Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Baker and Regan met with Deaver personally. The three had lunch at Baker’s house, away from the prying eyes of the media and their own staffs. Regan launched into an explanation and justification of the switch before realizing that Deaver had already made up his mind—after consulting Nancy. “In my innocence the thought that Deaver had cleared the plan with the First Lady before discussing it with me, or even with the president, did not occur to me,” Regan recalled. Nancy accepted the idea, and so did Deaver. To Baker and Regan, Deaver observed that the beginning of the second term was the logical time for a change. He added that Regan had been loyal to the president and wasn’t known for any personal agenda that would raise political problems. “This would be your terminal job, Don,” Deaver said, tacitly inviting Regan, who was about to turn sixty-six, to correct him. Regan did not.

  The three decided to wait until after the Reagans took their Christmas vacation at the ranch in California to approach the president. But early in the new year they met with Reagan in the Oval Office. Deaver smiled and said, “Mr. President, I’ve brought you someone your own age to play with.”

  Reagan smiled quizzically.

  “Don has something he wants to discuss with you that he’s talked to Jim and me about,” Deaver said. “We think it’s very interesting and we’d like to know what you think about it.”

  Regan made his pitch. “Reagan listened without any sign of surprise,” Regan recalled. “He seemed equable, relaxed—almost incurious. This seemed odd under the circumstances. The change I was describing was significant in itself, but it was only the latest in a series of changes that involved the president’s closest aides.” Deaver was leaving, and Ed Meese was slated to be the next attorney general. Now Baker, the third member of the White House troika, would be going to Treasury, replaced by Regan, whom Reagan knew but not well. “In the president’s place I would have put many questions to the applicant,” Regan observed. “How will you be different from Jim Baker? How will you handle Congress? What do you know about defense and foreign affairs? Who will you bring with you and who will you get rid of? What practices will you want to change? How will you handle the press? Why do you want this job?” But the president did nothing of the kind. “Reagan made no inquiries. I did not know what to make of his passivity.”

  Regan suggested that he might want time to think the matter over.

  Reagan asked Regan to say a bit more. Regan did so, still uninterrupted by questions. “Reagan nodded affably,” Regan recounted. “He looked at Baker and Deaver as if to check the expressions on their faces, but asked them no questions either.” When Regan finished, the president said, “Yes, I’ll go for it.”

  Regan couldn’t get over the apparent lack of reflection in the president regarding such a major personnel change. “The president’s easy acceptance of this wholly novel idea of switching his chief of staff and his secretary of the Treasury, and of the consequent changes in his own daily life and in his administration, surprised me,” Regan wrote. “He seemed to be absorbing a fait accompli rather than making a decision. One might have thought that the matter had already been settled by some absent party.”

  Regan again urged the president to think it over. Again Reagan waved him off. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t just go ahead with it,” he said.

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  THE WORLD SOON learned that the president’s chief of staff and Treasury secretary were switching jobs. And it discovered not much later that Don Regan was no Jim Baker as chief of staff. Baker relaxed in his new life at Treasury, where important decisions didn’t have to be made every day and where, when such decisions were made, they often escaped the intense scrutiny the media focused on the White House. Regan, moving in the opposite direction, quickly appreciated why Baker had seemed so worn. A chief of staff had to juggle a dozen balls simultaneously, and despite the efforts of Baker to brief him on what was in the air, some of the balls inevitably slipped through Regan’s inexperienced fingers.

  The fumble that first got the world’s attention had its roots in a meeting between Reagan and West German chancellor Helmut Kohl in November 1984. Kohl traveled to Washington to discuss alliance matters and to lay the groundwork for a meeting of the G7 in Bonn the following May. Kohl confessed that he and other Germans had been offended by their country’s exclusion from the fortieth-anniversary commemorations of the D-Day landings, and he shared that a subsequent bury-the-hatchet meeting between himself and François Mitterrand of France at the World War I battlefield at Verdun had yielded good feeling between their two countries and for the Western alliance in general. The chancellor hoped President Reagan would join him in a similar ceremony, perhaps at a wartime cemetery, on his visit to Germany. Kohl was fully aware of Jewish sensitivities toward anything that looked like a forgetting of the Holocaust; he suggested that Reagan balance a cemetery visit with a commemoration at Dachau or another concentration camp.

  Reagan accepted Kohl’s invitation in principle and turned the matter over to the State Department and the White House staff to arrange the details. The State Department went to work on the briefing papers and other materials that would inform the substance of the president’s German tour; the White House staff took responsibility for the theatrics.

  Unluckily, the White House staff was in the middle of the transition from Baker to Regan, and some details didn’t get the attention they deserved. In February 1985, Mike Deaver led an advance team to Germany to examine the sites the president would visit. By this time Kohl’s people had specified a military cemetery in Bitburg, in the chancellor’s home state and in a region of West Germany where a crucial election was about to be held. Deaver and the others visited the small cemetery, which looked inoffensive beneath a covering of snow. One of Deaver’s assistants later claimed to have asked whether any members of the notorious Nazi SS were buried there and been told that there were not. But neither Deaver nor his assistants brushed the snow off the gravestones to see for themselves.

