On the twenty-sixth of January Franco’s victorious forces entered Barcelona. At the League of Nations there were heated discussions about Spain’s future, but no action was suggested. Plainly disgusted, Seán Lester told Ursula, “We’ve learned from reliable sources that when Hitler entered the Rhineland, his forces were prepared for a hasty retreat if the French showed any sign of fight. But they didn’t. Will this be remembered as the century when civilization was handed over to bullies?” Morgan Llywelyn, 1949: A Novel of the Irish Free State, New York: Forge Books, 2003, p. 278

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Why nothing happened

• Freedom of movement for East Germans was already on the American list of bargaining chips. The TOP SECRET “Minutes of the Inter-Departmental Steering Group on Berlin” for 26 July 1961 summarized the negotiating proposals presented by Dean Acheson. The first item in the numbered list reported in the minutes was: “(1) there could be a discouragement of movements of population as distinct from acts of genuine political refuge.”This proposal was restated in the SECRET memorandum “Berlin: A Political Program” (31 July 1961) as “a general undertaking to discourage excessive movements of population, so long as a reasonable freedom of movement is permitted within the city, including freedom to live in one part and work in another without economic or other penalty.”
   
  This line of thinking was aimed squarely at the refugee flow and border crossers.

• The goal of any successful diplomatic negotiation is to extract the maximum counter-concession from your opponent for each bargaining chip you are prepared to give up. On 30 July 1961, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator J. William Fulbright, speaking on the television news program Issues and Answers, told the Soviets that they could have the number one bargaining chip in the American negotiation strategy for free:
   
  “I think that that might certainly be a negotiable point. The truth of the matter is, I think, the Russians have the power to close it [the Berlin Escape Hatch] in any case. I mean you are not giving up very much because I believe that next week if they chose to close their borders they could, without violating any treaty. I don’t understand why the East Germans don’t close their border because I think they have a right to close it. So why is this a great concession? You don't have that right now.”
  — quoted from The New York Times issue of 3 August 1961, p. 2
   
  
• This statement was loosely quoted in the East German Communist Party Newspaper Neues Deutschland in a three-column spread on the Front Page of the 3 August 1961 issue, with the headline:
  

  Fulbright: “The East Germans have the right to close their borders” / Cries of Rage in Bonn

  Fulbright: „Die Ostdeutschen haben das Recht, ihre Grenzen zu schließen“ / Wutgeschrei in Bonn

  „Ich denke, das könnte ein bemerkenswerter Punkt (eines Kompromisses) sein. Ich meine, man gibt nicht viel auf, weil sie (die DDR und die Sowjetunion) ohnehin die Macht haben (die Zugänge) auf jeden Fall zu schließen. Sie könnten das ohne Verletzung irgendeines vertraglich festgelegten Rechts tun … Ich verstehe nicht warum die Ostdeutschen nicht ihre Grenzen schließen, weil ich denke, daß sie ein Recht dazu haben, sie zu schließen.“

• The border around West Berlin was closed 10 days later, on 13 August, within Fulbright's time frame of "next week," which was not in the quote used by Neues Deutschland. If that had been in the German translation of Fulbright's statement, the exodus that followed would have been even greater.
   
  Even without Fulbright’s time frame of “next week” to warn them just how little time they had, the East Germans could clearly read the message hidden in the prominence given to Fulbright’s statement in Neues Deutschland. 47,700 refugees poured into the West during August, which was in essence only a half month. The average daily number of refugees after 13 August dropped to 112. Fulbright's statement could have been the event that triggered the decision to leave for many East Germans. The average monthly total for the first seven months of 1961 was only 19,000. The August number was almost two and a half times that.
   
  August 1961 had the highest monthly total of refugees recorded since 1949—with the exception of  March 1953, when Stalin died—at which time there were 58,605 refugees. It the refugee flow had continued at the same pace for the second half of August 1961, the monthly total would have surpassed that of March 1953, climbing to approximately 95,400.

• Embassy Bonn reported that “rarely has a statement by a prominent American official aroused so much consternation, chagrin and anger.”

• Willy Brandt’s Press Secretary Egon Bahr is quoted as saying: “we privately called him Fulbricht.”
  — Fabian Rueger, Kennedy, Adenauer and the Making of the Berlin Wall, 1958-1961, Stanford University, 2011, p. 210; See also Jürgen Petschull, Die Mauer: August 1961 — 12 Tage zwischen Krieg und Frieden, Hamburg: Stern Bücher, 1981, p. 205. The „Fulbricht“ quote was expunged when the book was republished in 1990 as Die Mauer: August 1961 — November 1989 vom Anfang und vom Ende eines Deutschen Bauwerks, Hamburg: Ein Stern Buch, p. 259.
   
