Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [148]
Unfortunately, Khrushchev himself was there to talk about Berlin, and only Berlin. The Soviet Union, he reiterated, was planning to sign a treaty with East Germany that gave it total authority to control access to West Berlin. What this meant—and Khrushchev made it sharply specific—was that the Americans, the British, and the French would have to end their historic shared occupation of the divided city. The Russians had been edging up to this land grab, then backing away, for several years. This time, however, they seemed ready to proceed.
“The USSR will sign a peace treaty, and the sovereignty of the GDR will be observed,” Khrushchev said in a formal pronouncement. “Any violation of that sovereignty will be regarded by the USSR as an act of open aggression. If the U.S. wants to start a war over Germany, let it do so.”
Kennedy argued, to no avail, for the opposite approach. Instead of heightening Cold War tensions, why not try to lessen them? If Berlin was going to change, why not see it as a model for the future and not as a relic of the past? He tried to interest the Russian in a topic that meant more to him than just about anything else: a treaty over nuclear testing. He tried everything he could think of that might touch the man who was his opponent. He even invoked their shared losses in World War II. For, in the same way Jack mourned his brother Joe, so Khrushchev grieved, still, for his downed fighter-pilot son. But all the efforts the American made to light some spark of commonality between them produced no results.
Desperate, Kennedy requested a third meeting. In the last encounter with Khrushchev, he tried separating the two issues, suggesting that the Soviets might sign a treaty with East Germany while still allowing open access to West Berlin. That way, peace, at least, could be maintained. But the whole idea of the USSR-GDR agreement was to shut down the steady drain of East German workers through the city. Again, Khrushchev dug in his heels.
The new East German government, he said, would have full authority to deny access. Any effort to resist by either America or its allies would be met with the full force of the Red Army, which greatly outnumbered American and allied forces. When Kennedy pushed Khrushchev to acknowledge the right of the United States to continue to have access to West Berlin, Khrushchev held firm. “It is up to the U.S. to decide whether there will be war or peace.”
At this final session Kennedy’s companion made it clear, if it wasn’t already, that his decision was “irrevocable” and “firm.” In the end, all Jack was able to offer in reply to Khrushchev’s threat of war was this grim prediction: “If that’s true, it’s going to be a cold winter.” He left Vienna and returned to Washington, crushed by the experience. The Bay of Pigs had tainted him, he saw, allowing Khrushchev to treat him so contemptuously.
Jack Kennedy now understood he had to find a way to convince Khrushchev he was someone who would fight. But, even before that, he needed to understand exactly why the Soviet leader had talked to him that way, hectoring him. Was Khrushchev, in fact, crazy? He hadn’t thought so, but what else explained why he was talking about war between two countries armed with nuclear weapons? “I never met a man like this,” he told Time’s Hugh Sidey. “I talked about how a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes, and he just looked at me as if to say, ‘So what?’ My impression was that he just didn’t give a damn if it came to that.”
To Ken O’Donnell he spelled out his own deeper belief, one he’d never share with a reporter, that not even Berlin was worth the possibility now threatened. “It will have to be for much bigger and more important 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