Berlin 1961

FREDERICK KEMPE.

BERLIN 1961.

FOREWORD.

by General Brent Scowcroft.

Historians have scrutinized the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 far more deeply than they have the Berlin Crisis that preceded it by a year. For all the attention given Cuba, however, what happened in Berlin was even more decisive in shaping the era between the end of World War II in 1945 and German unification and Soviet dissolution in 1990 and 1991. It was the Berlin Wallas rise in August 1961 that anch.o.r.ed the Cold War in the mutual hostility that would last for another three decades, locking us into habits, procedures, and suspicions that would fall only with that same wall on November 9, 1989.

Furthermore, there was a special intensity about that first crisis. In the words of William Kaufman, a Kennedy administration strategist who worked both Berlin and Cuba from the Pentagon, aBerlin was the worst moment of the Cold War. Although I was deeply involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis, I personally thought that the Berlin confrontation, especially after the wall went up, where you had Soviet and U.S. tanks literally facing one another with guns pointed, was a more dangerous situation. We had very clear indications mid-week of the Cuban Missile Crisis that the Russians were not really going to push us to the edgea.

aYou didnat get that sense in Berlin.a Fred Kempeas contribution to our crucial understanding of that time is that he combines the aYou are therea storytelling skills of a journalist, the a.n.a.lytical skills of the political scientist, and the historianas use of decla.s.sified U.S., Soviet, and German doc.u.ments to provide unique insight into the forces and individuals behind the construction of the Berlin Walla"the iconic barrier that came to symbolize the Cold Waras divisions.

History, sadly, does not reveal its alternatives. However, Kempeas important book prompts the reader to reflect on crucial questions regarding the Berlin Crisis that raise larger issues about American presidential leadership.

Could we have ended the Cold War earlier if President John F. Kennedy had managed his relationship with Nikita Khrushchev differently? In the early hours of Kennedyas administration, Khrushchev released captured U.S. airmen, published Kennedyas unedited inaugural address in Soviet newspapers, and reduced state jamming of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty broadcasts. Could Kennedy have more fully tested the possibilities behind Khrushchevas conciliatory gestures? If Kennedy had handled Khrushchev differently at the Vienna Summit in June 1961, would the Soviet leader have balked at the notion of closing Berlinas border two months later?

Or, on the other hand, as some have suggested: Is it possible that we should regard Kennedyas acquiescence to the communist construction of the Wall in August 1961 as the best of bad alternatives in a dangerous world? Kennedy famously said he preferred a wall to a wara"and there was reason for him to believe that was the choice that confronted him.

These are not small matters.

Another question raised by Kempeas compelling narrative is whether we, in the richness of time, will look at the Cold War in a more nuanced manner than we do now. The Cold War was not simply a standoff against a Soviet Union bent on world domination; it was also driven by a series of self-reinforcing misinterpretations of what the other side was up to. Berlin 1961as account of the miscommunication and misunderstandings between the United States and the Soviet Union at that crucial time makes one wonder whether we might have produced better outcomes if we had more clearly understood the domestic, economic, political, and other forces compelling our rivalas behavior.

These are speculative questions no one can answer with any certainty. Yet raising them in the context of Berlin 1961 is as relevant to navigating the future as it is to understanding the past. In the pages that follow are clues and cautions that are particularly timely during the first term of another young and relatively inexperienced commander in chief, President Barack Obama, who, like Kennedy, came to the White House with a foreign policy agenda aimed at engaging our adversaries more skillfully and understanding more reliably what lurks beneath seemingly intractable conflicts in order that we can better solve them.

I know something of such issues and challenges myself from our days dealing with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev when I served as national security advisor in President George H. W. Bushas White House.

The two U.S. presidents who dealt with Gorbachev, Bush and Ronald Reagan, were very different men. However, both understood that nothing was more important in trying to end the Cold War than the ways in which they engaged their Soviet counterpart.

