“The subject of the wall was a taboo, in a sense,” recalled Hans-Otto Bräutigam, West Germany’s representative in East Berlin. “Everybody considered the wall unbearable, uncivilized—but you couldn’t do anything about it. The subject was something one didn’t want to touch, because it was so emotional. For West Berliners, Reagan’s speech employed language they had really missed for some time. His words had a direct appeal. But in general, no one in Germany at that time believed there was a chance to open the wall in the near future.”14
Hildegard Boucsein was sitting in one of the front rows during Ronald Reagan’s speech, a privilege she enjoyed as an aide to the mayor of West Berlin. When Reagan called upon Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, one German next to her muttered that he was a “nationalist dreamer” and another said he was indulging in fantasy.15
Back in the United States, Reagan’s appeal to tear down the Berlin Wall was not taken particularly seriously. The focus of news coverage at the time was on the impending congressional hearings into Iran-Contra, not the Soviet Union or East Germany.
Within hours after Reagan’s speech, Henry Kissinger appeared on television to deliver his gloomy, gravelly-voiced judgment. Asked whether it was realistic to hope the Soviet Union might ease its policies toward Berlin, Kissinger replied, “They might relax them to some extent, but they won’t tear down the wall.” Americans should in any event not become overly excited about Gorbachev’s reforms, Kissinger told ABC’s Good Morning America. “The purpose is to make the Soviet Union stronger.”16
In an editorial a few days after Reagan returned from Europe, the New York Times compared Reagan to the Music Man, trying to replay the old tunes in River City. In the Washington Post, columnist Jim Hoagland wrote of Reagan’s speech: “History is likely to record the challenge to tear down the wall as a meaningless taunt, delivered as a grand gesture that was not conceived of as part of a coherent policy.”17
The State Department, which had for so long opposed the speech Reagan gave in Berlin, quickly sought to explain it away and to defuse its impact. State Department officials wrote what is called a “press guidance,” a series of internal talking points for senior U.S. officials and press spokespersons to use in answering reporters’ questions. On the day Reagan spoke at the Brandenburg Gate, the State Department instructed its officials to say: “The speech speaks for itself. We are consulting with our British, French and German allies.” The press guidance explained that Reagan had “suggested possible steps to open up East-West contacts within Berlin to expand Berlin’s role as a world meeting place.” State Department officials were instructed to tell reporters that “we call on the other side to join with us in overcoming barriers and opening Berlin still further to all of Europe, East and West.” Nowhere in the State Department’s press guidance did the words Berlin Wall appear, or the phrase tear down, or the name Gorbachev.18
During the following months, State Department officials busied themselves with the task of pursuing the small, practical steps they called Reagan’s Berlin Initiative. By this they meant not tearing down the wall, but the incremental steps concerning Berlin they had originally proposed should be at the heart of Reagan’s speech.
American diplomats dutifully explored with other governments the possibilities for international conferences that could be held on both sides of the Berlin Wall. Could the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), an organization with members in both Western and Eastern Europe, meet at the same time in both West and East Berlin? “Embassy Berlin strongly supports… recommendation to propose Berlin both sides of the Wall for the next CSCE follow-up meeting,” cabled a U.S. diplomat. The Soviets soon threw cold water on this proposal. How about having the Olympics in both sections of Berlin? That idea provided the fodder for diplomatic cables and meetings; it did not take hold either.19
If it had been up to the State Department, Reagan’s exhortation, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” would have been forgotten. But it was not. In the months after Reagan’s visit, the words came up repeatedly in public discussions of Berlin and of the Cold War. On July 3, 1987, on a visit to West Berlin, French prime minister Jacques Chirac irked Soviet and East German officials by supporting what Reagan had said. Chirac deplored the fact that Berlin was divided by an “inhumane, absurd wall.” The wall was “barbaric,” he said, because it was erected to protect an ideology at the expense of freedom and human rights.20
Reagan himself was not inclined to drop the line either. During the following months, whenever the president spoke in public about the Soviet Union, he included a few words about tearing down the Berlin Wall. It became part of Reagan’s repertoire. At a town hall meeting in Los Angeles that August, he said he had asked “that the Soviets join us in alleviating the division of Berlin and begin with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.” In his regular Saturday radio speech three days later, he said that if Soviet officials wanted to improve relations with the United States, “they can get out of Afghanistan, they can tear down the Berlin Wall, they can allow free elections in Europe.”21
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ON HIS OWN
The prolonged struggle over the Berlin speech demonstrated once again the extent to which the Reagan administration’s dealings with Mikhail Gorbachev represented the style and thinking of the president himself.
Reagan was often depicted as the instrument of larger forces and of the more assertive personalities around him. During his early years in the White House, Reagan’s policy toward Moscow was often seen as a reflection of hawks in his administration such as William Casey, his CIA director, or Caspar Weinberger, his defense secretary. During Reagan’s second term, as he proceeded to do business with Gorbachev, he was sometimes depicted as a figure-head for Secretary of State George Shultz, the real architect of America’s extensive diplomacy with Moscow. “It is quite apparent that Shultz has sold his deal to both Reagan and [White House chief of staff Howard] Baker,” Richard Nixon wrote in a note to himself after visiting the White House in the spring of 1987.1
Reagan’s own behavior often contributed to these perceptions. The president rarely became involved in the details of whatever was being debated inside his administration; for weeks he would remain remote or inert in the face of a growing controversy. Yet in the end, it was Reagan himself who set the tone and made the decisions. Shultz managed the details of America’s diplomacy with Moscow, but it was up to Reagan to provide the overall direction and to supply the ideas and rhetoric that would ensure there was support both in Congress and with the American public.
When it came to the Soviet Union, Reagan not infrequently seemed to move in several directions at the same time. He shifted direction with a canny sense of timing. Only nine months earlier, when faced with similarly intense divisions inside his administration about how to respond to the Soviet Union’s jailing of American reporter Nicholas Daniloff, Reagan had sided with Shultz. He had infuriated conservatives by agreeing to negotiations and a package deal for Daniloff’s release, in implicit exchange for the release of a Soviet spy in New York and the freeing of a leading Soviet dissident. This time, with Reagan’s aides divided over Berlin, the president rejected Shultz’s appeals. Instead, he chose to deliver a speech that reaffirmed the core value of political freedom and reminded Gorbachev the United States would not accept the continuing divisions in Europe.