Posted on 04/13/2004 5:10:15 AM PDT by blitzgig
William F. Buckley Jr. was 19 at the time of the Yalta Conference, which ceded much of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union, and 66 when the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist. Between those two points Buckley devoted himself to the cause of anti-Communism, ending up in what might as well have been a dead heat with Ronald Reagan for the rank of foremost Cold Warrior in the nation. Now Buckley has published a book that examines what was taking place inside the Evil Empire while he was busy containing it.
The Fall of the Berlin Wall is a very big little book. In fewer than 200 pages of text — it represents the newest entry in Turning Points, a series of brief works of history published by Wiley — it tells you everything about the Berlin Wall that there is to know. As it happens, that's a lot: Yalta, and the agreement to divide Berlin into four sectors, one each for the U.S., Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The tens of thousands of East Germans who fled the Soviet sector for one of the Western sectors, escaping Communism — and bleeding East Germany of its work force. The 1961 decision by Walter Ulbricht and Nikita Khrushchev to erect a temporary barrier between the Soviet and Western sectors — and the tepid American response that emboldened them to make it permanent. The unending series of incidents the Wall provoked. The way the tall slabs of concrete came to symbolize the divide between East and West, Communist and free. The emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev. The cascade of events in 1989 that culminated in the dazed announcement — on live television, by a member of the East German politburo — that "permanent emigration is henceforth allowed across all border crossing points," which thousands of delirious Berliners celebrated by dancing atop the Wall itself. The Fall of the Berlin Wall presents every event.
Yet the book's principal achievement lies not in its comprehensiveness, but in the wonderfully deft way it presents its material: This is a small masterpiece of the narrative tradition. This tradition — the writing of history as if it were a story — began with Thucydides and survived every subsequent century until the last one, when academics spurned it, choosing to publish not narratives but raw material such as econometric studies and demographic data sets. History professors across America now pride themselves on producing books too boring to read. But The Fall of the Berlin Wall embraces all the virtues that keep readers turning the page.
Recounting a visit he made to Checkpoint Charlie, for example, Buckley writes:
The Vopos [East German police] stalled me for a full twenty minutes . . . a way of saying that although formal diplomatic concessions were being made, there was no reason for the visitor not to feel the heavy heel of the commanding entity, the German Democratic Republic. I don't conceal that I thought the Germans who were enforcing the laws appeared especially well qualified to do so, in the square-set resolution of their heads, the grimness of their expressions, and their disembodied attention to duty. Exquisite diction and, in the mounting wave of dependent clauses that ends the second sentence, a use of rhythm that Macaulay would have approved.
The book's virtues likewise include a sense of accident and open-endedness — that at any number of points the story could have taken a different turn. Buckley suggests, for example, that when the Wall was first erected, East Berliners might have rioted — the authorities certainly feared that they would — prompting a bloodbath like the one that ended the 1953 workers' revolt. For that matter, Buckley suggests that the Western sectors of Berlin might have fallen to the Communists soon after World War II. When Stalin imposed the 1948 blockade, Buckley writes, "what saved West Berlin was the U.S. airlift, and what made the airlift possible was . . . [a] 1920 decision to fold surrounding land into Greater Berlin," equipping what would become West Berlin with two airports and acreage on which American engineers would be able to construct a third. Had a single municipality not taken over some suburbs, in other words, world history would have been different. In the hands of a writer so alive to contingency, an account such as this becomes not a collection of data but a drama.
It is a drama that teems. Academics may write as if impersonal forces alone define history, but Buckley knows better. He gives us individuals: Macmillan, unflappable and urbane, who, as the Wall is being erected, demonstrates his refusal to take it seriously by proceeding from a grouse shoot in Yorkshire to golfing in Perthshire. Accosted by reporters on a golf course, Macmillan coolly says of the Wall, "Nobody is going to fight about it." Adenauer, stern and intense. As the Wall goes up Adenauer agonizes for days, hesitant to visit Berlin for fear that his presence might incite violence. Finally making a visit, he recognizes that his sense of timing has failed when he sees West Berliners carrying placards that read, "At last!" And of course East German strongman Walter Ulbricht, who erected the Wall.
