Cold War Saga (review)

The Cold War of the early 1960s was a period of great peril for the United States and the world. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, anxious to influence the power balance in Europe and to gain recognition for the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was regularly threatening to sign a separate peace treaty with the GDR that would terminate Western access and occupation rights in West Berlin. The United States and its French and British allies, for their part, regularly affirmed that they would resist any such action, by force if necessary.

Kempton Jenkins, then a junior diplomat and expert on Germany in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, reveals in vivid detail the private negotiations between legendary U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson and long-time Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in which the real possibility of World War III cropped up, including the nuclear obliteration of New York City.

From January to March 1961, Thompson and Gromyko met six times at the Soviet Foreign Ministry to seek a negotiated resolution to the Berlin crisis. Although Gromyko discussed East German issues in his memoirs he did not dwell on his talks with the U.S. envoy. Ambassador Thompson never put pen to paper at the end of his career and left only handwritten notes on early drafts of his official, secret messages to Washington.

From the start of the negotiations, the Soviet side made clear its desire for a treaty that would formally end World War II, define national boundaries, recognize the existence of the two Germanys and create a “free city” of Berlin deep within the new Communist state of the GDR. The Western allies, unwilling to abandon their Berlin rights to an increasingly truculent Soviet Union, argued instead for an International Access Authority to regulate and police ground and air access routes to Berlin.

Jenkins describes how the talks got under way on 2 January 1961 in cordial fashion at Gromyko’s office in the towering ministry building on Smolensk Square with the foreign minister inquiring gently in fluent English about the ambassador’s wife. “Tommy,” Jenkins quotes Gromyko as saying, “I hope Jane is well.” Gromyko then addressed the 34-year-old Jenkins in Russian, testing his fluency, and patting him in a friendly manner on the back.

This is the sort of inside stuff of U.S.-Soviet diplomacy that often gets lost in historical accounts. Viktor Sukhodrev, the talented Soviet interpreter at the meeting, does not mention this particular incident in his memoir, Moi Yazyk—Moi Drug [My Language Is My Friend] (Moscow: ACT, 1999), but he does confirm that Gromyko always tried to establish cordial relations with his interlocutor even though he could be totally obstinate in negotiating.

Jenkins served as Thompson’s note-taker, jotting down Gromyko’s statements with pencil and paper and then refining his notes when Sukhodrev rendered the remarks sequentially into English. Sukhodrev was equally fluent in both languages, having gone to school in England during World War II as the son of a Soviet trade official. Jenkins preserved his notes of those meetings, with Thompson’s handwritten clarifications, for fifty years before sitting down to write his autobiography.

As East and West butted heads over Khrushchev’s repeated ultimatums that he would sign a separate peace with East Germany by December 1961, the pleasant atmosphere of the first meeting gave way to incendiary threats at the third on 13 January. Jenkins writes that Ambassador Thompson, responding to Gromyko’s tirade that access could be discussed only in terms of full sovereignty for East Germany, warned that the point of the negotiations was not to draw a line under World War II but to avoid a nuclear holocaust of World War III. The allusion to force set off the Soviet foreign minister, who declared that diplomats should refrain from trying to intimidate the Soviet Union and that a further deterioration in relations could lead to “the incineration of New York City.”

The chain-smoking U.S. ambassador did not react immediately but kept pulling on his cigarette until Gromyko...