James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Kennedy had told his advisers he expected the construction of a wall, or something like it. This would be, Kennedy calculated, a way to end the Soviet-American tensions over Berlin without a war. It was a solution that would stabilize the city and beyond that, preserve the status quo in Europe. “President Kennedy at the time—and this was about ten days before the Wall went up—judged that they would have to put something up, because East Germany was bleeding to death in terms of the outflow of people, extremely valuable people, and this would disrupt the whole Eastern bloc, which the Soviets regarded as fundamental to their security,” recalled Walt W. Rostow, Kennedy’s deputy national security adviser, in an interview a quarter century later. “President Kennedy went on to say that when they put up the wall, or whatever it was that would block exit, we would not be able to do anything about it, because he could barely hold together the Western alliance in defense of West Berlin…. If we had knocked down the barbed wire, they could have done other things to stop the outflow, put the wall further back,” Rostow said. “It would have been useless to knock it down. The Soviets were not about to witness the dissolution of the Eastern alliance. And the West was not about to force the dissolution of the Eastern alliance.” 10

Two years later, when the wall had become a permanent fixture in Berlin, Kennedy paid a visit to the city, choosing to deliver there one of his best-remembered speeches, an address that contained fervently anti-Communist themes:

There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world. Let them come to Berlin!

There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin!

And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the communists. Let them come to Berlin!…

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Kennedy’s aide and later his biographer, reported that Kennedy’s visit was received “as if it were the second coming.” When the president spoke outside the Rathaus Schöeneberg, West Berlin’s city hall, “The hysteria spread almost visibly through the square. Kennedy was first exhilarated, then disturbed; he felt, as he remarked on his return, that if he had said, ‘March to the wall—tear it down,’ his listeners would have marched.” 11

In fact, however, the reaction of West Germans to Kennedy was considerably more complicated than Schlesinger’s triumphal account recognized. In allowing the construction of the Berlin Wall to go unchallenged, Kennedy had settled upon a solution that avoided a war between the superpowers. However, he had also demonstrated to West Germans that he was willing to accept the division of Berlin.

Some residents of West Berlin, including a few of the city’s most prominent residents, had been dismayed by the American passivity. Among them was the mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt (who had, in fact, stood on the podium alongside Kennedy during his “Berliner” speech). In an interview more than four decades later, Egon Bahr, Brandt’s longtime associate and foreign-policy adviser, recalled that when the East Germans built the wall, “that was a bitter situation for us,” one that prompted Brandt to send an angry protest to Kennedy. “Nobody helped us,” Bahr said. “This damn wall was the beginning of our thinking that we have to take care of German interests on our own.” 12

“I’m not a great fan of Kennedy,” said Eberhard Diepgen, who was twenty years old when the wall was built and later served as mayor of West Berlin in the 1980s and mayor of a reunified Berlin in the 1990s. “Through his policies, he basically created the problem of the Wall. When he reduced the American guarantees from all of Berlin to the western part of the city, he made the building of the wall politically possible.” 13

For these Germans, Kennedy’s acceptance of the Berlin Wall taught a lesson: those who sought to overcome the division of Berlin or of Germany couldn’t rely solely on the Americans. They needed to look to the other side: to Moscow or East Germany or East Berlin.

There was a rough correlation between those West Berliners who were upset about the American decision to permit construction of the wall and those who played an active role years later in seeking to improve relations with the Soviet Union or to distance themselves from American foreign policy. Within a decade after the wall went up, Brandt, as German chancellor, launched his policy of Ostpolitik, working out groundbreaking agreements with the Soviet Union, Poland, and then East Germany.

For his own part, Diepgen years later often sought to obstruct whatever the Americans wanted to do in Berlin. When U.S. officials began talking in early 1987 about the possibility that Reagan would deliver a speech in front of the Berlin Wall and the Brandenburg Gate, the leading opponent of this idea was West Berlin’s mayor, Eberhard Diepgen.

After Kennedy’s famous speech, the subject of Berlin virtually vanished from American political discourse. It was a subject best left alone, too risky to discuss.

Over the years, Ronald Reagan had repeatedly made the same complaint about the Berlin Wall as had Willy Brandt: that John F. Kennedy should have done something to stop its construction. In one letter written shortly before his 1980 presidential campaign, he told one of his followers: “I agree with you about the lost opportunity in Berlin, when we could have knocked down and prevented the completion of the wall with no hostilities following.” 1

Reagan had visited Berlin only once for less than a day before his arrival in the White House. It was during a tour Reagan had made of several European capitals at the end of 1978, just as he was preparing his second campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Reagan’s foreign-policy advisers, led by Richard Allen, a former aide to Richard Nixon, were eager to help Reagan overcome perceptions that he would be too dangerous in foreign policy—precisely the unease that had sunk the candidacy of Reagan’s conservative Republican predecessor Barry Goldwater in 1964.

In a memo addressed directly to Reagan in the summer of 1978 from his office at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Allen said:

For many, you come across as a “saber rattler,” a “button pusher,” or as “too willing to send in the Marines.” This false image is happily amplified by the media…

Allen suggested that without changing his strong views, Reagan might want

to soften the delivery of your message…. You are, after all, trying to put your best foot forward; in so doing, you will have to sound more “Presidential” than a quiz show respondent. 2

With Reagan on his trip to Europe in late 1978 were Allen; his wife, Nancy; and Reagan’s longtime adviser Peter Hannaford. At their first stopover in London, Reagan visited Parliament for talks with the Conservative Party opposition leader, Margaret Thatcher (who within five months would become prime minister). They had met once before, when Reagan had visited London three years earlier. On that occasion, Reagan and Thatcher had talked in general about economic issues and the importance of free markets. This time, the principal subject of discussion was the new, mobile Soviet SS-20 ballistic missile, a medium-range weapon that could reach targets in Western Europe from inside the Soviet Union. 3

In Bonn, Reagan met with German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and also with Helmut Kohl, then the leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union. Schmidt was disdainful, and even Kohl was struck at the time by Reagan’s lack of experience. “He had no idea about Europe, or about Germany,” reflected Kohl in an interview three decades later. “He had, let us say, a minimum knowledge about the world. But he was very open, and in his dealings with me, Reagan was incredibly friendly, right from the start.” Within a few years, Reagan’s friendship with Kohl would turn out to be of profound importance for the strong relationship between the United States and Western Europe. 4