Three Days in Moscow

by Bret Baier

Dolan was enthusiastic about the direction of the speech, but before it was circulated, he told Robinson he had to attend a meeting in the Oval Office. He hoped to get a chance to ask Reagan for input on the speech. At the end of the meeting he managed to pop the question. “Mr. President, it’s still very early but we were just wondering if you had any thoughts at all yet on the Berlin speech.”

  In a piece for the Wall Street Journal titled “Four Little Words,” Dolan described what happened next. “Pausing for only a moment, Reagan slipped into his imitation of impressionist Rich Little doing his imitation of Ronald Reagan—he made the well-known nod of the head, said the equally familiar ‘well,’ and then added in his soft but resonant intonation while lifting his hand and letting it fall: ‘Tear down the wall.’ ”

  Dolan was elated. Back in his office he summoned Robinson. “Can you believe it? He said just what you were thinking. He said it himself.”

  “So, it was the president’s line now,” Dolan wrote.

  Baker, who had been doubtful about the phrase, which he thought might sound unpresidential, gave in when he realized that it had come from Reagan. Baker said:

  Those were Reagan’s words, as it turns out. He did that. Those were what we called yellow pad words. He really worked his yellow pad. Did you ever see a presidential yellow pad? It looks just like a regular yellow pad but it has secret watermarks on it. If you hold it up the right way you can see those identifying marks in there. The reason is obvious. Yellow pads are everywhere and the President was using yellow pads, but we needed to be able to tell—was this, sure enough, Ronald Reagan’s yellow pad? That’s why I called them yellow pad words. If they were written down on Ronald Reagan’s yellow pad, we used them.

  Richard Allen, who had been with Reagan on his first trip to the wall, remembered that when they were in Berlin, Reagan had said to him, “You know, Dick, we’ve got to find a way to knock this thing down.” So when, nine years later, Reagan gave the speech, Allen recognized Reagan’s voice.

  However, it’s an old custom for great presidential speeches to be subject to debates over authorship. Frederick Ryan, a White House aide to Reagan who later became the publisher of the Washington Post, said, “It’s funny; there are probably a hundred people out there who have told me that they’re the ones who wrote ‘tear down this wall.’ ” That’s an exaggeration, but it makes the point. And as Eisenhower speechwriter Malcolm Moos once put it, “When the President of the United States delivers a talk, we’ve got to assume it’s his speech, and we’re carpenters but not architects.”

  As the speech draft began to take shape and make the rounds of the State Department and NSC, the speechwriters encountered fierce resistance. To further complicate matters, Kornblum had sent his own draft of a speech, which was predictably designed to avoid all controversy or direct accusation: “One day, this ugly wall will disappear.” The US Embassy in Bonn thought the speech was far too confrontational. Perhaps the Germans were intimidated by Gorbachev; they feared upsetting him. But the situation was complicated. Many West Germans had come to admire Gorbachev as a man of peace, while Reagan still had the reputation of being a warmonger.

  The NSC’s Peter Rodman, the point man for the speech, challenged the ensuing drafts vigorously. Here we go again, thought Dolan as Rodman returned with yet more changes, trying to tone down the president.

  Rodman enlisted Deputy National Security Advisor Colin Powell (soon to become national security advisor when Frank Carlucci replaced Caspar Weinberger at Defense) in the debate; he, too, took issue with key passages and wrote that he was “uneasy at the negative undertone near the end.” In one late memo to Powell, Rodman wrote, “The Brandenburg gate speech is better than before, but the staff is still unanimous that it’s a mediocre speech and a missed opportunity.”

  Right up to the day of the speech, the NSC and State Department were submitting corrections. Mostly, they wanted Reagan to ditch “the line.” But driving to the Berlin Wall with Duberstein, Reagan was serene. He smiled at Duberstein. “The boys at State are going to kill me,” he said, “but it’s the right thing to do.”

  The diplomatic handwringers had their say, but Reagan’s was the final verdict. Those who cringed at Reagan-being-Reagan didn’t understand the strength of his convictions. He would give the speech he believed in and let the world respond as it would.

  Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, whose base was cruelly blocked from view by the wall, Reagan was deeply affected by the scene. Recalling the debate about where to hold the speech, he could feel in his bones that this was the only location that fit. The podium from which he would speak was set on a dais draped in black, red, and gold bunting, the colors of the West German flag. His aides had told him that East Berliners would be able to hear his speech across the wall, although police in East Berlin did their best to block off the area near the wall and push back the crowds. Learning that the police were pushing people back made Reagan angry enough to speak louder so he could be heard over the barrier that divided them. Painting a vivid picture of the global meaning of the wall, he said:

  Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same—still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state. Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly; here, cutting across your city, where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world. Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.

  In the speech, Reagan returned to an old theme of the decrepit state of communism, and the impossibility of such a vision surviving:

  In the 1950’s Khrushchev predicted: “We will bury you.” But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind—too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.

