistence’). Mao remarked that if 500 million or so people in the Communist bloc would be wiped out, the price might be worth paying for the utter end of capitalism and imperialism. The arguments between the two sides, couched in the usual wooden language, became public, as each side tried to convince other Communist parties of the correctness of its view. The depth of the disagreements became clear abroad only in 1963, and even then they were sometimes dismissed as part of some game to fool the West, ‘disinformation’, but they were real enough, and even caused one of the Soviet-dominated parties to defect, that of little Albania, fizzing with resentment at the preferential treatment accorded by one and all to Tito in Yugoslavia, which contained its own Albanians. Khrushchev now tried to stop China’s development, and in July 1960 withdrew his specialists. He had been clumsy — giving the Chinese too much in 1955 and then taking too much back five years later. The quarrel was to do with the role of war and revolution in an ideological world filled with such hatreds. At any rate, here was competition for Moscow, and Khrushchev responded adventurously. Off he charged, over Berlin.
Something needed to be done. The Western zones had become an open sore. The problem could be solved if a great wall were put up around West Berlin, thus preventing escapes into it. But it might also be solved if there were a deal with Germany; it might even be solved through a grand deal with the Americans, who (with the British and French) might be prepared just to abandon the place in return for some bargain over arms limitations or whatever. The East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, was cunning and repellent, a product of Comintern weasellings in thirties Moscow, and he understood that Khrushchev would dump him and his state if that were the price of a neutral Germany, detached from NATO, and ‘Finlandized’ on an enormous scale. Khrushchev himself well knew that walling in West Berlin would be wonderful propaganda for his enemies, in fact the crowning piece in the showcase that the West had built up. He strictly told Ulbricht not to take that step, but at the end of 1958 he threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, and offered to let Berlin be a Free City inside it. But he wanted a Western military evacuation; and the West would have to recognize East Germany if it wanted to continue dealings with West Berlin. In January 1959 a draft peace treaty for two disarmed and neutral German states was sent off, and an emissary in Washington suggested that negotiations might go over Adenauer’s head.
All of this had military overtones, to do with German rearmament, and Eisenhower himself had had considerable, often very unpleasant, experience of what that might mean. In fact the old general was now quite seriously minded to enter history as the man who had done most to stop nuclear destruction. True, Eisenhower played the golfing old buffer, and his wife was plain cooking. But he saw well enough what was going on, and produced a line, ‘the military-industrial complex’, that summed up the realities of warfare and militarized economics better than ever Norman Mailer did. Might he not decide that Berlin was not worth a fight? Oddly enough, it was the French who were most firmly in favour of defending Germany, their new associate in Europe. To exploit the differences, in May 1959 Khrushchev agreed to drop his ultimatum in return for a general conference at Geneva, scene of the earlier and quite satisfactory conference that had settled the French war in Indo-China. The new conference might lead to realization of Molotov’s old scheme, a conference on European security, from which the Americans could be excluded by definition, and which the USSR would then dominate (the phrase ‘our common European home’ comes from this period, and not the 1980s).
In September 1959 Khrushchev went to the USA and talked with Eisenhower, drawing the conclusion that here was weakness to be exploited; the two agreed on a ‘summit’, as these gatherings were irritatingly called, for May 1960, in Paris. The clowning but at least not block-like Khrushchev even had a certain success as regards public relations, holding his own quite well in a roomful of Rockefellers and Harrimans. A string of Western concessions followed — East German control was accepted over the access routes, rather than Soviet; even a promise not to spy. Khrushchev waved these things aside, for they only convinced him that with another show of Soviet power the Western powers would fall apart in disarray. He always was brutal in his ways — on one occasion, at the United Nations, taking off his shoe and banging it on the table in rage — and now he was accidentally presented with an excuse for more temper. The Americans used special planes, the U2s, to spy on the Soviet Union, and one of these was shot down. The pilot survived and talked. Eisenhower at first clumsily denied that U2s were flown, because he had expected the pilot to swallow the poison pill supplied to him. This denial caused a gleeful Khrushchev to present his evidence; Eisenhower was duly humiliated; the Paris conference was cancelled. Eisenhower missed his chance to be the man who had saved the world.
He was succeeded by an altogether different figure, Kennedy, a considerably younger man who took time to find his feet. They were found for him. The US budget for ICBMs and Polaris went up to almost $10bn, and such missiles, hidden in submarines, enabled a crippling ‘first strike’ to be made. In other words, provided that there were no warning at all, the Soviet capacity to strike back significantly would be destroyed, and the USSR would be helpless. At the same time the military advisers (Maxwell Taylor in particular, but also two up-and-coming academics, Henry Kissinger and Albert Wohlstetter) were adamant that there should be a powerful non-nuclear force as well, i.e. a strong army in western Europe. It was therefore in a very tense atmosphere that the Berlin crisis went ahead. Kennedy and his advisers would probably have settled for some agreement with Moscow over their allies’ heads, and Walt Rostow, one of Kennedy’s academics, went to Moscow and explained Kennedy’s interest in disarmament. This was not the best background for negotiation over Berlin — it was in fact a considerable mistake, given Khrushchev’s peasant megalomania. In June 1961 Kennedy and Khrushchev met in Vienna, and Khrushchev posed as the wiser, older man — he despised Kennedy’s youthfulness, enhanced all the
