James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

If it had been up to the State Department, Reagan’s exhortation, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” would have been forgotten. But it was not. In the months after Reagan’s visit, the words came up repeatedly in public discussions of Berlin and of the Cold War. On July 3, 1987, on a visit to West Berlin, French prime minister Jacques Chirac irked Soviet and East German officials by supporting what Reagan had said. Chirac deplored the fact that Berlin was divided by an “inhumane, absurd wall.” The wall was “barbaric,” he said, because it was erected to protect an ideology at the expense of freedom and human rights. 20

Reagan himself was not inclined to drop the line either. During the following months, whenever the president spoke in public about the Soviet Union, he included a few words about tearing down the Berlin Wall. It became part of Reagan’s repertoire. At a town hall meeting in Los Angeles that August, he said he had asked “that the Soviets join us in alleviating the division of Berlin and begin with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.” In his regular Saturday radio speech three days later, he said that if Soviet officials wanted to improve relations with the United States, “they can get out of Afghanistan, they can tear down the Berlin Wall, they can allow free elections in Europe.” 21

The prolonged struggle over the Berlin speech demonstrated once again the extent to which the Reagan administration’s dealings with Mikhail Gorbachev represented the style and thinking of the president himself.

Reagan was often depicted as the instrument of larger forces and of the more assertive personalities around him. During his early years in the White House, Reagan’s policy toward Moscow was often seen as a reflection of hawks in his administration such as William Casey, his CIA director, or Caspar Weinberger, his defense secretary. During Reagan’s second term, as he proceeded to do business with Gorbachev, he was sometimes depicted as a figure-head for Secretary of State George Shultz, the real architect of America’s extensive diplomacy with Moscow. “It is quite apparent that Shultz has sold his deal to both Reagan and [White House chief of staff Howard] Baker,” Richard Nixon wrote in a note to himself after visiting the White House in the spring of 1987. 1

Reagan’s own behavior often contributed to these perceptions. The president rarely became involved in the details of whatever was being debated inside his administration; for weeks he would remain remote or inert in the face of a growing controversy. Yet in the end, it was Reagan himself who set the tone and made the decisions. Shultz managed the details of America’s diplomacy with Moscow, but it was up to Reagan to provide the overall direction and to supply the ideas and rhetoric that would ensure there was support both in Congress and with the American public.

When it came to the Soviet Union, Reagan not infrequently seemed to move in several directions at the same time. He shifted direction with a canny sense of timing. Only nine months earlier, when faced with similarly intense divisions inside his administration about how to respond to the Soviet Union’s jailing of American reporter Nicholas Daniloff, Reagan had sided with Shultz. He had infuriated conservatives by agreeing to negotiations and a package deal for Daniloff’s release, in implicit exchange for the release of a Soviet spy in New York and the freeing of a leading Soviet dissident. This time, with Reagan’s aides divided over Berlin, the president rejected Shultz’s appeals. Instead, he chose to deliver a speech that reaffirmed the core value of political freedom and reminded Gorbachev the United States would not accept the continuing divisions in Europe.

Not only Shultz but many other foreign-policy officials had opposed the idea of having the president call upon Gorbachev to demolish the Berlin Wall. Soviet specialists at the State Department and the National Security Council had sought repeatedly to rewrite the speech. Colin Powell, the deputy national security adviser, coordinated and supported the bureaucratic opposition. Reagan’s White House chief of staff, Howard Baker, was also dubious.

The issue raised by Shultz and others was quite simple: What would be the impact in Moscow of the words “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”? Would Gorbachev be so irritated that he would give up trying to deal with Reagan and lose interest in conciliatory policies toward the United States? Might the speech strengthen the hand of those who were seeking to limit the extent of his reforms? In short, was Gorbachev sufficiently eager to forge new ties with the United States and sufficiently secure in his leadership to be able to withstand Reagan’s rhetoric?

In rejecting the State Department’s warnings, Reagan was making his own judgment about Gorbachev. He was betting on the Soviet leader. This was based, at least partially, on Reagan’s own perceptions. He had met Gorbachev twice at the summits in Geneva and in Reykjavik and had corresponded with him before and after those meetings. He had obtained a sense of how desperately Gorbachev wanted new agreements to ease the international climate and to limit Soviet military spending.

The dramatic exhortation to “tear down this wall” was in some ways a public-relations gimmick. Thomas Griscom, the White House communications director, acknowledged that he liked and approved the phrase because it was a perfect sound bite, one that helped get the president on television news shows in the United States. By itself, there was nothing new in Reagan’s declaration that the Berlin Wall should come down. Reagan had said so before, and so had other American officials. True, the site of the speech—in front of the Brandenburg Gate—was novel, but that only underscored that this was a speech intended more for television than for international diplomacy.

The new element in the substance of Reagan’s Berlin speech was not that the wall should come down, but that Gorbachev himself should take it down. This served a number of purposes. Reagan’s words called attention to the fact that the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe still depended on the Soviet Union; Honecker, who had personally overseen the construction of the wall, would never have had his job without Moscow. Even more significant, the speech set out a standard by which Gorbachev should be judged: Would his reforms be limited in scope, or would they change the existing order in Europe? The speech reaffirmed Reagan’s long-standing view that the ideological differences between the United States and the Soviet Union remained of fundamental importance. Finally, the speech buttressed Reagan’s public and congressional support inside the United States as he was preparing for further diplomacy with Gorbachev. He was protecting his political flanks, particularly on the right.

Reagan never gave voice to such calculations, of course. He didn’t talk about underlying strategy or tactics. The world saw only the simple façade: catching Reagan in some Machiavellian maneuver would have been akin to catching him dyeing his hair. As far as anyone could tell, he was an unreflective person, one who viewed events in simple terms. Indeed, it may well be that Reagan based his decisions largely on instinct. He may never have explained even to himself the considerations that lay behind changes in policy, his reasons for sometimes standing on principle and then at other times setting those principles aside in favor of diplomacy or negotiation.

The Berlin speech had been largely the product of Reagan’s speechwriters. The president no longer drafted his own speeches. Yet Reagan talked to the writers, offered them ideas, and chose when and how to defend their work in the face of objections from elsewhere in his administration. Within days after Reagan returned from Berlin, he sent word to Anthony Dolan, the chief White House speechwriter, saying how much he had liked the Berlin Wall speech. The archives show that Dolan sent a gracious reply dated June 15, 1987, which said: “In view of all you told us about what you wanted in Berlin—including the outline and the killer lines you gave us—it was particularly generous of you.” 2