In 1955, West Germany joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, provoking the Soviets to form the Warsaw Pact. In December 1957, NATO agreed to put U.S.-controlled intermediate-range ballistic missiles, IRBMs, in West Germany, which the Soviets regarded as a threatening move. Meanwhile, attracted to the pleasures of Western life, East Germans were emigrating to West Germany in droves, using West Berlin as the readily accessible transfer point. By September 1958, East Germany had lost two million people, many of them young and technically skilled, with continued losses of more than 10,000 per month.
Soviet Premier Khrushchev was under agonizing pressure—from his foes in the Kremlin, from the East German regime, from Chinese hardliners—to do something about the increasingly perilous Berlin problem. In November 1958 he announced that within six months he would sign a peace treaty with East Germany, declaring the final borders of World War II permanent and handing East and West Berlin, including the issue of Western access rights, over to the sovereignty of East Germany, declaring that if the West tried to interfere, there would be war. In messages to foreign ambassadors and official notes to the three Western powers controlling West Berlin, Khrushchev and his diplomats declared that they intended “to liquidate the occupation statutes concerning Berlin,” to declare “null and void” the arrangements that had existed since World War II.
Eventually, this Berlin crisis of 1958–1959 was settled pretty much without incident. East German authorities occasionally held up Western military traffic on the Autobahn; the U.S. sent in very-high-altitude transport planes, which Soviet fighters attempted but failed to intercept. Finally, Khrushchev won a few internal victories in the Kremlin; the U.S. demonstrated both its military superiority and its will to use it if necessary; and Khrushchev, in a meeting with Eisenhower at Camp David in September 1959, toned down his rhetoric and dropped his already-extended deadline on signing a treaty with East Germany.
However, that did not mark the end of the Berlin crisis. On January 6, 1961, Khrushchev delivered a speech to the U.S.S.R.’s leading ideological institutes, declaring that his policy of “peaceful coexistence” would in no way interfere with the “intensive economic, political and ideological struggle” between East and West, that “national wars of liberation” were “sacred,” to be supported by Communists “wholeheartedly and without reservation.” Finally, he talked about Berlin, where “the positions of the United States of America, Britain and France have proved to be especially vulnerable…. These powers cannot fail to realize that sooner or later the occupation regime in that city must be ended…. And should they balk, then we will take resolute measures, we will sign a peace treaty with [East Germany].”
Kennedy reacted grimly but resolutely to the speech, interpreting it as Khrushchev’s outline of a grand strategy for Communist subversion and expansionism, not just in Berlin but throughout the world, especially in the “gray areas” of Indochina, Africa, Latin America. He circulated the speech to his staff, instructing them to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.” He frequently read excerpts from it aloud at NSC meetings. It spurred Kennedy on in his fascination with counterinsurgency and counterguerrilla forces, reinforced general suspicions that “national liberation movements” in the underdeveloped world acted in effect as Soviet agents, convinced him that a new period of heightened danger in the Cold War lay before him, and seemed to confirm his earlier prediction that Berlin would serve as the main object of contention in the battle of wills.
In June, Kennedy journeyed to Vienna to meet on neutral territory with Khrushchev. The idea was to relax tensions, but it wasn’t to be. On Berlin, Khrushchev bluntly stated his position. The German situation was a mess that had to be resolved. A peace treaty with East Germany, ending the wartime occupation zones, would be signed by the end of the year, whether or not the Western powers wanted to join the U.S.S.R. in doing so. From that point on, all access to West Berlin would have to be settled with the East German authorities, who would wield sovereignty over all Berlin. The Soviet Union would certainly not allow the U.S. to maintain its present rights there. And if the U.S. tried to act as if it still owned West Berlin, that would violate East Germany’s sovereignty and be a cause for war.
The Vienna meeting profoundly disturbed Kennedy. As the two parted, Kennedy predicted, “It will be a cold winter.” He was shaken by the implacable stance that Khrushchev took. That the Cold War might become a hot war by the end of Kennedy’s first year of office seemed possible.
Three weeks after Kennedy returned to Washington, he received a paper on the Berlin crisis that he had assigned the previous March to Dean Acheson, Secretary of State in the Truman Administration and progenitor of the NATO alliance. Acheson thought that Berlin itself was more the pretext than the problem. Khrushchev’s intention was not to do something about the German problem but to test America’s will to resist aggression. By forcing the U.S. to back down on the commitment to Berlin, Khrushchev could destroy our commitments elsewhere, our general influence in the world. Khrushchev had dared to force the crisis because he felt that the United States was too fearful to use nuclear weapons—which we would have to use if the Soviets insisted on occupying all of Berlin to the bitter end of what might start out as a conventional conflict. Acheson’s solution was to avoid any sort of negotiations; they would only divert attention from the real issue. Instead, Kennedy should order a massive buildup of conventional forces, enough to hold out in conventional conflict for several weeks—not so much to defeat the Communists on the ground, but to persuade the Kremlin that we had the resolve to carry the conflict to whatever level it would take to keep West Berlin free, to affirm to the world that we honored commitments. Ideally, such resolution might persuade Khrushchev to back down. However, Acheson fully acknowledged that such a strategy might very well result in nuclear war.
Several White House and State Department advisers argued that Acheson went too far, that Khrushchev’s objectives might be more limited, that the President should seek out proposals to settle the crisis through negotiation. Kennedy sided with his advisers on negotiations, but agreed with Acheson’s fundamental approach. Indeed, the memo helped Kennedy define the terms and nature of the crisis. During a visit to the White House later in the year by Finnish President Urho Kekkonen, Kennedy described Khrushchev’s pressure on Berlin as part of a campaign “to neutralize West Germany as a first step in the neutralization of Western Europe.” Kennedy explained, “It is not that we wish to stand on the letter of the law or that we underestimate the dangers of war. But if we don’t meet our commitments in Berlin, it will mean the destruction of NATO and a dangerous situation for the whole world. All Europe is at stake in West Berlin.”
Earlier that spring, as Khrushchev began turning the screws on Berlin, William Kaufmann, consulting for Harry Rowen in the Pentagon, made an astonishing discovery while looking over some new intelligence data. By this time, thousands of photographs taken by the Discoverer reconnaissance satellite had been analyzed by the CIA, and while officials still proclaimed a missile gap, its unraveling was clearly under way. Moreover, the analysts had obtained highly detailed information about the Soviet missiles—their readiness, how long it would take the Soviets to launch them, the readiness of ancillary forces of the Soviet strategic arsenal, such as the air-defense and early-warning networks, the command-control facilities and all the rest. Kaufmann was one of the first civilians in the Pentagon to examine these recent findings closely, and their implications were stunning.