  Meanwhile, it was the possibility of a presidential visit to Dachau that provoked the first objections. The German press suggested that Dachau had been Reagan’s idea; the White House denied the report. George Shultz told Reagan that a Dachau visit would be symbolically important, but Reagan thought the symbolism would be counterproductive. He wanted to look forward rather than back.

  The president was asked about this in a news conference, and he responded that America and Germany needed to move on. “I feel very strongly that this time in commemorating the end of that great war, that instead of reawakening the memories and so forth and the passions of the time, that maybe we should observe this day as the day when, forty years ago, peace began, and friendship. Because we now find ourselves allies and friends of the countries that we once fought against. And that it be almost a celebration of the end of an era and the coming into what has now been some forty years of peace for us. And I felt that since the German people—and very few alive that remember even the war, and certainly none of them who were adults and participating in any way—and they have a feeling, and a guilt feeling that’s been imposed upon them, and I just think it’s unnecessary. I think they should be recognized for the democracy that they’ve created and the democratic principles they now espouse.”

  Reagan’s words evoked a passionate response. “President Reagan apparently believes that all Germans alive today are under 60 years old,” Menachem Rosensaft of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors wrote in the New York Times. “It would seem that a brief history lesson is in order. In 1943, when my parents arrived at Auschwitz, they were in their early 30s. Most of the German guards and doctors who tortured them and sent their families to the gas chambers were their age or younger. Similarly, many of the killers of Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and all the other death camps were in their 20s and 30s when they participated in the annihilation of six million European Jews.” Few of these personnel, being guards and other noncombatants, died in battle, and only a small number were ex
ecuted after the war for their crimes. “Thus, many of them are today in their 60s and 70s, still alive and well and living in Germany.” Rosensaft thought Reagan, of all presidents, should be aware of how long people lived. Josef Mengele, the monstrous chief doctor at Auschwitz, was seventy-four years old, the same age as Reagan. “Somehow I think Mengele remembers the Third Reich,” Rosensaft said. The president had traveled to Normandy to honor the soldiers who died there; he regularly paid tribute to America’s war dead. But now he wouldn’t take time to remember the Holocaust. “He has made it clear that for him, the dead of Dachau, symbolic of the dead of all the Nazi concentration camps, are less worthy of respect than the fallen soldiers of Normandy or the G.I.s who lie buried in Arlington National Cemetery,” Rosensaft said. “In essence, he is telling the world that he cares more about German sensibilities than about the memory of Hitler’s victims. As a son of Holocaust survivors, I am angry. As an American, I am ashamed.”

  Reagan’s problems multiplied when the White House announced that the president would be visiting the military cemetery at Bitburg. He would lay a wreath “in a spirit of reconciliation, in a spirit of forty years of peace, in a spirit of economic and military compatibility,” Larry Speakes explained. The announcement provoked new outcry from Jewish groups and protests from American veterans. Hundreds of members of Congress petitioned the president to reconsider.

  Reagan dug in his heels instead. “All it would do is leave me looking as if I caved in in the face of some unfavorable attention,” he told a gathering of editors and broadcasters. “I think that there’s nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery, where those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into ser vice to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”

  The parallel Reagan seemed to be drawing between the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the Nazi troops struck many in America as bizarrely ahistorical. “To equate the fate of members of the German army bent on world conquest with that of six million Jewish civilians, including one million innocent children, is a distortion of history, a perversion of language and a callous offense to the Jewish community,” Rabbi Alexander Schindler of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations asserted. “The president has made a terrible statement that brings shame to the American people. It insults not only Jews and others who suffered and perished in the camps, but every American and Allied soldier who gave his life to liberate Europe from the Nazi death grip.”

  By this time reporters had visited the Bitburg cemetery and discovered that the dead buried there included members of the Waffen SS, the military wing of Hitler’s elite guard. The discovery raised the controversy to a new level, for even forty years after the war the mere mention of the SS sent shudders through those who had suffered under Nazi rule. Further investigation linked the Bitburg dead to one of the worst single atrocities committed by an SS army division during the war: the massacre of more than six hundred civilian residents of a French village in 1944.

  The administration tried to mitigate the damage by inviting Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to the White House, where he received a medal for his work on behalf of human rights. Wiesel thanked the president and America for defeating the Nazis and liberating the death camps. “But, Mr. President,” he continued, “I wouldn’t be the person I am, and you wouldn’t respect me for what I am, if I were not to tell you also of the sadness that is in my heart for what happened during the last week. And I am sure that you, too, are sad for the same reasons. What can I do? I belong to a traumatized generation. And to us, as to you, symbols are important.” The symbolism of the president’s visit to Bitburg was tragically misguided. Wiesel credited Reagan’s claim that he hadn’t known about the SS graves when he accepted Kohl’s invitation to visit the cemetery. “Of course, you didn’t know. But now we all are aware. May I, Mr. President, if it’s possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find a way, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

