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Author: Frederick Kempe Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101515023 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 816
Book Description
In June 1961, Nikita Khrushchev called Berlin "the most dangerous place on earth." He knew what he was talking about. Much has been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later, but the Berlin Crisis of 1961 was more decisive in shaping the Cold War-and more perilous. It was in that hot summer that the Berlin Wall was constructed, which would divide the world for another twenty-eight years. Then two months later, and for the first time in history, American and Soviet fighting men and tanks stood arrayed against each other, only yards apart. One mistake, one nervous soldier, one overzealous commander-and the tripwire would be sprung for a war that could go nuclear in a heartbeat. On one side was a young, untested U.S. president still reeling from the Bay of Pigs disaster and a humiliating summit meeting that left him grasping for ways to respond. It would add up to be one of the worst first-year foreign policy performances of any modern president. On the other side, a Soviet premier hemmed in by the Chinese, East Germans, and hardliners in his own government. With an all-important Party Congress approaching, he knew Berlin meant the difference not only for the Kremlin's hold on its empire-but for his own hold on the Kremlin. Neither man really understood the other, both tried cynically to manipulate events. And so, week by week, they crept closer to the brink. Based on a wealth of new documents and interviews, filled with fresh-sometimes startling-insights, written with immediacy and drama, Berlin 1961 is an extraordinary look at key events of the twentieth century, with powerful applications to these early years of the twenty-first. Includes photographs
Author: Frederick Kempe Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101515023 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 816
Book Description
In June 1961, Nikita Khrushchev called Berlin "the most dangerous place on earth." He knew what he was talking about. Much has been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later, but the Berlin Crisis of 1961 was more decisive in shaping the Cold War-and more perilous. It was in that hot summer that the Berlin Wall was constructed, which would divide the world for another twenty-eight years. Then two months later, and for the first time in history, American and Soviet fighting men and tanks stood arrayed against each other, only yards apart. One mistake, one nervous soldier, one overzealous commander-and the tripwire would be sprung for a war that could go nuclear in a heartbeat. On one side was a young, untested U.S. president still reeling from the Bay of Pigs disaster and a humiliating summit meeting that left him grasping for ways to respond. It would add up to be one of the worst first-year foreign policy performances of any modern president. On the other side, a Soviet premier hemmed in by the Chinese, East Germans, and hardliners in his own government. With an all-important Party Congress approaching, he knew Berlin meant the difference not only for the Kremlin's hold on its empire-but for his own hold on the Kremlin. Neither man really understood the other, both tried cynically to manipulate events. And so, week by week, they crept closer to the brink. Based on a wealth of new documents and interviews, filled with fresh-sometimes startling-insights, written with immediacy and drama, Berlin 1961 is an extraordinary look at key events of the twentieth century, with powerful applications to these early years of the twenty-first. Includes photographs
Author: W. R. Smyser Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers ISBN: 0742599787 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 314
Book Description
The Berlin Wall Crisis dominated the presidency of John F. Kennedy from his inauguration in 1961 until his historic trip to the city in June 1963. W.R. Smyser's Kennedy and the Berlin Wall offers new insights into the Berlin events that riveted global attention, especially as Soviet and American tanks faced each other at point-blank range over "Checkpoint Charlie." Drawing on his experience as an American diplomat in Berlin at the time; personal interviews; memoirs; and Soviet, East German, and American documents, Smyser ties together the full story of what actually happened on the ground and in world capitals.
Author: Greg Mitchell Publisher: Crown ISBN: 1101903864 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
A thrilling Cold War narrative of superpower showdowns, media suppression, and two escape tunnels beneath the Berlin Wall. In the summer of 1962, the year after the rise of the Berlin Wall, a group of young West Germans risked prison, Stasi torture, and even death to liberate friends, lovers, and strangers in East Berlin by digging tunnels under the Wall. Then two U.S. television networks heard about the secret projects and raced to be first to document them from the inside. NBC and CBS funded two separate tunnels in return for the right to film the escapes, planning spectacular prime-time specials. President John F. Kennedy, however, was wary of anything that might spark a confrontation with the Soviets, having said, “A wall is better than a war,” and even confessing to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “We don’t care about East Berlin.” JFK approved unprecedented maneuvers to quash both documentaries, testing the limits of a free press in an era of escalating nuclear tensions. As Greg Mitchell’s riveting narrative unfolds, we meet extraordinary characters: the legendary cyclist who became East Germany’s top target for arrest; the Stasi informer who betrays the “CBS tunnel”; the American student who aided the escapes; an engineer who would later help build the tunnel under the English channel; and the young East Berliner who fled with her baby, then married one of the tunnelers. The Tunnels captures the chilling reach of the Stasi secret police as U.S. networks prepared to “pay for play” but were willing to cave to official pressure, the White House was eager to suppress historic coverage, and ordinary people in dire circumstances became subversive. The Tunnels is breaking history, a propulsive read whose themes still reverberate.
Author: Hope M. Harrison Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400840724 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
The Berlin Wall was the symbol of the Cold War. For the first time, this path-breaking book tells the behind-the-scenes story of the communists' decision to build the Wall in 1961. Hope Harrison's use of archival sources from the former East German and Soviet regimes is unrivalled, and from these sources she builds a highly original and provocative argument: the East Germans pushed the reluctant Soviets into building the Berlin Wall. This fascinating work portrays the different approaches favored by the East Germans and the Soviets to stop the exodus of refugees to West Germany. In the wake of Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviets refused the East German request to close their border to West Berlin. The Kremlin rulers told the hard-line East German leaders to solve their refugee problem not by closing the border, but by alleviating their domestic and foreign problems. The book describes how, over the next seven years, the East German regime managed to resist Soviet pressures for liberalization and instead pressured the Soviets into allowing them to build the Berlin Wall. Driving the Soviets Up the Wall forces us to view this critical juncture in the Cold War in a different light. Harrison's work makes us rethink the nature of relations between countries of the Soviet bloc even at the height of the Cold War, while also contributing to ongoing debates over the capacity of weaker states to influence their stronger allies.
