"It's not a very nice solution," Kennedy acknowledged, "but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war."54 The president could not resist observing, though, when he himself visited the Berlin Wall in June, 1963, that "we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us." The ugly structure Khrushchev had erected was "the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see."55"