James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Reagan and his party flew on to Berlin, where they stayed at the Kempinski Hotel. The next morning, Berlin officials gave Reagan and his party a tour of the city. The Reagans saw the Berlin Wall and had their picture taken at Checkpoint Charlie, one of the crossing points between East and West Berlin.

Later, after an American military briefing, Reagan said he would like to cross into East Berlin. U.S. consular officials accompanied him and his party on a very brief tour through Checkpoint Charlie to East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, less than half a mile away. This afternoon excursion was the only time Reagan set foot in a Communist country on the other side of Europe’s Iron Curtain until near the end of his presidency; he did not visit the Soviet Union until his trip to Moscow in 1988.

Reagan and everyone else in his party were instructed to keep their American passports out and pressed against the glass of the car. At Alexanderplatz, in the heart of East Berlin, Nancy Reagan and Hannaford’s wife went off to have a look at a state-run department store, while Reagan, Allen, and Hannaford waited outside. Suddenly, the three men witnessed East German Vopos (short for Volkspolizisten, the “people’s police”) stopping a lone young man carrying shopping bags. “They required him to produce identification documents and their treatment appeared to be pure harassment,” Hannaford later wrote.

None of them heard the conversation between the man and the police or saw anything else transpire. Yet Hannaford later claimed, “Looking on at this scene, Ronald Reagan, as strong a champion of liberty as could be found, saw it as an example of authoritarian oppression in action. It is an event he would mention many times upon his return to the United States.” 5If so, it was the thinnest possible reed on which to base foreign policy judgments; it raised the question of whether Reagan knew what sometimes takes place at traffic stops of racial minorities in the United States.

Decades later, the aides who accompanied Reagan made much of the broader meaning of this 1978 trip. Allen asserted in an interview that Reagan, standing at the Berlin Wall, had told him, “Dick, we’ve got to find a way to tear this thing down.” Hannaford said the glimpse of East Berlin “had a very powerful effect on the Reagans.” Upon being shown the point where a young East German had earlier been shot trying to escape, Hannaford said, “You could see the muscles in [Reagan’s] jaw tightening, and the sense of resolve was very, very powerful.” 6

Yet Reagan’s aides offered these recollections only many years later, with hindsight after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is not clear how much the Berlin stopover meant to Reagan at the time. A news story about Reagan the following day in Die Welt , West Germany’s conservative daily newspaper, focused on his criticisms of the Carter administration and, in particular, the unease in Europe over the Soviet SS-20 missiles. The newspaper’s picture of the Reagans at Checkpoint Charlie shows the couple standing stiffly and forlornly in the rain, with Nancy Reagan protecting herself under an umbrella. 7Berlin seemed to be little more than another desultory precampaign stop for an aspiring presidential candidate.

When Reagan next returned to Berlin in mid-1982, the city was in tumult. By then he had already been president for nearly a year and a half, and his administration was in the midst of a drive to install new American intermediate-range Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe to help offset the Soviet SS-20s. Although those efforts had been strongly endorsed by the West German government of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, they had also galvanized a strong opposition movement.

At a NATO summit meeting of Western leaders in Bonn, Reagan was greeted by three hundred thousand antiwar protesters, the largest single gathering of Germans since World War II. There were similar gatherings that week in London, Paris, Rome, and New York City. Reagan sought to deflect the antinuclear movement by declaring in a speech to the West German parliament, “To those who march for peace, my heart is with you. I would be at the head of your parade if I believed marching alone could bring about a more secure world.” 8

When Reagan flew on to West Berlin for a three-hour visit on June 11, 1982, tens of thousands of demonstrators assembled to denounce him, carrying signs that said “Back to Hollywood” and “Get Out, Cowboy.” Church bells chimed during the march, underlining the support of West German churches for the antinuclear movement. Eventually, the West Berlin rally descended into violence, as thousands of young protesters, wearing helmets for protection, shattered store windows, overturned cars, threw rocks and paving material, and set fires. In an attempt to contain the upheaval, the West Berlin police rolled out barbed wire; used tear gas, water cannons, and clubs; and waged pitched battles with the demonstrators along the Kurfürstendamm, the wide boulevard at the heart of West Berlin. 9

Reagan chose the occasion to unveil what he called a “new Berlin initiative.” It was a collection of proposals, none of them far-reaching, to reduce the risks of nuclear war through exchanges of information and notification of military exercises. He offered to keep American missiles out of Europe if the Soviets would eliminate their SS-20s and other intermediate-range missiles. “If Chairman Brezhnev agrees to this, we stand ready to forgo all of our ground-launched cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles,” Reagan said. Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev was by then in the final six months of his life, and Reagan’s proposals went nowhere. 10

Reagan did not ignore the subject of the wall. Indeed, during his 1982 trip, he offered a preview of the themes he would advance more fully five years later. Immediately upon his arrival in West Berlin, he told one audience:

You know, if I had a chance, I’d like to ask the Soviet leaders one question—in fact, I may stuff the question in a bottle and throw it over the wall when I go there today. I really want to hear their explanation. Why is that wall there? Why are they so afraid of freedom on this side of the wall? Well, the truth is they’re scared to death of it because they know that freedom is catching, and they don’t dare leave their people have a taste of it. 11

Reagan paid another quick visit to Checkpoint Charlie. He was asked what he thought of the wall. “It’s as ugly as the idea behind it,” he said. 12

During the 1980s, West Germans in general and West Berliners in particular became increasingly unreceptive to such rhetoric from American leaders. At one point during his 1982 visit, Reagan sought to call attention to the bonds between Americans and the people of Berlin by recalling memories of John F. Kennedy’s declaration “Ich bin ein Berliner.” While Reagan complained from time to time about Kennedy’s inaction in allowing the wall to be built, he seemed happy to link himself to the Kennedy speech that Americans knew so well. “We all remember John Kennedy’s stirring words when he visited Berlin,” said Reagan. “I can only add that we in America and in the West are still Berliners, too, and always will be.” 13

Nevertheless, these invocations of Kennedy’s rhetoric served only to obscure the differences that had emerged between the United States and West Germany. Indeed, in 1983, when American officials suggested the idea of a large-scale celebration to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Kennedy’s “Berliner” speech, they discovered to their dismay that the Germans weren’t particularly interested. 14In the United States, the speech was a source of pride; in West Berlin, it was remembered with a tinge of melancholy. As a result, the anniversary was allowed to pass by in obscurity.