Word: berlins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Clear Warning. The forum that Nixon used was a 55-minute press conference, during which, coolly and without notes, he reviewed the spectrum of U.S. concerns abroad, from Berlin and the Middle East to Peru's expropriation of American oil properties. When he came to Viet Nam, there was no question that he said exactly what he intended. Although he warned against the peril of using "words threatening deeds in order to accomplish objectives," he seemingly did just that...
...months, the East Germans and Soviets had threatened a new Berlin cri sis if the West Germans persisted in their plan to convene the Federal Republic's electoral college in the western half of the divided former German cap ital. Last week, as 1,023 West German electors met in West Berlin's cavernous East Prussia Hall and by a narrow margin selected Socialist Gustav Heinemann to succeed retiring President Heinrich Lübke as West German head of state, the Communist response was relatively mild and constrained...
...expected, the Soviets had obviously refused to allow the bellicose East Germans to create a crisis that would have jeopardized Russian hopes of holding talks about arms controls with the new U.S. Ad ministration. As part of his campaign against any political ties between West Germany and West Berlin, East Germany's Stalinist Boss Walter Ulbricht had wanted to clamp on a full-scale land blockade and to harass Allied air liners that carried the West German electors into the isolated city...
After declaring that he was "encouraged" by the Soviet initiative, Kiesinger asked Mayor Schütz to be ready to enter negotiations with the East Germans. Schütz sent a representative into East Berlin to open the talks. His envoy returned disappointed. The East Germans demanded the cancellation of the Federal Assembly before any other issue could even be discussed. Signaling a switch in the Soviet position, Izvestia bluntly asserted that West Germans could expect no reciprocity for removing the Federal Assembly from West Berlin...
...West Berlin Senate tried once more to reopen negotiations with East Germany, but a telex reply from East Berlin only reiterated the earlier Communist intransigence. Western diplomats were puzzled by the sudden reversal in Communist tactics. After all, even East German Boss Walter Ulbricht had sent a compromise proposal similar to Tsarapkin's to West Germany. Ultimately the most widely accepted supposition in the west was that Ulbricht had only reluctantly gone along with the initiative in the first place. By that theory, he later succeeded in persuading the hard-liners in the Kremlin leadership to override the compromise...