At the State Department, those who had been part of the Reagan-Shultz diplomacy with Gorbachev were shunted aside. The incoming secretary of state, James Baker, brought in his own small network of aides; the new team was openly disdainful of those who had been involved in the summits or the negotiations of the previous four years. “Jim Baker called me in about a week after he was named secretary of state,” recalled Rozanne Ridgway, who had been in charge of European policy under Shultz. “He said, ‘Tell me, Roz, don’t you think that you all went too fast?’ I said, ‘No, sir.’”7
The Nixon-Kissinger foreign-policy network reasserted itself. Reagan and Shultz were on the way out, and so, too, were the approaches they had embraced: the emphases on economics, ideas, and rhetoric as key components of American policy toward the Soviet Union. American strategy was to be redirected toward the more traditional issues of geopolitics and the balance of power.
Henry Kissinger quickly sought to place himself at the center of American policy once again. In December 1988, a month before the start of the new administration, Kissinger visited the White House to talk with the president-elect, Scowcroft, and Baker in Bush’s vice presidential office. He argued that they should allow him try to open up a secret channel to Gorbachev on behalf of the new administration. In particular, Kissinger was interested in arranging a quiet deal or understanding with Gorbachev about the future of Eastern Europe. The Soviet leader would be asked to agree that the Soviet Union would not intervene with force in Eastern Europe to stop political reforms or liberalization. In exchange, the Bush administration would recognize Soviet security interests in Eastern Europe and agree not to try to entice countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia away from their Warsaw Pact alliance with the Soviets.8
Kissinger’s idea seemed to assume that Gorbachev’s U.N. speech was not to be taken seriously. In it, Gorbachev had already renounced the idea of military intervention. State Department officials in charge of Europe and Soviet policy thought Kissinger’s idea was a lousy one. “We thought, ‘Don’t talk to the Soviets about Eastern Europe, period,’” recalled Thomas Simons. Developments in Eastern Europe were moving in the right direction anyway, and the United States should not “buy what it can get for free,” Simons argued. He and others at the State Department dubbed Kissinger’s idea “Yalta-2”—a biting reference to the Yalta conference of 1945 that had paved the way for the division of Europe after World War II.9
On January 19, 1989, Reagan’s last full day as president, East German leader Erich Honecker offered a defiant prediction aimed above all at Reagan and his outgoing administration. He said that the Berlin Wall “will still exist in 50 and even 100 years.”10
The previous day, Shultz, attending a conference in Vienna on his last trip to Europe as secretary of state, had called once again for the Berlin Wall to be torn down, echoing Reagan’s frequent refrain. British foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe had joined in by branding the wall a “grisly anachronism.” From East Berlin, Honecker retorted with his usual defenses of the wall, which as usual he called the “anti-fascist protective barrier.” The wall was necessary to safeguard East Germany and to preserve peace and stability, he said. It protected East Germans from “the machinations of the West’s society of drugs” and from being “plundered” by the currency exchange rates of one West German mark for every seven East German marks. “The Wall will remain for as long as the reasons for its presence have not been eliminated,” Honecker concluded.
East Germany’s situation was becoming increasingly bleak. In 1988, approximately 9,700 East Germans had fled, more than in any year since 1961, when the wall was built. “We saw that people were leaving the country. They felt that East Germany had no future,” recalled Lothar de Maizière, the East German lawyer who in 1990 served as his country’s final prime minister before reunification. “At that time, I was active in the Protestant Church. We were trying to keep people here, telling them that they could help to bring about change. But people didn’t believe it.”11
Honecker, as the East German official in charge of security, had supervised construction of the wall; a decade later, he had become general secretary of the East German Communist Party. In early 1989, at the age of seventy-six, he spoke in the same style, with the same stilted language and about the same central-planning targets as in the past. The highlight of his New Year’s Day speech to East German citizens had been the pledge that “212,200 apartments will be either newly built or modernized in 1989.” He did not mention the problem that even if the numerical goal was met, the apartments would be as ugly and lifeless as all the others.
In the same New Year’s speech, Honecker boasted as usual of “the unshakeable friendship and firm solidarity” between the leaders of East Germany and the Soviet Union. “We will continue to raise the level of our fraternal relations, which are exemplary in intensity and diversity,” Honecker said.12 Yet in the wake of Gorbachev’s speech to the United Nations, the signs of change were unmistakable. In January 1989, Hungary announced that a Soviet tank division would leave the country within six months and several other units by the end of the year. A few days later, Poland disclosed that some of the Soviet units on its soil would soon leave. Honecker himself, seeking to show that he was conforming to the spirit of Gorbachev’s speech, said East Germany would scale back its armed forces by ten thousand troops, a modest reduction.13
These troop cutbacks in Eastern Europe were important for their own sake, but they also further undermined Honecker’s public justifications for the Berlin Wall. For decades, one primary reason advanced for the wall had been to preserve the peace and to protect East Germany from an aggressive NATO alliance. The troop reductions throughout Eastern Europe in 1989 reflected—indeed, were based upon—the idea that the military threat from the West had lessened.
Still, Honecker remained confident that any changes in the existing order would be relatively minor. He was hardly alone in that belief. In 1989, during a visit to Munich, John McLaughlin, an American intelligence official who later rose to the top of the CIA, asked the head of West Germany’s intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), about the prospects for German reunification. “Not in my lifetime,” replied the official.14
As it turned out, Honecker would have been wrong about the Berlin Wall even if he had predicted that it would last for only one more year.
Ronald Reagan had believed that his last day on the job would be January 19. His advisers felt compelled to remind him that he would still be president until noon on Inauguration Day and would need to demonstrate that fact. “Symbolically, Mr. President, you need to come to the office on the morning of the 20th,” White House chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein told the president. Reagan agreed. Duberstein authorized White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater to make public the fact that Reagan would be at work on the morning of Inauguration Day. That turned out to be a mistake. Throughout the night of January 19 and into the early-morning hours of January 20, Duberstein and other White House officials were besieged with phone calls seeking last-minute favors from Reagan. In particular, members of Congress argued repeatedly that it was not too late for Reagan to pardon Oliver North, who had been indicted and was awaiting trial for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. This campaign failed.15
Reagan, often detached from the daily business of the presidency, had become ever more so since Election Day. Two weeks after the election, he had flown to California to buy a house in Bel Air and to take part in the groundbreaking for his presidential library in Simi Valley. Back in Washington, he had begun to pack up his papers. On December 6, the White House physician brought to the Oval Office a doctor who had set up a team in Los Angeles to take care of Reagan’s medical needs after he left the White House. In an apparent coincidence, Reagan’s diary shows that immediately afterward, he met with representatives of the Alzheimer’s Association, who gave him a plaque for his support.16