Despite labeling the Soviets athe evil empire,a President Reagan engaged in five summit meetings with Gorbachev and worked on countless concrete agreements that helped build confidence between the two countries. As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and we worked to bring about German unification, President Bush resisted all temptations to gloat or breast-beat. He consistently sent the message that both sides were winning if the Cold War was ending. Through exercising such moderation in his public statements, he also avoided giving Gorbachevas enemies in the Soviet Politburo any excuse to reverse his policies or remove him from office.

One can do no more than speculate on how either a tougher or a more conciliatory Kennedy might have altered history in the Berlin of 1961. What is indisputable is that the events of that year put the Cold War back into a deep freeze at a time when Khrushchevas break with Stalinism might have presented us with the first possibilities of a thaw.

Berlin 1961 walks us through those events in striking new ways, exploring the fundamental natures of the two primary countries, the U.S. and the Soviet Union; the domestic political environments of each; and the crucial roles played by the personal characters of their leaders; and then weaving it all into the equally important stories of how those factors played out in the countries of East Germany and West Germany themselves.

It is an engaging, richly researched, thought-provoking book that captures the drama of the time in its colorful Berlin setting, and challenges the conventional wisdom regarding one of the Cold Waras most decisive years.

INTRODUCTION:.

THE WORLDaS MOST DANGEROUS PLACE.

Who possesses Berlin possesses Germany, and whoever controls Germany controls Europe.

Vladimir Lenin, quoting Karl Marx.

Berlin is the most dangerous place in the world. The USSR wants to perform an operation on this soft spot to eliminate this thorn, this ulcer.

Premier Nikita Khrushchev to President John F. Kennedy at their Vienna Summit, June 1961 CHECKPOINT CHARLIE, BERLIN.

9:00 P.M., FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1961.

There had not been a more perilous moment in the Cold War.

Undaunted by the damp, dangerous night, Berliners gathered on the narrow side streets opening up onto Checkpoint Charlie. The next morningas newspapers would estimate their numbers at about five hundred, a considerable crowd considering that they might have been witnesses to the first shots of a thermonuclear war. After six days of escalating tensions, American M48 Patton and Soviet T-54 tanks were facing off just a stoneas throw from one anothera"ten on each side, with roughly two dozen more in nearby reserve.

Armed with only umbrellas and hooded jackets against the drizzle, the crowd pushed forward to find the best vantage points toward the front of Friedrichstra.s.se, Mauerstra.s.se, and Zimmerstra.s.se, the three streets whose junction was Berlinas primary Easta"West crossing point for Allied military and civilian vehicles and pedestrians. Some of them stood on rooftops. Others, including a gaggle of news photographers and reporters, leaned out of windows from low-rise buildings still sh.e.l.l-pocked from wartime bombings.

Reporting from the scene, CBS News reporter Daniel Schorr, with all the drama of his authoritative baritone, declared to his radio listeners, aThe Cold War took on a new dimension tonight when American and Russian fighting men stood arrayed against each other for the first time in history. Until now, the Easta"West conflict had been waged through proxiesa"German and other. But tonight, the superpowers confronted each other in the form of ten low-slung Russian tanks facing American Patton tanks, less than a hundred yards aparta.a The situation was sufficiently tense that when an American army helicopter flew low overhead to survey the battleground, an East German policeman barked in panic, aGet down!a and an obedient crowd dived facedown on the ground. At other moments an odd calm reigned. aThe scene is weird, almost incredible,a said Schorr. aThe American GIs stand by their tanks, eating from mess kits, while West Berliners gape from behind a rope barrier and buy pretzel sticks, the scene lit by floodlights from the eastern side while the Soviet tanks are almost invisible in the dark of the East.a Rumors swirled through the crowd that war was upon Berlin. Es geht los um drei Uhr (aIt will begin at three in the morninga). A West Berlin radio station reported that retired General Lucius Clay, President Kennedyas new special representative in Berlin, was swaggering toward the border Hollywood-style to direct the first shots personally. Another story spread that the U.S. military police commander at Checkpoint Charlie had slugged an East German counterpart, and that both sides were aching for a gunfight. Still another account had it that entire Soviet companies were marching toward Berlin to end the cityas freedom once and for all. Berliners as a breed were drawn to gossip even in the worst of times. Given that most of those in the crowd had experienced one if not two world wars, they reckoned just about anything could happen.