  Yet there was reason to hope, he said, detailing new signs that the Soviets were becoming more open to freedom. He spoke of some of the advances that were taking place, deeming them small steps toward openness and freedom. But then he delivered the punch line:

  There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

  A thrill shot through the audience when he said those words: perfect, unadorned, righteous. The spectators erupted in loud applause, and Reagan liked to think that there were many silent cheers emanating from the hopeful hearts of those on the other side of the wall. The speech would take its place in history, though few remarked on it at the time. Yet, watching the speech at home in Washington, Robinson might have thought he heard the sound of a trumpet.

  REAGAN WAS NERVOUS. It had been the hardest year of his presidency, weighted down by scandals and staff upheavals. His poll numbers had dipped by more than twenty points, and he was feeling a rare uncertainty about his ability to advance his agenda. It had seemed as though the damnable year would never end. Now, on December 8, he had one more important mission, a third summit with Gorbachev—the one that al
most didn’t happen after the stall in Reykjavík. The one, finally, on American soil.

  As he waited in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, preparing to go outside and greet Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev when they drove up, Reagan was bundled in a coat and scarf and feeling a little bit on edge. Nancy walked in, also in a coat, and went up to him. She was nervous, too, Fitzwater recalled. “I think she was afraid the American people would love Raisa more than they loved Nancy.” She leaned in for a tight hug. “You’ll be great, Ronnie,” she murmured.

  The summit had been difficult to schedule—remember, it had first been proposed at Geneva—and in September 1987 there still had not been an agreement on the date. At one point, the Soviets suggested dates around Thanksgiving, seeming not to appreciate the significance of the holiday or the fact that the Reagans were planning to be at their California ranch. Reagan scrawled an annoyed note in his diary wondering if he’d have to cancel Thanksgiving. A California summit was briefly considered. “She’s already bought the groceries for Thanksgiving,” Powell warned Shultz about Nancy, laughing. “Gorbachev’s going to the ranch whether he wants to or not.” But the meeting was soon cleared for December 8 to 10 in Washington.

  Meanwhile Shultz and Shevardnadze had been shuttling back and forth—Shultz to Moscow in April and October, Shevardnadze to DC in September and October—trying to iron out what they wanted to achieve at the summit. Everyone was looking for a decisive moment, which meant signing the INF Treaty and making enough headway on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) so that a treaty could be signed at the next summit. START was a long game, subject to endless failed negotiations, especially once Reagan had proposed SDI, but if signed it would become the crowning achievement of nuclear disarmament.

  The Washington summit was different from all the others, not only because a treaty would be signed but because it was taking place in Washington, DC. This was not neutral territory; it was a home-field advantage for Reagan, although no one could have guessed how adoring the public response to the Gorbachevs would be.

  In spite of his air of confidence and command, Gorbachev came to Washington during a troubled time in his own administration. As popular as he was in the United States, he was facing intense blowback at home. “We were gradually freeing ourselves of stereotyped thinking and the habit of blaming everything on the ‘imperialist Western states,’ ” he wrote of that period. But the process was understandably controversial. He was constantly put on the defensive about his radical program of perestroika and his penchant for negotiating with old enemies. On one hand, establishment Soviets were urging him to slow down. On the other, radical opponents, such as Boris Yeltsin, were saying he wasn’t moving fast enough. Yeltsin, a blustering, hard-drinking Russian stereotype of a man, was the outspoken populist to Gorbachev’s cautious reformer. The first secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party, who had been brought into the Politburo by Gorbachev, tasked with managing political and economic reforms, Yeltsin had grown increasingly angered by the slow course of change. He believed that Gorbachev had been corrupted by his political associations and was more loyal to the Party than to the people. In a devastating attack on Gorbachev and the system at an October 21, 1987, Central Committee meeting, Yeltsin criticized the “cult of personality” around Gorbachev and the glacial pace of perestroika. Gorbachev thought that ironic, as Yeltsin himself was a master of personality politics in Moscow, where he was frequently seen in photo ops siding with the common man against the powerful state. “He would suddenly appear at a factory, take the manager and lead him to the workers’ cafeteria to give him a public dressing-down, acting as if he were the protector of the people and the manager a monster of cruelty,” Gorbachev wrote. “To the enraptured applause of Muscovites he promised that problems of housing, medical care and services would be resolved in record time.” Those public displays, Gorbachev saw, were mostly for public relations purposes. But Yeltsin’s grandstanding had little effect. As he raged in front of the Central Committee that day, Gorbachev saw the outpourings of a man whose ambitions had outpaced his influence. To the shock of many, Yeltsin concluded with a dramatic announcement of his resignation.

  On November 9, Gorbachev learned that Yeltsin had been found covered in blood and rushed to the hospital. The initial report was that he had attempted suicide. But when doctors examined his wounds, they found them superficial; he had apparently used office scissors to simulate a suicide attempt. Rumors ran wild, fueled in part by Yeltsin, who at one point claimed to have been attacked by a mob on the street and at another point to have accidentally fallen on his scissors. Gorbachev, eager to save face for Yeltsin, quietly appealed to the committee to release him from his duties.

