James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Kissinger’s idea seemed to assume that Gorbachev’s U.N. speech was not to be taken seriously. In it, Gorbachev had already renounced the idea of military intervention. State Department officials in charge of Europe and Soviet policy thought Kissinger’s idea was a lousy one. “We thought, ‘Don’t talk to the Soviets about Eastern Europe, period,’” recalled Thomas Simons. Developments in Eastern Europe were moving in the right direction anyway, and the United States should not “buy what it can get for free,” Simons argued. He and others at the State Department dubbed Kissinger’s idea “Yalta-2”—a biting reference to the Yalta conference of 1945 that had paved the way for the division of Europe after World War II. 9

On January 19, 1989, Reagan’s last full day as president, East German leader Erich Honecker offered a defiant prediction aimed above all at Reagan and his outgoing administration. He said that the Berlin Wall “will still exist in 50 and even 100 years.” 10

The previous day, Shultz, attending a conference in Vienna on his last trip to Europe as secretary of state, had called once again for the Berlin Wall to be torn down, echoing Reagan’s frequent refrain. British foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe had joined in by branding the wall a “grisly anachronism.” From East Berlin, Honecker retorted with his usual defenses of the wall, which as usual he called the “anti-fascist protective barrier.” The wall was necessary to safeguard East Germany and to preserve peace and stability, he said. It protected East Germans from “the machinations of the West’s society of drugs” and from being “plundered” by the currency exchange rates of one West German mark for every seven East German marks. “The Wall will remain for as long as the reasons for its presence have not been eliminated,” Honecker concluded.

East Germany’s situation was becoming increasingly bleak. In 1988, approximately 9,700 East Germans had fled, more than in any year since 1961, when the wall was built. “We saw that people were leaving the country. They felt that East Germany had no future,” recalled Lothar de Maizière, the East German lawyer who in 1990 served as his country’s final prime minister before reunification. “At that time, I was active in the Protestant Church. We were trying to keep people here, telling them that they could help to bring about change. But people didn’t believe it.” 11

Honecker, as the East German official in charge of security, had supervised construction of the wall; a decade later, he had become general secretary of the East German Communist Party. In early 1989, at the age of seventy-six, he spoke in the same style, with the same stilted language and about the same central-planning targets as in the past. The highlight of his New Year’s Day speech to East German citizens had been the pledge that “212,200 apartments will be either newly built or modernized in 1989.” He did not mention the problem that even if the numerical goal was met, the apartments would be as ugly and lifeless as all the others.

In the same New Year’s speech, Honecker boasted as usual of “the unshakeable friendship and firm solidarity” between the leaders of East Germany and the Soviet Union. “We will continue to raise the level of our fraternal relations, which are exemplary in intensity and diversity,” Honecker said. 12Yet in the wake of Gorbachev’s speech to the United Nations, the signs of change were unmistakable. In January 1989, Hungary announced that a Soviet tank division would leave the country within six months and several other units by the end of the year. A few days later, Poland disclosed that some of the Soviet units on its soil would soon leave. Honecker himself, seeking to show that he was conforming to the spirit of Gorbachev’s speech, said East Germany would scale back its armed forces by ten thousand troops, a modest reduction. 13

These troop cutbacks in Eastern Europe were important for their own sake, but they also further undermined Honecker’s public justifications for the Berlin Wall. For decades, one primary reason advanced for the wall had been to preserve the peace and to protect East Germany from an aggressive NATO alliance. The troop reductions throughout Eastern Europe in 1989 reflected—indeed, were based upon—the idea that the military threat from the West had lessened.

Still, Honecker remained confident that any changes in the existing order would be relatively minor. He was hardly alone in that belief. In 1989, during a visit to Munich, John McLaughlin, an American intelligence official who later rose to the top of the CIA, asked the head of West Germany’s intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), about the prospects for German reunification. “Not in my lifetime,” replied the official. 14

As it turned out, Honecker would have been wrong about the Berlin Wall even if he had predicted that it would last for only one more year.

Ronald Reagan had believed that his last day on the job would be January 19. His advisers felt compelled to remind him that he would still be president until noon on Inauguration Day and would need to demonstrate that fact. “Symbolically, Mr. President, you need to come to the office on the morning of the 20th,” White House chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein told the president. Reagan agreed. Duberstein authorized White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater to make public the fact that Reagan would be at work on the morning of Inauguration Day. That turned out to be a mistake. Throughout the night of January 19 and into the early-morning hours of January 20, Duberstein and other White House officials were besieged with phone calls seeking last-minute favors from Reagan. In particular, members of Congress argued repeatedly that it was not too late for Reagan to pardon Oliver North, who had been indicted and was awaiting trial for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. This campaign failed. 15

Reagan, often detached from the daily business of the presidency, had become ever more so since Election Day. Two weeks after the election, he had flown to California to buy a house in Bel Air and to take part in the groundbreaking for his presidential library in Simi Valley. Back in Washington, he had begun to pack up his papers. On December 6, the White House physician brought to the Oval Office a doctor who had set up a team in Los Angeles to take care of Reagan’s medical needs after he left the White House. In an apparent coincidence, Reagan’s diary shows that immediately afterward, he met with representatives of the Alzheimer’s Association, who gave him a plaque for his support. 16

On the morning of January 20, Reagan appeared in the Oval Office, which had been stripped of all decorations. His aides, gathering to say good-bye, had to stand because there were no chairs in the empty office. They went through the formalities of briefing the president. As national security adviser, Colin Powell informed Reagan that the world was quiet.

Reagan reached into his pocket and pulled out his nuclear code card—the card with authentication codes that verify presidential authorization for the launch of nuclear weapons. “Colin, what do I do about this?” Reagan asked, trying to hand over the card. Powell wouldn’t take it. Reagan’s executive assistant, Jim Kuhn, told him he had to keep it for two more hours. “You’re still the president, sir,” Kuhn said. The plan that had been worked out with national-security officials called for Reagan to give the card to a military aide just as he was leaving the White House for Bush’s inauguration. Finally, just before noon, Reagan handed over the nuclear card, relieving himself of the responsibility he didn’t want. 17

Within days, Bush’s new team began to call into question the assumptions of the Reagan administration and to put forward a more negative view of Gorbachev and the Soviet Union. “I think the Cold War is not over,” Brent Scowcroft, the new national security adviser, said on television the weekend after the inauguration. Scowcroft offered, once again, a dark interpretation of Gorbachev’s motivations. “He’s interested in making trouble within the Western alliance, and I think he believes the best way to do it is a peace offensive, rather than to bluster the way some of his predecessors have.” 18