Part 8 (1/2)

Khrushchev would later explain his frequent retreats from public to Pitsunda by saying, aA chicken has to sit quietly for a certain time if she expects to lay an egg.a Though the metaphor had a negative connotation in English, Khrushchev described its meaning in a positive manner: aIf I have something to hatch, I have to take the time to do it right.a Pitsunda was where he caught his breath in the rush of history or wrote a few pages of it himself. It had been there, between his walks through the pine grove and past cabanas on the beach, that he had crafted his 1956 speech breaking with Stalin. He liked to introduce guests to his ancient trees, many of which he had given human names, and to show off his small indoor gym and private, gla.s.s-enclosed swimming pool.

It was a measure of how important Khrushchev considered relations with Kennedy that amid all his other demands that morning he had still been willing to receive Walter Lippmann, the legendary seventy-one-year-old American columnist, and his wife, Helen. It was not just Lippmannas national influence and access to Kennedy that endeared him to Khrushchev, but also the fact that his columns had been consistently friendly to the Soviets.

With the schedule for the s.p.a.ce launch firmed up, however, Khrushchev pa.s.sed word to Lippmann on the tarmac in Was.h.i.+ngton, in the first-cla.s.s cabin of his plane to Rome, that their meeting would be postponed. aImpossible,a Lippmann boldly responded in a scrawled reply to Soviet Amba.s.sador Mens.h.i.+kov.

By the time the Lippmanns landed, Khrushchev had decided he would see them, but he would not breathe a word concerning plans for his potentially historic s.p.a.ce launch with the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the following morning.

Khrushchev had accelerated the original May Day launch date after a training accident on March 23 killed the flightas intended cosmonaut, Lieutenant Valentin Bondarenko. Shortcuts taken by the Soviets to rush their first man into s.p.a.ce ahead of the Americans had likely contributed to Bondarenkoas death, which came after flames engulfed his oxygen-rich training chamber. The Soviets did not disclose any of the details of the accident. They did not even announce the cosmonautas death, and airbrushed Bondarenko from all photographs of the Soviet s.p.a.ce team.

Undaunted, Khrushchev grew all the more determined, and further accelerated the Soviet target launch date to April 12. The timing was chosen to keep Moscow ahead of the U.S. Project Mercury mission that was scheduled to launch astronaut Alan Shepard into s.p.a.ce on May 5. If the flight succeeded, Khrushchev would not only make history but also get a badly needed political boost. If Gagarinas mission failed, Khrushchev would bury all evidence of the launch.

Oblivious to that background drama, Lippmann and his wife arrived at Khrushchevas sanctuary at 11:30 in the morning, and would remain for eight hours of walking, swimming, eating, drinking, and talking before spending the night.

Lippmann savored his access to U.S. and world leaders, and it didnat get any better than meeting the communist worldas leader in his Black Sea lair. Before he had begun writing a column, Lippmann had been an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson and was a delegate to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles. Lippmann had coined the phrase aCold Wara and was the leading U.S. voice suggesting that Was.h.i.+ngton accept the new Soviet sphere of influence in Europe. Moscowas interest in Lippmann was so great that a KGB spy ring in the U.S. was working through his secretary, Mary Price, to gather information on his sources and subjects of interest, an infiltration Lippmann had not yet discovered.

The tall, large-boned Lippmann towered over the short, squat Khrushchev as they walked the compound. In a lively afternoon game of badminton, however, the fiercely compet.i.tive Khrushchev teamed up with the Lippmannsa portly female minder from the foreign ministry and thrashed the more athletic Lippmanns, who were surprised by his agility. Khrushchev viciously and repeatedly struck the shuttlec.o.c.k only a few inches above the net, often aiming at his opponentsa heads.

During a lunch break, Khrushchevas second-in-command, Anastas Mikoyan, joined the group for a three-and-a-half-hour conversation the focus of which was so exclusively on Berlin that Lippmann, like Amba.s.sador Thompson before him, concluded that for the Soviet leader, nothing matched the importance of Berlinas future.

