Berlin 1961 Read Online Free PDF

the previous New Year’s gathering, when an inebriated Khrushchev had nearly declared World War III over Berlin.
    It had been two in the morning when Khrushchev, in an alcoholic haze, escorted Thompson, his wife, the French ambassador, and Italy’s Communist Party leader into a newly built anteroom of St. George’s Hall, curiously decorated with a running fountain filled with colored plastic rocks. Khrushchev spat at Thompson that he would make the West pay if it didn’t satisfy his demands for a Berlin agreement that would include Allied troop withdrawal. “We have thirty nuclear weapons earmarked for France, more than enough to destroy that country,” he said, tilting his head toward the French ambassador. He added for good measure that he was reserving fifty each for West Germany and Britain.
    In an awkward attempt to restore a lighter mood, Jane Thompson had asked how many rockets Khrushchev had earmarked for Uncle Sam.
    “That’s a secret,” Khrushchev had said with a wicked smile.
    In an attempt to reverse the degenerating tone, Thompson had offered a toast to the upcoming Paris Summit with Eisenhower and its potential for improved relations. The Soviet leader, however, only escalated his threats, discarding his commitment to Eisenhower that he would refrain from any unilateral disruptions over Berlin until after the Paris meeting. Thompson was able to end the vodka-soaked session only at six in the morning, when he walked away knowing superpower relations would depend on Khrushchev’s inability the next morning to recall anything he had said that night.
    Thompson had dispatched a damage-control cable to President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Christian Herter that same morning, relating Khrushchev’s remarks while at the same time declaring they should not be “taken literally,” given the Soviet leader’s intoxicated condition. He offered that the Soviet merely wished “to impress upon us the seriousness” of the Berlin situation.
    A year later, and with Thompson safely at home, Khrushchev was in a more sober and generous spirit as the clock struck twelve. Following the bells welcoming the arrival of 1961, and the lighting of the forty-foot New Year’s tree inside St. George’s Hall, Khrushchev raised his glass and offered a toast that would be taken as doctrinal direction by party leaders and repeated in diplomatic cables around the world.
    “Happy New Year, comrades, Happy New Year! No matter how good the old year has been, the New Year will be better still!”
    The room exploded in cheers, embraces, and kisses.
    Khrushchev ritually toasted the working people, the peasants, the intellectuals, Marxist-Leninist concepts, and peaceful coexistence among the world’s peoples. In a conciliatory tone he said, “We consider the socialist system to be superior, but we never try to impose it on other states.”
    The hall grew silent as he turned his words to Kennedy.
    “Dear Comrades! Friends! Gentlemen!” said Khrushchev. “The Soviet Union makes every effort to have friendly ties with all peoples. But I think no one will reproach me if I say that we attach great importance to improving our relations with the USA because this relationship greatly molds others. We would like to believe that the USA strives for the same outcome. We hope that the new U.S. president will be like a fresh wind blowing away the stale air between the USA and the USSR.”
    The man who a year earlier had counted the atomic bombs he would drop on the West was striking a peacemaker’s pose. “During the election campaign,” Khrushchev told the crowd, “Mr. Kennedy said if he had been president he would have expressed regret to the Soviet Union” about sending spy planes over its territory. Khrushchev said he as well wanted to put “this lamentable episode in the past and not go back to it…. We believe that by voting for Mr. Kennedy and against Mr. Nixon, the American people have disapproved of the policy of Cold War