Kennedy saw the speech to the nation as a crucial test of his capacity to prove himself an effective leader. Speaking from the Oval Office crowded with cameras and klieg lights that added to the heat of the July evening, Kennedy strained to keep his poise, recalling how a perspiring Nixon undermined his election chances in September 1960. A larger dose of steroids than he normally relied on to control his Addison’s disease helped provide the adrenaline boost Kennedy needed to combat the strain of speaking to the hundreds of millions around the world who hoped he could fend off a disastrous war and defend two and a half million Germans from a communist takeover.
The speech aimed to leave no doubt either in Moscow or anywhere in the West that the president understood the fullness of the Soviet threat and was determined to meet it head-on. Khrushchev’s “grim warnings [in Vienna] about the future of the world . . . his subsequent speeches and threats . . . have all prompted a series of decisions by the Administration,” Kennedy said. The Soviet leader’s intention to end Western rights in Berlin and bring the city under his control would not be permitted. But the danger wasn’t simply to the people of that embattled city—it was to free peoples everywhere. The most immediate crisis, however, was in the center of Europe, where the United States intended to stand its ground against aggression. “We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin.” The United States was ready to talk, “if talk will help. But we must also be ready to resist with force, if force is used upon us.” Kennedy then described a defense buildup, which would provide “a wider choice than humiliation or all-out nuclear action.” But he had no intention of abandoning “our duty to mankind to seek a peaceful solution. . . . To sum it all up: we seek peace—but we shall not surrender.” Kennedy ended with a plea for public understanding and support. “We must look to long days ahead.”
Kennedy’s speech had its desired effect at home and in Russia. It put Acheson, Alsop, and the Chiefs on notice that he was in command and that while he was determined to avoid a war with Russia, he was also committed to saving Berlin from any act of communist aggression. His speech made clear to domestic critics and advisers that they could not browbeat him into anything he thought too militant or too passive.
Khrushchev initially responded to Kennedy’s speech with “rough war-like language,” telling John J. McCloy, Kennedy’s chief arms control representative, who was in Moscow for talks and was summoned to Khrushchev’s Black Sea summer retreat, that Kennedy was declaring war on the Soviet Union. He warned, “If Kennedy started a war, he would be the ‘last president of the United States.’” But it was no more than saber-rattling. Khrushchev’s military chiefs wanted no part of a confrontation with the West that could lead to an all-out war. “With respect to ICBMs,” Marshal Sergei Varentsov, the top commander, said privately, “we still don’t have a damn thing. Everything is only on paper, and there is nothing in actual existence.”
After so many threats, the pressure on Khrushchev to do something about Berlin was compelling. The exchanges over a showdown had accelerated the flood of immigrants from East Germany to the West. Since the beginning of 1961, more than twenty thousand a month had fled communist control. Khrushchev had initially vetoed suggestions of constructing a barrier between the two Berlins to stem the outflow as too provocative. But indications from Washington, including a statement from Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright, that the United States would not physically oppose Soviet efforts to restrict movement out of the communist zone, persuaded Khrushchev to build a wall. To bar against a U.S. reaction, however, Khrushchev preceded the start of construction on August 13 with a speech decrying “a war psychosis” and reminding everyone that “we have common needs and interests since we have to live on the same planet.” He directed the East Germans to build the wall in stages to ensure that the initial construction did not trigger an armed response.
The Wall touched off a new round of debate among Kennedy’s national security advisers. Acheson was more adamant than ever about the need for military action. He thought that “the Wall would have come down in a day if Harry Truman had been President.” General Lauris Norstad, the head of U.S. forces in Europe, who had no orders to respond, said, “If I had been commander I would have taken a wire and flung a hook over and tied it to a tank and pulled it down.” Lemnitzer complained that a passive reaction made everyone in the West appear to be “hopeless, helpless, and harmless.” The U.S. diplomatic mission in Berlin reported that Mayor Willy Brandt and newspaper, news service, radio, and television editors felt that accepting the Wall was creating a crisis of confidence that endangered America’s position in Europe. The mission also warned that if the Soviets were “able to ‘get away’ with this fait accompli, other similar actions may be undertaken. . . . Having taken such a big slice of salami and successfully digested it, with no hindrance, they may be expected to snatch further pieces greedily.”
Kennedy and his White House advisers were actually relieved by Khrushchev’s action. Kennedy saw the Wall as a demonstration of Khrushchev’s decision not to force a crisis. “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” Kennedy asked rhetorically. “There wouldn’t be any need of a wall if he occupied the whole city. This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war,” Kennedy told Kenny O’Donnell. Bundy reported that there was “unanimity in your immediate staff” for negotiation rather than military action. After all, the Wall was “something they [the Soviets] have always had the power to do; it was something they were bound to do sooner or later.” Kennedy’s answer was not a military response but the chance to score propaganda points or use this “very good propaganda stick” against the communists for having confined people unhappy living under Soviet control. “This seems to me to show how hollow is the phrase ‘free city,’” which Khrushchev had promised a West Berlin under East German rule,” he told Rusk. The Wall also showed “how despised is the East German government.”
