James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Over the following months, with Atwater at the helm, the Bush campaign would unleash a series of attacks on Dukakis for vetoing a bill that would have required students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in class and for granting a furlough to a convicted murderer named Willie Horton. Reagan’s negotiations with and endorsement of Gorbachev had aroused intense opposition from Republican conservatives. As a matter of electoral tactics, then, it was not surprising that during the 1988 campaign, Bush took a position well to the right of Reagan on Soviet policy.

Nevertheless, Bush’s campaign statements about the Soviets were not merely an election tactic. They also represented genuine disagreements with Reagan about Gorbachev and the Soviet Union. Over the course of the previous eight years, Bush had moved in the opposite direction from Reagan, becoming more hard-nosed toward Moscow as the president was becoming more conciliatory.

During Reagan’s first term, amid the defense buildup and the “evil empire” rhetoric, Bush had let it be known repeatedly in private that he believed the president was too combative toward the Soviet Union. In one conversation, he confided to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that Reagan’s views of the Soviet Union had been dominated by Hollywood clichés and by deep-seated stereotypes. “Well, he’s hard, very hard indeed,” Bush had said in 1983. Two years later, before Reagan’s first summit with Gorbachev, the vice president told Dobrynin that he personally wished for a better atmosphere between the United States and the Soviet Union. 4

Things began to change after Reagan and Gorbachev talked in Reykjavik about eliminating nuclear weapons. The vice president had a more traditional view about the value of these weapons, and he was also more skeptical than Reagan and Shultz that the Gorbachev approach represented something dramatically new for Soviet foreign policy. Bush was closer in outlook to Nixon, Kissinger, and Scowcroft. During the 1988 campaign, then, polite though he was, the vice president became the highest-ranking critic of Reagan’s diplomacy with Gorbachev.

During the Moscow summit, Reagan, Gorbachev, and their delegations had agreed to try to reach agreement before the end of the year on a treaty that would reduce strategic weaponry. But over the following months, Reagan administration officials found that it wasn’t possible. One reason was the opposition of the Bush campaign.

“At the end of the Moscow summit, the whole relationship [between Washington and Moscow] just went into limbo,” recalled Rozanne Ridgway, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs. “We were working on the treaty, but a large cadre of naysayers, like Brent Scowcroft and James Baker and all these guys, were saying that George Shultz had pushed the president too far and that we should put the thing on hold. Their argument was that we have only six months left, and we can’t get anything done.” 5

Jack Matlock, who was then serving as Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union and eventually stayed on as Bush’s ambassador, came to the same conclusion: Bush wanted the Reagan administration to go no further with Gorbachev. “He knew that he would have to indulge in some hard-line rhetoric to pacify the Republican Party’s right wing, and it would be difficult to fight for ratification of a major arms reduction agreement at the same time,” Matlock wrote. “Besides, he did not want his administration to look like a continuation of the Reagan administration.”

For his own part, Bush, during the summer of 1988, complained privately that he was disturbed by Reagan’s “sentimentality” toward Gorbachev. He worried that Reagan and Shultz were “crashing too hard” toward a final agreement with the Soviet leader in the last months of the Reagan administration. 6

When Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze visited Washington in late September, he and Shultz tried once more to see if they could conclude a treaty on reducing strategic weapons. They failed; there was too little time left. The Reagan White House was reluctant to make a deal for which the Bush team had no enthusiasm.

Gorbachev was not disposed to sit on his hands and wait for the results of the American election. In late October 1988, while Bush and Dukakis were in the closing days of their campaigns, the Soviet leader served as host for a groundbreaking visit to Moscow by West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, one that would pave the way for a reordering of the diplomacy and the political alignments throughout Europe.

Over the previous few years, the relations between the two men had been icy. Kohl had paid a courtesy call upon Gorbachev in the Kremlin just after Gorbachev was appointed party secretary in March 1985. At the time, with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko at his side, Gorbachev had invoked the memory of the twenty million Soviets who had died during World War II. Anyone who talked about German unity was a warmonger, Gromyko had declared. Kohl had responded by asking Gorbachev to imagine a wall along the Moscow River, dividing parts of the city from one another. “Suppose you’re on this side, and your mother and your sister were living on the other side, and you were trying to get from here to there—are you a warmonger then?” he asked. 7

Gorbachev’s initial impression was that Kohl was merely an agent of the Americans. “The government in Bonn followed President Reagan’s course with German precision,” he wrote. Relations became further strained in 1986, when Kohl used an analogy from the Nazi era to characterize Gorbachev. The chancellor was arguing that Gorbachev’s efforts at change were merely cosmetic in nature, meant more to beguile the West than to change the Soviet Union. American skeptics had been making similar points, but the wording Kohl chose had been unique. “He is a modern communist leader who understands public-relations,” the German chancellor said in an interview with Newsweek . “Goebbels, who was one of those responsible for the crimes of the Hitler era, was an expert in public relations, too.” 8

Gorbachev, infuriated, froze all contacts with Kohl, whose advisers quickly concluded that the chancellor had made a serious mistake. Kohl’s foreign-policy adviser, Horst Teltschik, was reduced to begging friendly officials in Hungary and Czechoslovakia to pass on tidbits of information about what was happening in the Kremlin. The chancellor wrote a letter of apology to Gorbachev, claiming his remarks had been taken out of context.

Two years later, as West Germany’s economy continued to thrive and as it developed ever-deeper ties with its central European neighbors, Gorbachev and his aides decided to try to do business with Kohl. “In 1988, there was a growing awareness on Gorbachev’s part that he needed Western help,” recalled Kohl. “He told me that he had to find a suitable partner. It was not to be expected that the Americans would help him. The Europeans might, and the strongest role among the Europeans was played by the Germans.” 9

This time, on October 28, 1988, the Soviet and West German leaders established a close personal rapport and working relationship. Kohl spoke to Gorbachev about the horrors of World War II, about his own family and the need for peace. Gorbachev chose not to challenge Kohl when he referred at one point to the hope for a unified Germany. “We witnessed an amazing metamorphosis that day,” said Gorbachev’s foreign-policy adviser, Anatoly Chernyaev, who, together with Teltschik, sat in on the session in Moscow. “In any case, as a result of that meeting, the trust between Gorbachev and Kohl began growing rapidly, trust that soon turned into a real, informal friendship.” 10Along with the new personal warmth came West German credits of $1.6 billion and a series of trade deals for West German companies in the Soviet Union.