Once in power, Gorbachev unleashed a series of reforms, known as "perestroika" (restructuring) and "glasnost" (openness), in an attempt to revive and strengthen the Soviet Union. Long considered the defining threat to the United States and the other Western democracies, the Soviet Union was showing signs of weakness by the late 1970s. Now, in the late 1980s, the Soviet republics and the nations within the Soviet sphere, including East Germany, were unhappy with Moscow and with the inefficient Communist system that had failed to deliver an equitable socialist paradise.
On Wednesday, December 7, 1988, Bush had joined Reagan and Gorbachev for a brief summit on Governors Island in New York Harbor. "Strange meeting with Gorbachev-strange in the fact that he really wants to get a direction and idea, and strange in the fact that the old and new were both there," Bush told his diary. "It was a little awkward." Bush could always tell when Gorbachev himself was angered: "His eyes sparkle and he turns red, with his mouth firmly set, and he kind of shrugs." At one point in the conversation on Governors Island, Bush recalled, Gorbachev grew agitated and "bristled" when Reagan "asked...about reform, and [Gorbachev] flared up a little and said, 'Well, have you completed all the reforms you need to complete?'" Bush called Gorbachev the next morning to say he was sorry he'd been so reticent, but that was the nature of the system. He would be more talkative after January 20, and even more talkative after a few months, during which the new administration was to conduct a global review of foreign policy.
Bush was alluding to what became known as his "pause." He had pledged an essential continuation of Reagan's policies but very much wanted to put his own mark on diplomacy. Thus was born the idea of a wide-ranging Bush review of the Reagan administration's standing positions around the world. There was much to contemplate, especially with the Soviets. On the one hand, Gorbachev had encouraged stirrings of nationalist and freedom movements behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. "From the point of view of long-term, big-time politics, no one will be able to subordinate others," Gorbachev wrote in a 1987 book. "Let everyone make his own choice, and let us all respect that choice."
Yet just four days before Bush's inauguration, in Prague, the totalitarian Czech regime arrested eight hundred anti-Soviet demonstrators, including the playwright Vaclav Havel, who was sentenced to nine months in prison. In April, government troops killed nineteen people at a nationalist demonstration in Tbilisi, Georgia, a Soviet republic. Moscow also continued to support Nicaragua's Communist regime, a source of ongoing American frustration.
What was unclear in early 1989, then, was whether the world was changing as rapidly in fact as it was in tone. The old schoolboy actor in Gorbachev understood the dramatic gesture. He was a master of sweeping disarmament proposals and spoke boldly of "freedom of choice" for nations in the Soviet sphere. The key problem for Bush was deciding whether Gorbachev's aim was truly a more democratic future or whether, in the words of Brent Scowcroft, the Soviet leader's goal was "to restore dynamism to a socialist political and economic system and revitalize the Soviet Union domestically and internationally to compete with the West." Even Bush's advisers were divided on the question. In Washington, many believed Gorbachev was a genuine reformer. Others thought he was either bluffing about a new day or, if he weren't, that he would be toppled by a hard-liner more interested in Soviet power than in Soviet change.
- As the weather in Washington warmed through the spring of 1989, the "pause" ended, and Bush was ready to act. According to the prevailing wisdom of the season, it was none too soon. In the view of many-including Bush himself-Gorbachev was winning the global public-relations battle. With his reforms and surprise disarmament proposals-he sprung one on Jim Baker in Moscow on Baker's first visit as secretary of state-the Soviet leader seemed to have usurped the American president as the world's leading statesman. Bush's allies and friends urged him to engage. "We are in a historic position," Helmut Kohl of West Germany told Bush by phone in early May. Kohl refused "to see Gorbachev as the new hero." The latest developments in Eastern Europe exceeded their "wildest dreams, the ideological breakdown of a political and economic system. This was the hour of our triumph." It was, Kohl said, a triumph due "not least to the efforts of the United States." For that reason, Kohl believed that "the President's role should be brought to the fore."
