His answer was broadcast on East and West German television stations and elsewhere around the world. He left the impression that there would be no more restrictions on passage through the Berlin Wall from that moment forward. Immediately, huge crowds of East Berliners rushed to the checkpoints at the Berlin Wall. In the vacuum of leadership, the border guards didn’t know their instructions and, for hours, were unable to get any guidance. Gradually, they let more and more East Germans pass through. At first, the border guards stamped each person’s identity papers; within a short time, they stopped doing even that. Their confusion and the East German government’s indecision were decisive. After twenty-eight years, the Berlin Wall was open.
Krenz didn’t know what to do. He did not want to resort to force; he had issued an order a few days earlier instructing border guards not to use weapons against demonstrators. “I tried to call Gorbachev that same evening, but I couldn’t get through,” said Krenz in an interview for this book. The following day, a distraught Vyacheslav Kochemasov, the Soviet ambassador in East Berlin, called Krenz, demanding to know what he had done and why. The Soviet Union had always taken the position that East Germany was not the ultimate legal authority over the borders between East and West Berlin because the city was still under the four-power agreement of the Soviets, Americans, British, and French. Krenz told the Soviet ambassador that once the outflow started, he had decided not to do anything that could jeopardize human life. Kochemasov asked him to write a telegram to Gorbachev immediately explaining what had happened. Krenz did. Two hours later Kochemasov called back. “Comrade Egon” he declared, “in the name of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, I would like to congratulate you on the courageous step you have taken.”11
Once again, Gorbachev’s role had proved decisive to the outcome. The Soviet Union might have intervened. It didn’t. Gorbachev had paved the way for the epochal change, first by setting the Soviet Union’s overall foreign policy on a new course, then by accepting the far-reaching political changes in Poland and Hungary, and finally, in the most dramatic flourish of all, by allowing the Berlin Wall to be torn down.
There are indications that Gorbachev did not foresee the implications of what he was doing. He believed that permitting East Germans to leave the country would help to reestablish a new equilibrium in which the two German governments would continue to coexist in some fashion or another. On November 17, a delegation of French and West German legislators visited Moscow, the first European officials to talk with Gorbachev after the fall of the wall. Walter Ischinger, the West German diplomat accompanying the delegation, was astonished to find the Soviet leader unperturbed. He sought to minimize the significance of what had happened.
The legislators asked Gorbachev about the long lines of East German cars at the borders seeking to cross into West Germany. “I’m not worried about this. This is normal,” Gorbachev told them. “You see, the East German government made some dumb decisions that led to the fact that the situation in East Germany was like a pressure cooker. They didn’t let people travel. And now we’ve taken the lid off the pressure cooker. You can be assured that by next week or in a couple of weeks, they’ll all be back and life will go on.”12
Life did not go on, at least not in the way Gorbachev meant. The consequences of the events of November of 1989 proved impossible to contain. Within hours after the Berlin Wall came down, even Willy Brandt, the former West German chancellor who had led the way in improving relations with Eastern Europe, talked vaguely about East and West Germans’ joining together. Within weeks, Kohl made a formal proposal to accomplish that goal; and within a year, the two Germanies were reunited. Within two years of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev’s own Communist Party collapsed too, and with it the empire the Soviet Union had constructed.
The Cold War was over. For years, many of America’s political leaders and most established foreign-policy experts, such as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, had spoken of the conflict between the two superpowers as an enduring stalemate. Ronald Reagan, by contrast, had grasped the possibility that the Cold War might come to an end. On this, it turned out that Reagan was right. He had not “won” the Cold War in the fashion that American conservatives later claimed. Rather Gorbachev had abandoned the field. Yet Reagan had supported Gorbachev at just the right time. He had undercut the Soviet perceptions of the United States as an enemy, thereby helping to give Gorbachev the recognition and breathing room that he needed to proceed with domestic reforms that proved to be irreversible. Whereas Nixon had repeatedly depicted Gorbachev as yet another tough Soviet leader, a man of steel eager to reassert Soviet power, Reagan had come to a more accurate reading.
Reagan’s successors eventually came around to his view of Gorbachev’s significance. After an initial “pause” of more than six months, President George H. W. Bush and his senior advisers, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, decided to proceed toward their own summitry with Gorbachev. Bush announced at the end of October that he would meet soon with the Soviet leader in Malta. Ten days later, before the two leaders met, East Germans began rushing through the Berlin Wall. Bush was guarded in his public comments, unable to summon forth the rhetoric Reagan might have used and unwilling to say anything that might embarrass Gorbachev. “I’m not going to dance on the wall,” Bush quipped. Scowcroft told reporters East Germany would probably remain a separate state within the Soviet sphere of influence.13
Within two years, Bush’s Soviet policy was tied as closely to Gorbachev as Reagan’s had been, even though Gorbachev was losing support at home. “They complain that we put too much emphasis on Gorbachev, but we’re getting good deals from him all over the world,” remarked Baker in the summer of 1991.14 Gorbachev and his Communist Party fell from power following a failed coup attempt in August. But before the tumult, on July 31, Bush and Gorbachev signed a new treaty to cut back on long-range ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons—a step toward the goal Reagan and Gorbachev had pursued at Reykjavik of reducing or eliminating nuclear weapons.
As the Soviet empire began to crumble, Richard Nixon did another about-face. During the late 1980s, Nixon had aligned himself with the right-wing criticisms of Reagan’s Soviet policy; he had repeatedly suggested that Reagan was too enamored of Gorbachev and too willing to reduce America’s nuclear arsenal. By the early 1990s, however, Nixon repositioned himself on the political left, this time urging more conciliatory policies toward Moscow and greater support for democracy in Russia.
In particular, Nixon criticized the George H. W. Bush administration for not providing greater economic aid to Russia. In early 1992, soon after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Nixon denounced the Bush administration’s “pathetically” insufficient economic support for the new government of Boris Yeltsin. “The stakes are high, and we are playing as if it were a penny-ante game,” Nixon wrote in a memo that was leaked to the New York Times. Nixon’s words put the Bush administration on the defensive; officials rushed to defend the administration against the charge that it might somehow be “losing” Russia by not providing enough money.
Watching from retirement in California, George Shultz was astonished. Nixon’s recommendation caused a lot of damage, Shultz believed, because it helped foster in Russia the notion that the route to economic prosperity was through aid from abroad. Above all, Shultz wondered what had happened to Nixon, whom Shultz had come to view during the Reagan years as a hawk. “He flipped from over here to over here,” Shultz said, gesturing with his hands to show the move from one end of the political spectrum to the other.15 One explanation for Nixon’s behavior may have been supplied by the New York Times story itself. Its account of Nixon’s memo said that this was “the latest of many public policy pronouncements that have helped to refurbish the image of the former President, who resigned in disgrace in 1974 over the Watergate scandal.”16