On a rainy October night in 1961, Soviet and American tanks sat muzzle to muzzle at Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous boundary between East and West Berlin. Fifty years later, Frederick Kempe, chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council and author of Berlin: 1961, stood before an audience in Persson Auditorium to discuss the issues that brought two superpowers to the brink of World War III.
The conversation on November 3, arranged by Scott Williams ’80, P’15, was co-sponsored by the departments of German, history, and political science with support from IJʿ’s Lester D. Stickles ’18 Fund for Military Diplomacy. It was part history lesson and part cautionary tale.
As Kempe, a former Wall Street Journal reporter told it, John Kennedy burned a series of olive branches offered by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the new president’s inaugural year. He also revamped the nuanced strategy used by past administrations to contain the communist threat.
“I just don’t think that there was a very sophisticated mixture of carrots and sticks in 1961,” Kempe said. Whereas Truman and Eisenhower left Russia wondering just how far they would go in the defense of Western Europe, Kennedy took a nuclear first-strike off the table.
When Khrushchev decided to staunch the flow of refugees from East Berlin by erecting a wall through the divided city, he was sure that Kennedy would acquiesce. He was right. But before the confrontation was over, American and Soviet tanks spent 16 hours with their guns leveled at point-blank range.
The Berlin Wall was physical proof of Kempe’s contention that the first year of a presidency is the most dangerous for America and the world. Furthermore, when we don’t understand our adversaries, it is easy to provoke unintended conflict.
The lessons of the Cold War are as relevant as its impact on current events. “It set the stage for everything we’re going through today: the rise of China, the rise of India, the new age of globalization,” said Kempe. Yet historians have rarely approached it with the same enthusiasm and quality as they have applied to the first and second world wars.
“Cold War history is often hard to study, because it can lack turning points,” said Hannah Fuchs ’14. “But Kempe clarified 1961 as one of those points, and he encouraged us to question if changes in certain factors could have led to a much different history.”