The Berlin Wall

On a quiet August weekend 50 years ago, with world leaders all off on vacation, the Berlin Wall went up. Writing about the then-president’s “Berlin blunder” in his latest column, George Will quotes the New York Times’ Scotty Reston saying at the time that Kennedy “talked like Churchill but acted like Chamberlain.” In Will’s view,

Tens of millions of East Europeans might have been spared those years of tyranny, and the West might have been spared considerable dangers and costs, if Kennedy had not been complicit in preventing the unraveling of East Germany.

I don’t see it that way. Kennedy understood that the entire Soviet empire, not just East Germany, was bleeding through the Iron Curtain cut that was Berlin, where anybody could take a subway or just walk from east to west (Communist authorities were able to control access from East Germany into East Berlin). Khrushchev had to do something about Berlin, which he called a "bone in my throat."

East-West tensions dropped once the bleeding stopped. The U.S. came out on top a year later, when the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in failure for Khrushchev, who was attempting to upend the balance of terror that was fast turning against the Soviet Union, as the U.S. brought Polaris-missile nuclear submarines and Minuteman intercontinental missiles rapidly online. By decade's end we were on the moon, the ultimate symbol of our technological superiority. In time, no East Germany. In time, no Soviet empire.

The U.S. overreach in Vietnam, a product of hubris as much as weakness, delayed our post-Cuban Missile Crisis victory in the Cold War. Vietnam was an unnecessary venture, at least following the far more important 1965 anti-Communist take-over in Indonesia. America did not regain its post-Vietnam debacle footing until Reagan’s election in 1980. Reagan’s muscular foreign policy then helped bring the Berlin Wall down in 1989, after 28 too-long years.

My version of history. Thank you Mr. Will.