Clay, who had commanded the 1948 airlift that had rescued West Berlin from a three-hundred-day Soviet blockade, had set the current confrontation in motion himself a week earlier over an issue most of his superiors in Washington did not consider a war-fighting matter. Breaking with established four-power procedures, East German border police had begun to demand that Allied civilians present their ident.i.ty cards before driving into the Soviet zone of Berlin. Previously, their vehiclesa distinctive license plates had been sufficient.

Convinced from personal experience that the Soviets would whittle away at the Westas rights like soft salami unless they were confronted on the smallest of matters, Clay had refused, and ordered armed escorts to muscle the civilian vehicles through. Soldiers carrying bayoneted rifles and backed by American tanks had flanked the vehicles as they wound their way through the checkpointas low, zigzag, red-and-white-striped concrete barriers.

At first, Clayas tough approach was vindicated: the East German border guards backed down. Swiftly, however, Khrushchev ordered his troops to match U.S. firepower tank for tank and to be prepared to escalate further if necessary. In a curious and ultimately unsuccessful effort to preserve deniability, Khrushchev ordered that the Soviet tanksa national markings be obscured and that their drivers wear unmarked black uniforms.

When the Soviet tanks rolled up to Checkpoint Charlie that afternoon to halt Clayas operation, they transformed a low-level border contest with the East Germans into a war of nerves between the worldas two most powerful countries. U.S. and Soviet commanders operating out of emergency operation centers on opposite sides of Berlin weighed their next moves as they anxiously awaited orders from President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

While leaders deliberated in Washington and Moscow, the American tank crews, commanded by Major Thomas Tyree, nervously sized up their opponents across the worldas most famous Easta"West divide. In a dramatic nighttime operation on August 13, 1961, just two and a half months earlier, East German troops and police with Soviet backing had thrown up the first, temporary barriers of barbed wire and guard posts around West Berlinas 110-mile circ.u.mference in order to contain an exodus of refugees whose flight had threatened the continued existence of the communist state.

Since then, the communists had fortified the borderline with concrete blocks, mortar, tank traps, guard towers, and attack dogs. What the world was coming to know as athe Berlin Walla was described by Mutual Broadcasting Networkas Berlin correspondent Norman Gelb as athe most remarkable, the most presumptuous urban redevelopment scheme of all timeathat snaked through the city like the backdrop to a nightmare.a Journalists, news photographers, political leaders, spy chiefs, generals, and tourists alike swarmed to Berlin to watch Winston Churchillas figurative Iron Curtain a.s.sume a physical form.

What was clear to them all was that the tank showdown at Checkpoint Charlie was no exercise. Tyree had seen to it that his men had loaded their tanksa cannon racks that morning with live ammunition. Their machine guns were at half-load. Beyond that, Tyreeas men had mounted several of their tanks with bulldozer shovels. During exercises in preparation for just such a moment, he had trained his men to execute a plan to drive into East Berlin peacefully through Checkpoint Charlie, which was permitted under four-power rights, then crash through the rising Berlin Wall upon their returna"daring the communists to respond.

To produce warmth and steady their nerves, the U.S. tank drivers gunned their engines to a terrifying roar. However, the small Allied contingent of 12,000 troops, only 6,500 of whom were Americans, would stand no chance in a conventional conflict against the 350,000 or so Soviet soldiers who were within striking distance of Berlin. Tyreeas men knew they were little more than a trip wire for an all-out war that could go nuclear faster than you could say Auf Wiedersehen.

Reuters correspondent Adam Kellett-Long, who had rushed to Checkpoint Charlie to file the first report on the showdown, worried as he monitored an anxious African American soldier manning the machine gun atop one of the tanks. aIf his hand shook any harder, I feared his gun would go off and he would have started World War III,a Kellett-Long thought to himself.