Over lunch on Wednesday, May 17, 1989, Jim Baker underscored the message, telling Bush it was time to be bold. "You need to get ahead of the power curve" against Gorbachev, Baker said. Bush agreed. The result: The president decided to use the fortieth anniversary meeting of NATO in Brussels in May to propose substantial reductions in conventional armed forces in Europe (CFE). Given what came afterward, from Berlin in November 1989 through the end of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, the CFE moment is little remembered, but the May 1989 proposal marked an important pivot for Bush, who emerged from the NATO summit as a forceful leader. He did it in his own style-quietly-but the impact was undeniable. His plan would be substantive and unexpected, a combination Bush loved.
In a Friday, May 19, meeting at Kennebunkport, Bush told his advisers that he wanted to offer to cut 25 percent of American conventional forces in Europe if Gorbachev would do the same on his end. "I thought this was large enough," Bush recalled, "to show that we were serious and committed to responding to the positive changes we were seeing in the policies of the Soviet Union." The U.S. military, led by Admiral William Crowe, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pushed back against the president, arguing that such large reductions in Europe were unwise, even dangerous. The president disagreed. "I want this done," Bush said. "Don't keep telling me why it can't be done. Tell me how it can be done."
With the Pentagon's support, the president settled on a proposal to cut 20 percent of combat troops. The CFE idea was not just about CFE. Bush was facing two related problems. One was how to take the initiative with the Soviet relationship. The other was about NATO short-range nuclear forces (SNF) in Europe. While intermediate-range weapons (INF) had been eliminated in the 1987 treaty, SNF were still deployed. As Jim Baker described the dynamics of the debate, SNF, with a very limited range, were politically unpopular in West Germany. "If they were ever used," Baker recalled, "they were likely to hit targets only in East Germany or Poland. Or as the Germans began to say, 'The shorter the missile, the deader the German.'" SNF were also due for modernization, creating domestic problems for West German chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Bush's insight was that if he could get NATO and the Soviets to agree to substantial cuts in conventional forces, then the short-range nuclear question would become less urgent. In military terms, with fewer Soviet forces at hand, there would be reduced pressure to modernize NATO short-range weapons. The West would not need to deter a massed army that was no longer there. With time to think, Bush had solved two problems at once.
He kept the CFE proposal secret from the public, enduring attacks about his lack of vision and initiative while quietly briefing the allies. Ten days before the NATO summit in Brussels, Bush hosted Francois Mitterrand at Kennebunkport, hurriedly sprucing up Dorothy Bush's little house on Walker's Point for the French president. When Bush first raised the possibility of having Mitterrand in Maine, Barbara "thought I'd lost it," Bush recalled. "Everyone expected the worst. Here was the formal and composed president of France coming to our most informal home." The intimate seaside setting, however, was conducive to constructive talks. Mitterrand spoke openly to Bush at Walker's Point, though the French leader did decline the customary speedboat ride.
The year before, Helmut Kohl later told Bush, Mitterrand had said Europe had "no stake in the election in the United States"-meaning that the French leader did not believe it made a difference whether Bush won or lost. After the trip to Maine, though, Mitterrand told Kohl that he had been wrong-that Bush's victory had indeed been the preferred outcome. Bush's personal diplomacy had carried the day.
In Brussels, Margaret Thatcher was less than enthusiastic about Bush's CFE idea. The tough-minded British prime minister thought it generally wisest to give no ground whatever. "Chiefs of State Dinner was a little tense," Bush dictated. "Thatcher kept telling me not to negotiate....She lectured all the other participants. She was tense." Bush greeted Thatcher, who started right in. "We must not give on this," Thatcher said. "You are not going to give, are you?" When the leader of Turkey, Turgut Ozal, walked over to join the president and the prime minister, Thatcher "gave both of us a lecture on freedom," Bush recalled, "with...Ozal and I both agreeing with her; but I expect he was like I was-'Why does she have any doubt that we feel this way on this issue?'"
For Bush, Thatcher was a complicated, somewhat tiresome figure. "My first impression: Margaret [is] principled, very difficult, [and] most people are far more down on her than I would have thought possible. Indeed, they talk about her a lot and laugh about her....She's a principled woman, and a good friend of the States, but she talks all the time when you're in a conversation. It's a one-way street." Helmut Kohl simply referred to her as "that woman."
