The Berlin Wall (35 page)

Back in Washington from the Cape, Kennedy conferred with his aides. General Maxwell Taylor, the President’s recently appointed liaison with the chiefs of staff, was opposed even to a reinforcement of the Berlin garrison. In strict military terms, he may have been right, but Berlin was not strictly or even mainly a military crisis. The morning wore on, but no practical measures were decided. There was vague talk of flag-showing activities, but the administration continued to veto statements by the American commandant. The President, although swayed by Murrow’s dramatic report from Berlin, was still concerned that no one on the other side of the Atlantic should be allowed to force his hand.

In a way, this was understandable. As Egon Bahr, Brandt’s press secretary, would later comment, the reality remained one of ‘big Kennedy and little Brandt’.

And ‘big Kennedy’ was perfectly clear where he stood, despite Murrow’s warnings and the ‘Berlin Mafia’s’ pleas. Kenneth P. O’Donnell, a major figure in the Boston-Irish political establishment and now
‘special assistant’ to the President, heard the President’s conclusions at the end of his first morning back in the Oval Office. Kennedy asked,

‘Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize Berlin? There wouldn’t be a need of a wall if he occupied the whole city. This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.’

He leaned back in his chair and tapped his teeth with his fingers, the way he always did when he was reflecting. And then he said: ‘This is the end of the Berlin crisis. The other side panicked—not we. We’re going to do nothing now because there is no alternative except war. It’s all over, they’re not going to overrun Berlin.’
²⁶

The President’s conclusion was pure, cold
realpolitik
.

The British were even less inclined to let the Germans dictate policy. On 14 August Sir Christopher Steel, Her Britannic Majesty’s ambassador to West Germany, cabled London to cast doubt on the West Germans government’s response to the sealing of the border. They had declared it a Soviet/East German plot to gobble up West Berlin, a view that was, Steel said, ‘at variance with the obvious facts of the situation’. ‘The Federal Government,’ Steel wrote to his masters in London, ‘are not really interested in reunification and their attitude is all politics.’ He continued:

I must say that I personally have always wondered that the East Germans have waited so long to seal this boundary. I think that hitherto it has been the fear of West German and Allied sanctions which stopped them doing so (as last winter) but the cumulative defections of the past month have forced them to action. I should think that in any settlement it would be almost impossible for us to re-establish a situation where East Germans are more or less free to leave the Communist world at will. We ought really, therefore, to get together with the Americans as soon as possible—albeit cautiously—to ensure that they, no more than we, regard this as the issue on which we break.
²⁷

The British ambassador’s dry scepticism reflected the views of diplomats and politicians throughout the Western world. The East was not
out to swallow Berlin. It was out to rearrange the situation there to its advantage, and in particular to secure East Berlin. As long as this was all the East did, the Allies would undertake no military counter-measures. The only exception, for the moment, was the French, who had their own fish to fry. Though Paris took an unenthusiastic, even hostile, view of German reunification, it was none the less keen to prise West Germany from the USA’s embrace and bind it in a French alliance. Appearing to support a ‘hard line’ on Berlin was a cost-free way for de Gaulle to pile up brownie points in Bonn.

All the same, time was passing, and doing absolutely nothing was not an option. In Berlin itself, there was increasing popular outrage in the Western sectors. Demonstrations continued. The German popular press began to turn restless and critical.

Possibly with Murrow’s encouragement,
²⁸
Willy Brandt decided to make direct contact with the President of the United States. He must, he decided, make clear to the most powerful man in the Western world what was at stake. Brandt told Egon Bahr to draft a letter to Kennedy.

The problem with such a letter was twofold. First, there was the ‘little Brandt and big Kennedy’ dilemma. Then there was the perhaps even more important fact of the German election campaign. Brandt was running for chancellor, and a direct relationship with Kennedy would have indicated to some that the American administration favoured his candidacy.

The German hustings were, and remain, a pretty robust environment. Less than forty-eight hours after the border closure, Adenauer upped the stakes, for Brandt and by implication for Kennedy. At an election rally in Bavaria on 14 August, the old man brutally referred to the West Berlin Mayor as ‘Brandt alias Frahm’.

This jibe constituted a double insult. First, it reminded his audience that Willy Brandt had been born with the name Herbert Frahm, in Lübeck, of an unmarried mother. Second, it underlined the fact that his current name, by which the great Social Democrat leader would go down in history, was actually a
nom de guerre
acquired as a political exile in Norway. There he had worked with the local anti-Nazi resistance, returning to Germany only in the autumn of 1945, and even then wearing the uniform of a Norwegian officer. Adenauer was reminding his
supporters (especially the nationalistically inclined ones) both that Brandt was born a bastard and that he was—by some interpretations—a ‘traitor’ who fought against Germany during the war.

The old man had decided to play hard ball. Brandt was deeply hurt, so much so that he felt constrained to abandon an evening sitting of the city parliament.
²⁹

Meanwhile, Bahr worked on, drafting the letter to Kennedy on behalf of his wounded and frustrated boss. With the continuing absence of any clear Allied action to oppose the ‘security barriers’ that the East Germans had erected, something needed to happen. At midnight on Monday, forty-eight hours after the first construction squads had moved in on the sector border, Berlin would enter its third full day as a divided city. Time was not on the side of those who wished to reverse that process.

Lochner, talking in an interview with the wisdom of hindsight, told the sad truth, both for Brandt and the ‘Berlin Mafia’:

At that time in our various post mortems of course we thought oh well, what could we have done? And one of the unrealistic scenarios was if we had immediately sent some tanks to remove the barbed wire—that’s how the wall started out, they simply started putting barbed wire across the major thoroughfares—and immediately at the same time and publicly [we had] called the Russians and said, ‘we realise that Saturday night till Sunday you had nobody on duty, so we took the liberty. Your East German henchmen are running wild here, they’re clearly violating the free circulation of all of Berlin, so since we couldn’t reach any of you we took the liberty on behalf of all four occupation powers to remove this silly effort to interfere with traffic.’

