James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

On the whole, however, the West Berlin observances of the anniversary were subdued. West Germans had become increasingly nervous about the possibility of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. They were beginning to learn to live with the wall and to move toward an acceptance of and reconciliation with East Germany. Kohl himself, after denouncing the immorality of the wall, carefully added a few notes of hope for better relations with Honecker’s government. “We remain prepared for a policy of small steps in the interest of the German people,” he said. Other West German officials went further. Eberhard Diepgen, the mayor of West Berlin, was supervising plans for a reconstruction of the area around the Reichstag alongside the border between the two parts of the city; the plan was based on the notion that it was time for West Berliners to be realistic and stop dreaming that the wall would come down. 2

The American perspective was different. Two days before the twenty-fifth anniversary of the construction of the wall, the White House released the transcript of a so-called interview that President Ronald Reagan had given to Das Bild , the newspaper with the largest circulation in West Germany. Reagan’s words were, in fact, merely a set of written answers to written questions submitted by the paper—the sort of responses that were routinely drafted in the president’s name by lower-level Reagan administration officials. Still, Reagan’s remarks were front-page news in Germany. “I would like to see the wall come down today, and I call upon those responsible to dismantle it,” he asserted. “No regime can attain genuine legitimacy in the eyes of its own people if those people are treated as prisoners by their own government.” 3

The president may never have seen these words before they were released. But the following day, Reagan was asked once again about the Berlin Wall at a press conference in Chicago. The president rambled a bit, then offered a reply similar to what had been said in writing the previous day. “Isn’t it strange that all of these situations where other people build walls to keep an enemy out, and there’s only one part of the world and one philosophy where they have to build walls to keep their people in?” he asked. “Maybe they’re going to recognize that there’s something wrong with that soon.” 4

By the 1980s, Berlin had been for many years a subject that American leaders avoided. “Berlin was a third rail for everyone,” observed Barry Lowenkron, a European specialist in the State Department. “The subject was just off the table.” 5The reason lay in Berlin’s stormy history at the center of the early disputes of the Cold War, and the uneasy equilibrium that had resulted from the construction of the Berlin Wall at the beginning of the Kennedy administration.

Germany had been divided ever since American, British, and French troops and the Soviet Red Army occupied the country after World War II. In the following years, the zones of the three Western allies were consolidated into West Germany, while the area under Soviet control became East Germany. The city of Berlin, located inside East Germany more than a hundred miles from the West, was itself split up by the occupying powers, and these divisions eventually became West and East Berlin. Under Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union imposed a land blockade to attempt to force the Western powers out of Berlin, but the Allies responded with the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, and the Soviets finally backed down.

For the first sixteen years after the end of the war, there had been freedom of movement within the separate sections of Berlin. That meant, effectively, that residents of East Berlin could respond to the economic deprivation and political repression under East Germany’s Communist government by moving to West Berlin and often from there onward to other locations in West Germany. Many East Berliners and other East Germans took this route—all the more so after the East German regime headed by Walter Ulbricht crushed a rebellion that erupted in East Berlin in 1953. Ulbricht repeatedly urged Moscow to do something to stem the outflow, or to let him act on his own.

In 1958, Nikita Khrushchev set off a new Berlin crisis by declaring that within six months he would either end the formal four-power arrangements for occupation of the city or turn over the control of access to Berlin to Ulbricht’s East Germany. He was, at the time, reflecting the heady confidence in Moscow following the Soviet launch of its Sputnik satellite. “Berlin is the testicles of the West,” Khrushchev once said. “Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin.” However, the Eisenhower administration held its ground, and Khrushchev let the deadline pass, choosing instead to pay a visit to the United States. 6

In East Germany, Ulbricht sought in 1959 to collectivize remaining private farmland, touching off a new exodus to the West that soon reached a rate of 10,000 people a month and then kept on climbing. More than 120,000 East Germans left the country in 1959, and more than 180,000 in 1960. East Germany’s overall population was in decline. 7Not only did the flood of refugees deprive the East German economy of professionals and other needed personnel, it also undermined the Communist regime’s control over the country. Ulbricht and his aides had to be careful in cracking down on dissent, or in imposing labor discipline or carrying out military conscription, because they had to worry that those who were unhappy would leave for the West.

Ulbricht pressured Khrushchev to give him more support and to help stop the outflow. In 1961, soon after John F. Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower as president, Khrushchev deliberately renewed the tensions over Berlin, suggesting once again that he might force out the Western powers or limit their access to the city. Kennedy’s response seemed to be a tough one: At a summit meeting in Vienna in early June, he made clear that the United States would be willing to use force to protect the Western presence in Berlin and the right of the Allied powers to travel into and out of the city. In an address to the American people a few weeks later, Kennedy said, “We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force.” He also raised the defense budget, moved to increase the size of the army, and sought authority to call up reserves. 8

Yet Kennedy’s response also left an opening, an opportunity that first Ulbricht and subsequently Khrushchev decided to seize. To be sure, the American president had been specific about defending the Western presence in Berlin; essentially, Kennedy was holding to the policies of the Truman administration during the Berlin Airlift. At the same time, however, Kennedy had made no commitments to the residents of East Berlin. This suggested to Ulbricht and Khrushchev a possible solution: Why not go along with Kennedy and leave the Western powers undisturbed in West Berlin, but also shut off East Berlin from the West?

Two weeks after the Vienna summit, Ulbricht held a press conference at which, when discussing the different sections of Berlin, he at one point issued a strange denial: “No one has the intention of building a wall.” Those remarks touched off what the Germans called Torschlusspanik— fear that the open door from East to West was about to be closed. The number of refugees shot up still higher. 9

During the following weeks, throughout July and early August 1961, Ulbricht won support from Moscow and his Warsaw Pact allies to build a barricade between East and West Berlin. Finally, in the overnight hours of August 12-13, Ulbricht’s aides and the Ministry of Security, or Stasi, carried out Operation Rose, the code name they had used in their preparations. They put up the barbed wire they had been secretly stockpiling for weeks; severed phone lines between East and West Berlin; and restricted car, subway, and train movements between the two parts of the city. They carefully did nothing to restrict transportation between West Berlin and West Germany, thus avoiding any repetition of the failed embargo of 1948-49.