  Now Gorbachev was headed for Washington for what he hoped would be a signature achievement: the signing of the INF Treaty. Reagan had to deal with his own share of opposition to the treaty. Conservatives in Congress called him an appeaser and warned that the agreement would put the United States at a disadvantage. “President Reagan is little more than the speech reader-in-chief for the pro-appeasement triumvirate of Howard H. Baker Jr., George P. Shultz and Frank C. Carlucci,” steamed Howard Phillips, the chairman of the Conservative Caucus, in a New York Times op-ed. In the Los Angeles Times he was quoted as calling the president “a useful idiot.”

  But Shultz believed that Reagan still had the upper hand, and he told him so. “Gorbachev comes to Washington to address an agenda you have defined, against a background of American strength and consistency you have created,” he wrote in a memo to the president before the summit. “As such, his visit reflects a qualitative change in the nature of the U.S.-Soviet relationship you inherited in 1981.” Not only would the INF Treaty be signed, but Shultz was confident they would lay the groundwork for a broader START treaty the following year.

  Meanwhile, Fitzwater, busy managing the press for the major event, had initiated a collaboration that was something of a breakthrough. Imagining the embarrassing specter of Gennadi Gerasimov, Gorbachev’s press secretary, holding competing press conferences across town, he came up with an interesting idea: to ask Gerasimov if he would be willing to do joint briefings, starting with one the day before the summit. Gerasimov agreed. That afternoon, reporters packed into a hall at the Marriott, where they were treated to a good-natured back-and-forth by the two press secretaries. Fitzwater had expected the idea to be a hit with the media, and he was right. He also had a sense of humor about it. “I knew Gennadi Gerasimov had been with Gorbachev for a while and he spoke great English and he was really bright and good-looking. I remember after the series of briefings Time magazine said, ‘Who would have guessed that the Soviet spokesman would look like Cary Grant and the American spokesman look like Nikita Khrushchev?’ ”

  As the Russian limo carrying the Gorbachevs pulled up at the south entrance of the White House, the Reagans walked briskly to the car to greet them. Everyone was smiling, but the smiles between Reagan and Gorbachev seemed friendlier than in the past—more intimate.

  “I have often felt that our people should have been better friends long ago,” Reagan said as they stood together for a twenty-one-gun salute by the military honor guards. Gorbachev nodded in agreement.

  Once inside, the two men met privately in the Oval Office. Reagan began by giving Gorbachev a gift, a pair of cuff links with the symbol from Isaiah 2:4 referencing the phrase “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” Gorbachev smiled with appreciation. It was an appropriate symbol, he told Reagan, given the treaty that they hoped to sign later that day.

  Then the president once again took the opportunity of a private moment to press the issue of human rights. He gave Gorbachev a card containing the names of Soviet citizens who were petitioning to be granted exit visas. It was a personal request, he stressed.

  Gorbachev agreed that human rights was a high priority for the Soviet government—in itself a remarkable admission—but said that the m
atter of exit visas was complicated. He denied Reagan’s assertion that more than half a million Jews wanted to leave the Soviet Union, and returned to a favorite theme: a repetition of America’s own human rights ills, including incidences of anti-Semitism. They sparred back and forth.

  Reagan and Gorbachev had different ideas about the importance of human rights. Gorbachev saw it as a side issue, while Reagan thought it was just as important as everything else they were discussing. Days earlier, in a speech before human rights groups, he had placed human rights improvement on a par with arms reduction. He had said, however, that a window was opening, if only a crack. Not that long before, the Soviets had refused to discuss human rights, calling them an internal affair. But now the matter was being openly discussed.

  That was Reagan’s way when addressing communism: he always dug deeper, considering the true nature of the chasm between the two systems. Arms control was essential, he believed, but he also thought that such a change meant little if people were not free to live and worship as they chose.

  Gorbachev finally said he was open to discussing the matter—but not that day. He did, however, invite Reagan to visit his country in June 1988 for what would be their fourth summit. The Millennium of Christianity in Russia would be celebrated then, he said, and Reagan could visit churches and see for himself.

  Overall, their mood was both self-congratulatory and reflective. They had traveled far, Gorbachev remarked, and the journey had often been difficult. But they were reaching a more profound level in their dialogue, a greater trust and understanding. Reagan mused that were they to encounter a threat from another planet, their differences would disappear and they would be united as human beings.

  Unlike other summits, the centerpiece of this one, signing the INF Treaty, happened on the first day. That afternoon, in an East Room ceremony carried live on TV, Reagan and Gorbachev signed Russian and English versions of the treaty, which would completely eliminate intermediate-range missiles—859 for the United States and 1,752 for the Soviet Union. Key members of the administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the congressional leadership, and Soviet officials witnessed the signing.