James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

In another proposed revision, Rodman crossed out the passage asking why people lived in West Berlin. The sentence referring to East Germany as “merely brutish” was further highlighted. “This must come out,” wrote Rodman. “West Germans do not want to see East Germans insulted.” 2

This last challenge by Reagan’s foreign-policy team failed. The passage about the food, clothing, and cars of West Berlin stayed in the speech. What words could better have illustrated, to ordinary Berliners, the difference between the two economic systems? The line denouncing East Germany as “brutish” was not merely kept but strengthened. In the speech Reagan ultimately delivered, he referred to East Germany as “a surrounding totalitarian presence that refuses to release human energies or aspirations.”

In short, Reagan’s foreign-policy advisers wanted the speech to be about tangible diplomacy, not about political freedom. They wanted the speech to smooth over the differences between East and West. They were eager to do business with Gorbachev and afraid—far too concerned, as it turned out—that the Soviet leadership might react to Reagan’s tough speech by refusing to negotiate with the United States. They failed to recognize how eager, if not desperate, Gorbachev was to work out agreements that would limit Soviet military spending. They did not see the extent to which the United States held an increasingly strong position in dealing with Moscow.

In addition, Reagan’s foreign-policy team worried about the impact of the speech in West Germany and West Berlin. True, ordinary West Germans wanted no part of the East German system: its omnipresent Stasi security apparatus and stilted economy. Yet State Department and National Security Council officials did not want Reagan to deliver a confrontational speech at a time when the political and intellectual elites in West Berlin and in West Germany seemed eager to overcome the Cold War rhetoric of the past.

The very idea of a Reagan speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate made some West German officials extremely nervous. They didn’t want the speech to be given—not there, not in front of the Berlin Wall. And so, in the weeks before Reagan’s speech, there was one more test of wills over the speech—not in Washington but in West Berlin.

When Ronald Reagan’s advance team had first decided in April that the president should speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate, officials in West Berlin objected. The site, they argued, was too sensitive: provocative and laden with emotion. It would be too difficult to protect the president. West Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen, then in the process of trying to reduce tensions with East Berlin and other West Berlin officials even worried aloud that the East Germans would somehow intervene to prevent Reagan from speaking in front of the wall. 3They suggested that Reagan might instead speak at the Reichstag, which carried historical significance yet did not symbolize the Cold War in the same way as the Berlin Wall did. American officials, invoking their legal authority, decided to disregard the German complaints. Under the framework established after World War II, the United States, Britain, and France were still sovereign powers in their parts of the city.

In the final weeks before Reagan’s visit, the uneasiness in West Germany about his speech, and the location for it, became so intense that the issue reached German chancellor Helmut Kohl. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher argued that the event could anger Gorbachev and create new tensions with the Soviet Union. “The general climate of opinion was, ‘What a fool President Reagan is, he is making life miserable for us, he is alienating Mikhail Gorbachev,’” recalled Walter Ischinger, who was then serving in Bonn as an aide to Genscher. “1987 was a time when we were making bilateral efforts to improve relations with East Germany and with Honecker. So our attitude was, ‘Oh, no, here comes Ronald Reagan with his hammer.’” 4

Kohl was far more willing to support the American president than was his foreign minister. His own outlook was far closer to Reagan’s. The German chancellor had himself called in public for the destruction of the Berlin Wall. On April 30, 1987, when the formal ceremonies opened in West Berlin for the celebration of the city’s 750th anniversary, Kohl had told the audience, “There can be no talk of normality as long as a wall and barbed wire divide this city, our fatherland and thereby Europe.” 5

During the previous years, Reagan had gone out of his way to establish a personal relationship with Kohl and to do favors for him. On a visit to West Germany in May 1985, he had taken part with Kohl in ceremonies at the military cemetery at Bitburg, despite the revelation that it included the graves of members of the Waffen-SS, the military arm of Heinrich Himmler’s Nazi police guard. The plan to visit Bitburg had touched off a wave of protests in the United States, and several of Reagan’s top aides, including Secretary of State George Shultz, had urged him not to go. But the German chancellor had made an impassioned personal appeal, saying that “President Reagan could go to Bitburg, or he could cancel and see the Kohl government fall.” 6

Reagan had supported Kohl back then, and now, two years later, the German chancellor was willing to go along with a Reagan speech at the Brandenburg Gate. “We had a struggle within our government, because Genscher was a little concerned that this could be a kind of confrontation,” recalled Horst Teltschik, who was Kohl’s principal adviser for foreign policy. “The problem was, is it the right time to do that. And well, in the end, the chancellor decided it was okay. I told the chancellor, ‘Look, this is our strongest ally.’” 7

West Berlin officials tried to forestall a speech at the Berlin Wall by raising new security problems. Reagan’s White House planners had said they wanted an audience of roughly forty thousand people, but Diepgen’s aides said it would not be feasible to have so large a crowd. There would of course have to be security checks on those who were coming to see the U.S. president, and the West Berlin government didn’t have the time or personnel necessary to check so many people.

American officials once again overrode the objections from Diepgen’s government. They decided to round up a crowd for Reagan on their own from the American community in West Berlin and from leading German employers. “We went to all the big companies here, and we said we want to invite all your people to see the president,” said John Kornblum, the head of the U.S. diplomatic mission in West Berlin. “You give us your employment rolls, and we’ll run them through the police computer.” The United States and its allies retained direct control over the West Berlin police department. Over a period of several days, American officials took the lists of approximately sixty thousand workers at German companies and ran them one by one through computers inside the U.S. mission, checking their dates of birth and police records to make sure that no impostors or troublemakers were on the list. Everyone who was cleared was given a ticket and was told to bring a photo identification card to the event. 8

When U.S. Secret Service officials arrived in West Berlin, they had their own security questions. What if someone in East Berlin—say, a representative of East Germany’s Ministry of State Security, known as the Stasi—tried to take a shot at the American president? U.S. officials decided to erect a huge bulletproof screen behind the podium where Reagan would speak.

In the end, the Americans were so worried about security for Reagan that they resorted to an extraordinary measure, one tinged with irony. In order to lay the groundwork for Reagan’s anti-Soviet speech, the United States sought the quiet help and cooperation of the Soviet Union.