James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended only to raise false hopes in the West? It is impossible to tell.

But there is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, come to Berlin. If you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, come to Berlin.

Come here to this wall.

Herr Gorbachev, machen Sie dieses Tor auf . 2

The final words were the German for “open up this gate.” Robinson, following the example of John Kennedy’s words “Ich bin ein Berliner,” had tentatively decided to put the key phrase in German. Dolan scrawled the phrase “tear down this wall” back into the draft.

This passage would survive and, with minor revisions, become the core of Reagan’s speech in Berlin. Yet the May 20 draft was merely the opening scene in a protracted drama. After Dolan had given his assent, the speech began to circulate through the bureaucracy in Washington. What followed over the next three weeks was an epic struggle within the Reagan administration, pitting Reagan’s domestic advisers and speechwriters against his foreign-policy team.

Officials at the State Department hated what Robinson had written. It seemed to be full of old Cold War rhetoric, a return to the past, at just the time when the situation seemed to be changing in the Soviet Union. “I just thought it was in bad taste,” recalled Thomas Simons, a veteran Foreign Service officer who was serving as the deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs. Rozanne Ridgway, Simons’s boss, was particularly worried about the impact of the speech, because she believed that Gorbachev’s own position at the top of the Soviet leadership was fragile. Ridgway feared that hard-liners in Moscow might seize on a tough Reagan speech as ammunition against him, arguing that it was useless for Gorbachev to try to do business with the United States. “Those of us who were aware of the fact that there was a major struggle going on inside the Soviet Union were not really persuaded that you had to keep throwing stuff at this guy in public,” Ridgway said. 3

At the time, State Department officials were trying to move toward new arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union, and they felt that a speech like the one Robinson had drafted would make things more difficult. They were instinctively suspicious of Reagan’s White House speechwriters, particularly when it came to anything involving the Soviet Union. “It just struck us that every time we were going somewhere, or were going to meet with the Soviets, the speechwriters came out,” Ridgway said. State Department officials were also in the midst of a diplomatic campaign in Eastern Europe, designed to see if the United States could open up some distance between their Communist governments and the Soviet Union. The speech Robinson had written depicted Eastern Europe as under Moscow’s control, and in this sense, too, it threatened State Department initiatives.

State Department officials and those at Reagan’s National Security Council had their own agenda for Reagan’s speech, and they had been holding meetings and sending out cables in pursuit of it. They viewed Reagan’s stopover in Berlin as an opportunity for a new series of steps on policy—the ones that had already been laid out in the draft speech sent by John Kornblum, the U.S. minister in West Berlin. These included changing the rules for international aviation into and out of the city, holding international conferences jointly in West and East Berlin, and staging the Olympics or some other high-level sports competition in both parts of the city. However, State Department officials had expected that the Berlin Wall would serve as merely the backdrop, rhetorically and visually, for what they formally called a Presidential Initiative on Berlin. The emphasis was to be on diplomacy, not rhetoric.

Thus, while Reagan’s White House speechwriters were refining the language of an exhortation to tear down the wall, his foreign-policy team was moving in entirely different directions. National Security Council and State Department officials were consulting the British and French (the other two sovereign powers in West Berlin) about the possibilities and details of future international conferences in Berlin and future exchanges between East and West Berlin. One State Department cable, for example, said that the United States would “like to encourage more youth exchanges at the district level between the eastern and the western parts of the city.” The National Security Council composed letters for Reagan to send to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and French president François Mitterrand, which the president signed and sent out on May 16, 1987, seeking their support. 4Years later, it is difficult to fathom how so much effort could have been spent on such small steps.

The Berlin “initiative” led to an arcane bureaucratic struggle involving the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community. The aviation rules for Berlin had not changed since the late 1940s: American planes were required to fly into the city at altitudes of ten thousand feet or less, while Soviet planes were required to fly at above ten thousand feet. The rules were designed to prevent collisions, and they had worked. However, with the arrival of jet airplanes, the American companies flying into West Berlin, such as Pan American, complained that the low-altitude rules wore down their engines and required them to spend many thousands of dollars on paint for their planes. On behalf of the commercial airliners, U.S. diplomats in West Berlin had recommended an easing of the altitude limitation. However, U.S. intelligence officials and the air force balked. They argued that the low-altitude flights made it easier for them to see and photograph Soviet and East German military equipment on the ground.

The declassified archives of the Reagan administration show that on May 6, 1987, the National Security Council held a special meeting of its Policy Review Group specifically to discuss Berlin. The participants included representatives of Vice President George Bush’s office, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Department, and the State Department. The subject of that meeting was apparently to reconcile the internal disagreements within the U.S. government over the idea of changing the aviation rules for Berlin. 5

“The fact is that when I was sitting there in Berlin, I was more worried about the air initiative than I was about this sentence” to tear down the wall, acknowledged Kornblum in an interview two decades later. “The air initiative was the key part [of Reagan’s speech], from an operational point of view.” 6Reagan’s conservative speechwriters had often been at odds with his more moderate domestic and political advisers. But in 1987, Reagan’s new White House team, headed by Chief of Staff Howard Baker, was nervous about a dramatic erosion of support from the right. (One conservative leader, Richard Viguerie, had written that “the symbolic end of the Reagan revolution came with the installment of Howard Baker as White House chief of staff.” 7) The result was that for a change, the White House staff was inclined to support the speechwriters.

Reagan’s new White House team was also especially eager to show that he was still an active and engaged president, despite Iran-Contra. Thomas Griscom, the longtime Baker aide installed as the White House communications director, liked Robinson’s speech from the moment he saw it. “There were real questions at that point about whether this presidency was over,” Griscom later reflected. The passage about the Berlin Wall would attract attention, he felt. It would be a line people would remember. 8