At about midnight in Berlin, or 6:00 p.m. in Washington, Kennedyas top national security advisers were meeting in emergency session in the White House Cabinet Room. The president was growing increasingly nervous that matters were getting out of control. Just that week, Kennedyas nuclear strategists had finalized detailed contingency plans to execute a nuclear first-strike on the Soviet Union, if necessary, which would leave Americaas adversary devastated and its military unable to respond. The president still had not signed off on the plans and had been peppering his experts with skeptical questions. But the doomsday scenarios colored the presidentas mood as he sat with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lyman Lemnitzer, and other key U.S. officials.

From there they phoned General Clay over a secure line in his map room in West Berlin. Clay had been told Bundy was on the line and wished to speak with him, so he was taken aback when he heard the voice of Kennedy himself.

ah.e.l.lo, Mr. President,a Clay said loudly, abruptly ending the buzz behind him in the command center.

aHow are things up there?a Kennedy asked in a voice designed to be cool and relaxed.

Everything was under control, Clay told him. aWe have ten tanks at Checkpoint Charlie,a he said. aThe Russians have ten tanks there, too, so now weare equal.a An aide then handed General Clay a note.

aMr. President, Iave got to change my figures. Iave just been told that the Russians have twenty more tanks coming up, which would give them exactly the total number of tanks that we have in Berlin. So weall bring up our remaining twenty. Donat worry about it, Mr. President. Theyave matched us tank for tank. This is further evidence to me that they donat intend to do anything,a he said.

The president could do the math as well. Should the Soviets escalate their numbers further, Clay lacked the conventional capability to respond. Kennedy scanned the anxious faces of his men in the room. He propped his feet up on the table, attempting to send a message of composure to men who feared matters were spinning out of control.

aWell, thatas all right,a said the president to Clay. aDonat lose your nerve.a aMr. President,a responded Clay with characteristic candor, aweare not worried about our nerves. Weare worrying about those of you people in Washington.a A half-century has pa.s.sed since the Berlin Wall rose, midway through the first year of the Kennedy administration, yet it is only now that we have sufficient distance and access to personal accounts, oral histories, and newly decla.s.sified doc.u.ments in the U.S., Germany, and Russia to more confidently tell the story of the forces that shaped the historic events of 1961. Like most epic dramas, it is a story best told through time (the course of a calendar year), place (Berlin and the world capitals that shaped its fortune), and particularly people.

And few relationships between the two leading figures of their day have been as psychologically fraught or involved characters of such sharp contrasts and colliding ambitions as John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev.

Kennedy walked onto the world stage in January 1961 after winning the closest U.S. election since 1916 on a platform of agetting America moving againa following two terms of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he had accused of allowing Soviet communists to gain a dangerous edge both economically and militarily. He was the youngest president in American history, a forty-three-year-old American son of privilege, raised by a multimillionaire father of boundless ambition whose favored son, Joseph Jr., had died at war. Though handsome, charismatic, and a brilliant orator, the new president suffered afflictions that ranged from the adrenal insufficiency of Addisonas disease to often crippling back pain exacerbated by a war injury. Though outwardly confident, he would be wracked by uncertainty about how best to engage the Soviets. He was determined to be a great president of the caliber of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, yet he worried they had only found their place in history through war. In the 1960s he knew that would mean nuclear devastation.

An American presidentas inaugural year often can be perilous, even when its occupant is a more experienced one than Kennedy, as the burdens of a dangerous world are pa.s.sed from one administration to another. And during Kennedyas first five months in office, he would suffer several self-inflicted wounds, from his mishandling of the Bay of Pigs invasion to the Vienna Summit, where by his own account Khrushchev had outmaneuvered and brutalized him. Yet nowhere were the stakes higher for him than in Berlin, the central stage for U.S.a"Soviet compet.i.tion.

By temperament and upbringing, Khrushchev was Kennedyas opposite. The sixty-seven-year-old grandson of a serf and son of a coal miner was impulsive where Kennedy was indecisive, and bombastic where Kennedy was measured. His moods alternated between the deep-seated insecurity of a man who had been illiterate until his twenties and the bold confidence of someone who had risen to power against impossible odds while rivals faded, were purged, or were killed. Complicit in his mentor Joseph Stalinas crimes before renouncing Stalin after his death, in 1961 Khrushchev was vacillating between his instinct for reform and better relations with the West and his habit of authoritarianism and confrontation. It was his conviction that he could best advance Soviet interests through peaceful coexistence and compet.i.tion with the West, yet at the same time pressures were growing on him to escalate tensions with Washington and by whatever means necessary stop the outflow of refugees that threatened to trigger East Germanyas implosion.

Between the establishment of the East German state in 1949 and 1961, one of every six individualsa"2.8 million peoplea"had left as refugees. That total swelled to 4 million when one included those who had fled the Soviet-occupied zone between 1945 and 1949. The exodus was emptying the country of its most talented and motivated people.

In addition, Khrushchev was racing against the clock as 1961 began. He faced a crucial Communist Party Congress in October, at which he had reason to fear his enemies would unseat him if he failed to fix Berlin by then. When Khrushchev told Kennedy during their Vienna Summit that Berlin was athe most dangerous place in the world,a what he meant was that it was the spot most likely to trigger a nuclear superpower conflict. Beyond that, Khrushchev knew that if he botched Berlin, his rivals in Moscow would destroy him.

The contest between the key supporting German actors to Khrushchev and Kennedy was just as charged, an asymmetrical conflict between East German leader Walter Ulbricht and his failing country of seventeen million people, and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his rapidly rising economic power of sixty million.

For Ulbricht, the year would be of even greater existential importance than it was for either Kennedy or Khrushchev. The so-called German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was officially known, was his lifeas work, and at age sixty-seven he knew that without radical remedy it was heading for economic and political collapse. The greater that danger, the more intensively he schemed to prevent it. Ulbrichtas leverage in Moscow was growing in rough proportion to his countryas instability because of the Kremlinas fear that East German failure would cause ripples across the Soviet empire.

Across the border in West Germany, the countryas first and only chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was, at age eighty-five and after three terms, waging war simultaneously against his own mortality and against political opponent w.i.l.l.y Brandt, who was West Berlinas mayor. Brandtas Social Democratic Party represented to Adenauer the unacceptable danger of leftist takeover in the coming September elections. However, Adenauer considered Kennedy himself to be the greatest threat to his legacy of a free and democratic West Germany.

By 1961, Adenaueras place in history would seem to have been a.s.sured through the phoenix-like rise of West Germany from the Third Reichas ashes. Yet Kennedy considered him a spent force upon whom his U.S. predecessors had relied too much at the expense of closer relations with Moscow. Adenauer, in turn, feared Kennedy lacked the character and backbone to stand up to the Soviets during what he was convinced would be a decisive year.

The story of Berlin 1961 is told in three parts.

Part I, aThe Players,a introduces the four protagonists: Khrushchev, Kennedy, Ulbricht, and Adenauer, whose connecting tissue throughout the year is Berlin and the central role the city plays in their ambitions and fears. The early chapters capture their competing motivations and the events that set the stage for the drama that follows. On his first morning in the Lincoln Bedroom, Kennedy wakes up to Khrushchevas unilateral release of captured airmen from a U.S. spy plane, and from that point forward the plot is driven by the two leadersa jockeying and miscommunication. Meanwhile, Ulbricht works behind the scenes to force Khrushchev to crack down in Berlin, and Adenauer navigates life with a new U.S. president whom he mistrusts.

