James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Reagan hadn’t left the United States for five months, not since his summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik in October 1986. Even in the early spring, the president ventured outside the country only once, and then not far: he made a two-day trip to Ottawa to see Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney. However, later that spring Reagan’s schedule called for him to attend, as usual, the annual meeting of the leaders of the world’s leading industrialized nations. The session was to be held in Venice. Once he was already in Europe for the economic summit, he would have a chance to go elsewhere. For example, the United States had already promised that Reagan would go to West Berlin sometime during 1987 to the 750th anniversary celebrations of Berlin’s founding. Reagan’s advisers began looking at the Berlin stopover as a chance to show the American public and the world that Iran-Contra hadn’t ended the Reagan presidency.

Ronald Reagan’s repertoire included a seemingly endless supply of anti-Communist jokes. When he met with visitors from the Soviet Union or other places on the front lines of the Cold War, he invariably offered something from this storehouse of material. Telling these jokes came naturally to Reagan, but they also served other purposes. They kept the tone and mood of a meeting light, deflecting discussion away from weighty details of policy on which Reagan was not well versed. Not accidentally, they also conveyed Reagan’s own underlying beliefs and values.

“Question: What are the four things wrong with Soviet agriculture?” he would ask a dumbfounded visitor. “Answer: Spring, summer, fall and winter.” Reagan would recount with relish the story of the Moscow resident who purchased a car and was told by the salesman that it would be ready on a specific date a quarter century later. “Morning or afternoon?” the customer asked. “Why does it matter for a date so far away?” the salesman wondered. “Because the plumber is coming in the morning.” In a meeting with West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, which Schmidt had hoped would be about the need to revive détente with the Soviet Union, Reagan suddenly asked whether the German leader had heard what happened when Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev showed off his personal supply of expensive foreign cars to his mother. “Very fine,” his mother replied. “But what happens if the Commies come and take them away?” 1

Most of this humor was about life inside the Soviet Union. But Reagan even kept a few extra stories handy about life in other Communist countries. When West Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen paid a brief visit to the White House on March 4, 1987, the president was ready for him. He first welcomed Diepgen with a few words of German, some of the only German he knew. “Haben Sie einen Streichholz?” he asked the mayor—the German for “Do you have a match?” It was a phrase the president had learned from a German actress during his days in Hollywood.

Then Reagan quickly reached into his bag of jokes. “Why was [Communist Party leader] Erich Honecker the last person to leave East Germany?” Reagan asked. Diepgen couldn’t guess. “Because someone had to turn out the light,” Reagan told him. 2Under the circumstances, the joke was a rather pointed one. At the time, Diepgen was considering Honecker’s invitation to visit East Berlin. He was eager to go, but the allies objected, holding to their long-standing position that East Berlin was temporarily under Soviet control and not under Honecker’s domain. Reagan, as usual, avoided becoming entangled in the complexities of these issues. His session with Diepgen took place days after the Tower Commission had reported on Iran-Contra and Donald Regan had been fired as White House chief of staff. Reagan was preparing for a televised address to the nation that night, in which he would concede for the first time in carefully worded sentences that “it was a mistake” for his administration to have sent arms to Iran. The twenty-minute meeting with Diepgen was confined to generalities.

The task of admonishing Diepgen fell instead to John Whitehead, the deputy to Secretary of State George Shultz. Whitehead, a former investment banker with Goldman Sachs, had precisely the right credentials to keep the mayor in line. He was a World War II veteran, had taken part in the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach, and later, as a visiting American businessman, had seen Berlin at the time the Berlin Wall was constructed. Whitehead had just returned from a trip to Eastern Europe, where, on Shultz’s instructions, he had been exploring the prospects for change there; in Warsaw, he had met both with General Wojciech Jaruzelski and with Lech Walesa, thus conveying U.S. support for Walesa’s Solidarity movement. 3

Whitehead made it clear that the United States, not Diepgen, would play the lead role in deciding the timing and conditions of any meetings with a Communist leader such as Honecker. He reminded the mayor that the allies were still sovereign in West Berlin, and that the city owed its continuing freedom to the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49. Americans had long-standing emotional ties to the city, Whitehead went on; he had seen firsthand how residents of the city even dug tunnels to flee to the West. Diepgen argued that it was time to make the Berlin Wall more permeable; greater contact between the two German governments might cause the residents of East Germany to question the regime. The deputy secretary of state rejected his pleas. When it comes to the Berlin Wall, you shouldn’t shy away from confrontation, he told Diepgen. The West Germans couldn’t deal on their own with East Germany because they would just be too soft. 4

The West German mayor failed to win the Reagan administration’s approval for his proposed visit to East Berlin. Instead, he was offered a consolation prize, one that might help buttress Diepgen’s standing back home. During his visit to Washington, the White House announced that Reagan had formally accepted Diepgen’s invitation to visit West Berlin in June.

The United States would take part in the Berlin anniversary celebrations, but on its own terms—terms that emphasized the continuing Soviet presence in Eastern Europe.

That same week, on March 6, 1987, American officials in West Germany sent to Washington the first draft of the speech they wanted Reagan to deliver in West Berlin. A copy of that original twenty-three-page text, stamped “Secret,” was obtained for this book under the Freedom of Information Act. It was written by John Kornblum, a round-faced, bespectacled Foreign Service officer who was serving at the time as U.S. minister and deputy commandant in West Berlin, the official in charge of the American presence there.

Kornblum had spent most of his career working on German and central European issues in Washington, Bonn, and Berlin. What he wrote reflected the anxieties within the U.S. government about the drift of events in West Germany—in particular, the concerns that either Kohl’s government in Bonn or Diepgen’s in West Berlin would accept the permanent division of Berlin or recognize East Berlin as part of East Germany. The key section of Kornblum’s draft came near the end of the speech, where he wanted Reagan to say: “We have no need to sacrifice our principles, such as the status of Berlin, in search of weak compromises from the East.” 5

Kornblum did not avoid the subject of the Berlin Wall. On the contrary, his draft repeatedly pointed to the wall. That fact was not surprising. Reagan himself had already attacked the wall, both during his 1982 trip to Berlin and in his remarks in 1986 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its construction. Calling attention to the evils of the Berlin Wall was not something original or unique to Reagan; it was a regular refrain in speeches by U.S. officials. Kornblum’s draft of the speech included some of the usual themes: