That same morning, officials at his National Security Council gathered in the Situation Room of the White House, the place where senior officials try to resolve foreign-policy crises. They were trying one more time to win approval for changes in Reagan’s Berlin speech:
June 3, 1987
Memorandum For Colin L. Powell
From: Peter W. Rodman
Subject: Presidential Address: Brandenburg Gate
Attached is a redo of the Berlin speech, reflecting our meeting in the Sit Room this morning…. You indicated you planned to call Tom Griscom about it.1
This time, Reagan’s foreign-policy advisers complained about several passages in the speech that depicted life in West Berlin. In the speechwriters’ draft, the president was supposed to praise the economic advances made there in the four decades since World War II: “Where there was want, today there is abundance—food, clothing, automobiles, the wonderful goods of the Kudamm [the Kurfurstensdamm, West Berlin’s main shopping street]; even home computers.”
Rodman crossed out the words food, clothing and the rest of the sentence that followed. “Patronizing as well as materialistic,” he commented.
The foreign-policy team also attempted to cut a passage that asked residents of West Berlin why they continued to live in the city, despite its isolation inside East German surroundings, the history of the threatening Soviet blockade, and the grim presence of the wall. “What keeps you here?” the speech asked. It suggested that West Berliners had a way of life “that stubbornly refuses to abandon this good and proud city to a surrounding presence that is merely brutish.”
Officials at the State Department and the National Security Council warned that Reagan should not ask the people of West Berlin why they stayed there. Those words were too negative in tone, they argued. In fact, some people lived in West Berlin for self-interested reasons: because it was among the most subsidized cities in Europe, or because residence there won them an exemption from the military draft to which other West Germans were subject.
In another proposed revision, Rodman crossed out the passage asking why people lived in West Berlin. The sentence referring to East Germany as “merely brutish” was further highlighted. “This must come out,” wrote Rodman. “West Germans do not want to see East Germans insulted.”2
This last challenge by Reagan’s foreign-policy team failed. The passage about the food, clothing, and cars of West Berlin stayed in the speech. What words could better have illustrated, to ordinary Berliners, the difference between the two economic systems? The line denouncing East Germany as “brutish” was not merely kept but strengthened. In the speech Reagan ultimately delivered, he referred to East Germany as “a surrounding totalitarian presence that refuses to release human energies or aspirations.”
In short, Reagan’s foreign-policy advisers wanted the speech to be about tangible diplomacy, not about political freedom. They wanted the speech to smooth over the differences between East and West. They were eager to do business with Gorbachev and afraid—far too concerned, as it turned out—that the Soviet leadership might react to Reagan’s tough speech by refusing to negotiate with the United States. They failed to recognize how eager, if not desperate, Gorbachev was to work out agreements that would limit Soviet military spending. They did not see the extent to which the United States held an increasingly strong position in dealing with Moscow.
In addition, Reagan’s foreign-policy team worried about the impact of the speech in West Germany and West Berlin. True, ordinary West Germans wanted no part of the East German system: its omnipresent Stasi security apparatus and stilted economy. Yet State Department and National Security Council officials did not want Reagan to deliver a confrontational speech at a time when the political and intellectual elites in West Berlin and in West Germany seemed eager to overcome the Cold War rhetoric of the past.
The very idea of a Reagan speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate made some West German officials extremely nervous. They didn’t want the speech to be given—not there, not in front of the Berlin Wall. And so, in the weeks before Reagan’s speech, there was one more test of wills over the speech—not in Washington but in West Berlin.
When Ronald Reagan’s advance team had first decided in April that the president should speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate, officials in West Berlin objected. The site, they argued, was too sensitive: provocative and laden with emotion. It would be too difficult to protect the president. West Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen, then in the process of trying to reduce tensions with East Berlin and other West Berlin officials even worried aloud that the East Germans would somehow intervene to prevent Reagan from speaking in front of the wall.3 They suggested that Reagan might instead speak at the Reichstag, which carried historical significance yet did not symbolize the Cold War in the same way as the Berlin Wall did. American officials, invoking their legal authority, decided to disregard the German complaints. Under the framework established after World War II, the United States, Britain, and France were still sovereign powers in their parts of the city.
In the final weeks before Reagan’s visit, the uneasiness in West Germany about his speech, and the location for it, became so intense that the issue reached German chancellor Helmut Kohl. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher argued that the event could anger Gorbachev and create new tensions with the Soviet Union. “The general climate of opinion was, ‘What a fool President Reagan is, he is making life miserable for us, he is alienating Mikhail Gorbachev,’” recalled Walter Ischinger, who was then serving in Bonn as an aide to Genscher. “1987 was a time when we were making bilateral efforts to improve relations with East Germany and with Honecker. So our attitude was, ‘Oh, no, here comes Ronald Reagan with his hammer.’”4
Kohl was far more willing to support the American president than was his foreign minister. His own outlook was far closer to Reagan’s. The German chancellor had himself called in public for the destruction of the Berlin Wall. On April 30, 1987, when the formal ceremonies opened in West Berlin for the celebration of the city’s 750th anniversary, Kohl had told the audience, “There can be no talk of normality as long as a wall and barbed wire divide this city, our fatherland and thereby Europe.”5
During the previous years, Reagan had gone out of his way to establish a personal relationship with Kohl and to do favors for him. On a visit to West Germany in May 1985, he had taken part with Kohl in ceremonies at the military cemetery at Bitburg, despite the revelation that it included the graves of members of the Waffen-SS, the military arm of Heinrich Himmler’s Nazi police guard. The plan to visit Bitburg had touched off a wave of protests in the United States, and several of Reagan’s top aides, including Secretary of State George Shultz, had urged him not to go. But the German chancellor had made an impassioned personal appeal, saying that “President Reagan could go to Bitburg, or he could cancel and see the Kohl government fall.”6
Reagan had supported Kohl back then, and now, two years later, the German chancellor was willing to go along with a Reagan speech at the Brandenburg Gate. “We had a struggle within our government, because Genscher was a little concerned that this could be a kind of confrontation,” recalled Horst Teltschik, who was Kohl’s principal adviser for foreign policy. “The problem was, is it the right time to do that. And well, in the end, the chancellor decided it was okay. I told the chancellor, ‘Look, this is our strongest ally.’”7