The United States and the Soviet Union were, at the time, engaged in their most serious confrontation since the Berlin airlift of 1948. And once again, Berlin was at the center of the crisis. Sixteen years after the defeat of the Nazis, the city was still divided among four occupying powers: the British, French, and Americans in the West; the Soviets in the East. The division was economic, as well as political. While Communist East Berlin stagnated, capitalist West Berlin thrived. But it was a fragile prosperity. Located deep within East Germany, linked to West Germany only by air and a 110-mile stretch of highway, the free sectors of Berlin were surrounded by troops from the Soviet bloc. NATO forces in the city were vastly outnumbered. America’s nuclear weapons were all that protected West Berlin from being overrun.
Since 1958 the Soviet Union had been threatening to sign a treaty with East Germany, hand over the eastern part of the city to its Communist ally — and block NATO access to West Berlin. The threat was forcefully repeated at a summit meeting between President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in June 1961. The Soviet Union seemed ascendant, having recently launched the first man into space. And Kennedy’s stature had been greatly diminished by the Bay of Pigs invasion, a failed attempt to overthrow the Communist government of Cuba. Khrushchev thought the new president was young and inexperienced, perhaps too timid to provide air support for the CIA-backed army pinned down on the beaches of Cuba. Kennedy had hoped that the summit would lead to warmer relations between the two superpowers. Instead, Khrushchev confronted him with an ultimatum: if the United States did not agree to the creation of a “free” and demilitarized Berlin, the Soviets would sign a treaty with East Germany by the end of the year and severely limit NATO’s rights in the city. When Kennedy made clear that would be unacceptable, the Soviet leader didn’t back down.
“It is up to the United States to decide whether there will be war or peace,” Khrushchev said.
“Then it will be a cold winter,” Kennedy replied.
During the Eisenhower administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff seemed to have few options if the Soviets tried to close the autobahn to Berlin. A convoy of American troops would most likely depart from West Germany on the road — and if they were attacked, the United States would be under great pressure to launch a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Secretary of Defense McNamara hoped that a subtler response could be devised. He wanted a plan that would permit the gradual escalation of a conflict, and delay the use of nuclear weapons for as long as possible. But the French president, Charles de Gaulle, and the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had little confidence that West Berlin could be defended with conventional weapons. Any suggestion that the United States might not use nuclear weapons immediately, they worried, could weaken deterrence and encourage the Soviets to take risks.
General Lauris Norstad, the supreme allied commander of NATO, agreed with the British and the French. Norstad thought that once the fighting began, the escalation wouldn’t be gradual. It would be “explosive,” and NATO had to be ready for all-out nuclear war. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Norstad had persuaded McNamara to keep the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy. “This is the time to create strength,” Norstad said, “not reduce it.”
As Khrushchev continued to make public threats against West Berlin and raise the specter of war, President Kennedy followed the advice of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. “If a crisis is provoked,” Acheson had suggested, “a bold and dangerous course may be the safest.” The United States should raise the stakes, send more conventional forces to Germany, and show a willingness to fight. On July 25, Kennedy gave a televised address on the Berlin crisis. The Soviet Union had no right to restrict NATO’s presence in West Berlin, Kennedy asserted, “and we have given our word that an attack upon that city will be an attack upon us all.” He proposed a call-up of reservists and National Guard units, an expansion of the draft, the addition of more than 100,000 troops to the Army, a delay in the retirement of the Strategic Air Command’s B-47 bombers — and a plan to build more civilian bomb shelters in the United States. Angered by the speech, Khrushchev asked John McCloy, a White House adviser who was visiting Russia, to pass along a message: “Tell Kennedy that if he starts a war then he would probably become the last President of the United States.”