Whereas Lenin looked ruthless, Ulbricht looked disapproving. To see him standing at a lectern, shoulders squared, eyes narrowed behind steel-rimmed glasses, lips pursed above the goatee — you might take him for a solemn symphony conductor, prepared to bring down his baton to reprimand an erring violinist. You would not immediately guess that his favored means of registering displeasure were indeterminate jail sentences and, for star transgressors, the firing squad. A nonsmoker and nondrinker (except to toast the occasional victory of the Workers' and Peasants' State . . .) . . . [Ulbricht] was undeviating in doing his daily calisthenics and taking his daily run. One of the tyrants of the 20th century, indelibly limned — and devastatingly disdained.
Buckley's portrait of Khrushchev is equally arresting. We tend to remember the Soviet premier as a crude peasant, blustering "We will bury you" or pounding his shoe on a table at the U.N. Drawing on materials that have become available since the demise of the USSR, Buckley presents a Khrushchev who is not just crude but wily and — the real surprise — circumspect. Responding to Ulbricht's proposal for sealing off the Western sectors of Berlin, Khrushchev imposed strict conditions. First he refused to permit Ulbricht to interfere with air traffic. Then he agreed to a wall only if it were composed at first of barbed wire. If the Allies responded to the barbed-wire barriers with force, the man Buckley terms "Khrushchev the Cautious" insisted, Ulbricht's troops were to fall back.
Which brings us to Buckley's portrait of John Kennedy. It is remarkably generous. At least it is remarkably generous considering what it might have been. In his inaugural address, after all, Kennedy proclaimed his intention to "bear any burden [and] oppose any foe," then spent his first months in office seeming to shrink from both. In his third month he called off air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion. In his fifth month he traipsed into Vienna for a summit meeting with no better plan than to offer Khrushchev a pat little lecture on the dangers of "miscalculation." When Khrushchev erupted, denouncing Kennedy for insulting him, our 35th chief executive simply listened, dazed, as Khrushchev abused him. Kennedy could hardly have improved upon that act if he had wanted Khrushchev to miscalculate American resolve. Then, in his seventh month, Kennedy faced the crisis in Berlin.
Kennedy seems to have contemplated forcing the East Germans to dismantle the structure, sending to Berlin General Lucius Clay, who 13 years earlier had faced down Stalin by organizing the airlift. Yet only a few months after the first barbed-wire barriers appeared, Kennedy had our ambassador to Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson, inform the Soviets that the U.S. accepted the Berlin Wall as "a fact of international life." The torch may have been passed to a new generation, but Kennedy demonstrated no eagerness to hold it aloft.
In presenting this material, Buckley refuses to adopt a censorious tone toward Kennedy like the tone I just employed. He is too aware of all that the young president faced — the clashing views and personalities of his advisers, the incomplete information he was receiving from Berlin, the strain of coordinating policy with allies as disparate as Macmillan, Adenauer, and de Gaulle, the burden of weighing nuclear possibilities. If Kennedy had indeed chosen to respond with force, what then? Deep inside East Germany, West Berlin would have proven all but indefensible. For that matter, what would have happened if the U.S. had forced the East Germans to remove the Wall? Before the border was sealed, more than 12,000 East Germans a month had been presenting themselves in West Berlin for asylum. Khrushchev may have proven cautious, but how long could he once again have countenanced such a torrent of refugees? Sometimes implicitly, but often enough explicitly, Buckley poses just these questions, putting the reader in Kennedy's place. The portrait that emerges? That of a young man, charged with solemn responsibilities, who did the best that he could — and even, arguably, the best that could have been done.
The dominant virtue of this book? Moral clarity. Many a tenured historian would rather write a dozen unreadable tomes than make a single "value judgment," but Buckley thrives on such judgments. He presents the Berlin Wall as exactly what it was, a manifestation of evil. "When all the world is surfaced over in concrete," Buckley writes, "one day a blade of grass will sprout up. This happened in Berlin on November 9, 1989."
He did. Also in the CIA. What's the point of your question?
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