Well, that was theoretically possible, but no two star Generals could take such a decision. Any such decision required checking with Washington, London, Paris and Bonn—by that time,’61, you couldn’t leave the Germans out. And that obviously was totally impossible within the span of a weekend. If any such measure had been taken later, that might have provoked a war or whatever, because only it could be done under this guise of actually coming to the help of the Soviets the very first night and within hours…
³⁰

Tuesday 15 August saw the working week advance. Every hour that passed without a challenge to the East German barrier spoke more loudly of its permanence.

There were more disturbances on the Western side of the border, more calls for action. Finally, there came the long-awaited note of protest from the Western commandants, delivered to their Soviet counterpart, Colonel Andrei I. Soloviev, at his headquarters by the three powers’ liaison officers. It chided the East Germans for erecting an ‘arbitrary barrier’. It complained that East Berlin had been turned into an ‘armed camp’, violating Berliners’ right to free movement and employment. ‘We must protest,’ it concluded, ‘against the illegal measures introduced on August 13 and hold you responsible for the carrying out of the relevant agreements’.

It would not have escaped Soloviev’s notice that the one thing the protest did
not
contain was an ultimatum demanding the border barrier’s removal.

In Washington, the Berlin Steering Group met at 10.45 EST (mid-afternoon in Germany) on 15 August. Present were the Secretaries of State, Defense, Commerce, and Agriculture, the Under-Secretary of the Treasury, the Attorney-General (Robert Kennedy) and the Director of the CIA, plus the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Wilson, Edward Murrow’s deputy, and a clutch of the President’s assistants, including Maxwell Taylor and McGeorge Bundy.

Short of an additional appearance from the President, this was about as heavyweight as a meeting got. So heavy that this one ended up muscle-bound. They discussed not how to reverse the closure of the sector border, but how to deal with the public-relations aspect. According to the minutes, Rusk was even more frank about the realities of the situation than Kennedy had been in talking to O’Donnell:

The Secretary of State noted that while the border closing was a most serious matter, the probability was that in realistic terms it would make a Berlin settlement easier. Our immediate problem is the sense of outrage in Berlin and Germany which carries with it a feeling that we should do more than merely protest. It was not easy to know just what else we should do.
³¹

‘We must keep shooting issues and non-shooting issues separate,’ Rusk declared.

Again, no sanctions against the Soviet Union and its allies were announced. True, at the BSG’s meeting, the Secretary of Commerce had proposed that the US should publicly rule out sending subsidised food exports to Soviet-block countries (negotiations with Poland along these lines were already in progress). After discussion, however, such a statement was deemed unwise. Boycotting East Germany’s great international trade window, the Leipzig Fair, was likewise ruled out. The same went for restrictions on the until now almost automatic issuing of Temporary Travel Documents (TTDs) for Easterners visiting West Berlin. The only suggested counter-measure that met with the approval of most present—though not of Secretary McNamara—was the idea of reinforcing the US garrison in Berlin. Plus a stepping-up of the propaganda offensive. Robert Kennedy in particular pressed for more forceful efforts in this area.

The world was still not even certain exactly what Ulbricht and Khrushchev were up to. At the meeting of the Berlin Steering Group the previous day, reference had been to a ‘fence’ rather than a wall. In the night, however, telephone contact between East and West was suddenly cut, and movement of mail restricted.

None the less, all that really occurred during the third day after the sealing-off of East Berlin was that Washington officials briefed energetically to the press. As the
New York Times
reported:

The Kennedy administration set out today to portray East Germany’s closing of the border between East and West Berlin as a dramatic confession of Communist failure.

The highest officials here indicated that this would be the extent, for the time being, of the Allied response to Communist moves in Berlin. As long as Western rights of access to the divided city are respected, the officials said, protest and vigorous propaganda will be their primary form of retaliation.
³²

This was all perfectly rational. The first paragraph expressed the line originally proposed in the first, hasty cable to Pierre Salinger at Hyannis
Port the previous Sunday. The second paragraph, while engagingly frank and representing the reality of the matter, was the kind of thing that the West Germans and West Berliners were horrified to hear. Their anxiety all too easily led to a kind of prickly bewilderment that could easily tip into a peculiarly ambivalent anti-Americanism, a nervous biting of the protective hand.

Moreover, who could deny that the ‘Berlin Mafia’ and their German friends were in part right to be anxious? Was it not possible that the East was at heart concerned to do more than just defend itself? If one looked closely, even during these early days of Berlin’s isolation, the Communists had already started to slice off some more juicy little morsels of the notorious salami.

In their original declaration of intent, issued during the small hours of Sunday, the East Germans assured the world that once the border had been ‘protected’, access to East Berlin would not be restricted, except for ‘
provocateurs
’ and the like. None the less, within a day of ‘Operation Rose’, individuals had been forbidden access. On 15 August, Willy Kressmann, district mayor of Kreuzberg, attempted to drive into East Berlin and was denied entry as a potential troublemaker. This colourful Social Democrat—known as ‘Texas-Willy’ because during an American trip he had been made an honorary citizen of San Antonio—planned to distribute funds to ‘border-crossers’ who were resident in East Berlin but employed in Kreuzberg. These had been unable to collect their wages because of the border closure.
³³

There would soon be other cases. Sometimes unwelcome would-be visitors were only allowed into East Berlin on foot. The East could choose to interpret the word ‘
provocateur
’ exactly as it wished.