  The name "Fulbricht" is a pun based on the surname of the East German leader Walter Ulbricht, who would have seen Fulbright’s remarks in Neues Deutschland, and interpreted them as a signal that the West would not react to the closing of the sector borders in Berlin.

• McGeorge Bundy sent the press coverage of Fulbright’s interview to Kennedy with a comment about “the helpful impact of Senator Fulbright’s remarks.” Kennedy subsequently refused to distance himself from Fulbright’s statement, which suggests that he asked Fulbright to make this statement as a way of signaling to Khrushchev and Ulbricht that the US might view the building of a wall as an acceptable way to defuse the Berlin Crisis.
  — W. R. Smyser, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009, p. 90.

• Fulbright was clearly not the only one in the West making such comments. At a press conference on 15 June 1961, Ulbricht had alluded to this when he said: "As I understand your question, there are people in West Germany who wish that we would mobilize the construction workers of the capital of the GDR for the purpose of erecting a wall. I am not aware of the existence of any such intention. The construction workers of our capital are primarily engaged in the building of housing, and all their efforts are directed toward this goal. No one has the intention of building a wall."

• In a phone conversation with Khruschev on 1 August, Ulbricht said:
  "Der Gegner spürt, dass wir uns darauf vorbereiten, die Grenze zu schließen. Gestern hat mich zum Beispiel ein englischer Korrespondent gefragt: Würden Sie heute die Grenze schließen? Ich habe gesagt, dass das von den Westmächten abhängt."
  “The enemy senses that we are preparing to close the border. Yesterday, for example, and English correspondent asked: “Would you close the border today?” I said that depends on the Western Powers.”

• In the now declassified SECRET Department of State Memorandum of 28 June 1961 entitled “The Berlin Crisis” that was prepared for President Kennedy, Dean Acheson clearly presented US priorities in Berlin:
   
   “It is plain that, if carried to its conclusion, the Berlin offensive strikes at the power and world position of the United States. Even its more limited purposes are gravely damaging to the United States and the Western Alliance. This is the nature of the crisis which confronts us; not the fate of a city, or of its two and one-half million people, or even the integrity of our pledged word. … Nothing could be more dangerous than to embark upon a course of action of the sort described in this paper in the absence of a decision to accept nuclear war rather than accede to the demands which Khrushchev is now making, or their substantial equivalent.”
   
  The fact that Kennedy was not prepared to take that risk is demon­strated by his widely quoted statement: “It's not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

• Early in August, Kennedy privately told his Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Walt Rostow): “Khrushchev is losing East Germany. He cannot let that happen.… He will have to do something to stop the flow of refugees—perhaps a wall. And we won’t be able to prevent it. I can hold the Alliance together to defend West Berlin but I cannot act to keep East Berlin open.”
  — W.W. Rostow, The Diffusion of Power: An Essay in Recent History (New York, 1972), p. 231.

• In a phone conversation between Khrushchev and Ulbricht on 1 August 1961, Khrushchev said:
  "Wenn die Grenze geschlossen wird, werden Amerikaner und Westdeutsche zufrieden sein. Botschafter Thompson hat mir gesagt, dass diese Flucht den Westdeutschen Ungelegenheiten bereitet. Wenn Sie also diese Kontrolle errichten, werden alle zufrieden sein."
  If the border were to be closed, the Americans and West Germans would be pleased. Ambassador Thompson told me that the refugee flow is inconveniencing the West Germans. Were you to establish this control, everyone would be pleased.

• A declassified BND document from mid-August 1961 reports that:
  "In seiner Unterredung mit dem Bundeskanzler ließ SMIRNOW gewisse Andeutungen über eine vorherige sowjetische/amerikanische „Verständigung“ bezüglich Absperrmaßnahmen fallen."
  In his discussion with the Federal Chancellor [Konrad Adenauer], [Ambassador Andrey Andreyevich] Smirnow let certain hints fall about a prior Soviet-American "Understanding" on measures to cordon things off.

• In an interview on Amazon, Frederick Kempe—the author of Berlin 1961—explains why Kennedy did nothing. He says that his "book builds the best cases to date that Kennedy acquiesced to the border closure and the building of the Wall. The record shows that in many respects he wrote the script that Khrushchev followed—as long as Khrushchev restricted his actions to Soviet-controlled East Berlin and East Germany, Kennedy would accept his actions. Kennedy falsely believed that if East Germany could end its refugee stampede, Khrushchev might become a more willing negotiator on a set of other issues. It was a tragic misreading of the man and of the situation. Berlin paid for it—as did tens of millions of people."

• While Kennedy projected a face of shocked depression to the press and the public, his sense of relief at the building of the Wall was evident to those who were closest to him.
  — Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961, p. 379.

