James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

That fall, Erich Honecker, the East German Communist Party leader who had personally overseen the construction of the Berlin Wall, finally made a groundbreaking visit to West Germany, a trip he had sought for more than three years. Honecker flew to Bonn for talks with Chancellor Helmut Kohl and other West German officials.

The rapprochement between the two German governments had been delayed by the cool reactions in both Moscow and Washington, neither of which was eager for its own German ally to stray too far from the fold. The Soviet Union was worried that East Germany would become overly dependent on West German loans, while the Reagan administration was concerned that West Germans might come to accept the legitimacy of Honecker’s government. The French and British had been even less enthusiastic about an event that might revive German nationalism.

Nevertheless, amid the sense of impending change in both the Soviet Union and the United States, no one could make a convincing argument against Honecker’s excursion. In 1984, Soviet leaders had based their opposition on grounds that West Germany had allowed the Reagan administration to put Pershing missiles on West German soil. By mid-1987, the United States and the Soviet Union were moving toward an agreement to remove those missiles, and Gorbachev himself was talking about visiting Washington. Three years earlier, Honecker had sought Moscow’s permission to meet with Kohl and failed to get it. But in 1987, when he was seventy-five years old, Honecker did not bother to ask Moscow in advance, according to Egon Krenz, who served under Honecker and later succeeded him as East Germany’s Communist Party leader. Instead, Honecker arranged the meeting himself and only afterward asked Gorbachev for his assent. 13

“It was, for Honecker, a very important journey,” recalled Hans-Otto Bräutigam, then the West German representative to East Germany, who helped arrange the trip. “He felt much closer to the Federal Republic [West Germany] than to his major ally [the Soviet Union].” During the five-day visit, Honecker traveled to the town where he had been raised, Wiebelskirchen, and visited the graves of his parents. At a dinner in Honecker’s honor, Kohl once again exhorted the East German leader to tear down the Berlin Wall, as he had the previous spring. Germans “suffer because of a wall that is literally in their way and repels them,” he said. However, Kohl also cautioned that German reunification “is at present not on the agenda of world history.” 14

The larger trade-off underlying the visit was an implicit exchange of West German money for East German relaxation of travel restrictions. The West Germans extended a continuing series of loans to East Germany, plus further sums for the release of East German prisoners, and more than $500 million a year to help pay for postal delivery, transportation, and other services. During the first eight months of 1987, Honecker’s regime allowed 867,000 East Germans to travel to the West for purposes such as short-term family visits—a number vastly more than the 100,000 allowed in the entire year of 1982, just before the West German cash began flowing. West Germany also raised the sum paid to each individual East German visitor from $33 in 1986 to $55 in 1987. “Our strategy was to intensify the contacts and the ties between East Germans and West Germans,” Horst Teltschik, Kohl’s principal foreign-policy adviser, explained two decades later. “It was not an easy decision for the chancellor to receive Honecker in Bonn, but the main reason was to deal with him to get more travel, what he called human relief.” 15

Honecker returned to East Berlin with a sense of triumph, hoping that the trip would revitalize his regime. He had obtained promises of new money and a false sense of legitimacy; the West Germans had flown the East German flag and played the national anthem. In fact, Kohl got the better of the bargain, because the greater contacts between East and West only further undermined Honecker’s regime. “Honecker’s visit to Bonn didn’t work,” said Bräutigam. “The East German leadership was too old to take risks, and the country was too weak. There was no money and no energy. The people were becoming restless. It was a boring place. People just wanted to get out.” 16

In late October, Shultz returned to Moscow to set a date for the Washington summit, bringing Carlucci (then still the national security adviser) with him. They did not expect the meetings to be contentious. The two governments had already announced the previous month that they had settled on the outlines of a treaty banning intermediate nuclear weapons, that Gorbachev would be coming to the United States in the fall, and that only the timing remained in doubt.

Gorbachev proceeded to astonish them by suddenly pressing for new concessions. Once again, as he had at Reykjavik a year earlier, the Soviet leader insisted that Reagan accept restrictions on the Strategic Defense Initiative. He also sought U.S. assent to at least the key provisions of a separate treaty on long-range strategic weapons.

Shultz tried to divert the conversation toward Gorbachev’s visit to America. He proposed that the best time would be late November. “It would be very desirable for you to travel beyond Washington,” he said, thus conveying Reagan’s eagerness to show off the American way of life. These efforts fell flat. Gorbachev suggested he might not be willing to meet Reagan or come to the United States at all if he couldn’t obtain some new agreements. “People will not understand it if the two leaders keep meeting and have nothing to show for it,” he said. 17

The session became increasingly contentious. Gorbachev complained that the United States continued to portray the Soviet Union as an enemy. Shultz countered by bringing up the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and its deadly attack on the Korean Airlines plane. Gorbachev, in turn, cited the U-2 incident of 1960, in which the American pilot Gary Francis Powers had been shot down while flying a reconnaissance plane over the Soviet Union. The atmosphere became so strained that Gorbachev’s veteran interpreter Pavel Palazchenko recalled wanting to shout, “Stop! There’s got to be a better way to do it. Why not take a break… ?”

This confrontation took place only days after the stormy meeting of the Communist Party leadership at which Gorbachev’s own politics were called into question. “It could not but affect the atmosphere and Gorbachev’s state of mind,” reflected Palazchenko years later. “I think he felt, rightly, that the main danger was from the conservatives, who could use any concession to the Americans as a pretext to attack his foreign policy as too soft.” At the same time, Gorbachev seemed to want to test whether Reagan might be so eager for a Washington summit in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal that he would give more for it.

The secretary of state, however, yielded no ground. He suggested that if there were to be no summit in Washington, perhaps the nearly completed treaty on intermediate-range missiles could be signed by lower-ranking officials in some other location. The timing would have to be soon, however, for such a treaty to be ratified before Reagan left office. Those words played on Soviet fears that a new administration or a newly constituted U.S. Senate might decide to abandon whatever treaty the Reagan administration negotiated.

The meeting ended without agreement, and the secretary of state left for home without a summit. The following day, Reagan did some public bargaining of his own. During his weekly Saturday radio address, he reported on Shultz’s trip. “No date was set for a summit meeting, but we’re in no hurry,” Reagan said. “And we certainly will not be pushed into sacrificing essential interests just to have a meeting.” 18