The Berlin Crisis

If the Laotian crisis has come to seem somewhat arcane with the passage of time, the same certainly cannot be said of contemporaneous events in Berlin. Standing before a tumultuous crowd during a visit to the city in June 1963, Kennedy struck one of the keynotes of the Cold War. ‘All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words Ich bin ein Berliner,’ he proclaimed.1 On the face of things, though, one free man who did not share his opinion was Harold Macmillan. Macmillan’s famous gaffe about the building of the Berlin Wall — ‘nobody is going to fight about it’2 — delivered as he left the eighteenth green at Gleneagles, suggests the existence of a wide gulf between the two leaders’ positions over Berlin. However, the conventional versions of these two incidents conceal as much as they reveal about Kennedy and Macmillan’s attitudes to the Berlin question. Playing back a film of his speech in private, the president later recalled that he had been ‘disturbed’ by the ‘almost hysterical reception’ he had received in Berlin. He felt that if he had come to his peroration and said ‘“and at this moment I call upon you all to cross into East Germany and pull down that wall” they’d all have gone.’ Kennedy, according to his close confidant Ambassador Ormsby-Gore, worried that ‘the German people … at this moment in history were not totally to be relied upon and that this rather sheep-like instinct of theirs could be very frightening under certain circumstances and under the wrong leader still.’3