In Part II, aThe Gathering Storm,a Kennedy reels from the botched U.S. effort to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs and sees an opportunity to recover his endangered foreign policy standing through an arms buildup and a summit meeting with Khrushchev. The greatly increased refugee exodus from East Germany sharpens the crisis for Ulbricht, who intensifies his scheming to close the Berlin border. Ever mercurial, Khrushchev transforms himself from courting to undermining Kennedy at the Vienna Summit, where he tables a new, threatening Berlin ultimatum and expresses mock sympathy about his adversaryas demonstrated weakness. Kennedy is left disheartened by his own poor performance and grows preoccupied with finding ways to ensure that Khrushchev doesnat endanger the world by miscalculating American resolve.

aThe Showdown,a the bookas third and final part, doc.u.ments and describes the dithering in Washington and the decisions in Moscow that result in the stunning nighttime August 13 border-closure operation and its dramatic aftermath. Privately, Kennedy is relieved by the Soviet action and hopes that the Soviets will become easier partners with the East German refugee matter solved. He quickly learns, however, that he has overestimated the potential benefits of a Berlin Wall. Dozens of Berliners engage in desperate escape attempts, some with deadly outcomes. Internationally, the crisis intensifies as Washington debates how best to fight and win a nuclear war, Moscow wheels its tanks into place, and the world holds its breatha"just as it would again a year later when the ripples of Berlin 1961 would result in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Sprinkled throughout the narrative are vignettes of Berliners themselves, who are buffeted by their involuntary role in a decisive moment of Cold War history: the survivor of multiple Soviet rapes who tries to tell her story to a people who just want to forget; the farmer whose resistance to land collectivization lands him in prison; the engineer whose flight to the West ends with her victory at the Miss Universe pageant; the East German soldier whose leap to freedom over coils of barbed wire, with his arm releasing his rifle in mid-flight, becomes the iconic image of liberation; and the tailor who is gunned down while trying to swim to freedom, the first victim of East German shoot-to-kill orders for would-be escapees.

Early in 1961, it was just as unthinkable that a political system would put up a wall to contain its people as it was inconceivable twenty-eight years later that the same barrier would crumble peacefully and seemingly overnight.

It is only by returning to the year that produced the Berlin Wall and revisiting the forces and the people surrounding it that one can properly understand what happened and try to settle a few of historyas great unanswered questions.

Should history consider the Berlin Wallas construction the positive outcome of Kennedyas unflappable leadershipa"a successful means of avoiding wara"or was the Wall instead the unhappy result of his missing backbone? Was Kennedy caught by surprise by the Berlin border closure, or did he antic.i.p.ate it and perhaps even desire it because he believed it would defuse tensions that might lead to nuclear conflict? Were Kennedyas motivations enlightened and oriented toward peace, or cynical and shortsighted at a time when another course of action might have spared tens of millions of Eastern Europeans from another generation of Soviet occupation and oppression?

Was Khrushchev a true reformer whose efforts to reach out to Kennedy following his election were a genuine effort (that the U.S. failed to recognize) to reduce tensions? Or was he an erratic leader with whom the U.S. could never have done business? Would Khrushchev have backed off from the plan to build a Berlin Wall if he had believed Kennedy would resist? Or was the danger of East German implosion so great that he would have risked war, if necessary, to shut off the refugee flow?

The pages that follow are an attempt to shed new light, based on new evidence and fresh insights, on one of the most dramatic years of the second half of the twentieth centurya"even while we try to apply its lessons to the turbulent early years of the twenty-first.

PART I.

THE PLAYERS.

1.

KHRUSHCHEV: COMMUNIST IN A HURRY.

We have thirty nuclear weapons earmarked for France, more than enough to destroy that country. We are reserving fifty each for West Germany and Britain.

Premier Khrushchev to U.S. Amba.s.sador Llewellyn E. Thompson Jr., January 1, 1960.

No matter how good the old year has been, the New Year will be better stilla. I think no one will reproach me if I say that we attach great importance to improving our relations with the USAa. We hope that the new U.S. president will be like a fresh wind blowing away the stale air between the USA and the USSR.

One year later, Khrushchevas New Yearas toast, January 1, 1961.

THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW.

NEW YEARaS EVE, DECEMBER 31, 1960.

It was just minutes before midnight, and Nikita Khrushchev had reason to be relieved that 1960 was nearly over. He had even greater cause for concern about the year ahead as he surveyed his two thousand New Yearas guests under the towering, vaulted ceiling of St. Georgeas Hall at the Kremlin. As the storm outside deposited a thick layer of snow on Red Square and the mausoleum containing his embalmed predecessors, Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchev recognized that Soviet standing in the world, his place in history, anda"more to the pointa"his political survival could depend on how he managed his own blizzard of challenges.

