Frederick Kempe's new book, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth, is deeply reported and researched, lucidly written, carefully considered—must reading for anyone interested in the subject. But while I am personally quite fond of its author, a former Wall Street Journal colleague, it is also fundamentally wrong in the conclusions it draws about some of the mistakes made by President John Kennedy during his first year in office.
Kempe's essential argument is that had Kennedy been tougher at his Vienna summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and/or more aggressive in response to Khrushchev's subsequent bullying on Berlin, the wall erected in August 1961 would not have been built, East Germany might have soon collapsed, and the fall of the Soviet empire might have been accelerated by as much as three decades.
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