Looking back now, 1961 and 1962 were probably the most tense years in Soviet-American relations. Khrushchev as a result of his meeting with Kennedy in Vienna, clearly believed that Jack Kennedy was a very weak president and therefore he was free to put pressure on him to recognize East Germany and to accept an arrangement in which Moscow would turn over control of the access routes to Berlin from the West to the East Germans. In my Memoirs, I quoted Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who was in the talks between Kennedy and Khrushchev:
“At one point, Khrushchev said to Kennedy, ‘We are going to negotiate a new agreement with East Germany and he access routes to Berlin will be under their control. If there is any effort by the West to interfere there will be war…Kennedy went right back at him, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Then there will be war, Mr. Chairman. It’s going to be a very cold winter.” Of course we in the press knew the talks had been tense, but we did not know about that little dialogue then. On July 25, Kennedy spoke to the nation in which he said: “I hear it said that West Berlin is militarily untenable. And so was Bastogne. And so in fact was Stalingrad. Any dangerous spot is tenable if men—brave men–will make it so,”
The Berlin crisis continued into the summer of 1961. Khrushchev was threatening to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and to in effect keep the Western powers out of West Berlin unless the Western powers signed separate peace treaties with East Germany and made West Berlin an open city. I might add incidentally that because of Berlin, many of my colleagues who like me, had enlisted earlier in the six months active duty program and 5 1/2 years in the Army Reserve, were called up for active duty as a show of determination by the Kennedy administration. None of them were sent to Europe, but instead idled their time away at local army posts. I was writing the week-in-review column on world affairs for The Star. One if my columns had a headline: “Berlin: Tension and Tactics.” Another said: “The Elements of a World Crisis.” The crisis reached its crescendo on Sunday, August 13 when the East Germans began putting up the Berlin Wall on orders from Moscow. This Wall essentially kept East Germans from migrating to the West until it came down on the night of Nov. 9, 1989 [it was literally suddenly opened].
Ironically, the erection of the Berlin Wall—instead of inflaming passions—had an opposite effect.As Dean Rusk was to write in his memoirs: “I was at a baseball game on August 13 when I was informed the East Germans had begun to build a barricade and spring barbed wire between East and West Berlin, the first step in what eventually became the Berlin Wall. The move caught us by surprise, but we soon determined that the East Germans aimed the Berlin Wall at their own people, not the people of West Berlin….We quicly decided that the Wall was not an issue of war and peace between East and West….By and large, even though we thought their actions despicable, what Eastern Europeans did to their own people was not an issue of war between east and west.”
Later, in October, the “crisis” that had been fomented by Khrushchev’s threat to sign a peace treaty with East Germany and bar the West from West Berlin evaporated. The Soviet leader told the 22nd Communist Party congress in Moscow that even though in June he had threatened to sign the peace treaty by the end of the year, he now said that it was no longer so important and that the deadline had been lifted. This led to a brief period of euphoria, but it ended a year later, with the very tense crisis over Cuba.
