Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 943.155 KEM | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 943.155 KEM | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 943.155 KEM | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A fresh, controversial, brilliantly written account of one of the epic dramas of the Cold War-and its lessons for today.
"History at its best." -Zbigniew Brzezinski
"Gripping, well researched, and thought-provoking, with many lessons for today." -Henry Kissinger
"Captures the drama [with] the 'You are there' storytelling skills of a journalist and the analytical skills of the political scientist." - General Brent Scowcroft
In June 1961, Nikita Khrushchev called it "the most dangerous place on earth." He knew what he was talking about.
Much has been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later, but the Berlin Crisis of 1961 was more decisive in shaping the Cold War-and more perilous. For the first time in history, American and Soviet fighting men and tanks stood arrayed against each other, only yards apart. One mistake, one overzealous commander-and the trip wire would be sprung for a war that would go nuclear in a heartbeat. On one side was a young, untested U.S. president still reeling from the Bay of Pigs disaster. On the other, a Soviet premier hemmed in by the Chinese, the East Germans, and hard-liners in his own government. Neither really understood the other, both tried cynically to manipulate events. And so, week by week, the dangers grew.
Based on a wealth of new documents and interviews, filled with fresh- sometimes startling-insights, written with immediacy and drama, Berlin 1961 is a masterly look at key events of the twentieth century, with powerful applications to these early years of the twenty- first.
Author Notes
Frederick Kempe is the editor and associate publisher of The Wall Street Journal Europe and the founding editor of the Central European Economic Review . A well-known American commentator in Germany, he is also the author of Divorcing the Dictator , a book about America and Noriega featured on the cover of Newsweek , and Siberian Odyssey .
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
On the 50th anniversary of its construction, Kempe, founder and CEO of the Atlantic Council and a former Wall Street Journal staffer, delivers a definitive history of the Berlin Wall. For years, citizens of Communist East Germany streamed across the open border into prosperous West Berlin: 200,000 in 1960 alone. It was an exasperating brain drain, and the danger that other eastern Europeans would cross over threatened to destabilize the Communist region. Assembling personal accounts and newly declassified documents, Kempe writes a gripping, almost day-by-day chronicle of colorful, often clueless leaders and their byzantine maneuvers. Still reeling from his Bay of Pigs humiliation, President Kennedy yearned to prove himself the stalwart leader of the free world. The more experienced but mercurial Khrushchev wanted better East-West relations despite hostility from his hard-line rivals and East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, an unreconstructed Stalinist who despised him. No meeting of minds occurred, and the wall went up, but Kempe concludes that it solved the problem and avoided a war. Berlin faded from the headlines for 28 years, until in 1989 both the wall and the cold war came to an end. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
This informed history of the politics behind a crucial Cold War confrontation focuses on the key decision makers: JFK, Khrushchev, West Germany's Konrad Adenauer, and East Germany's Walter Ulbricht. Presenting these leaders' private communications about their options in the 1961 iteration of the chronic Berlin crisis, Kempe depicts how these men appraised their and their opponents' strengths. Despite Khrushchev's outward belligerence, the Communists' position was fundamentally weak, for an exodus from Ulbricht's state portended its impending collapse. With Ulbricht's lobbying Khrushchev to seal the border between West and East Berlin in the background, Kempe foregrounds the advice, soft to hard, about parrying possible Communist moves with which Washington officials and Allied diplomats swamped Kennedy. His chronology of memos and meetings dramatizes events behind closed doors, while his recounting of incidents in Berlin shows the potential of the crisis for inadvertent escalation to nuclear war. Critical of certain decisions that led to Kennedy's ultimate acquiescence in closure of the border, Kempe's history reflects balanced discernment about the creation of the Berlin Wall.--Taylor, Gilber. