Officially, the Western powers countered Khrushchev’s ultimatum by demanding the retention of the status quo in Berlin for the time being, though they consented to a four-power meeting of the foreign ministers at which the Berlin situation and other German problems would be open to discussion. At this meeting, which was held in Geneva in the summer of 1959, the Soviets repeated their demands for a Western withdrawal from Berlin, while the Western foreign ministers argued that four-power control over Berlin must remain intact until the city became the capital of a reunited Germany. Christian Herter, who had become the new U.S. secretary of state following Dulles’s death earlier that year, pointed out that the West Berliners wanted the Western troops to stay, which was certainly true. The Berliners’ greatest fear, repeatedly articulated by West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt, was that the Western powers might be bullied into believing that they had to trade their stake in Berlin for world peace.
Brandt and the Berliners had reason to be concerned about the steadfastness of British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who warned President Eisenhower that it would “not be easy to persuade the British people that it was their duty to go to war in the defense of West Berlin,” and to help a people “who have tried to destroy us twice in this century.” Eisenhower privately worried that the same might be true of the Americans. Still hoping for a peaceful way out of the Berlin imbroglio, he invited Khrushchev to visit him at the presidential retreat in Camp David for one-on-one discussions. Such an informal arrangement, he believed, might be more productive than the full-blown summit meeting that Macmillan was lobbying for.
Proud to be the first Soviet leader to be received on U.S. soil by an American president, Khrushchev arrived at what he called the “presidential dacha” in September 1959. The talks were convivial enough, but the only changes in existing positions involved Khrushchev’s dropping of the six-month time frame for a Berlin solution and Eisenhower’s concession that the existing Berlin situation was “abnormal.” With no substantial progress either at Gamp David or Geneva, Eisenhower reluctantly agreed to a four-power summit meeting in Paris in the coming spring on the German problem.
As it turned out, any possible movement at the Paris Summit was scuttled in advance by a momentous event high in the skies over the Soviet Union: the Russians’ downing of an American U-2 spy plane on May 1, 1960. Eisenhower had been extremely reluctant to sanction such flights in view of the impending summit, but the CIA convinced him that one last reconnaissance was necessary to check on Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) bases. The Russians were incapable of knocking down a U-2, the CIA promised, and for that very reason unlikely to complain publicly about the flights. As it happened, however, the Soviets succeeded not only in bringing down the plane but in capturing the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, who had disobeyed orders to blow up his aircraft and to kill himself if he ran into trouble. Failing to extract a public apology from Eisenhower for violating Soviet airspace, Khrushchev used the U-2 incident to wreck the Paris Summit, from which in any case he had not expected to extract any substantial gains with respect to Berlin.
Khrushchev had greater hopes on this score following the election of John F. Kennedy to the American presidency. Kennedy was known to be skittish on the Berlin question, which he had barely touched on during his campaign against Vice President Richard Nixon. As the new president himself admitted shortly after being elected, of all his foreign policy problems Berlin had the greatest potential of forcing a choice between “holocaust and humiliation.” Khrushchev knew that fear of Russian retaliation against Berlin had been a primary motive for Kennedy’s failure to save the Bay of Pigs invasion, his first major humiliation in office. JFK’s cut-and-run approach in that instance convinced the Soviet premier that the American leader would also fold if pushed in Berlin, which he gleefully called “the testicles of the West,” the place on which he had only to “squeeze” a little when he wanted his adversaries “to scream.”
Khrushchev got his chance to squeeze Kennedy on Berlin during their first face-to-face confrontation at the Vienna Summit in June 1961. The meeting had hardly gotten underway when the Soviet premier began to complain about Washington’s “impossible” position on Berlin and Germany. But instead of “solving” the problem through the creation of a neutral, reunited Germany, the Soviet leader now called on the West to acknowledge Germany’s permanent division by pulling out of Berlin. By staying in West Berlin, remilitarizing West Germany, and feeding Bonn’s dreams of reunification, he said, America was creating the preconditions for a new world war. As an interim solution, Khrushchev repeated Moscow’s offer to make West Berlin into a “free city” with guaranteed access to the wider world, but without any contractual ties to the West. Glaring at Kennedy, he said that he wanted to reach an agreement “with you,” but if he could not, he would sign a peace treaty with the GDR. Then “all commitments stemming from Germany’s surrender will become invalid. This would include all institutions, occupation rights, and access to Berlin, including the corridors.”
Before coming to Vienna, Kennedy had been advised by Allan Lightner, the U.S. minister in West Berlin, to “tell Khrushchev in blunt language” that the “Soviets should keep their hands off Berlin.” This, in effect, is what he proceeded to do. While thanking the chairman for being so “frank,” he reminded him that “the discussion here is not only about the legal situation but also about the practical facts, which affect very much our national security. . . . 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.”
Having expected at least some give from the young American president, Khrushchev became increasingly angry, lecturing him like a schoolchild on the stakes at play in Berlin. The former Nazi capital, he said, was “the most dangerous spot in the world.” Upping his ante in metaphors, he fumed that his government was determined “to perform an operation on this sore spot, to eliminate this thorn, this ulcer.” By signing a peace treaty with East Germany Moscow would “impede the revanchists in West Germany who want a new war.” Slamming his hand on the table, he shouted: “I want peace. But if you want war, that is your problem.”
Despite a regimen of amphetamines prescribed by a quack doctor for his Addison’s disease, Kennedy remained calm under the barrage. “It is you, and not I, who wants to force a change,” he replied. America would not abandon Berlin. If as a result Moscow followed through on its threats and signed a peace treaty with East Germany in December, it would be “a cold winter,” he said grimly.
Kennedy’s calm at Vienna was deceptive. After the meeting he admitted that Khrushchev “just beat hell out of me.” More importantly, he unburdened himself in private regarding his actual feelings about Berlin, which were much more ambivalent than he had made out in Vienna. “We’re stuck in a ridiculous position,” he confided to his aide, Kenneth O’Donnell. “It seems silly for us to be facing an atomic war over a treaty preserving Berlin as the future capital of a reunited Germany when all of us know that Germany will probably never be reunited.” Contradicting an earlier assertion that the freedom of Western Europe hinged on the defense of West Berlin, he added:
God knows I’m not an isolationist, but it seems particularly stupid to risk killing a million Americans over an argument about access rights on an Autobahn. . . or because the Germans want Germany reunified. If I’m going to threaten Russia with a nuclear war, it will have to be for much bigger reasons than that. Before I back Khrushchev against the wall and put him to a final test, the freedom of all Western Europe will have to be at stake.