Author: Michael Beschloss Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN: 1504039378 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 801
Book Description
The groundbreaking and revelatory tale of the most dangerous years of the Cold War and the two leaders who held the fate of the world in their hands. This bestselling history takes us into the tumultuous period from 1960 through 1963 when the Berlin Wall was built and the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and Soviet Union to the abyss. In this compelling narrative, author Michael Beschloss, praised by Newsweek as “the nation’s leading Presidential historian,” draws on declassified American documents and interviews with Kennedy aides and Soviet sources to reveal the inner workings of the CIA, Pentagon, White House, KGB, and politburo, and show us the complex private relationship between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Beschloss discards previous myths to show how the miscalculations and conflicting ambitions of those leaders caused a nuclear confrontation that could have killed tens of millions of people. Among the cast of characters are Robert Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Adlai Stevenson, Fidel Castro, Willy Brandt, Leonid Brezhnev, and Andrei Gromyko. The Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vienna Summit, the Berlin Crisis, and what followed are rendered with urgency and intimacy as the author puts these dangerous years in the context of world history. “Impressively researched and engrossingly narrated” (Los Angeles Times), The Crisis Years brings to vivid life a crucial epoch in a book that David Remnick of the New Yorker has called the “definitive” history of John F. Kennedy and the Cold War.
Author: Manfred Wilke Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 1782382895 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 374
Book Description
The long path to the Berlin Wall began in 1945, when Josef Stalin instructed the Communist Party to take power in the Soviet occupation zone while the three Western allies secured their areas of influence. When Germany was split into separate states in 1949, Berlin remained divided into four sectors, with West Berlin surrounded by the GDR but lingering as a captivating showcase for Western values and goods. Following a failed Soviet attempt to expel the allies from West Berlin with a blockade in 1948–49, a second crisis ensued from 1958–61, during which the Soviet Union demanded once and for all the withdrawal of the Western powers and the transition of West Berlin to a “Free City.” Ultimately Nikita Khrushchev decided to close the border in hopes of halting the overwhelming exodus of East Germans into the West. Tracing this path from a German perspective, Manfred Wilke draws on recently published conversations between Khrushchev and Walter Ulbricht, head of the East German state, in order to reconstruct the coordination process between these two leaders and the events that led to building the Berlin Wall.
Author: Ian James Bickerton Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1538120569 Category : Young Adult Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
John F. Kennedy: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works cover all aspects of his life and work. Despite his short tenure in office, Kennedy shaped the domestic and international direction of the nation for decades to come. He is remembered domestically for the hope and encouragement he instilled in the struggle for civil rights, his support for the freedom riders and for equality for women. Abroad, his memory lives in his handling of the Cold War against an aggressive Soviet Union and such events as the Berlin crisis and Wall, his intervention in the Vietnam War, the invasion of Cuba and Bay of Pigs disaster, the Cuban Missile crisis, and the beginnings of space exploration—all of which tested the young, relatively inexperienced, leader. Includes a detailed chronology detailing John F. Kennedy’s life, family, and work. The A to Z section includes family members, his handling of the Cold War, and such events as the Berlin crisis and Wall, his intervention in the Vietnam War, the invasion of Cuba and Bay of Pigs disaster, the Cuban Missile crisis, and the beginnings of space exploration. The bibliography includes a list of publications concerning his life and work. The index thoroughly cross-references the chronological and encyclopedic entries.
Author: Gregory M. Tomlin Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 1612347711 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 399
Book Description
In March 1961 America’s most prominent journalist, Edward R. Murrow, ended a quarter-century career with the Columbia Broadcasting System to join the administration of John F. Kennedy as director of the United States Information Agency (USIA). Charged with promoting a positive image abroad, the agency sponsored overseas research programs, produced documentaries, and operated the Voice of America to spread the country’s influence throughout the world. As director of the USIA, Murrow hired African Americans for top spots in the agency and leveraged his celebrity status at home to challenge all Americans to correct the scourge of domestic racism that discouraged developing countries, viewed as strategic assets, from aligning with the West. Using both overt and covert propaganda programs, Murrow forged a positive public image for Kennedy administration policies in an unsettled era that included the rise of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and support for Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem. Murrow’s Cold War tackles an understudied portion of Murrow’s life, reveals how one of America’s most revered journalists improved the global perception of the United States, and exposes the importance of public diplomacy in the advancement of U.S. foreign policy.
Author: Robert M. Slusser Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421432277 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 414
Book Description
Originally published in 1973. This book uses the Berlin Crisis of 1961 as a starting point to investigate Soviet-American relations in the Kruschev period. The book first chronicles the timeline of the succession of events during the Berlin Crisis and their interrelation. It then turns to the close interaction between Soviet and foreign policy before situating the event into the broader timeline of Soviet history.
Author: Frederick Kempe
Author: Frederick Kempe
Author: W. R. Smyser
Author: Honoré Marc Catudal
Author: Greg Mitchell
Author: Hope M. Harrison
Author: Michael Beschloss
Author: Manfred Wilke
Author: Ian James Bickerton
Author: Gregory M. Tomlin
Author: Robert M. Slusser