• Rueger observes that “It is a painful and often omitted fact that … the order to ready the sector closure in August came only after the West had communicated loudly and clearly that it would defend West Berlin, but not care about the sectoral border.”
  — Rueger, p. 254

• Campaigning for election as Chancellor of Germany in Nuremberg, West Berlin's Mayor Willy Brandt said that the streams of refugees pouring into Berlin every day were driven by the fear that "the Iron Curtain will be cemented shut" and that they will be left "locked into a giant prison. They are agonizingly worried that they might be forgotten or sacrificed on the altar of indifference and lost opportunities."
  — Kempe, p. 338.

• The Frenchman Georges Pâques (1914-1994), who spied for the Soviets for over 20 years, and who had access to Allied contingency plans for Berlin that were agreed upon at the Foreign Ministers' Conference in early August 1961, reportedly passed these on to the Soviets. This let the Soviets know that if they and/or the East Germans were to build a "barrier" to close off East Berlin, the Western Allies were not prepared to use force to stop them.
  — Honoré M. Catudal, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall Crisis, Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1980, pp. 244-245.

• In her talks with Gorbachev in the Kremlin, Margaret Thatcher told the Soviet leader: "The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe." She could not say this publicly, because it was counter to NATO policy. "We don’t want a united Germany … because such development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security."
  — Michael Binyon, "What Thatcher and Gorbachev really thought when the Berlin Wall came down," The Times, September 11, 2009.
  
  

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What could have happened?

• On 15 September, Ulbricht wrote to Khrushchev: “The tactic of gradually carrying out the measures made it more difficult for the enemy to orient himself with regard to the extent of our measures and made it easier for us to find the weak places in the border. I must say that the enemy undertook fewer countermeasures than was expected.”
  — Inside the Warsaw Pact, Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1992, p. 31.

• General Gehlen remarked that "In the beginning, the barrier was a light and temporary structure, which could have been withdrawn at the least sign of force from the three Western powers."
  — The Service, p. 239.

• The East German military units installing the barbed wire barriers had rifles, but no ammunition.
  —Rueger, p. 226. See also: Christof Münger, Kennedy, die Berliner Mauer und die Kubakrise: die westliche Allianz in der Zerreissprobe 1961-1963, Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003, p. 101.

• Order of the East German Minister of Defense (Nr. 01/61 Strausberg, 12. August 1961):
  "Die Anwendung der Schußwaffe ist kategorisch verboten und erfolgt nur auf meinen Befehl."
  The use of firearms is categorically forbidden and will only be upon my orders.

• It was only “three days later, after it had turned out that the West would protest but not actively respond, [that] GDR construction teams began replacing the barbed wire with bricks and mortar.”
  — Rueger, p. 226.

• Hagen Koch, a former member of the East German Stasi, confirms the other part of the "legend." "If the Americans had let General (Lucius D.) Clay knock down our barbed-wire barriers, we were under orders to do nothing,” Koch said. “Most of DDR personnel believed the Americans would call our bluff. They didn’t. It might have been different if the American president was Reagan instead of Kennedy.”
   
• The West-German commentator on Soviet Affairs Wolfgang Leonhard stated "We know now — we learned later from refugees — that the leadership in East Berlin would have backed down if the West had stood up to them."
  — Newsweek , volume 114 (1989), p. 38; Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev (1960-1961), New York: Harper Collins, 1991, p. 282.

• Lucius D. Clay, the former military governor of the U.S. Zone, Germany (1947–49) and the "father" of the Berlin Airlift (1948–1949), felt that "we might have been able to have stopped the Wall from being built that night," if the American Commandant of Berlin had taken action, "even if he had been in violation of his instructions, he would have succeeded and he would have been forgiven and he would have become a very great man."
  — Michael R. Beschloss, p. 281.

• The senior statesman Dean Acheson, former U.S. Secretary of State under President Harry S. Truman (1949 to 1953), was of the same opinion. "If we had acted vigorously … we might have been able to accomplish something."
  — Beschloss, p. 281.

• Military Police Lieutenant Vern Pike—like many of those stationed in Berlin at the time—believed that "Kennedy and Johnson could have simply pushed the wall down before it was built without the Soviets doing much more than whimper about it."
  — Kempe, p. 388.

• Hagen Koch, a former member of the East German Stasi, confirmed Pike's belief "that the communist gambled and won in putting up The Wall in 1961.”

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On her "Our Whiskey Lullaby" blog, Katherine writes, "I truly believe that this wasn't a legend at all. I think the United States knew about the wall before it was built, but we kept our mouths shut. This book is a great voice to us all and even though the story itself is fictional, the basis behind it, in my opinion, isn't."

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