In the spring of 1961, I was promoted to the job of writing the foreign section of The Star’s Week-in-Review section. That section was a rough imitation of The New York Times’s section. In my many years at The Times later in life, I enjoyed writing for that section immensely with my analyses of world events. Now, unfortunately, The Times does not bother using the Review to cover recent events, but buys free-lance pieces of varying quality. L.Edgar Prina, a former Navy officer, did the domestic side of the report and Ed Tribble, a former city editor for The Star, was the section’s editor.
As it turned out, my first piece for the Review was to set the stage for the meeting between President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961. Kennedy, of course, had blundered in his first days in office into going ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion which had turned out to be a genuine disaster for the United States and those Cuban emigres who had participated. And the expectation was that Khrushchev would seek to take advantage of a weakened president. At that time, a period before Southeast Asia would dominate the news, the big story centered around Berlin. At that time, of course, due to the agreements by the allies at the end of World War Two, there were two Germanies, and the former capital, Berlin, was divided into an eastern and western zone, the former dominated by the Communists and the latter by pro-Western leaders.
As soon as the Vienna meeting had ended we knew trouble was brewing. Kennedy told the nation that the talks were “as somber as it was immediately useful.” He said the meeting was one of “sober, intensive conversation.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who participated in the talks, gave this blow-by-blow account in his memoirs published years later:
“At one point, Khrushchev said to Kennedy, ‘We are going to negotiate a new agreement with East Germany and the access routes to Berlin will be under their control [instead of Soviet]. If there is any effort by the West to interfere there will be war.'” Rusk added, in his memoirs, that “Diplomats almost never use the word ‘war.’ They always talk about ‘gravest possible consequences’ or something like that. But 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.'”
In my review piece, without knowing of the talk of war, I wrote: “Clearly at the Vienna summit held only two months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Khrushchev set out to intimidate the new, young president of the United States. The experience sobered and shook Kennedy. He stood head to head with Khrushchev in their verbal duel, but for the first time he felt the full weight of Soviet pressure and ideology. It was a brutal moment, and Kennedy was clearly startled that Khrushchev would try to roll over an American president. What bothered Kennedy even more than the Berlin issue itself was that Khrushchev would eve make such an attempt.”
As the summer continued, Khrushchev kept indicating that he would be willing to sign a peace treaty with East Germany alone by the end of 1961 if the United States, Britain and France did not do the same. Implicit in that statement was a threat to bar the Western powers, and by implication, the people of West Berlin, from free coming and going there. During that summer, some of my friends, who like me had served in the six months reserve, were called up. None was sent to Europe. Adam Clymer, for instance, who later became a colleague on The Times, was sent to an Army post office in Baltimore for a few months. The call-up was clearly a political gesture to show Khrushchev the U.S. was ready.
Finally—and I remember it like it was yesterday—reports from Berlin on August 13 said that the East Germans were sealing off their part of the city. The Berlin Wall was being created. But there was no effort to block allied traffic in and out of Berlin. This was the wall that finally came down in 1989, as part of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.
Dean Rusk, in his memoirs, “As I Saw It,” remembers the Wall this way:
“I was at a baseball game on August 13 when I was informed the East Germans had begun to build a barricade and o 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. They were not trying to keep anyone out, but rather to keep their own people in. ….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.”
At the end of September 1961, the U.N. General Assembly convened for its usual fall session. There was a considerable amount of high-level East-West talks going on during that period. I summed it up in my column on October 1, 1961:
“The Berlin crisis was the principal subject of discussion in and outside the General Assembly last week. President Kennedy and Foreign Minister Gromyko both addressed the General Assembly and Mr. Gromyko continued exploratory talks with Secretary of State Rusk and British Foreign Secretary Lord Home. The Berlin crisis for four months has swung like a pendulum from darkness to light, from fear to confidence, and from bellicose threats to peaceful assurances. Last week, it appeared to slow down and hold up by a brighter promise of a peaceful settlement. Whether it will remain in place or swing towards war ultimately will depend on the skill of the diplomats. But developments in New York indicated that a promising start had been made. Undoubtedly a great deal of that optimism can be attributed to the reconvening of the General Assembly where ‘peace,’ ‘negotiations’ and ‘settlement’ are on everybody’s lips/ The optimism, however, had some substantive roots. These included a speech by President Kennedy on Monday in which he told he General Assembly that the West was willing to negotiate a treaty that would take into account the ‘interests of others’ provided the freedom of West Berlin was protected.’”
Meanwhile, in Moscow, at the 22nd Soviet Communist Party Congress, Khrushchev addressed the group for over six hours and avoided any ultimatum on Berlin and that led observers to believe the crisis was about over. I wrote:
“Premier Khrushchev announced last week that his government would not insist on a German peace treaty being signed by December 31, 1961…Khrushchev took a more conciliatory position and said that American and British leaders were ‘showing a certain amount of understanding of the situation and are inclined to seek a solution to the German problem and the question of West Berlin on a mutually acceptable basis.”
In June, he had said that such a treaty had to be signed by the end of the year. But now, he said, “If the Western powers show readiness to settle the German problem then the question of the terms of signing a German peace treaty will not be of such importance. We shall then not insist that the peace treaty be signed without fail by December 31, 1961.” Western leaders had privately been told by Gromyko that the ultimatum would be dropped and were not surprised by the public announcement.”
So by the end of October, the Berlin crisis seemed no longer a real crisis. And Western diplomats were now turning their attention to the brewing crises in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. But later in 1962, they would be stunned by Cuba.
To Be Contnued