Bush's proposal to reduce CFE by 20 percent (and to pursue negotiations on SNF, but with the expectation that modernization would prove unnecessary) was widely seen as an important allied advance. Mitterrand, the once-wary recent houseguest, spoke to the gathered NATO leaders after Bush. "We need innovation," Mitterrand said. "The President of the United States has displayed imagination-indeed, intellectual audacity of the rarest kind." The news went over beautifully at home. The New York Times praised "the willingness of this deeply cautious man to aggressively seize the moment"; Lee Atwater, now chairman of the Republican National Committee, called to congratulate Bush on the splendid public reaction.
Credit 32.1 Jim Baker, Bush, Brent Scowcroft, and John Sununu with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher at a NATO working session after the president's 1989 summit at Malta with Mikhail Gorbachev.
The next day, in Mainz, Germany, Bush spoke about the sense of change in Europe. "For 40 years, the seeds of democracy in Eastern Europe lay dormant, buried under the frozen tundra of the Cold War," the president said. "And decade after decade, time after time, the flowering human spirit withered from the chill of conflict and oppression; and again, the world waited. But the passion for freedom cannot be denied forever. The world has waited long enough. The time is right. Let Europe be whole and free." Flying around the world, building relationships, splitting differences, solving problems, attracting accolades, defending democratic values: In the middle of 1989, six months into his presidency, George H. W. Bush was thoroughly in his element.
- As he managed the West's reaction to the gradual loosening of totalitarian Soviet power, he was confronted with the tightening of such power a world away, in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital.
The trouble had begun in mid-April when Chinese students streamed into Tiananmen to mark the death of Hu Yaobang, a popular reformer who had been removed from office two years before. Venerated as a force for modernization, particularly by the young, Hu was a rallying point for dissatisfaction with the Chinese regime. The demonstrations grew in intensity, with the military clashing with protestors, providing global television images of a totalitarian power seeking to crush dissent by violent means.
On Saturday, June 3, 1989-Bush was in Kennebunkport resting up from the NATO summit; Jim Baker had hoped to play a round of golf with one of his sons at the Chevy Chase Club-the Chinese army attacked the demonstrators. Casualty figures from the Tiananmen uprising remain elusive; it appears that several hundred people died (though the number could well be higher) and perhaps three thousand were wounded.
American values demanded that the United States stand up against the Chinese government's crackdown, yet pragmatism demanded that the president balance human rights with the value of the long-term Chinese relationship. Home to about 1.1 billion people, China was too important to consign to pariah status.
The politics of China in America were unusual. Liberal Democrats disliked the regime on human rights grounds; conservative Republicans remained hostile to what had long been known as "Red China." Congressman Stephen Solarz, Democrat of New York, embodied the former; Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, the latter. "Neither has any responsibility for the overall relationship, the lives of Americans students, or anything else," Bush dictated. "Yet they're popping off....They don't have any suggestions, but they just want to complicate the [life] of the President."
Bush's preferred position of moderation lacked a natural constituency, but he was convinced that there was long-term diplomatic wisdom in containing short-term emotional outrage. In Washington, where he was monitoring the crisis, Jim Baker was in sync with the president. "The Chinese leadership was clearly in an embattled frame of mind," Baker recalled. "It was important not to respond in a way that played into the hands of the hard-liners who were pushing for even more repressive action, which would inevitably lead to more bloodshed." From Walker's Point, Bush asked Baker and Scowcroft for options and retired for the night. "The strength of democracy and freedom is fantastic, it's wonderful," Bush dictated, "and yet change has to be orderly in many situations. The big point is, we cannot foment revolution or it might make things worse."
At eight A.M. on Monday, Bush spoke to Richard Nixon. "What's happened [is being] handled badly and is deplorable," Nixon said of the crackdown, "but take a look at the long haul." After returning to the White House, Bush met with Scowcroft and Baker to lay out his objectives: "I wanted a measured response, one aimed at those who had pushed for and implemented the use of force: the hard-liners and the Army. I didn't want to punish the Chinese people for the acts of their government. I believed that the commercial contacts between our countries had helped lead to the quest for more freedom. If people have commercial incentives, whether it's in China or in other totalitarian systems, the move to democracy becomes inexorable." In terms of sanctions, he resisted an overall embargo and instead suspended military sales and prohibited visits between American and Chinese military officials.
