1961 Paris Summit (PJW)

"1961 Paris Summit" is an excerpt from former Secretary of State James William Fulbright's novel America First: American Foreign Policy from 1961-1964, published in 1986.

The Paris Summit

A secret meeting between the foreign secretaries of the United States, United Kingdom, France, and West Germany was set for the beginning of August; the most pressing issue would be the Berlin Crisis, but the other issue, which primarily concerned the United States and Britain, was the war in Vietnam.

The meeting began on August 5th. The other three ministers at the meeting were Maurice Couve de Murville of France, Richard Austin "Rab" Butler of Britain, and Heinrich von Brentano of West Germany. Talk about the Berlin Crisis came first. All of us agreed that war with the Soviet Union was undesirable. We also all agreed that West Berlin mustn't be allowed to fall to the Soviet Union as well. When it came to who would supply what in this defense of West Berlin, Butler and Murville protested any higher degree of British and French involvement, respectively. British and French soldiers were already embroiled in conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Brentano and I presented our own plan: escalating the program to rearm the Bundeswehr, along with potentially maintaining our military presence within Britain and France.

Butler and Murville were uneasy on both parts. It had been only a decade and a half since the War, and the idea of rearmed Germany on their borders was not an appetizing one. Butler, like Prime Minister Eden and most of Britain, was torn on the idea of the level of American presence in Britain, while Murville supported the current plan of reducing our presence in France. Ending that plan and maintaining our presence there would be unacceptable to President de Gaulle. However, they couldn't reduce our military presence yet keep a de-armed Bundsewhr; it had to be one or the other.

Butler was the first of the two to agree to a compromise: Britain would accept a rearmed Germany in exchange for lowering American presence in Britain and Britain would not be required to send any more forces to Germany. Britain would also have to keep its commitments to the anticommunist front in Southeast Asia, but we agreed to help spread those commitments equally across SEATO. Murville was much harder to convince, but seeing how Butler, Brentano, and myself were now a united front against him, he conceded to allow a rearmed Germany in exchange for an accelerated reduction of American presence in France.

Next came how to respond to increased Soviet movement along the inner Berlin border. Thanks to intelligence operatives, we already knew the Soviets were planning to construct a wall to end the movement of East Germans to the West. Butler and Murville supported economic sanctions against East Germany and the other nations of the Warsaw Pact, but Byrd demanded a swift resolution to the crisis, something prolonged sanctions and the building of the wall would not allow. Brentano and I had already drafted a plan for the coming months of what to do when the Soviets made their move...