Not only Shultz but many other foreign-policy officials had opposed the idea of having the president call upon Gorbachev to demolish the Berlin Wall. Soviet specialists at the State Department and the National Security Council had sought repeatedly to rewrite the speech. Colin Powell, the deputy national security adviser, coordinated and supported the bureaucratic opposition. Reagan’s White House chief of staff, Howard Baker, was also dubious.
The issue raised by Shultz and others was quite simple: What would be the impact in Moscow of the words “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”? Would Gorbachev be so irritated that he would give up trying to deal with Reagan and lose interest in conciliatory policies toward the United States? Might the speech strengthen the hand of those who were seeking to limit the extent of his reforms? In short, was Gorbachev sufficiently eager to forge new ties with the United States and sufficiently secure in his leadership to be able to withstand Reagan’s rhetoric?
In rejecting the State Department’s warnings, Reagan was making his own judgment about Gorbachev. He was betting on the Soviet leader. This was based, at least partially, on Reagan’s own perceptions. He had met Gorbachev twice at the summits in Geneva and in Reykjavik and had corresponded with him before and after those meetings. He had obtained a sense of how desperately Gorbachev wanted new agreements to ease the international climate and to limit Soviet military spending.
The dramatic exhortation to “tear down this wall” was in some ways a public-relations gimmick. Thomas Griscom, the White House communications director, acknowledged that he liked and approved the phrase because it was a perfect sound bite, one that helped get the president on television news shows in the United States. By itself, there was nothing new in Reagan’s declaration that the Berlin Wall should come down. Reagan had said so before, and so had other American officials. True, the site of the speech—in front of the Brandenburg Gate—was novel, but that only underscored that this was a speech intended more for television than for international diplomacy.
The new element in the substance of Reagan’s Berlin speech was not that the wall should come down, but that Gorbachev himself should take it down. This served a number of purposes. Reagan’s words called attention to the fact that the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe still depended on the Soviet Union; Honecker, who had personally overseen the construction of the wall, would never have had his job without Moscow. Even more significant, the speech set out a standard by which Gorbachev should be judged: Would his reforms be limited in scope, or would they change the existing order in Europe? The speech reaffirmed Reagan’s long-standing view that the ideological differences between the United States and the Soviet Union remained of fundamental importance. Finally, the speech buttressed Reagan’s public and congressional support inside the United States as he was preparing for further diplomacy with Gorbachev. He was protecting his political flanks, particularly on the right.
Reagan never gave voice to such calculations, of course. He didn’t talk about underlying strategy or tactics. The world saw only the simple façade: catching Reagan in some Machiavellian maneuver would have been akin to catching him dyeing his hair. As far as anyone could tell, he was an unreflective person, one who viewed events in simple terms. Indeed, it may well be that Reagan based his decisions largely on instinct. He may never have explained even to himself the considerations that lay behind changes in policy, his reasons for sometimes standing on principle and then at other times setting those principles aside in favor of diplomacy or negotiation.
The Berlin speech had been largely the product of Reagan’s speechwriters. The president no longer drafted his own speeches. Yet Reagan talked to the writers, offered them ideas, and chose when and how to defend their work in the face of objections from elsewhere in his administration. Within days after Reagan returned from Berlin, he sent word to Anthony Dolan, the chief White House speechwriter, saying how much he had liked the Berlin Wall speech. The archives show that Dolan sent a gracious reply dated June 15, 1987, which said: “In view of all you told us about what you wanted in Berlin—including the outline and the killer lines you gave us—it was particularly generous of you.”2
In Berlin, Reagan had set forth what he had long believed about the Soviet Union. He had acknowledged the possibility that Gorbachev might represent a change, but had also voiced skepticism about how far Gorbachev would be willing to go. Having delivered his Berlin speech, Reagan was now in position for his final eighteen months of diplomacy with Gorbachev.
PART IV
SUMMITS
-1-
“QUIT PRESSING”
Ronald Reagan had a favorite line to explain why he did not go to summit meetings with Soviet leaders during his first term. “They keep dying on me,” he said.1 That was literally true; Reagan was obliged to deal with four Soviet leaders during his first fifty months in the White House. But as usual, Reagan’s quip was not the full story.
Reagan had written out by hand a letter to Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev in April 1981, during the period when he was recovering from the attempt by John W. Hinckley, Jr., to assassinate him. The president had also sent letters to Brezhnev’s two successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. However, none of this correspondence included any proposal for a meeting. Throughout Reagan’s first years in office, he had concentrated on rapidly increasing the U.S. arsenal of planes, warships, and other weaponry. In 1983, he asked his National Security Council for a detailed memo exploring the costs and benefits of a summit with Andropov, but many within his administration opposed such a meeting unless the Soviet Union would give something tangible in advance in exchange. Before the dispute could be resolved, the furor over the Soviet shooting of the Korean Airlines plane and Andropov’s own illness scuttled any possibility of a summit.2
At the beginning of 1984, the lack of summitry became a political issue after Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale pointed out that Reagan might leave office as the first American president since Herbert Hoover to have failed to sit down with the leader of the Soviet Union. Reagan began thinking about the possibility of an election-year summit, seeking advice from everyone from Secretary of State George Shultz to his newly enlisted outside adviser, Suzanne Massie. “She reinforced my gut feeling that it’s time for me to personally meet with Chernenko,” Reagan recorded in his diary after talking with Massie.3
Instead of a summit, however, Reagan deflected Mondale’s attacks in other ways. His speeches about the Soviet Union took on a more conciliatory tone. Reagan talked with Chinese leaders in Beijing. He met in Washington with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. Even if Reagan had been willing to extend a summit invitation, the Soviets were in no mood to respond; they did not want to help him win a second term. Soviet leaders “would have liked to offer rhetorical assistance to the campaign of the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale—not because they knew him, but because they preferred anybody to Reagan,” Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, recalled.4
Toward the end of the 1984 campaign, the Soviets recognized Reagan’s political strength and shifted ground. That fall, a Soviet official approached Thomas Simons, one of the State Department officials responsible for Soviet affairs, and suggested that Moscow could help the president win reelection. But it was too late. “The president doesn’t need your help,” Simons replied. I know, said the Soviet official regretfully.5