Bush went to the White House briefing room to announce the American response to the violence. Soon there was a complication: Fang Lizhi, a Chinese astrophysicist and political dissident, received asylum at the American embassy in Beijing. "We had no choice but to take him in," Bush dictated, "but it's going to be a real stick in the eye to the Chinese."
The president attempted to telephone Deng Xiaoping but was told that any message he might want to send should be passed along through the regime's ambassador. "I was a little pissed off at that," Bush told his diary on Thursday, June 8, 1989, "but I recognize that the Chinese are under great strain." Ten days later Bush tried another tack. He sat down at his electric typewriter to write Deng a four-page letter "from the heart." He knew Deng and Deng's colleagues from the old days in China; his quiet belief in the Chinese leader's ultimate good intentions was a key factor in the moderate American response. "Had I not met the man...I think I would have been less convinced that we should keep relations with them going after Tiananmen Square," Bush told Jeffrey A. Engel, the editor of his China diary, in 2005.
Bush therefore wrote to Deng rather as one suspects he himself would have liked to have been written to in such circumstances-without self-righteousness. "I have tried very hard not to inject myself into China's internal affairs," Bush told Deng. "I have tried very hard not to appear to be dictating in any way to China about how it should manage its internal crisis. I am respectful of the differences in our two societies and in our two systems....But I ask you as well to remember the principles on which my young country was founded." Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly were key American values, the president wrote, and "reverence for those principles...inevitably affects the way Americans view and react to events in other countries." The sanctions he had imposed, he concluded, had been rooted in this national reaction-and he, as president, faced great pressure to do more. Would Deng receive a confidential envoy from Bush to discuss matters further?
Within twenty-four hours came word from Deng: He would be open to such a presidential emissary. Bush decided to send Scowcroft. In Beijing, Scowcroft found the Chinese leadership guarded but also well disposed to deal with a Bush administration. The Chinese wanted time and space-and no interference by outsiders in their domestic life. They trusted Bush, but for them trust was a tender flower, and only time would reveal whether the United States was going to accord Beijing the respect and autonomy it believed it deserved. Bush's calibrated course pleased no one totally, but, as Bush had learned in the 1970s, the China problem did not lend itself to simple solution. "Just let it wait for a while-hold the line," Bush dictated in September 1989. Bush did what he could, and no more, and the bilateral connection between the two powers endured.
His reaction to Tiananmen and his CFE proposal at the NATO summit were connected. Both were coherent steps taken to respond rationally to shifting global truths-twin examples of what was described in a draft statement for the press as "Steadiness, realism, [and] the search for opportunities to further peace and stability." They were, the draft said, examples of how "the encouragement of peaceful progress toward democracy, and the assertion of American values" would "guide this Administration in a remarkable period of change."
- In June, Hungary took down the barbed wire that separated it from Austria, opening a gateway to the West. In the same month, in Poland, Solidarity, the party of dissent, won new elections, sweeping the old Communist forces from power; by August the nation was being governed by popularly elected leaders. In midsummer, Bush traveled to both nations, gently urging reform and signaling, with his balanced approach, that the future need not be bloody. Bush avoided large crowds if at all possible for fear that "things could get out of control." The strategy worked. "We had stepped carefully in Poland and Hungary and had avoided aggravating the Soviets, whose military presence still loomed there," Bush recalled. "It was a good start. But I understood that the pressure on Gorbachev from hard-liners to intervene would grow, as these once reliable allies began to pull farther away and the Soviet security buffer against the West eroded."
Heading home from Eastern Europe, Bush slept "for one hour, hard," then got back up to draft a personal appeal to Gorbachev for a meeting. "I want to do it without thousands of assistants hovering over our shoulders," Bush wrote Gorbachev, "without the ever-present briefing papers and certainly without the press yelling at us every 5 minutes about 'who's winning'..."
