0 - The Black Vault

THE BDM CORPORATION
invasion prompted offers of assistance from the Soviet Union and dark hints
that its Premier, Nikita Knrushche',, was ready to employ Russian missile
power to aid Cuba.
"The tim;ng of the Cuban fias'o was unfortunate, because President
Kennedy was scheduled to have a summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in
early June on the then delicate subject of Berlin., The growing prosperity
of West Berlin contrasted sharply with the poverty and drabness of the
Soviet sector.
West Berlin had become as great an irritation to the communis:s
as Cuba was to the US. In 1958 Khrushchev had demanded that Berlin
be made a free city and th.'eatened that unless western troops were withdrawn
in six months he would conclude a separate treaty with East Germany.
Althougn Khrushchev later backed off from this threat and even showed some
signs of a conciliatory attitude on Berlin, at the Vienna meeting he made a
complete about fac:.8/
a. Rationale For the Mobilization
Khrushchev informed President Kennedy at Vienna that unless
the US (and the West) accepted the Soviet position, he would take unilateral
action to solve the Berlin impasse, The Soviet premie- had hoped
to intimidate the new president in the wake of his Bay of Pigs setback, but
his efforts proved unsuccessful. Instead, Mr, Kennedy in July 1961,
requested and received additional defense funds from Congress as well as
authority to call up to 250,000 members of the Reserve and National Guard
to active duty.
The President refrained from declaring a national emergency,
which would have permitted him to bring up to a million Reserve members
into federal service; he did not wish to panic either the American public
or the Soviet Union by a huge mobiiization, On the uther hand, he
determined to strengthen the conventional drmed forces in the event that
Soviet pressure on Berlin demanded a gradual commitment of US military
might.
During the month of August, tensions hightened as thousands
of refugees crossed from East to West Be-lin, and the communists took the
arastic measure of building a high wall around their sector to block
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