The pressure on Kennedy to act more decisively or give some indication that he would use force against the Soviets if they overreached on Berlin persuaded him to satisfy a Brandt request that U.S. troops make a visible show of crossing the Autobahn from West Germany to the city. After the Vienna summit, Kennedy had told O’Donnell, “It seems particularly stupid to risk killing a million Americans over an argument about access rights on an Autobahn. . . . If I’m going to threaten Russia with a nuclear war it will have to be for much bigger and more important reasons than that.” But the insistence of the Germans that he provide some demonstration of U.S. opposition to the Wall moved Kennedy to order an armored brigade of fifteen hundred U.S. troops to show the flag by traveling the 110 miles from West Germany to West Berlin. To underscore the importance he put on the gesture, Kennedy directed Lyndon Johnson and General Lucius Clay, the former U.S. military governor of Germany and architect of the 1948 Berlin airlift, to fly to Bonn and then West Berlin to give a message of hope that America was “determined to fulfill all our obligations, all our commitments” and “dare to the end to do our duty.”
Johnson was reluctant to take on the assignment. He saw it as more of a symbolic than substantive expression of America’s opposition to the Wall and feared that the trip would do more to undermine faith in U.S. commitments than reinforce it. But his presence on the ground, which put him in harm’s way if the Soviets challenged the brigade’s movement, boosted German convictions that Kennedy meant to hold the line against any communist aggression. After all, it was assumed that Kennedy would have to respond if his vice president came under attack in Berlin. Fortunately, Khrushchev was content to close off the exodus from the East without trying to fulfill threats against West Berlin. And when Johnson, borrowing from U.S. history, spoke passionately about the commitment of “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” to the preservation of German freedoms and issued a plea to have “faith in your allies,” it bolstered G
erman belief in Kennedy’s leadership.
But uncertainties remained. And Kennedy, with the support of Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, Stevenson, and Kennan, wanted to enter into negotiations that could at least reduce the chances of an immediate crisis over Berlin. Kennedy instructed Rusk to “examine all of Khrushchev’s statements for pegs on which to hang our position. He has thrown out quite a few assurances and hints here and there and I believe they should be exploited.” Kennan reinforced Kennedy’s interest in talks: “Unless the West shows some disposition to negotiate,” he advised, “the hard line is going to be pursued in Moscow not only to the very brink but to the full point of a world catastrophe.”
Acheson, the military, and de Gaulle disagreed. They admonished Kennedy against being taken advantage of in any negotiations with Khrushchev. Taylor was invited now to divide his attention between Cuba and Berlin. Kennedy hoped he would be more restrained than the Joint Chiefs about using military power. But Taylor disappointed him, urging a hard line against Khrushchev: He saw “clear evidence that Khrushchev intends using military force, or the threat thereof, to gain his ends in Berlin.” He urged Kennedy “to shift into higher gear” on making military preparations to combat Soviet plans. Acheson counseled against appearing too eager to negotiate. Instead, he wanted Kennedy to make clear that he was willing to use nuclear weapons to meet any Soviet aggression. De Gaulle predicted that entering into negotiations would encourage Moscow to increase their pressure on Berlin and “would be considered immediately as a prelude to the abandonment, at least gradually, of Berlin and as a sort of notice of our surrender.” It “would be a very grave blow to the Atlantic Alliance.”
The clash of opinions demonstrated how imperfect the views of even the most experienced and intelligent observers on current events could be: Taylor, Acheson, and de Gaulle misread Khrushchev’s interest in negotiations that would put aside his threats to seize West Berlin. In September, Khrushchev sent a series of messages, including a lengthy letter, encouraging bilateral talks about Berlin that were designed to give him a retreat from his bullying. The message sent to Kennedy through Pierre Salinger, who received it from a Russian journalist, was “The storm in Berlin is over.” When Salinger delivered the message to Kennedy at one in the morning, he declared with no small relief: “There’s only one way you can read it. If Khrushchev is ready to listen to our views on Germany, he’s not going to recognize the Ulbricht regime in East Germany—not this year, at least—and that’s good news.”
With the opening of negotiations, Khrushchev announced in a speech on October 17, 1961, at a Communist Party congress that “the western powers were showing some understanding of the situation, and were inclined to seek a solution to the German problem and the issue of West Berlin.” And so, “We shall not insist on signing a peace treaty absolutely before December 31, 1961.” Schlesinger recorded: “The crisis was suddenly over.”
The end of the Berlin crisis was a welcome respite from the constant drumbeat of trouble that had beset Kennedy and his advisers from day one of his presidency. But even with Berlin momentarily put aside as a source of daily tension, Kennedy found no easing of the pressure to save Vietnam. Arguments among his advisers about what to do about Berlin now gave way to sharp and sometimes personally caustic disputes about how to defeat communist aggression against Diem’s government in Saigon.