White House, State Department, and CIA officials had briefed Lippmann before his departure, so he was able to float a trial balloon on their behalf. Lippmann questioned why Khrushchev considered the Berlin matter such an urgent affair. Why not negotiate a Berlin standstill of five to ten years, during which the U.S. and the Soviet Union could attend to their relations.h.i.+pas other problems and create an atmosphere more conducive to a Berlin agreement?

When Khrushchev sharply dismissed the notion of further delay, Lippmann pressed him for reasons.

A German solution, said Khrushchev, must come before aHitleras generals with their twelve NATO divisions get atomic weapons from France and the United States.a Before that could happen, Khrushchev said he wanted a peace treaty setting in stone the current frontiers of Poland and Czechoslovakia and guaranteeing the permanent existence of East Germany. Otherwise, Khrushchev insisted, West Germany would drag NATO into a war aimed at unifying Germany and restoring its prewar eastern frontier.

Lippmann took mental notes while his wife scribbled down the conversation verbatim. Both tried to remain sober by pouring out the considerable amounts of vodka and Armenian wine that Mikoyan served them into a bowl the Soviet leader had provided them in an act of mercy.

Time and again, with Kennedy as his intended audience, Khrushchev told the Lippmanns he was determined to abring the German question to a heada that year. Lippmann would later report to his readers that the Soviet leader was afirmly resolved, perhaps irretrievably committed, to a showdowna over Berlin to stop the gusher of refugees and to save the communist East German state.

Khrushchev laid out his Berlin thinking to Lippmann in three parts, offering greater detail than he had previously provided for public consumption. Lippmannas three-part report on their talks would win him a second Pulitzer Prizea”and appear in 450 newspapers.

First, Khrushchev told the columnist, he wanted the West to accept athere are in fact two Germanysa that would never be reunited. The U.S. and the Soviet Union therefore should codify through peace treaties the three elements of Germany: East Germany, West Germany, and West Berlin. This would fix by international statute West Berlinas role as a afree city.a Thereafter its access and liberty could be guaranteed, he said, by symbolic contingents of French, British, American, and Russian troops and by neutral troops a.s.signed by the United Nations. The four occupying powers would sign an agreement with both Germanys that would produce that outcome.

Because Khrushchev doubted Kennedy would accept this option, he sketched for Lippmann what he called his afallback position.a He would accept a temporary agreement that provided the two German states perhaps two or three years during which they could negotiate a loose confederation or some other form of unification. If the two sides reached a deal during that period of time, it would be written into a treaty. If they failed, however, all occupation rights would end and foreign troops would leave.

If the U.S. refused to negotiate either of his first two options, Khrushchev told Lippmann, his athird positiona was to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany that gave Ulbricht full control over all West Berlin access routes. If the Allies resisted this new East German role, Khrushchev said he would bring in the Soviet military to blockade the city entirely.

To cus.h.i.+on the blow of this threat, Khrushchev told Lippmann he would not precipitate a crisis before he had the chance to meet Kennedy face-to-face and discuss the matter. In other words, he was opening his negotiations with the president through the columnist.

a.s.suming his una.s.signed role of U.S. co-negotiator, Lippmann suggested to Khrushchev a five-year moratorium on Berlin talks during which the current situation would remain frozen, which he knew from his pre-trip briefings was Kennedyas preference.

Khrushchev waved his hand dismissively. Thirty months had pa.s.sed since his Berlin ultimatum, he said, and he would not agree to that long a delay, nor was he willing to let the Berlin matter go unsettled before his October Party Congress. His deadline for a Berlin solution was the fall or winter of 1961, he said.

Khrushchev told Lippmann that he didnat believe Kennedy was making decisions anyway. He summed up the forces behind Kennedy in one word: Rockefeller. He thought it was big money that manipulated Kennedy. Despite atheir imperialistic nature,a he felt these capitalists could be won over with common sense. If they were forced to choose between a mutually advantageous agreement or Soviet unilateral action or war, Khrushchev said that he thought the Rockefeller crowd would cut a deal.

