Günter Bischof - The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

The State Department expected a Soviet intervention all along and began to coordinate serious contingency planning with the Pentagon in May 1968 by instituting a “EUR[opa] advisory group” under the leadership of Malcolm Toon, the director of Soviet affairs in the State Department. 8In June, Secretaries of State Rusk and Defense Clark Clifford both agreed that they wanted “to stay out” of the Czech crisis, hoping that Prague could resolve their differences with Moscow directly. Rusk, like the CIA, was still hopeful that the Czechoslovaks might “get away” with their reform agenda—the U.S. did not intend “tinkering with it in any way.” 9Next to the Vietnam conflict, Clifford’s main worry at this time were the efforts by powerful Senators Mike Mansfield, Stuart Symington, and Henry Jackson to withdraw American forces from Europe to limit defense expenditures. 10Only on 22 July did Rusk warn Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatolii Dobrynin for the first time. Rusk noted that “the USA has been against interference in the affairs of Czechoslovakia from the very start.” In the message summarizing this conversation that Dobrynin sent to the Politburo, Rusk apparently said: “ This is a matter for the Czechs first and foremost. Apart from that, it is a matter for Czechs and other nations of the Warsaw Pact ” (emphasis added). 11Did Rusk mean to indicate that this was entirely an internal affair in the Soviet Bloc? According to Dobrynin, then, Rusk seems to have indicated that he respected the Soviet sphere of interest in Eastern Europe. Kremlin leaders (especially KGB chief Andropov) took this as a “green light” to the Kremlin to go forward with their plans for intervention. 12

In spite of a growing number of signals of impending Warsaw Pact action in August, the Johnson administration did not anticipate direct Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. A daring reform agenda by the Czechoslovak Communists such as allowing free speech and a refining of Czech historical memory by openly criticizing the Stalinist purges of the early 1950s became increasingly intolerable to the Warsaw Pact allies as these changes threatened to spill over into the Bloc and initiate an undermining of their own regimes. 13President Johnson himself seems to have recognized the imminent threat of “falling dominoes” in the Soviet Bloc when he wrote in his memoirs in his typically hyperbolic rhetorical style: “If the fire was not stamped out quickly, they might soon face a holocaust.” 14Warnings about impending Soviet action were coming in from NATO headquarters in Belgium. 15CIA chief Richard Helms warned the president also on 18 August that something was brewing in Moscow. Helms’s futile warnings met with no success in moving the president toward action (it was like “peeing up a rope,” noted Helms later). 16The principal reason for this lackadaisical response in the White House clearly was the fact that the United States “ obviously was not prepared to intervene militarily ” (emphasis mine) in case of a Soviet intervention. All the United States could do was try to intimidate the Soviets by whipping up world public opinion, mobilizing Western European Communist parties to warn Moscow not to interfere “in internal affairs of a brother Communist Party and nation,” and involving the United Nations, noted the Eastern Europe expert Nathaniel Davis. He warned, however, not to make the mistakes of Hungary 1956 again, namely “in creating expectations we are not prepared to follow through on.” 17

The surprising events of 19 to 21 August placed the president on a veritable roller-coaster ride. When the invasion of as many as half a million Warsaw Pact troops finally came during the night of 20/21 August, President Johnson initially refused to accept it. It instantly squashed his ambitious agenda for accelerating détente with the Soviet Union. Soviet Ambassador Anatolii Dobrynin, himself most likely ignorant of the impending invasion, 18presented a handwritten note to the White House on 19 August for the public announcement the following morning of a summit meeting between President Johnson and the Kremlin leaders in Leningrad in early October. 19After the signing of the Nonproliferation Treaty in early July, this summit was scheduled to begin talks on Strategic Arms Limitation and the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems. Progress in such negotiations was expected to be the culmination of Johnson’s détente efforts. 20During the regular Tuesday lunch on 20 August, Johnson served a glass of sherry to his principal advisers and toasted the impending summit. He boasted: “This could be the greatest accomplishment of my administration.” Yet the dark clouds gathering over Czechoslovakia were discussed also. CIA director Helms thought that a hastily called meeting of the Central Committee in Moscow indicated Soviet action soon. His gloomy warnings were prophetic. 21

The evening of 20 August brought shocking news to the White House. At 7:05 p.m. that evening, Ambassador Dobrynin made a rare direct call to the president to ask him for a meeting right away. An hour later, the Soviet ambassador informed the president that the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops was already underway. The intervention was designed to stop the “domestic and international conspiracy” against Czechoslovakia. President Johnson kept blabbering about the summit meeting and seems to have failed to register the full meaning of the dire invasion news. It appears that an embarrassed Walt W. Rostow, Johnson’s national security advisor, set the president straight after Dobrynin’s departure. 22

Rostow and Rusk set the gears of the White House crisis management team into motion and called for an emergency meeting of the National Security Council at 10:15 p.m. Clark Clifford noted in his memoirs how different Johnson’s mood was compared to the giddy lunch meeting earlier that day. Johnson felt doubled-crossed by the Kremlin leaders and reluctantly agreed to cancel the summit meeting. Secretary of State Dean Rusk averred that the United States could do little to help Prague—the Czechs had to help themselves. General Earle G. Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made it abundantly clear that a military U.S. response was out of the question and insisted: “We do not have the forces to do it.” Wheeler confirmed what Rusk had observed after the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965: the United States did not have the military capability to respond to two major international crises at the same time. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who right away sensed the repercussions of the Czech crisis on his presidential run in 1968, also counseled caution. All that could be done was “giving the Russians hell” by castigating their intervention in the United Nations and registering a formal protest via the Soviet ambassador with the Kremlin. 23Rusk proceeded to do this by calling Dobrynin to the State Department before midnight. Rusk told him “the Soviet action was like throwing a dead fish in the president’s face.” He told him to call Moscow immediately and cancel all preparations for the planned summit meeting since the United States did not want to condone “the Soviet march into Czechoslovakia.” 24During the same night, the State Department activated a special “Czechoslovakia Task Force” to monitor the Czech crisis and coordinate the crisis response with NATO and principal U.S. allies. 25Bonn was asked to closely observe its borders with Czechoslovakia yet prevent border incidents. The governments of the Federal Republic and Austria were called upon to help refugees coming across the borders. 26

On Wednesday 21 August, the president handled the Czech crisis as part of his daily routine. The president got up at 8 a.m. after only three hours of sleep and began working the phones to draft an official statement on the invasion. Since the crisis so far had not been a “sanguinary” one, this statement should not be an “inflammatory” one; he sincerely bemoaned this step backwards after all the progress in East-West relations in recent months. CIA and State Department analysts zoomed in on the repercussions for U.S. and Western European détente efforts. 27George McGhee, who had just finished his tour as U.S. ambassador to West Germany a few months earlier, insisted that the United States must not give the impression that it accepted the status quo and Moscow’s sphere of influence in Europe. He observed prophetically that the Warsaw Pact invasion gave the United States a unique opportunity to strengthen NATO and stop Congressional efforts to withdraw U.S. forces from Europe. 28In a briefing for NATO ambassadors by Charles Bohlen, the undersecretary of state for European affairs, West German ambassador Knappstein expressed his fear that the Soviets might also intervene in Berlin (the West’s “testicles” that could be squeezed at any time, as Nikita Khrushchev had once observed). 29As Melyn Leffler has recently demonstrated again, the divided Germany was still considered the most intractable Cold War issue in the 1960s by both superpowers. 30Johnson read his official statement on the invasion at noon and then proceeded to take his usual hour-long afternoon nap after lunch. He then worked the phones for the rest of the day, keeping the most important members of Congress informed. 31