Dean Rusk Weighed Summoning Khrushchev to a Blockaded Berlin
By Vera Kessler ·
Kept Top Secret until its release in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, this 1961 memo weighs the psychological cost to Berliners if a high-stakes summit with Nikita Khrushchev failed.
The residents of Berlin spent 1961 watching a city being sliced in two by concrete and barbed wire. Their survival depended on whether two men in Washington and Moscow could agree on who owned the streets they walked.
In the high-voltage atmosphere of that year, the American government viewed the city not just as a geopolitical anchor, but as a theater of psychological endurance. A memorandum dated November 20, 1961, sent from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to President John F. Kennedy, shows the administration weighing the risks of a face-to-face encounter between the two superpowers in the very city that had become the flashpoint of the Cold War.
A Dramatic Site
The memo was a response to a suggestion from General Norstad that Kennedy "summon Khrushchev to a meeting in Berlin." The word summon carries a specific weight; it is the language of an equal or a superior, not a petitioner. Rusk acknowledged that Berlin would provide a "dramatic site for such an event," but he was wary of the optics. The drama of a summit at the Wall could easily pivot from a triumph of diplomacy to a public collapse.
Rusk’s primary concern was the fragility of the people living in the shadow of the East German fortifications. He warned that the "likelihood of the meeting proving successful would have to be considered," because if the summit failed on Berlin soil, the result would be a "particularly depressing effect on the Berlin population." For the people of the city, a failed meeting wasn't a diplomatic setback; it was a signal that their protectors were powerless, potentially leaving them stranded behind a curtain of steel.
Planning for Blockades
The memorandum reveals that the U.S. was not merely reacting to the Wall, but was actively preparing for a total severance of the city. Rusk notes that the administration had already included a proposal for a high-level meeting in their "quadripartite planning for the contingency that Allied or German land access to Berlin is blocked." This was the nightmare scenario of the era: a repeat of the 1948 blockade, where West Berlin would be starved into submission unless the West could fly in enough coal and flour to keep the city alive.
There was also the tension of the alliance. Rusk noted the "possibility that our Allies would feel that a bilateral meeting would be particularly inappropriate in Berlin," given the city's status as a Four-Power entity. While the U.S. considered planning "privately for a possible bilateral meeting" to maximize its own flexibility, the official posture remained tied to the four powers that had divided Germany after the war. The internal struggle was between the efficiency of a two-man deal and the stability of a multilateral front.
The Missing November 8 Memo
The record provided by the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series is a window, but it is one with significant blind spots. The November 20 memo was prompted by a request from Kennedy on November 8, asking for Rusk's comments on General Norstad's suggestion. However, the FRUS archive explicitly notes that "The November 8 memorandum is not printed."
We are left with the response but not the original prompt. We know that a staffer named Day drafted Rusk's reply on November 16, four days before it reached the President's desk, but the specific phrasing of Kennedy's curiosity remains a gap in the historical record. This missing piece of paper likely contained the President's own initial instincts about whether to challenge Khrushchev on the ground in Berlin or maintain a distance that avoided the risk of a public failure.
While the U.S. government planned for various contingencies—ranging from diplomatic summits to the total blockage of land routes—the final determination on the site and composition of any meeting was deferred to a "stage closer to the actual contingency." Rusk promised that the State Department would prepare more detailed plans of a "unilateral US nature," ensuring Washington had its own playbook regardless of what the Allies or the Soviets intended.
The document ends there, leaving the specifics of those unilateral plans and the contents of the November 8 memorandum in the shadows.