For weeks the U.S. and its Western allies had been planning to meet the Berlin showdown that Nikita Khrushchev had threatened for the autumn of 1961, when he would sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and thereby leave Allied access to Berlin in the grasping hands of East Germany's Red puppet, Walter Ulbricht (see THE WORLD). But among all the contingency plans in the files at the State Department, not one dealt with a positive response to a blockade of the border between East and West Berlin. Thus, last week,...
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