Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter thirty-six

I stayed in Palo Alto for just two days. With the quickening pace of international events, I simply couldn’t afford any more time off. President Bush had decided to visit Eastern Europe in order to signal American support for what was unfolding there. Any doubts about the momentous nature of the changes were wiped away when we arrived in Poland on July 9 and in Hungary two days later.

Hungary had been a center of reform, managing even in the depths of the Cold War to gain some modicum of independence from Moscow. But now the Hungarians were challenging Soviet power directly and moving toward multiparty elections. More astonishingly, Hungary had decided to dismantle the barbed wire demarcating its border with Austria. In fact, during our time in Budapest, Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Németh gave President Bush a piece of that twisted metal border fence. He proudly and rightly told the President that his country had been the first to breach the Iron Curtain.

It was in Poland, though, that the Cold War had begun in 1945, and it was now clear that it was in Poland where it could end. Air Force One landed on a muggy, hot evening in Warsaw. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the communist general who’d imposed martial law in 1981 and was now the president of Poland, greeted President Bush. But communism in Poland had lost its ferocity. That night at the state dinner, held in a tacky, faded dining hall, the room suddenly went dark due to a power surge caused by the hot television lights. It was a metaphor for the Communist Party’s coming fate.

It was clear that the party’s demise was sealed the next day when we went to the city of Gdańsk, the home of Solidarity. In contrast to the stultifying arrival ceremony, President Bush was greeted in the town square by hundreds of thousands of cheering Polish workers. “Bush, Bush, Bush!” they chanted, waving American flags. “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”

I turned to a colleague and said, “I don’t think this is what Karl Marx had in mind when he said, ‘Workers of the world, unite.’”

By the end of August 1989, it was clear that the cascade of events would not stop in Poland and Hungary but would roll into Germany, the epicenter of the Cold War, and sweep away the line that had divided East from West for more than forty years, ever since the end of World War II.

At the time, the division of Germany into two parts was one of those givens of international politics. Each year West German leaders would mechanically repeat platitudes about the coming day when all Germany would be united. But nobody actually believed it. Although the two countries had learned to live next to each other, their continued division hardly bred stability; the best troops of NATO and the best troops of the Warsaw Pact stood stationed on high alert at the border between East and West. Even with the collapse of communism in Poland and Hungary, few believed that the Soviet Union was ready to contemplate the unification of Germany.

By the fall of 1989, the impact of Gorbachev’s policies was becoming evident. Erich Honecker, the hard-line leader of East Germany, had been forced from power because he was unwilling to pursue Moscow’s liberalizing policies at home. Now, because of the refusal of other Warsaw Pact states, particularly Hungary, to enforce the border controls between their countries, hundreds fled East Germany without fear of being returned to the German Democratic Republic—the official name of a country that was anything but democratic. The flow quickened until it was a veritable flood. One news cartoon, captioned “Germany Unifies,” depicted West Germany full of people and East Germany empty. That wasn’t far from reality.

The GDR was dying, and increasingly Germans were speaking about what had only months before seemed impossible. I attended a conference in Germany at the end of October. Usually these transatlantic meetings were filled with talk of arms control and relations between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. This time, however, Germans wanted to talk to each other across the political divides of socialist and conservative, East and West. As an American, I felt like a bystander. On the plane ride home, I penned a memo for the President reporting that German unification was suddenly on the agenda. But before I could send it, the unthinkable happened: the Berlin Wall fell.

It turns out that the most momentous event in forty years of international history occurred thanks to a gigantic bureaucratic screw-up in the GDR. To stem the exodus of its citizens, the East German government decided to develop new, liberalized travel policies that would give East Germans the ability to leave the country. The hope was that in making it easier to travel back and forth, people would visit other nations but ultimately return home. Interior Ministry officials intended to have these relaxed restrictions apply to the border between East and West Germany, but not in Berlin, which had a different status. That point, however, was somehow left out of the draft regulations.