Khrushchev said he was ready to call the Americansa nuclear bluff. aIn my opinion,a he said, athere are no such stupid statesmen in the West to unleash a war in which hundreds of millions would perish just because we would sign a peace treaty with the GDR that would stipulate a special status of afree citya for West Berlin with its 2.5 million population. Such idiots have not yet been born.a At the end of the day, it was the Lippmanns and not Khrushchev who flagged and retreated to bed. Khrushchev embraced each of them with overpowering hugs before they returned, tired and drunk, to their hotel room in nearby Garga. Lippmann noticed none of the weariness in Khrushchev that Amba.s.sador Thompson had seen just a month earlier. Nothing, however, would energize the Soviet leader as much as the news he would hear the following morning.

PITSUNDA PENINSULA, SOVIET UNION.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 1961.

Khrushchev had only one question when Sergei Korolyov, the legendary rocket designer and head of the Soviet s.p.a.ce program, phoned him with the good news: aJust tell me, is he alive?a Yes, Korolyov declared, and even better than that, Yuri Gagarin had returned to Earth safely after becoming the first human in s.p.a.ce and the first human to orbit the Earth. The Soviets had called his mission Vostok, or aEast,a to drive home the point of their rise. And the project had achieved its purpose. To Khrushchevas delight, during the 108-minute flight, Gagarin had whistled a patriotic tune composed by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1951: aThe Motherland hears, the Motherland knows, where her son flies in the sky.a Over the protests of military leaders, the euphoric Soviet leader spontaneously promoted Gagarin two ranks to major.

Khrushchev exploded with joy and pride. As had been the case with the Sputnik mission in 1957, he had again beaten the Americans in the s.p.a.ce race. At the same time, he had demonstrated a missile technology with unmistakable military significance, given Soviet advances in nuclear capability. Most important, Vostok provided him with the political booster rocket he badly needed ahead of his October party conferencea”effectively neutralizing his enemies.

A banner headline in the official newspaper Izvestia, whose entire issue was devoted to the flight, read: GREAT VICTORY, OUR COUNTRY, OUR SCIENCE, OUR TECHNIQUE, OUR MEN.

Khrushchev exulted to his son Sergei that he would stage a grand event that would allow the Soviet people to celebrate a real hero. Sergei tried to talk his father out of an immediate return to Moscow, given the toll the stressful year already had taken on his health, but Khrushchev would not be dissuaded. The KGB hated the idea of crowds they could not completely control, but Khrushchev would not heed their warnings either.

The Soviet leader ordered the biggest parade and national celebration since World War IIas end on May 9, 1945. His sense of triumph was so great that he spontaneously jumped into the open limousine that drove Gagarin and his wife down Leninsky Prospekt to Red Square. On sunlit streets, they together waved to cheering crowds who climbed trees and hung out of windows for better views. Roadside balconies so groaned with people that Khrushchev feared they would collapse.

From atop the Lenin Mausoleum, Khrushchev used his cosmonautas nickname as he declared, aLet everyone whoas sharpening their claws against us knowathat Yurka was in s.p.a.ce, that he saw and knows everything.a He scorned those who had belittled the Soviet Union and thought Russians went abarefoot and without clothes.a Gagarinas flight seemed as much a personal confirmation for Khrushchev of his leaders.h.i.+p as it was a message to the world about his countryas technological capability. The peasant boy who had been illiterate and shoeless had outdone Kennedy and his far more advanced country.

More than three weeks later, Project Mercury would make Alan Shepard the second human and first American in s.p.a.ce. History would always record that Khrushchev and Yurka got there first.

WAs.h.i.+NGTON, D.C.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 1961.

Adenaueras timing could not have been worse.

