Free Exceptional by Dick Cheney Page A

provide for our security, they must also keep in mind their sacred duty to safeguard the civil liberties of the American people.
    IN JANUARY 1961 A new American president took the oath of office. The first president born in the twentieth century, John F. Kennedy carried an aura of glamour, vigor, intellect, and energy. A handsome war hero, he had prevailed in 1960 in part by portraying the Eisenhower-Nixon administration as weak on communism. Throughout the campaign he criticized the “missile gap,” the superiority in missiles that Eisenhower had purportedly allowed the Soviets to achieve.
    Expectations for the new president were high, but the first monthsdid not go well. Kennedy approved a plan, inherited from the Eisenhower administration, to use Cuban exiles to spark an uprising aimed at ousting Cuba’s communist dictator, Fidel Castro. At the last minute, however, Kennedy canceled the U.S. air support the exiles were counting on. The invasion failed, the CIA-backed guerrillas were captured, and the Bay of Pigs operation went down in history as a fiasco.
    In Moscow, Khrushchevfollowed events closely. He was sizing up America’s new president, and he wasn’t impressed. This seemed to be a man he could get the better of, and he planned to do just that at their upcoming summit in Vienna.
    Documents in the Soviet archives released since the collapse of the Soviet Union detail Khrushchev’s plan. In a meeting with the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on May 26, 1961, Khrushchev laid out his scheme for isolating West Berlin and shutting off the flow ofrefugees from the East. He did not believe the Americans or any of the other Western powers would stop him, and as he saw it the situation was dire: thousands of East German citizens were fleeing the Soviet Bloc through West Berlin. Khrushchev planned to notify Kennedy that the Soviets and the East Germans would sign a treaty by the end of the year closing all corridors of access to West Berlin, with or without U.S. approval.
    Kennedy and Khrushchev met in Vienna June 3–4, 1961. The two-day meeting was tense throughout, but it was over the issue of Berlin that Khrushchev’s bullying reached its peak. Kennedy explained to Khrushchev that America would not accept the loss of access to West Berlin. In the aftermath of World War II, the Allies had agreed on arrangements for the governing of Berlin, and Kennedy told Khrushchev that the Soviets could not unilaterally change that agreement by denying access to the other powers. Khrushchev threatened that if the Americans attempted to exercise those rights after the treaty with East Germany had been signed, the Sovietswould respond militarily.
    New York Times reporter James “Scotty” Reston had an interviewscheduled with Kennedy at the end of the second day of meetings. Reston reported that the president entered the room, sank down on a couch, and sighed. Reston said to him, “Pretty rough?” Kennedy replied, “Roughest thing in my life.” Reston wrote:
    Kennedy said just enough in that room to convince me of the following:
    Khrushchev had studied the events of the Bay of Pigs; he would have understood if Kennedy had left Castro alone or destroyed him; but when Kennedy was rash enough to strike at Cuba and not bold enough to finish the job, Khrushchev decided he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could beintimidated and blackmailed.
    Khrushchev left Vienna and went to East Berlin, where he announced a treaty would be concluded by December 31. As the pace of the exodus from the East increased that summer—16,500 refugees fled into West Berlin in the first elevendays of August alone—Khrushchev decided more immediate action was needed. In the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, Time reported, East Berliners were awakened by “the scream of sirens and the clank ofsteel on cobblestones” as military convoys spread across their portion of the city,