Memoirs Of A Cold War Son

7. War over Berlin?

chapter 7 War over Berlin? I remember the 20th of August 1961 as if I had just put on clean fatigues. The “world’s fight” was abruptly here, now, sure to postpone the scholarship that was supposed to prepare me for vague battles in the future. Things had fallen apart. After the Vienna summit, Berlin muscled in on politics and private lives like a vulgar gate-crasher. Escalation frayed the nerves of American forces in West Germany and West Berlin. My family wanted me home, while tours of active duty were extended. I proceeded as if things were normal, as if leaving the army and attending Oxford were still attainable goals along a private time line that unruly public events could not erase. But I felt a distinct change in atmosphere . I was disoriented, no longer sure that time marked progress and worked in my favor. I could not free myself from events that were becoming historical around me, hardly the story I had bargained for since winning the Rhodes scholarship. I sensed that my fate was firmly in the grip of leaders in Washington and Moscow who were losing control of the Cold War. The Berlin crisis paralleled, and often accentuated, the everyday, the peaceful, the comical. I knew I was locked into an unusual drama, yet I could also go outside it, as if waking from a dream to find familiar surroundings. My memory preserved both everyday and unusual moments, its customary way of showing that it was on the job marking, filing, comparing. Memory can judge Cold War realities more accurately than governments do. American troops who reinforced the Berlin Garrison in August 1961 were later awarded the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal. The far larger numbers who stood on alert in West Germany in case the reinforcements precipitated war received no official recognition . Looking back, I think this differentiation is senseless. All of us who were in Germany in August 1961 made history and have been made by it. There is meaning in what we did and what we remember. Shortly after I returned from the University of Heidelberg’s celebration , Kennedy and Khrushchev met at Vienna on 3–4 June to discuss a wide range of issues, including Laos and nuclear arms testing as well as Berlin. Kennedy rejected Soviet proposals for even an interim settlement of the Berlin question, and Khrushchev renewed his ultimatum to sign a separate peace treaty with the East Germans no later than December, giving them control of access to a demilitarized West Berlin. “Savaged” by Khrushchev, as Kennedy privately admitted to James Reston in the U.S. embassy after the summit, the president returned home to begin preparing for the “cold winter” he promised his adversary. Escalation soon became obvious in Stars and Stripes. I read it then, and it sounds authentic as I reread it now. On Sunday, 18 June, the newspaper reported Saturday’s mass rally of about 100,000 West Berliners against Soviet policy, as well as Kennedy’s threat that a Soviet refusal to negotiate a treaty banning nuclear tests could prompt the United States to resume the testing that both governments had suspended in 1958. Daily coverage of Berlin — usually with headlines on the first page — began on 22 June, with the regular use of the word “crisis” starting in early July. On 21 June, twenty years after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev reiterated his plans for Berlin and wondered aloud whether West German leaders were foolish enough to imitate War over Berlin? : 199 their Nazi predecessors. A week later Kennedy dismissed Khrushchev ’s boast that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States economically by 1970 and affirmed Western determination to protect West Berlin. The fall of West Berlin, warned the secretary general of nato, would mean the end of the Atlantic Alliance. On 1 July we read — thanks to a news leak in Washington — that the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed evacuating 250,000 military dependents from France and West Germany, declaring a national emergency , calling up reserves and National Guard, transferring at least one combat division from America to West Germany. On the 8th the Soviets rejected American proposals for a test ban treaty, and Khrushchev announced a turnabout in defense policy: the suspension of planned troop reductions and an increase of 25 percent in military spending for the year. President Kennedy, who expected the...