The West German chancellor landed in Was.h.i.+ngton just a few hours after Yuri Gagarin had parachuted to safety in Kazakhstan. He sat in the Oval Office with a president who was eager to get him out of town and get on with the invasion of Cuba.

All the more awkward, Adenauer had arrived in Was.h.i.+ngton roughly a month after the visit of w.i.l.l.y Brandt, the Berlin mayor, with the speaker of the Berlin Senate Egon Bahr. It was almost unprecedented that a newly elected U.S. president would schedule a meeting with key opposition representatives of an Allied country before he had met with the national leader, but such was the nature of the strained Kennedya”Adenauer relations.h.i.+p.

Kennedy had told Brandt that aof all the legacies of World War II which the West had inherited, Berlin was the most difficult.a Yet the president said he could think of no good solution to the problem, and neither could Brandt. aWe will just have to live with the situation,a Kennedy had said.

Brandt joined the list of those who were telling Kennedy that Khrushchev would be likely to act to change Berlinas status before his October Party Congress. To test Western resolve, Brandt said the East Germans and Soviets were increasing their hara.s.sment of civilian and military movement between the two sides of Berlin. If the Soviets again blockaded West Berlin, he said the city had built up stockpiles of fuel and food that would last for six months. This would give Kennedy time to negotiate his way out of any Berlin difficulty.

Brandt had used his forty minutes in the Oval Office to try to instill in Kennedy a greater pa.s.sion for the cause of Berlinas freedom. He called West Berlin a window to the free world that had kept alive East German hopes for eventual liberation. aWithout West Berlin this hope would die,a he said, and American presence was the aessential guaranteea for the cityas continued existence. Brandt was relieved to hear Kennedy for the first time reject the Soviet proposal of a UNa”protected afree citya status for West Berlin, an outcome Kennedy had been rumored to support. For his part, Brandt a.s.sured Kennedy that his Social Democratsa earlier flirtations with the Soviets over neutrality were a thing of the past.

A month later, Kennedyas conversations with Adenauer would be less congenial. Kennedy asked Adenauer many of the same questions he had posed to Brandt, but with less satisfying a result. When asked what the Soviets might do during 1961 in Berlin, Adenauer told Kennedy, aAnything or nothing could happen,a noting that he was not a prophet. Adenauer said that when Khrushchev issued his six-month ultimatum in November 1958, no one had expected him to be so patient, and still he had not delivered on his threats.

Kennedy wanted to know what Adenauer believed the U.S. reaction ought to be if the Soviet Union did sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, a.s.suming Khrushchev did so without interfering with access to Berlin.

Adenauer delivered an elderly manas lecture to the young president about how complicated the legal situation was regarding Germany. Was the president aware, he asked, that there still had been no peace treaty signed by the four powers with Germany as a whole? Was the president aware, he inquired further, of athe little-known facta that the Soviet Union still maintained military missions in parts of West Germany? The three Allies had asked Adenauer not to say much about this, the chancellor said, as they also kept such outposts in East Germany, which enabled them to gather intelligence.

Since his boss had failed to answer Kennedyas direct question, Foreign Minister Brentano a.s.sessed Soviet alternatives. The first possibility was that of another Berlin blockade, which he thought unlikely. The second was the Soviet transfer of control over Berlin to the East German leaders.h.i.+p, followed by hara.s.sing tactics impeding access to the city, an outcome Brentano considered more probable. So Brentano suggested contingency planning for that possibility.

Given such a case, Adenauer said West Germany would stand by its military commitments under NATO and intervene to defend Western forces against Soviet attack. aIf Berlin fell, it would mean the death sentence for Europe and the Western World,a said Brentano.

What followed then was a complex discussion about which parties had what legal rights under what contingencies in a Berlin crisis. What rights did West Germany have in international law over Berlin? What rights did it want? What rights did the four powers have to supply and defend Berliners? What was the essence of the NATO guarantee for Berlin? When might it be exercised, and by whom? At what point did the West go nuclear in a Berlin conflict?