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ON Aug. 13, 1961, Robert H. Lochner drove to the eastern sector of Berlin. A radio director in the city's American sector, Lochner used a hidden tape recorder to capture stories of families who were suddenly trapped in the East by the decision to build the Berlin Wall. Thousands had been fleeing each week, threatening the Communist state's viability. Now Lochner watched as an elderly woman timorously walked up to one of the transport policemen and inquired when the next train was due for West Berlin. He never forgot the officer's contemptuous response: "That is all over. You are all sitting in a mousetrap now." Indeed they were. Moscow's satrapy was unable to create a flourishing economy, relying on loans to keep itself afloat. But the one line of work it did excel at was continually refining its deadly border with the West. Even Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, the bustling epicenter of the Weimar Republic, was converted into a desolate minefield. Not until the Hungarian government opened its border with Austria in May 1989 did the whole rotten edifice collapse and, to general astonishment, one Germany replace two. But could the end of the Warsaw Pact have taken place much earlier? Did John F. Kennedy lack the courage to knock down the Berlin Wall? Did he inadvertently prop up the Soviet empire? These are some of the questions that Frederick Kempe, the president and chief executive of the Atlantic Council, broaches in "Berlin 1961." Kempe, who was for a time The Wall Street Journal's bureau chief in Germany, has performed prodigies of research, consulting American, German and Soviet archives as well as interviewing numerous participants in the Berlin crisis. His reconstruction of the diplomacy and events leading up to August 1961 is spellbinding. But the revisionist conclusions he draws from them are not always as convincing. Kennedy, by his own admission, made a hash of much of the first year of his presidency. The Bay of Pigs debacle left Khrushchev convinced that Kennedy was a callow stripling whom he could bludgeon at will. The disastrous June 1961 Vienna summit between the two men, where Khrushchev ranted about a possible conflict over Berlin while Kennedy wanly tried to interject, seemed to confirm the tempestuous Soviet prime minister's conviction that his American counterpart could be rolled. "He savaged me," a browbeaten Kennedy confided afterward to the New York Times correspondent James Reston. Nevertheless, Kennedy had successfully communicated to Khrushchev that he was chiefly interested in preserving American military access routes and protecting West Berlin. It was also the case, as Kempe reports, that Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general, had established a back channel with the K.G.B. agent Georgi Bolshakov and told him that he and his brother "sympathized" with the Soviet "fear of German revanchists." Once the Berlin Wall went up, the president kept mum. But he told his aides, "It's not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war." Kempe chides Kennedy for not doing more, for helping to "write the script" for the wall's construction. According to Kempe, "Kennedy's actions allowed East German leaders to stop just the sort of refugee flow that would be the country's undoing 28 years later." He adds, "Kennedy was not focused on rolling back Communism in Europe." Kempe says only by implication what should have been done. He censures Kennedy for opting "neither to disrupt the border closure . . . nor punish his Communist rivals with sanctions." In Kempe's view, Khrushchev's success with Berlin emboldened him to emplace nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962. Kempe concludes that Kennedy's facing down of the Soviets over Cuba and his triumphant visit to West Berlin in 1963 represented a U-turn. A "new Kennedy" had at last emerged. But did Kennedy really bungle matters in 1961? Far from appeasing the Communists, Kennedy was simply ratifying longstanding American policy. At the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, the Russians, British and Americans arranged to divide Germany into four zones of occupation. Had Dwight Eisenhower been willing to accelerate the pace of battle in April 1945, he might have been able to reach Berlin before the Red Army. But he had no interest in sacrificing American soldiers for a political objective. So Stalin, at an enormous cost in lives, liberated Berlin. No American president ever seriously challenged Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. Not Eisenhower when revolts took place in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956. Not Lyndon B. Johnson during the Prague Spring in 1968. Not Ronald Reagan when martial law was declared in Poland in 1981. In Europe, the old principle of Cuius regio, eius religio - Whose realm, his religion - prevailed. The truth is that everyone got something out of the Berlin Wall. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was a Rhinelander who loathed Prussia and was intent on embedding West Germany firmly in NATO and the European Union. The East German leader Walter Ulbricht got his little Communist state. For America, the wall eliminated the risk that a nuclear war would erupt over Berlin. Real change began to occur only in 1970 when the German chancellor Willy Brandt struck out on a new course of détente with the East and expressed contrition for Nazi crimes. By 1989 a younger generation was in the Kremlin. Much as the Soviet expert George F. Kennan had predicted in 1947, containment led to the "gradual mellowing" and peaceful demise of the Communist system. Confronting Moscow in 1961 might well have led to a very different outcome. Jacob Heilbrunn is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Kirkus Review
