The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [351]
At the end of June, Kennedy became seriously ill with a cough, chills, a sore throat, and a high fever. By the time Dr. Travell was called in the middle of the night, the president was running a temperature of 103 degrees, rising to 105 soon after she arrived. The doctor diagnosed his condition as “beta hemolytic streptococcus” and immediately gave him penicillin, an intravenous infusion, and a sponge bath. The next day, when his temperature was coming down, Dr. Travell announced to a press briefing that the president had a “mild virus infection.”
Kennedy had spoken bold rhetoric at his inaugural address concerning how he and his administration would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Since he had returned from the summit in Vienna, however, his words did not have the same resonant ring. As a young man, he had prophesied that one day there would be a nuclear confrontation between the two great powers, but he had not imagined that he would be one of the two leaders holding the power of destruction in his hands.
Kennedy was deeply concerned about the nature of Soviet power. In July he sent a memo to his secretary of Defense asking about the Soviet air show. “Were any of the exhibits surprising?” he asked McNamara. “Do we believe their planes are superior to ours?”
He knew from all the data he had received since taking office that not only was there not the missile gap that he had talked about during the campaign, but that the United States had overwhelming nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. Kennedy knew too that in some ways that did not matter the way it always had: in a nuclear war the Soviets would be able to turn American cities into charred, unlivable ruins even as American nuclear bombs were destroying their own cities. By this terrible new logic, it was as if all his life he had been told that the world was round and suddenly he realized that it was flat, and that he stood at a precipice beyond which lay only darkness.
On July 25, 1961, Kennedy went before the American people on television—the medium for which his cool, elegant demeanor was perfectly crafted—to talk about the Berlin crisis. He repeated to the millions watching him much of what he had said to Khrushchev in Vienna. He would “not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force.” He backed up that promise by calling for an even greater military buildup and putting half of the nuclear bomb-carrying B-52s and B-47s on ground alert. He called too for a vastly expanded civil defense program, including building and expanding bomb shelters.
There was an eerie unreality about this speech to an America in which good times and private concerns dominated most lives, and in which the nation’s enemies were both far away, over distant oceans and ice caps, and far too near, only a thirty-minute missile journey from the Soviet Union to American cities. “I would like to close with a personal note,” Kennedy said. “When I ran for the presidency of the United States, I knew that this country faced serious challenges, but I could not realize—not could any man realize who does not bear the burdens of this office—how heavy and constant would be those burdens.”
Kennedy may have boldly unsheathed his rhetoric, but the reality remained that Khrushchev could not go on allowing the constant drain of many of East Germany’s best-educated citizens, drawn westward by the siren call of freedom and affluence. By the summer of 1961, the exodus had become a virtual stampede: thirty thousand East Germans a month were walking into West Berlin.
Early Sunday morning on August 13, 1961, while most of Berlin slept, East German troops and police began setting up barbed-wire barricades all along the route between East and West Berlin. Within two days they had started building the permanent concrete wall that would become one of the essential metaphors of the cold war.
Kennedy was a leader