Kennedy’s decision in early July to put off expanding U.S. commitments to Vietnam produced an immediate pushback from Rostow, who worried that Kennedy underestimated the need for force in combating the Viet Cong. On July 13, Rostow urged Rusk, who shared his concern about saving Vietnam, to consider three alternatives that he might put before the president: “A sharp increase in the number of Americans in South Vietnam for training and support purposes; a counter-guerrilla operation in the north, possibly using American Air and Naval strength to impose about the same level of damage and inconvenience that the Viet Cong are imposing in the South; and . . . a limited military operation in the North; e.g., capture and holding the port of Haiphong.” Except for item one, the proposals were way beyond anything Kennedy was ready to entertain. The stages of economic growth Rostow had written about so persuasively had given way to the stages of military action he saw as the only immediate formula for securing U.S. interests in South Vietnam. Rostow’s evangelism about beating back the communist challenge in Vietnam had made him a convert from faith in social engineering to a believer in the use of American power.
Rostow was not alone in believing that Vietnam could be saved by a more assertive U.S. policy. By the middle of July, after only two months in Saigon, Nolting had become a full convert to the can-do school—principally, the work of turning Diem into a liberal reformer ready to take up American ideas. But Diem was anything but a willing pupil. More French than Vietnamese, or at least more schooled in Western ways than traditional Vietnamese culture—a staunch anticommunist Catholic—Diem understood perfectly how to deal with a conventional American diplomat: talk up social and political reform that could outdo the communists in winning the hearts and minds of the country’s masses. It was a façade calculated to deceive Nolting. As the journalist David Halberstam, who arrived in Saigon as a reporter for the New York Times in 1962, said, “Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country, a Central Vietnamese in the South, but most important of all, he was a mandarin, a member of the feudal aristocracy in a country swept by revolution.”
By contrast, Nolting saw Diem as the right man in the right place at the right time. He told Rusk that a number of trips around Vietnam with Diem had convinced him that Diem was an honorable man committed to “sound and good” objectives for his country. “He is no dictator”: He didn’t relish concentrating power in his hands. Nolting thought Diem “would prefer to be a monk rather than a political leader. . . . I think the United States should have no hesitation on moral grounds in backing Diem to the hilt. Where we think he is wrong, we can bring about amelioration and improvement gradually in proportion to the confidence he has in us. . . . I believe we [are] taking the right track.” Few diplomatic assessments in U.S. history were more off target than Nolting’s of Diem: He loved power, was contemptuous of American preachments about democracy, and had much less of a hold on his country than Nolting believed.
Others in the Kennedy administration, led by Taylor, Rostow, and Robert Komer, the National Security Council expert on Southeast Asia, shared Nolting’s hope of relying on Diem to stem the communist surge in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. But they were less optimistic than Nolting and pressed Kennedy to understand that he would have to make some difficult choices. Komer wanted Kennedy to go “all-out in cleaning up South Vietnam.” Taylor and Rostow were no less eager to save the country but were less blunt in urging a rescue operation. They urged Kennedy to choose either “to disengage from the area as gracefully as possible,” which U.S. domestic politics alone made an unpalatable choice; find “a convenient political pretext and attack with American military force the regional source of aggression in Hanoi; or build as much indigenous military, political and economic strength as we can in the area, in order to contain the thrust from Hanoi while preparing to intervene with U.S. military force if the Chinese Communists come in or the situation otherwise gets out of hand.”
John Steeves, a State Department expert on Asia and the chairman of the multi-agency Southeast Asia Task Force, simultaneously warned against the growing dangers of communist aggression in the region: He advised the president to “make the basic decision now to resist this encroachment by appropriate military means. . . . The loss of Southeast Asia to the free world would be highly inimical to our future strategy and interest.” Although North Vietnam was not China or Russia threatening to expand its reach in Asia or Europe, it was a communist country about to bring another free people under its control. Most American policymakers believed that if South Vietnam fell into the communist orbit, it would be a blow to free peoples everywhere. Anticommunism was the prevailing mind-set and memories of Hit
ler made a failure to combat totalitarian aggression anywhere look like a fatal mistake.
Three days after his July 25, 1961, speech addressing the Berlin crisis, Kennedy met with Rusk, Taylor, Bundy, Ball, Rostow, and the task force advisers on Vietnam to discuss the dangers in Southeast Asia. They warned him that the United States was on a treadmill in Vietnam, while Laos remained a matter of grave concern. To protect Vietnam from communist infiltration, they urged Kennedy to consider using U.S., Lao, Thai, and South Vietnamese forces to occupy southern Laos, which Hanoi was using as a supply route to insurgents in South Vietnam. They also described plans for air and naval operations against Haiphong or Hanoi, North Vietnam’s principal port and capital.
Kennedy thought their suggestions absurd. But he politely said that he doubted the “realism and accuracy in such military planning.” As for Laos, “optimistic estimates were invariably proved false.” He did not think that any operation could save southern Laos, “and he emphasized the reluctance of the American people and of many distinguished military leaders to see any direct involvement of U.S. troops in that part of the world.” When some of the advisers predicted that “with a proper plan . . . the results would be very different from anything that happened before,” Kennedy put them off by pointing out that “General de Gaulle, out of painful French experience, had spoken with feeling [to him] of the difficulty of fighting in this part of the world.”