James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Carlucci’s notes then show a direct dialogue between the president (P.) and Massie (S.M.)

S.M.If you have something for me to say to him, I could get to him + hear what has to say.

P.Say, I realize how busy he is, but we most eager to receive him here. Are things going on at Geneva [ the site of U.S.-Soviet arms control negotiations ] to talk about. R [ Reykjavik ] was to set path for solution. We not cooled off. Very eager to have him here.

S.M.He has nothing to show. Needs something to show. To come here looks like he running after you.

P.We would hear his reaction.

S.M.I could read his answer.

P.We still eager to go there. 2

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the KGB’s Bogdanov and the president of the United States were employing Massie’s trips for their own purposes. Bogdanov, and perhaps others in Moscow, were using Massie to persuade the president to make greater concessions out of sympathy for Gorbachev. Bogdanov could float ideas, offer proposals or arguments, and plead for understanding in Washington in a way that Gorbachev could not have done on his own. The president, for his own part, was using Massie to carry messages to Gorbachev that did not have to go through the State Department or other official government channels.

On March 2, 1987, five days after Massie’s session with Reagan and Carlucci, officials at the White House prepared a written statement for Massie to deliver in Moscow. A copy of it now lies buried in the archives of Reagan’s presidential library. The single-spaced, five-line message says:

The First Lady and I are still very much looking forward to the opportunity to welcome you and Mrs. Gorbachev in the United States in 1987, with my coming to the USSR in the following year. There is much to discuss in our continuing face-to-face dialogue and I would hope to hear from you at an early date. 3

The files show that White House staff aides planned to deliver this message by Federal Express to Massie’s apartment in New York. In an interview two decades later, Massie said she never received such a FedEx, because she had by that time moved from New York City to Cambridge. But Massie confirmed that she had received this same message from the Reagan White House, either in person or over the phone, and had delivered it to Moscow. 4

With or without Federal Express, this was Reagan’s back-channel diplomacy in its quintessence. The president of the United States was communicating with the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union not by diplomatic pouch, not through his secretary of state, not through the hotline installed in the White House and Kremlin, but through a lone, idiosyncratic message carrier—a nervy, enterprising American author with no formal credentials, but with a boundless belief in the “soul” of Russia.

During the spring of 1987, as conservatives railed at Ronald Reagan’s conciliatory approach to Mikhail Gorbachev, his aides were bickering over a speech the president was supposed to give on a trip to Europe. The president was scheduled to go to Venice in June for the annual economic summit meeting of the leaders of the seven largest industrialized nations. From there, plans called for him to stop over for a day in Berlin. The question was what he should say there.

The speech Reagan eventually delivered now stands as one of the best-remembered moments of his presidency. The video images of that speech are played in virtually every documentary about the Reagan administration or the end of the Cold War. On June 12, 1987, Reagan, standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall, issued his famous exhortation to Gorbachev: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

The Berlin Wall speech lies at ground zero in the historical disputes over Ronald Reagan and his presidency. In the ensuing years, two radically different perspectives have emerged. In one, the speech was the single triumphal moment leading toward the end of the Cold War. In the other, the speech was mere showmanship, without substance. Both perspectives are wrong. Neither deals adequately with the complexities or the underlying significance of the Berlin Wall speech.

For American conservatives, the Berlin Wall speech has taken on iconic status. This was Reagan’s ultimate challenge to the Soviet Union—and, so they believe, Mikhail Gorbachev effectively capitulated when, in November of 1989, he failed to intervene as Germans suddenly began tearing down the wall. At the museum of Ronald Reagan’s presidential library in Simi Valley, California, a section of the Berlin Wall stands outside the main doors, overlooking the view to the Pacific Ocean, the monument chosen as the enduring symbol of the Reagan presidency.

Among Reagan’s most devoted followers, an entire mythology has developed about the Berlin Wall speech. Theirs is what might be called the triumphal school—the president spoke, the Soviets quaked, the wall came down. Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California congressman and former Reagan speechwriter, maintained in an interview for this book that one day after Reagan’s speech, Mikhail Gorbachev gathered his aides together and said, “You know, this Reagan, once he grabs on to you, he never lets go… and if he’s talking about this wall, he’s never going to let go unless we do something. So what we have to do is find a way to bring down the wall and save face at the same time.” 1

This is fiction: over the two decades since Reagan’s speech, no evidence has turned up to corroborate Rohrabacher’s account. The triumphal school fails to explain the connection between Reagan’s speech and the events of 1989. Even more problematically, the triumphal school ignores Reagan’s actual policies toward the Soviet Union at the time of the Berlin Wall speech. From the autumn of 1986 through the end of his presidency in January 1989, Reagan was in fact moving steadily toward a working accommodation with Gorbachev, conducting a series of summits and signing arms-control agreements with the Soviet leader. At the time, many American conservatives who now belong to the triumphal school were furious at Reagan.

The opposing perspective on Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech holds that it was nothing but a stunt. The adherents of what might be called the theater school are not merely liberals or Democrats with a generalized animus toward Reagan. The theater school also includes, prominently, the veterans of the George H. W. Bush administration of 1989-93: the so-called realists who tended to view the Reagan administration as overly moralistic in its foreign policies and insufficiently attuned to concerns such as stability and the balance of power. Adherents of the theater school point out that, when viewed strictly as a statement of foreign policy, the Berlin Wall speech didn’t even say anything particularly new. It was a long-standing tenet of American policy that the wall should come down.

In their 1995 book on the end of the Cold War, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed , Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, who had both served in the George H. W. Bush administration, belittled the significance of the Berlin Wall speech. They argued that the Reagan administration did not seriously follow up the speech with actions. “American diplomats did not consider the matter part of the real policy agenda,” they wrote. 2

In an interview for this book, Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to George H. W. Bush, called Reagan’s tear-down-this-wall line “corny in the extreme. That [speech] is what everyone remembers now. It was irrelevant, that statement at that time.” Despite Scowcroft’s view, President George H. W. Bush felt compelled to repeat Reagan’s language on his own first presidential visit to Europe in the spring of 1989. “I tried to get him [Bush] not to,” recalled Scowcroft. “He felt a lot of loyalty to Reagan. He was not going to depart from the Reagan agenda.” 3