A tale of missed opportunities just might have ended in nuclear war.Former longtime Wall Street Journal editor Kempe (Father/Land: A Personal Search for the New Germany, 1999, etc.) recounts a curious series of episodes in which the Russians appeared to be bearing olive branches, the Americans arrows. When John F. Kennedy came into office, Nikita Khrushchev made unexpectedly conciliatory gesturesfor instance, he allowed Radio Free Europe to be broadcast behind the Iron Curtain, released American fliers who had been shot down while spying in Soviet airspace and even published Kennedy's inaugural address inPravda. Kennedy, however, mistrusted Khrushchev, who was "vacillating between his instinct for reform and better relations with the West and his habit of authoritarianism and confrontation." Given this suspicion, Kennedy failed to encourage the Soviet leader's good moments. Meanwhile, Khrushchev faced a difficult problem. He had defanged his most dangerous rival, Stalin-era secret policeman Lavrentiy Beria, but still faced considerable opposition from hardcore Stalinistsand competition from Mao's China, which was jockeying for position as the world's leading communist power. He was also embroiled in a bad situation in East Germany, which seemed in danger of collapsing in the wake of his post-Stalin reforms and which was serving as a gateway through which other Eastern Europeans could easily escape to the West. The climax of the difficult year 1961, as Kempe demonstrates, was the building of the Berlin Wall following one misreading of Soviet cues after another on the part of the Kennedy administration. In the end, Kennedy had to swallow his pride and accept the fact of the wall, which "had risen as he passively stood by." That failure notwithstanding, Kempe concludes that, ultimately, Kennedy was able to regain advantage with his successful handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year.A bit too long, but good journalistic history in the tradition of William L. Shirer and Barbara Tuchman.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The Berlin Crisis of 1961, on the heels of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, not only froze European Cold War borders but also became another nonprofile in courage for JFK, inciting Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to provoke the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later. So claims Kempe (associate publisher, Wall Street Journal, Europe edition; Father/Land: A Pivotal Search for the New Germany) as he skillfully weaves oral histories and newly declassified documents into a sweeping, exhaustive narrative. Although no love was lost between Khrushchev and East Germany's Walter Ulbricht, they both were committed to staunching the flow of well-educated, professional East Germans to the West; hence, the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Kempe is especially strong at recounting Khrushchev's bullying of Kennedy at the June 1961 Vienna Summit and on the Wall's political, social, and personal impacts. VERDICT Likely the best, most richly detailed account of the subject, this will engross serious readers of Cold War history who enjoyed W.R. Smyser's Kennedy and the Berlin Wall but appreciate the further detail. Both authors view JFK circa 1961 as a work in progress with weaknesses that did not remain the pattern. [See Prepub Alert, 12/1/10.]-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Foreword | p. xi |
| Introduction: The World's Most Dangerous Place | p. xv |
| Part I The Players | |
| 1 Khrushchev: Communist in a Hurry | p. 3 |
| Marta Hillers's Story of Rape | p. 14 |
| 2 Khrushchev: The Berlin Crisis Unfolds | p. 19 |
| 3 Kennedy: A President's Education | p. 49 |
| The ôSniperö Comes In from the Cold | p. 68 |
| 4 Kennedy: A First Mistake | p. 72 |
| 5 Ulbricht and Adenauer: Unruly Alliances | p. 90 |
| The Failed Flight of Friedrich Brandt | p. 109 |
| 6 Ulbricht and Adenauer: The Tail Wags the Bear | p. 113 |
| Part II The Gathering Storm | |
| 7 Springtime for Khrushchev | p. 129 |
| 8 Amateur Hour | p. 154 |
| Jörn Donner Discovers the City | p. 179 |
| 9 Perilous Diplomacy | p. 184 |
| 10 Vienna: Little Boy Blue Meets Al Capone | p. 209 |
| 11 Vienna: The Threat of War | p. 239 |
| 12 Angry Summer | p. 269 |
| Marlene Schmidt, the Universe's Most Beautiful Refugee | p. 287 |
| Part III The Showdown | |
| 13 ôThe Great Testing Placeö | p. 293 |
| Ulbricht and Kurt Wismach Lock Horns | p. 321 |
| 14 The Wall: Setting the Trap | p. 323 |
| 15 The Wall: Desperate Days | p. 363 |
| Eberhard Bolle Lands in Prison | p. 395 |
| 16 A Hero's Homecoming | p. 398 |
| 17 Nuclear Poker | p. 419 |
| 18 Showdown at Checkpoint Charlie | p. 448 |
| Epilogue: Aftershocks | p. 482 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 503 |
| Notes | p. 507 |
| Bibliography | p. 553 |
| Index | p. 565 |