  THE WASHINGTON MEDIA corps was willing to blame Don Regan for the public relations disaster the Bitburg affair had become. Pundit after opiner whispered or shouted that Jim Baker would never have allowed such a debacle had he still been chief of staff. Regan resented the charges. “The commitment in question was already on the president’s calendar when I arrived at the White House,” he recalled. Regan blamed Mike Deaver for not keeping on top of the planning and especially for not checking the roster of the Bitburg dead more carefully. “How the hell did that happen?” he demanded of Deaver when the story of the SS graves broke. Washington insiders knew Deaver had a drinking problem, which he admitted after he left the White House and was charged with perjury in an investigation of lobbying activities. Deaver’s alcoholism didn’t prevent the jury from convicting him (though it might have helped mitigate his sentence), but it lent retrospective credence to the rumors at the time of the Bitburg affair that his resort to the bottle had impaired his performance as deputy chief of staff. Regan reiterated the rumors in pointing the finger at Deaver for the SS oversight. “It was said that he was drinking a quart of Scotch whisky a day and masking his breath with mints while he went about his duties in the White House,” Regan wrote. Regan added that he himself hadn’t been able to recognize Deaver’s impairment because Deaver had disguised it so well. “I never saw the slightest sign in Deaver’s behavior that he was drinking to excess; in fact I was then under the impression that he was a teetotaler.”

  Some in Washington blamed Helmut Kohl for snookering the president. Kohl’s constituents included World War II veterans who resented the abasement forced upon Germany by international opinion as a result of the Holocaust. By no means did all of them long for the days of the Third Reich, but more than a few felt that their entire generation was wrongly blamed for the war crimes of the worst among them. A visit by Reagan to a military cemetery, arranged by Kohl, would reassure these voters that the chancellor sympathized with them.

  However Bitburg landed on Reagan’s schedule, the decision to go ahead with the visit in the face of the public criticism was the president’s alone. Reagan characteristically blamed the media for making too much of missteps by his administration. “The press had a field day assailing me because I’d accepted Helmut Kohl’s invitation,” he wrote in his diary as the controversy was just beginning. “Helmut had in mind observing the end-of-WWII anniversary as the end of hatred and the beginning of friendship and peace that has lasted forty years.” The media had inflamed the understandable sensitivities of well-meaning people. “I have repeatedly said we must never forget the Holocaust and remember it so it will never happen again. But some of our Jewish friends are now on the warpath.” Yet they wouldn’t change his mind. “There is no way I’ll back down and run for cover.” It would send a very bad signal to the world, besides being unjustified. “Yes, the German soldiers were the enemy and part of the whole Nazi hate era,” Reagan wrote. “But we won and we killed those soldiers. What is wrong with saying ‘let’s never be enemies again’? Would Helmut be wrong if he visited Arlington Cemetery on one of his U.S. visits?”

  Reagan’s determination didn’t prevent him from trying to soften the impact of his cemetery visit. Kohl repeated his invitation to Reagan to visit a concentration camp; Reagan this time accepted. “Helmut may very well have solved our problem,” he noted. He sent Deaver to Germany to finalize the plans, with special instructions to make sure no new problems arose.

  The furor persisted, however. “The press has the bit in their teeth and are stirring up as much trouble as they can,” Reagan wrote. He took pains to publicize that he would visit a concentration camp as well as the military cemetery. “By nightfall the TV press was distorting that statement,” he muttered.

  Deaver arrived back from Germany and explained that the visit to a camp was firmly on the schedule. But Bergen-Belsen suite
d Kohl better than Dachau, and he had seen no reason to insist on the latter. Kohl himself called Reagan to confirm the new schedule and to thank the president for his steadfastness. The chancellor was “quite emotional,” Don Regan wrote in his notes of the call. Reagan appreciated the message and the emotion. “He told me my remarks about the dead soldiers being the victims of Nazism as the Jews in the Holocaust were had been well received in Germany,” Reagan commented to himself. “He was emphatic that to cancel the cemetery now would be a disaster in his country and an insult to the German people. I told him I would not cancel.”

  Reagan received encouragement from closer to home as well. “I was very proud of your stand,” George Bush wrote to him. “If I can help absorb some heat, send me into battle. It’s not easy, but you are right!!”

  Reagan valued the support, but the criticism was no less important in making him hold his ground. “The uproar about my trip to Germany and the Bitburg cemetery was cover stuff in Newsweek and Time,” he wrote derisively. “They just won’t stop. Well, I’m not going to cancel anything no matter how much the bastards scream.” Forty-eight hours later he wrote, “Every day seems to begin with the latest press muckraking over whether I should or shouldn’t go to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany. Well, d--n their hides. I think it’s morally right and I’m going.”

  THE PRESIDENT JOINED the other G7 leaders in Bonn in early May. Discussions centered on trade and finance. Japan’s Yasuhiro Nakasone proposed a new round of the trade talks that had been going on recurrently since World War II; he sought to head off protectionism, particularly against exports of Japanese automobiles. France’s Mitterrand pushed for monetary talks to adjust exchange rates, which had hurt the French economy of late. Britain’s Thatcher cemented her mutual admiration pact with the president.