Word: berlins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Burden of Ike's letter was a solemn warning that unless the Geneva conference made some progress toward ending the seven-month-old Berlin crisis, the U.S. would not agree to an East-West summit conference. In essence, Ike told Khrushchev the same thing that he told a White House press conference two days later: "I see no use whatsoever in trying to have a harvest when there is no planting and no tilling...
...Great New Plan." With sublime and confident arrogance, Russia's boss ignored Eisenhower's personal warning and rejected a final set of Western concessions at Geneva-concessions that included an implicit offer to accept a communique making no direct mention of Western occupation rights in Berlin. Instead, in an uncompromising, 70-minute speech in Moscow, Khrushchev derided "anyone" who thought that the U.S.S.R. was "prepared to pay any price for the sake of a summit meeting," truculently argued that there would be summit talks regardless of what happened in Geneva, "since the existing situation urgently requires...
...only give in Khrushchev's speech was purely illusory: he still insisted that the Western powers must withdraw their troops from Berlin, but professed willingness to bargain over the deadline date. Delivering this "great new plan" to the Western foreign ministers in Geneva, dour Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko suggested that Moscow might be willing to wait as long as 18 months, instead of a year. Either way it was an ultimatum, though Gromyko quibbled at calling it that. At this bleak point, 41 days after they had first assembled in Geneva, the Big Four foreign ministers at last...
...dispersed, Western diplomats found consolation in the unity that they had shown at Geneva and in the fact that they had made no substantial concessions to Moscow. This claim, as far as it went, was true: the Western powers had not compromised their legal or physical position in West Berlin, and though they had been shouldered dangerously close to de facto recognition of Communist East Germany, they had clung to their refusal to grant formal diplomatic recognition to the East Germans. But none of this altered the fact that as the weeks went by, the Western performance at Geneva...
High Tempers. The Christian Democrats hesitated to split away from the old man; in so doing, they would risk destroying the party itself. But tempers were high, even among many Adenauer supporters, as Gerstenmaier set July i as the date, and West Berlin as the place, for elections for the presidency (this too was in defiance of Adenauer, who thought that a Bundestag session convened in Berlin instead of Bonn would be considered provocation by the Russians...