The Presidency: Toughening Up

To visitors, the President of the U.S. seemed outwardly edgy—shifting about in his chair, straightening his tie, pulling up his socks. But behind the gestures, typical of John F. Kennedy’s restless style, lay a new and considerable confidence.

To be sure, the problems that faced Kennedy ten months after his inauguration were numerous and thorny enough to make any man tense. While U.S. and Russian tanks faced each other across the border of East Berlin, Communist aggression in Southeast Asia was newly alarming as a threat to the free world and a test of U.S. intentions. Russian nuclear tests had reached such a stage that the President had decided that the U.S. must resume atmospheric testing soon—and resign itself to the international outcry likely to follow. On the domestic front, the U.S. economy was not behaving as well as expected, and the future of Kennedy’s New Frontier programs was in doubt; the President had just about given up hope that, in the election year of 1962, he would be able to win congressional approval of such pet programs as aid to education and medical care for the aged.

No False Hopes. Yet, as Kennedy discussed the problems confronting him, his visitors could sense in his words the calmness of a man who, after long and arduous deliberation, had made some vast and grave decisions—and intended to stick by them. Only a few weeks ago talk was rife in Western capitals of a “deal” with the Russians over Germany; last week that talk had all but vanished. Kennedy is determined to go to war over Berlin if necessary—and he so warned Russia’s Andrei Gromyko during their October talk at the White House. Because he has decided to fight if necessary, Kennedy is willing to continue talking with the Russians as long as possible, at the conference table or elsewhere. But he does not intend to negotiate in haste or from weakness, as the U.S. made clear last week by warning that unless the Russians restore free access to East Berlin, the U.S. may refuse to negotiate about Berlin at all. All along the line, Kennedy’s stand has gradually toughened.

That toughening applies also to the U.S.’s relationship with its Allies. When he received a note from France’s Charles de Gaulle last week, expressing fear that any sort of negotiations could only lead to dangerous concessions, Kennedy informed French Ambassador Herve Alphand that he was growing weary of the French attitude of offering objections without any help. Replying to an equally anxious note from Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, Kennedy assured West German Ambassador Wilhelm Grewe in no uncertain terms that he does not intend to let West Berlin go down the drain, or to make any concessions at West Germany’s expense. But he held out no false hopes of German reunification, which he feels is unrealistic so long as Russian troops and a Moscow-backed government control East Germany.

Rights on the Line. Though President Kennedy realizes that there is little left to negotiate about in the face of an unbending Soviet position, he is willing to continue talking because he wants to let the Russians know 1) precisely what the West considers its rights to be, and 2) that any threat to those rights means a fight. Kennedy is carefully laying Western rights on the line so that, when and if

Khrushchev signs a separate peace treaty with East Germany, no “one will mistake the point at which the U.S. will use force to protect those rights.

If war comes over West Berlin, it is not likely to come over such border incidents as last week’s. It will come either because basic Western rights in Germany are denied, or because Nikita Khrushchev realizes that he cannot get what he wants from the West by bluff—and decides to go all the way.