The Berlin Airlift and Berlin Wall: The History and Legacy of the Fight Over the Occupied City during the Cold War by Charles River Editors

Author:Charles River Editors
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Charles River Editors
Published: 2019-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

Khrushchev and Kennedy meet at Vienna

W.R. Smyser, author of Kennedy and the Berlin Wall argues that Kennedy was naive about Khrushchev’s level of seriousness over the Berlin issue going into the Vienna summit because his ambassadors had not correctly communicated Khrushchev’s anger and urgency on the matter. Khrushchev had told the Czechs that he planned to scare Kennedy into doing what he wanted in Berlin. He also believed humiliating Kennedy in Berlin would accomplish his further goals of causing NATO members to lose faith in the promises of the American government and scaring away Western investors from West Germany, thus leaving the country open to a takeover.[37]

During the meeting, Khrushchev alternated between calm and, as Kennedy later described it, “going berserk”. He claimed that the United States was asking the Soviet Union “to sit like schoolboy with his hands on his desk” and that since the Soviet Union believed so strongly in the ideas of communism “it [could not] guarantee that these ideas will stop at its borders”.[38] Kennedy responded by explaining to Khrushchev the nature of his position on Berlin: “This matter is of the greatest concern to the U.S. We are in Berlin not because of someone's sufferance. We fought our way here, although our causalities may not have been as high as the U.S.S.R.'s. We are in Berlin not by agreement by East Germans, but by our contractual rights."[39]

Khrushchev did not react well to Kennedy’s replies, alternately threatening and lecturing Kennedy that his position would lead to inevitable war between the two sides, and Smyser’s discussion of Kennedy and Khrushchev suggests that Khrushchev’s intimidation tactics may have worked to an extent: “Khrushchev may well have put in a show, deliberately throwing the kind of tantrums that he had thrown in some of his private meetings with MacMillan [the British Prime Minister]…An American journalist told a U.S. official that…Kennedy looked ‘green’ at the end of the summit. Another American wrote that Kennedy appeared ‘dazed’ by the ‘sheer animal energy’ of Khrushchev’s presentation”.[40]

Kennedy’s performance in Vienna has met with mixed reactions. Some have put the blame for the construction of the Berlin Wall on what they see as Kennedy’s weakness in his initial meeting with the Soviet premier, while others believe he more than adequately defended American sovereignty in a nearly impossible situation. At a 2011 CIA conference discussing the wall, the conference concluded that “Kennedy undercut his own bargaining position with the Soviet Premier when [he] conveyed US acquiescence to the permanent division of Berlin. This misstep in the negotiations made Kennedy’s later, more assertive public statements, less credible to the Soviets, who now saw him as indecisive and weak”.[41]

In a similar vein, Large discusses Kennedy’s own frustration with the need to defend Berlin, indicating that Kennedy was not as committed to the city as he might have seemed in Vienna. Large recalls Kennedy’s words to an aide: "We're stuck in a ridiculous position. It seems silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty

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