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
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.”
