The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersh

Author:Seymour Hersh [Seymour Hersh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780007397662
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1997-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

The president’s technique in superpower confrontations would become ingrained by the Cuban missile crisis in late 1962. The president would speak with resolve to his aides and in public, but privately do everything—using Georgi Bolshakov, if he was available—to settle the dispute. He used this technique again in late October 1961, when American and Soviet tanks squared off against each other at Checkpoint Charlie, a highly publicized gate in the Berlin Wall formally known as the Friedrichstrasse crossing. The tanks were armed and had authority to fire.

The dispute began when East German border guards stopped the automobile of Allan Lightner, the senior American diplomat in Berlin, who with his wife was going into East Berlin to attend an opera. The guards asked to see Lightner’s passport. He refused, since to show it would have suggested American recognition of the authority of East Germany, and not the Soviet Union, in East Berlin, a concession the United States did not wish to make. Lightner was refused access to the East, and returned with a squad of American soldiers, backed up by four tanks. The border guards stepped aside and Lightner and his wife were allowed to drive through. General Clay telephoned the president and won approval to escalate the issue. American civilians, ignoring the border guards, thus began to drive into East Berlin, accompanied by ever-increasing numbers of American troops. On October 26, a battalion of thirty-three Soviet tanks entered East Berlin, precisely matching the number of American tanks in reserve on the other side. The formal standoff began a day later, when ten Soviet tanks moved up to the East German side of the checkpoint, facing ten American tanks, which also moved forward.

Publicly, as Clay told his biographer Jean Edward Smith, Kennedy backed him all the way. The president telephoned during the crisis and urged him to not “lose your nerve.” Clay responded, he said, “Mr. President, we’re not worried about losing our nerve over here. What we’re worried about is whether you people in Washington are losing yours.” Kennedy said, “I’ve got a lot of people here that have, but I haven’t.” In private, of course, Kennedy was agitated by the dispute, telling an aide, “We didn’t send him [Allan Lightner] over there to go to the opera in East Berlin.” The president and his brother turned once again to Georgi Bolshakov. In his interview with the Kennedy Library, Robert Kennedy said, “I got in touch with Bolshakov and said the president would like them to take their tanks out of there in twenty-four hours. He said he’d speak to Khrushchev, and they took their tanks out in twenty-four hours. He delivered effectively when it was a matter that was important.”

In a little-noted analysis published thirty years later in Foreign Policy magazine, Raymond L. Garthoff, a former CIA and State Department official who has written widely on U.S.-USSR affairs, wrote about the Checkpoint Charlie incident from the Soviet point of view. In Soviet archives and through interviews in Moscow, Garthoff

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