In late 2009 I wrote a number of posts on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. The opening of the Berlin Wall was the symbolic end of the Cold War. Our victory in the Cold War was as significant as November 11, 1918 or V-E or V-J Day in 1945, but it is less noticed because the war was cold instead of hot.
In any case, for those of us alive during the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, the Berlin Wall was omnipresent. It was there, Germany was divided, and we didn’t think it would change, at least in our lifetimes. But it did change, and the Wall that seemed like it would last forever was gone in a little over 28 years. That was twice as long as the Thousand Year Reich lasted, but not nearly as long as anybody expected.
Which brings me to the point of this post: August 13 is the fiftieth anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall. The Wall went up on August 13, 1961.
I recently read a new book, Berlin 1961 by Frederick Kempe, which covers not only the building of the Wall, but the rest of 1961, though the emphasis is on Berlin. The subtitle of the book explains the author’s thesis: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth.
The book starts with the Bay of Pigs and how President Kennedy messed it up, basically by doing things halfway. Actually, the book starts with the Berlin Crisis in 1958 and then the downing of Gary Francis Powers’ U-2 plane in May 1960. The interesting thing about the downing of the U-2 is that it was a bigger problem for Nikita Khrushchev than it was for President Eisenhower. The downing of the plane made public the fact that the United States had been making the flights, i.e., violating Russian airspace, for a long time and the Russians hadn’t been able to do anything about it. This made Khrushchev look weak to his hard-line opponents inside the Kremlin.
After the Bay of Pigs, the book continues to the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit in Vienna in June of 1961. That, too, was a disaster for President Kennedy. Kennedy, who was taking all kinds of painkillers for his various physical problems, disregarded his advisors’ advice and tried to talk/argue ideology with Khrushchev. Kennedy had always found that people responded to his charm. Khrushchev didn’t. After the summit, President Kennedy confessed to James Reston of The New York Times: “Worst thing in my life. He savaged me.” [Kempe, p.257]
While Khrushchev had been pushing the Berlin issue since 1958, by 1961 it was Khrushchev who was getting pushed on Berlin – by Walter Ulbricht, leader of East Germany. The East Germans had closed their border with West Germany in 1952, but Berlin was under Four-Power control, and there was freedom of movement in Berlin. That meant, to get out of East Germany, one only had to go to East Berlin and then nonchalantly cross the sector boundary into West Berlin. And lots of East Germans were doing it. In fact, East Germany was hemorrhaging people. Ulbricht was pressuring Khrushchev: Something had to be done to stop the flow or East Germany would collapse. And if the Soviets lost East Germany, the rest of Eastern Europe could be next. Obviously, this was unacceptable.
Khrushchev told Kennedy, in Vienna and at other times, that if the United States would not negotiate a new status for Berlin, the Soviets would sign their own peace treaty with East Germany and then turn over control of not only East Berlin but also the access routes to West Berlin to the East Germans. Implicit in Khrushchev’s threat was that East Germany would close the sector boundary in Berlin and shut down the access routes to West Berlin from West Germany.
Kennedy, on the other hand, did not see Berlin as a priority. He was worried about nuclear war. He wanted a test ban treaty. He didn’t care that much about Berlin as an issue. He didn’t see Germany reuniting any time soon. But for Khrushchev, Berlin was the main issue – and so it became the main issue.
It is President Kennedy’s handling of the Berlin crisis in 1961 that Mr. Kempe really criticizes. Mr. Kempe not only sees President Kennedy as being relieved when the Wall was built. He also wonders whether, in speeches and other ways, President Kennedy wasn’t providing signals to Khrushchev that something like the Wall was the solution to the Berlin problem.
As Mr. Kempe notes, President Kennedy’s speeches on Berlin in summer of 1961 emphasized the protection of Allied rights in “West Berlin”. This was a clear change from prior formulations, which had talked about “Berlin”. Also, Mr. Kempe writes: “Kennedy had made clear through several channels before August 13 that he would not respond if Khrushchev and the East Germans restricted their actions to their own territory.” [Kempe, p. 359] And this is what they did. Everything that the Soviets and East Germans did was within East Berlin/East Germany. They did not interfere with Western access rights to West Berlin. They did not do anything in or to West Berlin. Even the Wall itself was very carefully built entirely within East Berlin. In fact, after the Wall went up, there was a foot or two of East Berlin that was now on the West Berlin side of the Wall.
In his criticism of President Kennedy, Kempe notes the lack of response to the barbed wire barrier that went up on August 13. It was only after the barbed wire had been in place for several days, without reaction by the West, that the East Germans began turning the barbed wire into a real wall. Was the delay a matter of logistics or were the Russians waiting to see what the West might do? We don’t know, but Mr. Kempe finds the delay significant.
Mr. Kempe compares President Kennedy’s response to the building of the Wall with President Truman’s response to Stalin’s blockade of Berlin in 1948. While Truman was told there was nothing we could do in response to the blockade, General Lucius Clay did something: he started an airlift. Truman supported it, and it worked. After almost a year, the Russians backed down. The United States not only won a battle with the Soviet Union, they also won the friendship of the German people.
