Abstract
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
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Notes
Gearson, J. P. S., Harold Macmillan and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 1958–62: The Limits of Interest and Force ( Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan 1998 ), p. 185; and ‘British Policy and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 1958–61’, Contemporary Record, Vol. 6, No. 1, Summer 1992, p. 160.
For a very different interpretation of Anglo-American relations over Berlin see Trachtenberg, M., A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999 ), pp. 263–7. Lawrence Freedman, by contrast, agrees that Kennedy was inclined to the British view over Berlin (Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam ( Oxford: OUP, 2000 ), p. 61 ).
Home, Macmillan, 1957–86, pp. 119–20; Gearson, Harold Macmillan and the Berlin Wall Crisis, pp. 21–3; Lee, S., ‘Pragmatism versus Principle? Macmillan and Germany’, in Aldous, R., and Lee, S., Harold Macmillan: Aspects of a Political Life ( Basingstoke: Macmillan, — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999 ), p. 113.
Schild, G., ‘The Berlin Crisis’, in White, M. J., (ed.), Kennedy: The New Frontier Revisited ( Basingstoke: Macmillan–now Palgrave Macmillan, 1998 ), pp. 94–5.
Tusa, A., The Last Division: Berlin and the Wall ( London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996 ), p. 225.
Brandon, H., Special Relationship ( London: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1989 ), p. 160.
Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 357. Dean Rusk offers a very different perspective on the fate of the State Department draft in his memoirs (Rusk, D., As I Saw It: A Secretary of State’s Memoirs ( London: I. B. Tauris and Co., 1991 ), p. 194 ).
Ibid, pp. 140–2; Trachtenberg, M., History and Strategy ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 ), p. 218.
Zubok, V., and Pleshakov, C., Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev ( Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996 ), p. 253; Tusa, The Last Division, p. 261.
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© 2002 Nigel Ashton
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Ashton, N.J. (2002). The Berlin Crisis. In: Kennedy, Macmillan and the Cold War. Contemporary History in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800014_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800014_3
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