The new policies were written on November 9, 1989, but the internal security forces didn’t yet have clear instructions on how to implement them. That night the party press secretary spotted the draft policies on a table as he headed to the podium for what had become a daily press conference to try to calm the waters. He read the regulations to the astonished press and almost immediately realized that he couldn’t explain what they meant. But it was too late. People began to flock to the Berlin Wall, which for decades had been both the symbol and the reality of Europe’s division. The Interior Ministry guards didn’t know what to do. Faced with the flood of people, the commander made a historic decision: he ordered his troops to withhold fire. The Berlin Wall collapsed in joyous celebration.

At about three that afternoon Washington time, the phone rang in our suite of offices in the Old Executive Office Building, the place within the White House complex where most of the President’s staff works. The assistant to Brent’s deputy was on the phone. “The General”—as we called Brent—“wants you to come over and talk to the President about what is going on in Berlin,” she said. Unfortunately, we had all been too busy doing other things to know what was happening. “Turn on CNN,” she told us. “The Wall has come down.”

My colleagues quickly made calls to the CIA and the State Department to verify what was being reported while I monitored the news coverage. Within a short time we were in Brent Scowcroft’s office, trying to recover from the fact that the crack staff of the NSC had been scooped by CNN. The President was already in the Oval Office with the press. He was careful and guarded in his public reaction to the unfolding events, telling reporters that he was very pleased with the development. “We are saluting those who can move forward with democracy,” the President said. “We are encouraging the concept of a Europe whole and free.” These words were deliberately measured so as not to alarm the Soviets or get too far ahead of the West Germans in pushing for reunification. In private conversations within the West Wing, however, his support for unification was unequivocal. Nevertheless, when we suggested on that momentous day that President Bush go to Berlin, as Kennedy and Reagan had done, the President demurred. “This is a German moment,” he said with characteristic modesty. “What would I do? Dance on the Wall?”

The next day, we began to consider how we would manage the unification process. We knew where we stood, thanks to the President’s clarity. But the French and British weren’t so sure that it was a good idea. Was Moscow really prepared to see Germany unify, and on what terms? We wanted to be sensitive to Soviet interests. After all, with about thirty-five thousand nuclear weapons and nearly five million men under arms, the Soviet Union was a weakening but still formidable force. The United States would need to be Germany’s anchor and advocate. But we would also need to make sure that U.S. interests were protected. The Cold War was almost won after forty years. We didn’t want to make a fatal mistake at the very end.

President Bush decided that he needed to sit down with Gorbachev. Perhaps naively, we hoped to arrange a low-key meeting between the two and worked with the Soviets to hold talks in the island country of Malta on December 2 and 3, 1989. The arrangements were to be kept secret until the last minute to prevent too much buildup. But we could not keep a meeting between the two world leaders quiet, and when the news leaked, the expectations for the summit were even greater, since the secrecy itself fueled speculation about what would happen.

At this meeting the President and Gorbachev started to develop a relationship of trust, which served them well through the coming metaphorical storms at the end of the Cold War. It was also at this meeting that I met the Soviet leader for the first time.

“She tells me everything I need to know about the Soviet Union,” the President said to Gorbachev as he introduced me.

“I certainly hope she knows a lot,” Gorbachev quipped.

At the end of May 1990, Gorbachev came to Washington for a full-scale summit, his popularity in the West growing even as it declined at home. We wanted to make the visit special to shore up the Soviet president, whom we now saw as essential to ending the Cold War peacefully. There was a grand ceremony to sign an arms control treaty in the East Room, a magnificent state dinner, and a trip to Camp David, all underscoring the importance of the man and his excellent relationship with President Bush.

Gorbachev had been invited to give a speech at Stanford, and the President asked me to accompany Gorbachev to Palo Alto. As I sat on the South Lawn of the White House waiting with Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, to take off in the presidential helicopter, Marine One, a thought crossed my mind: I’m awfully glad I changed my major.