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Andreas W. Daum, Richard D. Williamson. First Steps toward Détente: American Diplomacy in the Berlin Crisis, 1958–1963., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Page 1554, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1554
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We are not lacking studies on Cold War Berlin, the world's most prominent trouble spot in the years between the famous 1948–1949 airlift into West Berlin and U.S. President John F. Kennedy's much acclaimed visit to the city in 1963. Nor is America's diplomatic attitude vis-à-vis Berlin a scholarly terra incognita; quite to the contrary. Yet, readers might welcome a coherent account of U.S. Berlin diplomacy during some of the pivotal years of the Cold War era. Richard D. Williamson's book attempts to provide this story. The result is highly ambivalent, however.
In many regards, this is a peculiar book. Clearly, it has its strengths. Williamson writes well and avoids academic jargon. His narrative is well organized. Six tightly composed chapters follow the sequence of events—and the deliberations behind the scenes—in America's Berlin diplomacy from the late Eisenhower administration to the end of the Kennedy presidency. This approach might be especially valuable for students who are interested in learning how to construe a story based on the chronology of archival findings—retrieved here mostly from the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson presidential libraries—and of documents published in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series. Moreover, the author aims at articulating some broader arguments. In line with recent, more specialized studies, Williamson highlights that Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Dulles demonstrated a remarkable interest in a consensual solution to the Berlin crisis. He interprets the Berlin diplomacy of both the United States and the Soviet Union as catalytic, a series of experimental steps as the author puts it, in allowing détente between the superpowers. Williamson rightly emphasizes that Nikita Khrushchev embraced the Berlin question as a personal issue, although the Soviet leader failed with his idea of abandoning the city's four-power status. This book is on point, too, in emphasizing that no one on the American or Soviet side wanted to wage a war over Berlin—as much as this threat occupied the public and caused headaches for NATO and for U.S. officials trying to come up with coherent contingency plans in the event tensions escalated.
