Word: berlins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Kennedy's tenure was littered with messy crises-in Laos, Cuba, the Congo, Latin America, Algeria, Viet Nam and Berlin-and his record in dealing with them is decidedly uneven. Revisionists like to say that Kennedy was a cold warrior who sought confrontation, but in the early '60s, the Soviets busied themselves around the world in ways that no American President could ignore...
...quickly after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy went to Vienna for a summit with Nikita Khrushchev, who, judging Kennedy to be callow and inexperienced, ranted and bullied. Khrushchev followed the meeting by building the Berlin Wall and then, within a month, interrupting the informal moratorium on nuclear testing in the atmosphere...
...mixture of gestures. The founder of the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps, those aggressively idealistic enterprises, could be by turns imperial, bold and assertive, and restrained. He learned eventually to define American interests and hold firmly to the line he had drawn, as he did in the Berlin crisis and, most notably, in the Cuban missile crisis. The Bay of Pigs had taught him caution and the exploration of options...
...Germans stood in the city center to observe the requisite five minutes of silence before dispersing for an afternoon of speeches. Here too the demonstration was smaller than expected. A plan for blockading the River Elbe with small boats was abandoned because not enough craft showed up. In West Berlin, only 10,000 attended a demonstration in front of the city hall. But that ceremony would have been more impressive if thousands of West Berliners had not decided to join the far larger demonstrations in Bonn...
...Soviet general staff, publicly acknowledged what Western intelligence sources had long known: Soviet forces in Eastern Europe already are armed with short-range nuclear weapons capable of striking up to 70 miles. On the diplomatic front, after a visit by Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to East Berlin, the Soviets and the East Germans warned that relations between the two Germanys would suffer "serious damage" once the NATO missiles were installed. Against this chill blast, Reagan sent the protesters a message that fell mainly on deaf ears. Said he: "It is not the U.S. and NATO which threaten peace...