Where Is the Crisis?

The word at Bonn's Palais Schaumburg one morning last week was that Chancellor Konrad Adenauer seemed to be in a terrible mood. Washington kept shouting from the housetops that a Berlin crisis was imminent; Adenauer did not agree, and did not see what Washington wanted him to do about it. At noon a cable signed Schroeder was placed on his desk, and within minutes the temper in Adenauer's office improved. The German Foreign Minister, visiting Washington, reported his considered judgment that the American uproar about Berlin had been started largely for domestic political reasons. No one he had talked to, reported Schroder, had any solid evidence that the Soviets were about to make any unusual new trouble for Berlin.

Palaver at State. Both London and Paris essentially agreed with Schroder's estimate. In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev had a three-hour talk with Ambassador Foy Kohler in which he delivered no warnings, and pushed no harder than before. In Washington, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, at his own request, saw Kennedy and Secretary of State Rusk. As usual, Gromyko was adamant; at a State Department dinner the dialogue droned on roughly like this:

Gromyko: Now, Mr. Secretary, the situation is that there are two Germanys and there are two Berlins. Those are facts, and they will not change.

Rusk: Ah, Mr. Minister, all this may be true. But it is also true that there is a Western presence in Berlin. That is a fact, and it will not change.

Gromyko's attitude was not new, and suggested stalemate rather than crisis. Barring the existence of some unknown intelligence reports or private revelation, all the Washington warnings--by the President, Bobby Kennedy, Rusk, Defense Secretary McNamara et al.--were not based on anything concrete. The closest thing to specific evidence was a month-old Tass statement, which suggested that Moscow was willing to be patient about signing a peace treaty with East Germany until after the U.S. elections. The danger in Berlin remains real enough at all times, but it also happens to fit in neatly with the Kennedy election strategy; one way of diverting attention from the Cuba issue is to argue that Berlin is really more dangerous and important. At week's end, the Administration itself revised its timetable, now suggested that the big crisis would come early next year rather than next month.

Greetings at the Wall. The unpleasantest noises about Berlin from the Red side last week were provided by Polish Communist Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka, who. with Premier Josef Cyrankiewicz, journeyed to East Berlin. Gomulka has long been considered a relatively independent and "respectable" Communist, and there had been much speculation that he loathed Walter Ulbricht's nasty East German regime. But in public, at least, he could scarcely have been more obliging: he denounced West Germany, demanded Western withdrawal from Berlin and an early peace treaty. He visited the Wall, the world's most obscene tourist attraction, and signed a visitors' book, inscribing, "Hearty greetings to the soldiers standing watch on the borders of the German Democratic Republic."

Meanwhile, Nikita Khrushchev kept toying with the idea of going to the U.S. for conversations with President Kennedy. Khrushchev, Americans in Moscow guessed, might not want to stay put in Russia too long at a time of harvest and production failures, rising costs, and other domestic problems. For him, too, talking about Berlin might be a useful diversion at the moment.

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