At home, Khrushchev was suffering his second straight failed harvest. Just two years earlier and with considerable flourish, he had launched a crash program to overtake U.S. living standards by 1970, but he wasnat even meeting his peopleas basic needs. On an inspection tour of the country, he had seen shortages almost everywhere of housing, b.u.t.ter, meat, milk, and eggs. His advisers were telling him the chances of a workersa revolt were growing, not unlike the one in Hungary that he had been forced to crush with Soviet tanks in 1956.

Abroad, Khrushchevas foreign policy of peaceful coexistence with the West, a controversial break with Stalinas notion of inevitable confrontation, had crash-landed when a Soviet rocket brought down an American Lockheed U-2 spy plane the previous May. A few days later, Khrushchev triggered the collapse of the Paris Summit with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wartime Allies after failing to win a public U.S. apology for the intrusion into Soviet airs.p.a.ce. Pointing to the incident as evidence of Khrushchevas leadership failure, Stalinist remnants in the Soviet Communist Party and Chinaas Mao Tse-tung were sharpening their knives against the Soviet leader in preparation for the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Having used just such gatherings himself to purge adversaries, all Khrushchevas plans for 1961 were designed to head off a catastrophe at that meeting.

With all that as the backdrop, nothing threatened Khrushchev more than the deteriorating situation in divided Berlin. His critics complained that he was allowing the communist worldas most perilous wound to fester. East Berlin was hemorrhaging refugees to the West at an alarming rate. They were a self-selecting population of the countryas most motivated and capable industrialists, intellectuals, farmers, doctors, and teachers. Khrushchev was fond of calling Berlin the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es of the West, a tender place where he could squeeze when he wanted to make the U.S. wince. However, a more accurate metaphor was that it had become his and the Soviet blocas Achillesa heel, the place where communism lay most vulnerable.

Yet Khrushchev betrayed none of those concerns as he worked a New Yearas crowd that included cosmonauts, ballerinas, artists, apparatchiks, and amba.s.sadors, all bathed in the light of the hallas six ma.s.sive bronze chandeliers and three thousand electric lamps. For them, an invitation to the Soviet leaderas party was itself confirmation of status. However, they buzzed with even greater than usual antic.i.p.ation, for John F. Kennedy would take office in less than three weeks. They knew the Soviet leaderas traditional New Yearas toast would set the tone for U.S.a"Soviet relations thereafter.

As the Kuranty clock of the sixteenth-century Spa.s.skaya Tower ticked over Red Square toward its thunderous midnight chime, Khrushchev generated his own heat inside St. Georgeas Hall. He hand-clasped some guests and bear-hugged others, nearly bursting from his baggy gray suit. It was the same energy that had carried him to power from his peasant birth in the Russian village of Kalinovka near the Ukrainian border, through revolution, civil war, Stalinas paranoid purges, world war, and the leadership battle following Stalinas death. The communist takeover had provided many Russians of humble beginnings with new opportunities, but none had survived as skillfully nor risen as far as Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.

Given Khrushchevas increased capability to launch nuclear-tipped missiles at the West, it had become a consuming occupation of U.S. intelligence agencies to fathom Khrushchevas psychological makeup. In 1960, the CIA had a.s.sembled some twenty expertsa"internists, psychiatrists, and psychologistsa"to scrutinize the Soviet leader through films, intelligence files, and personal accounts. The group went so far as to inspect photo close-ups of Khrushchevas arteries to a.s.sess rumors of their hardening and his high blood pressure. They concluded in a highly cla.s.sified reporta"which later would reach President Kennedya"that despite Khrushchevas mood swings, depressions, and drinking bouts (which they reported he had recently brought under greater control), the Soviet leader exhibited the consistent behavior of what they called a achronic optimistic opportunist.a Their conclusion was that he was more of an ebullient activist than, as many had believed until then, a Machiavellian communist in Stalinas mold.