In 1961, however, the U.S. did nothing. For a while, we asserted the rights of Allied soldiers and civilians to enter East Berlin without showing identification cards to East German border guards, but we did nothing to push aside the barbed wire barriers. We did nothing about the illegal presence of East German soldiers in Berlin. And, finally, after a tank-to-tank confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie in October,* we stopped challenging the authority of the East Germans at the border crossing points.
While Mr. Kempe never specifically says so, by the end of the book, you get the feeling he thinks the Wall could have been avoided by a more forceful response and demonstration of power by the Americans.
But to complete the story of the Wall (and what might have happened if we had responded differently), I think you also have to compare 1961 with the events of 1989 and 1990. In 1989/90 a combination of a people’s revolution in East Germany and hard bargaining and intelligent diplomacy by the United States and West Germany resulted in something that few, if any, thought possible: a free and unified Germany in NATO.
And so, the question is, what could similar firmness have accomplished in 1961? If the U.S. had more been firm, and intelligent, could the Wall have been avoided? I don’t think so. Let me explain.
First, consider 1948. The situation in 1948 was very different than 1961 – and in more than that the US had a nuclear monopoly in 1948 that we no longer had in 1961.
In 1948 the Soviet blockade was an existential threat to West Berlin. For the Soviets, however, the blockade was not an existential threat, either to them or to the East Germans. Nor was it a response to some other existential threat to them. That made it easier for the Soviets to eventually back down, which they did.
In 1961, however, the Soviet Union and East Germany did face an existential threat. They had to do something to stop the flow of people out of East Germany. This exodus was threatening the collapse of East Germany. If East Germany went, how many of the other East European countries might also go? The Soviets ultimately determined that the key was to do something that stopped the flow of refugees, but did not threaten West Berlin. And that was what the Wall did. As President Kennedy said, he could threaten war to protect West Berlin. He would have the people’s support for that. But he couldn’t threaten war to protect the right of access to East Berlin or the right of East Berliners to travel to West Berlin.
What about 1989/90? The difference between 1961 and 1989/90 was not really in the West. It is true that George H.W. Bush and Helmut Kohl played a much better game of diplomacy in 1989/90 than John F. Kennedy did in 1961. Less skilled diplomacy by Bush and Kohl in 1989/90 might have achieved less than what was actually accomplished, but the real difference in 1989/90 was in the East, in East Germany and Soviet Union.
In 1961 Khrushchev was willing to use force to keep East Germany in the Soviet bloc. He had done that in Hungary five years earlier, and he seemed willing to do it again. Mikhail Gorbachev was not willing to use force in 1989. He was focused on reforming communism in the Soviet Union, on glasnost and perestroika. He did not have the time and energy, or the desire, to intervene in East Germany.
But perhaps even more important was the difference in the East German leadership. In 1961, Walter Ulbricht believed. He was willing to use force, as were the people under him, to save his country and to protect communism. He and his subordinates were first generation leaders. They believed in communism and the cause.
In 1989, Erich Honecker, a second generation leader, still believed, as did a few others in the leadership. But many didn’t. Many of the second generation were near the end of their time. The third generation was taking over. The third generation could see the differences between West Germany and East Germany. They knew, or at least some of them did, that East Germany was only staying as close as it was to the West (and it wasn’t that close) because of huge loans from the West. East Germany was going broke. And this fact affected both the country and its leaders. Ultimately, the East German leadership did not have the resolve or the will to use force against those protesting in the streets of East Germany.**
The West prevailed in 1948 because they were facing an existential threat to their rights in West Berlin and they were willing to fight to maintain themselves there, while the Russians were not willing to start a war to force them out. In 1989, the Soviet Union wouldn’t intervene in East Germany, and the East German regime had lost the will to fight. The people pushed and the leadership cracked.
But 1961 was different. In 1961 the Russians/East Germans were defending East Germany’s existence. They needed to do something to stop the exodus from East Germany. If they didn’t, East Germany would have been lost, with the rest of Eastern Europe next. In 1961 that was unacceptable. And as long as the existence of West Berlin was not being threatened, the West was not willing to fight back.
The Russians and East Germans won in 1961 (assuming the Wall was a victory) because situation in 1961 was an existential question for East Germany and the Russians, and they were willing to threaten to fight to not lose East Germany. The Americans and the West, on the other hand, were not willing to fight for the right of East Germans to leave East Berlin or to protect Western access rights to East Berlin. It wasn’t worth a war.
I suppose it is possible that the West could have successfully pushed back on the Wall in August of 1961 and avoided a war, but only if the Russians and East Germans could have found another way to stop the flood of people leaving East Germany. The Soviets and East Germans needed to stop this flow. In 1961 they had the will to do it, and we couldn’t justify risking war to stop them. It is for this reason that I do not think the outcome of the Berlin crisis in 1961 would have been all that much different, even if John F. Kennedy had done a better job.
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Note on sources: The main sources for this post were: Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth, 2011; Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany, 1997; and Jeffrey Kopstein, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945-1989, 1997. The citations for quotations from Mr. Kempe’s book are listed in the post. Other than that I have not cited specific pages.
* According to Frederick Kempe, “the Cold War’s most perilous moment.” [Kempe, p. 481]
** Compare East Germany in 1989 to Syria today.
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