The draft emphasizes historical systemic conflicts and East-West differences. We prefer to be more forward-looking, emphasizing overcoming barriers, the tasks before us, and areas where progress might be made. The West Germans, who are working to develop a fragile dialogue with the East, have expressed concern to us on several occasions that the President’s speech not condemn the East too harshly.2
Powell assigned to an experienced NSC staff aide, Peter W. Rodman, the task of rewriting and contesting Robinson’s speech line by line. During the Nixon and Ford administrations, Rodman had served as an aide to Henry Kissinger; the two men were sufficiently close that Rodman later helped write Kissinger’s memoirs. He had thus been closely involved in the policy of détente with the Soviet Union that Reagan had opposed. Rodman nevertheless viewed himself as a conservative. He saw no contradiction in working first for Kissinger and then for Reagan. (He would later serve as a Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration.)
In Rodman’s view, the détente policies of Nixon and Kissinger had been designed to preserve America’s position overseas and to outflank the political left amid the turmoil of the Vietnam War, at a time when a Democratic Congress was moving to bring American troops home. Rodman believed that in the changed political climate of the 1980s, Reagan, by virtue of his popularity, was able to succeed on some issues (such as, for example, Angola) where Kissinger had been unable to win public or congressional support.3 Despite this effort to minimize the philosophical differences between realists and conservatives, however, Rodman tended to be skeptical of Reagan’s young anti-Communist speechwriters, who knew less than he did about the details and history of various foreign-policy disputes.
Throughout late May of 1987, Rodman served as the point man for the National Security Council and State Department as they sought again and again to revise the Berlin Wall speech. State and the NSC had already been defeated in their attempt to throw out Robinson’s draft in its entirety. They next tried to edit the speech, suggesting major changes in some passages and attempting to delete others.
The objections covered everything from broad policy to the most arcane details. On behalf of the State Department, Rodman tried to take out the allusion to Marlene Dietrich’s song “Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin” (“I still have a suitcase in Berlin”), which Robinson had picked up at his dinner in West Berlin. Rodman said the line had “the wrong tone—nostalgia and abandonment, not commitment.” State Department officials added that this was an old German song not particularly identified with Dietrich anyway. In a Solomonic compromise, the line stayed in, but not Dietrich: in his actual speech, Reagan attributed the song to its German composer, Paul Lincke.
Some of Rodman’s suggestions were accepted. The early versions of the speech included the line “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, come to Berlin.” (Those words evoked John F. Kennedy’s 1963 speech: “There are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin.”) But in his critique, Rodman argued that it would be silly for Reagan to utter these words, because by the time of the president’s speech, Gorbachev would in fact have recently attended the Warsaw Pact meetings in Berlin and would have just departed. Was Reagan supposed to tell Gorbachev to come back to Berlin? This became too confusing, and the line vanished.4
Among the deletions Rodman sought was the line calling upon Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. In Rodman’s editing of a draft of the speech dated May 27, 1987, the entire four-paragraph passage about demolishing the wall is crossed out with a big X.
Rodman had the support of senior officials. On June 1, Powell wrote a short note saying that “we (and the State Department) continue to have serious problems with this speech…. We still believe that some important thematic passages (e.g., pp. 6-7) are wrong.” At the very top of page 6, the first sentence read: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”5
This was not merely a war of memos. In late May, the top officials of Ronald Reagan’s foreign-policy team spent time on the phone and in meetings attempting to change the speech—in particular, to remove the words “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” At first, they directed their lobbying campaign at Thomas Griscom, the White House official responsible for overseeing the speechwriters. At one point, Robinson was summoned to Griscom’s office, where he found Colin Powell waiting for him. Powell said he didn’t like the tone of the speech.
Robinson defended what he had written, and Griscom supported his speechwriter. Reagan himself had already seen, recited, and felt comfortable with the line about tearing down the wall, Griscom pointed out. In an interview two decades later, Powell explained that he had merely been doing his job to pass along the objections of the State Department. The “fantastic” line about tearing down the Berlin Wall remained in the speech, Powell noted, “and the State Department said, ‘Uh oh, this could be trouble.’ I think the secretary of state had reservations that we might be putting our finger in Gorbachev’s eye, while we were trying to build a relationship with him.”6
A few days after the Powell meeting, the dispute was elevated to the very highest level of the Reagan administration. White House chief of staff Howard Baker called Griscom into his West Wing office for a session with Secretary of State George Shultz. The secretary said he had problems with the Berlin speech. He was concerned that if Reagan delivered the line urging Gorbachev to tear down the wall, it could set back the progress that had been made so far in improving relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed, such a speech might even jeopardize Gorbachev’s position and the domestic reforms he was carrying out. (Shultz, in an interview for this book, said he did not recall making such an argument. “I can’t imagine anyone objecting to him making that statement, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall,’” Shultz said.)7
Griscom responded that “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” was the best line in the whole speech. “That is the sound bite that everyone is going to grab,” he told Shultz and Baker. This would be one of the president’s final trips to Europe, and the Berlin speech represented an opportunity for him to say something memorable, he argued. Moreover, Griscom pointed out, the line about the wall did not really represent any significant change in American foreign policy. The United States had always taken the position that the Berlin Wall should be torn down.
Baker was not persuaded. In the end, the decision went back to the president. Baker’s deputy, Kenneth Duberstein, informed Reagan in the Oval Office that there had been a dispute within his administration over the words “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Duberstein said that he thought it was a great line, but that the State Department strongly objected on grounds that it might be too inflammatory. Reagan asked Duberstein if he agreed. The White House aide gave no direct answer. You’re the president, he said. You get to decide. Reagan looked down at his desk, looked back up, and said, “I think we’ll leave it in.”8
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ROCK CONCERT
The battles over what Reagan would say in Berlin continued even as he departed for Europe. At 8:45 a.m. on June 3, 1987, the president and his wife left the White House by helicopter for Andrews Air Force Base, where they boarded Air Force One for Venice. Reagan was by then seventy-six years old and traveling less and less; this was the first time he had left the continental United States since the summit in Reykjavik nearly eight months earlier.