The White House aides were meeting with Reagan daily at Villa Condulmer. Duberstein figured that Shultz’s message was merely for the record, a formality that would enable him to tell subordinates in the State Department he had done his best. He knew that Shultz saw Reagan regularly and could get in to see him alone whenever he wanted. Duberstein reasoned that if the secretary of state still felt really strongly about the Berlin speech, he wouldn’t have made his opposition known in a phone call to the White House staff; he would have asked for five minutes of time to see Reagan on his own.5 As a result, Shultz’s last protest was brushed aside. Once more, for the final time, the State Department lost the argument and the Berlin Wall speech remained intact.
By the first week in June, well before Reagan landed in West Berlin, anyone in the city who was paying attention would have known that the president’s speech was going to urge that the Berlin Wall be torn down. Reagan administration officials made no effort to conceal that this would be a central theme of the speech.
The White House released the written text of an “interview” Reagan had given to the Deutsche Press-Agentur, West Germany’s news service. In fact, this was once again not an interview in the usual meaning of the word, but written responses to written questions, issued in Reagan’s name but prepared by his staff. It was the same sort of format used in the summer of 1986, when Reagan had said, “I would like to see the wall come down today, and I call upon those responsible to dismantle it.”6 This time, on June 2, 1987, Reagan said in the supposed interview: “In a word, we want the Berlin Wall to come down, so that the reintegration of all four sections of the city into one unit again becomes a reality.” Shultz, meanwhile, offered a similar preview of the speech to another West German audience. Speaking to reporters in West Berlin, he called for removing “the dividing line in Europe, which includes the Berlin Wall.” America would prefer to see Berlin as an open city without the wall, the secretary of state said.7 Not surprisingly, these remarks were treated as major news in the West German press. Reagan: WE WANT THE WALL TO COME DOWN! said a front-page headline in the Berliner Morgenpost on June 4, eight days before Reagan’s visit.8
In East Berlin, Erich Honecker got the message. East Germany’s Communist Party leader gave his own interview to Dutch newspapers, saying he saw no basis for removing the Berlin Wall because the circumstances that had led to the building of the wall had not disappeared. On June 4, the East German Foreign Ministry called in the leading U.S. diplomat in East Berlin to protest Reagan’s remarks in the interview about the Berlin Wall. The East German diplomat said that any questions regarding the “state border of the German Democratic Republic” were its own business. The United States should not interfere in East Germany’s internal affairs, he said.9
These previews of Reagan’s speech served the purpose of letting the German public know what was coming. The administration was making sure that no one in Berlin, on either side of the wall, would be caught off guard by Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate. The words “tear down this wall” were meant to be a dramatic surprise primarily to Reagan’s domestic audience, that is, to Americans back home who would not have noticed how many other times Reagan or other American officials had said similar things.
The previews also helped to preempt any last-minute appeals by West German officials that Reagan play down the importance of the wall in his speech. As a result, the last-minute battles between the West Germans and Americans were fought over the question of where Reagan should deliver his speech (should it be at the Brandenburg Gate?) and not over what he should say.
Although the advance interviews by Reagan and Shultz made it plain the president would call for the wall to be dismantled, they did not reveal that the president intended to call directly upon Gorbachev to dismantle it. That was, indeed, to be a surprise.
As Reagan left the United States, his aides were still trying to overcome the perceptions that had taken hold during the Iran-Contra scandal—above all, that he was a politically crippled president, a lame duck who would merely serve out inertly the remaining twenty months of his term in the White House. “It’s not morning anymore, but it’s not the twilight of the Reagan presidency, either,” one senior White House official told the Washington Post.10
Yet Reagan’s performance during the four-day economic summit in Venice seemed merely to reinforce these impressions of Ronald Reagan in decline. “The 76-year-old president is this week a shadow of his former self…. His leadership is compared unfavourably with that of Mr. Gorbachev,” reported the Guardian. “Mr. Reagan resembles the old bull, wounded and stiff, defying a crowd which is waiting for the next act,” said the Financial Times.11
At the end of the summit gathering, Reagan held a news conference at Venice’s Hotel Cipriani in which he seemed to fumble several answers. The first three questions, and five of the first seven, were about Iran-Contra. National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci had instructed the president to deflect these questions by saying he was at an economic summit; Carlucci was thus dismayed to hear Reagan wade into the scandal once again, insisting he had no idea that his aides were organizing support for the Nicaraguan contras.12 At one juncture, the president suggested that the United States might be willing to tolerate a lower value for the dollar against other currencies. Aides soon rushed to correct the record and make clear this was not the case. Talking about diplomacy at the United Nations, Reagan was unable to summon forth the words “Security Council”; after a moment’s delay, he said, “committee.”
He was asked about Mikhail Gorbachev. Why did Gorbachev have such a strong image in Europe as a man of peace? “Well, maybe because it’s so unusual,” Reagan replied. “This is the first Soviet leader, in my memory, that has ever advocated actually eliminating weapons already built and in place.” The reporter persisted. “Do you trust him?” Reagan fell back on his standard answer, the familiar words given to him by Suzanne Massie. “Well, he’s a personable gentleman, but I cited to him a Russian proverb… , Doveryai no proveryai. It means trust but verify.”13
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BRANDENBURG GATE
On June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan landed at West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport after a ninety-minute flight on Air Force One from Venice. It was to be merely a day trip; it was not necessary to fly the Reagans’ special European bed to Berlin. Indeed, Reagan’s entire visit to Berlin lasted scarcely five hours.
He rode from the airport with West Berlin’s mayor Eberhard Diepgen, the political leader who had tried for months to keep Reagan from speaking in front of the Berlin Wall. Diepgen was by now resigned to the inevitable, having concluded that the two superpowers would not permit him to carry out the exchange with East Germany that he had so eagerly sought.1 Reagan and Diepgen sat down for talks with West Germany’s president, Richard von Weizsäcker. The German president recalled years later that Reagan’s visit had seemed mostly like a media event. Reagan did not tell von Weizsäcker what he planned to say in his speech.2