Gorbachev agreed, and plans were soon under way for a session at Malta late in the year. The president's view of Gorbachev mixed sympathy and skepticism. "He's having enormous problems with his Republics and with the economy, and I'm telling our people, we might be on the verge of something big and something important," Bush dictated. "So let's think big, let's think in big broad terms, and not in the old Cold War rhetoric terms-keep our eyes open, be sure, but think big."
- Summer brought a new-and critical-member of the president's national security team into the Bush inner circle. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe, was retiring. Bush's first thought was to name air force general Robert Harris to the post, which was, by statute, the principal military adviser to the president. "He's steady," Bush said of Harris, adding: "Someday it should be Colin Powell, but I don't think he's quite ready. He needs to have a big and more visible command in the Army." An impressive army officer, Powell had served as Reagan's last national security adviser and then taken over the U.S. Army Forces Command, a posting near Atlanta. "I wish that Colin had more command experience, a joint command, a CINC command; but Cheney wants him and I love the guy," Bush told his diary in August. "So I said to Dick, 'Okay, we'll go with your recommendation, but please talk to Colin to be sure he himself thinks he's ready.' Scowcroft feels that, given Cheney's insistence, we should probably go with Colin. But there's another side to it, and that is that he doesn't have quite the amount of field experience."
As an old national security hand himself, Bush did not want to set an unhappy precedent. "My worry had been that it would be seen as the way to become Joint Chiefs is to do some time in the White House as an NSC advisor, and that's not good," Bush dictated. "But Colin is so able that I don't think that will happen. Cheney feels very relaxed about it." At Bush's request, Cheney asked Powell if he "didn't think it was too early." Powell did not, and the announcement went forward. "The Powell decision has gone down well," Bush told his diary. The president's regard for Powell grew rapidly, and the president, pleased with his new chairman, never looked back.
- On Sunday, November 5, 1989-a beautiful New England day-Bush made a sentimental return to his old prep school, Phillips Academy. It was the bicentennial of a visit to Andover by the first president, George Washington, who had stopped in the town during a tour of the eastern states in his first year in office.
Speaking on campus, Bush talked about what Andover had meant to him. His days at the school, he said, had taught him "the great end and real business of living. And even now its lessons of honesty, selflessness, faith in God-well, they enrich every day of our lives."
He was transported back across the years. It was over there, Bush said, gesturing, "where that guy in a red coat is standing, that I heard that our country was at war on December 7th, 1941." Then there was the Stimson commencement speech, "over there, in Cochran Chapel," where the secretary of war "observed how the American soldier should be brave without being brutal, self-reliant without boasting, becoming a part of irresistible might without losing faith in individual liberty. I never forgot those words."
- He returned to the White House for a dinner that evening in the Residence with Richard Nixon. "He was not emotional towards it," Bush dictated. "I introduced him to all of the upstairs staff, some of whom had been here, but there wasn't a real warmth....We really feel close to them, and if I left tomorrow, I'd still feel close to them. I'm not sure Nixon felt close to them." After dinner, with Nixon gone, Bush finished the evening, and the weekend, by dictating to his diary. "The moves in East Germany are phenomenal," he said. "They're going so much faster than anybody had thought-real rapid."
The next day he lunched with Zbig Brzezinski, the former Carter national security adviser. "He's amazed at the rapidity of change, but what concerns me is that the Soviets will be compelled to crack down, given some uprising in one of the republics, or possibly in Eastern Europe, and a lot of things will go back to square one," Bush told his diary on Monday, November 6, 1989. "This would be very bad." The essential thing, Bush believed, was not to overreact: "If we mishandle it, and get way out looking like an American project," he dictated on Wednesday, November 8, "you would invite crackdown and invite negative reaction that could result in bloodshed."
At that hour, in East Berlin, the wall that had divided the city for nearly three decades was about to be breached-permanently.
THIRTY-THREE.
The Fall of the Wall
It is this that really concerns me. Some violence coming out in the Soviet Republic, where the Soviets use force, and that tightens up what happens in Eastern Europe.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH BUSH WAS AT HIS DESK in the Oval Office in the middle of the afternoon of Thursday, November 9, 1989, when Scowcroft walked in with news: There was word, Scowcroft said, that "the Wall had been opened." The president and his national security adviser stepped out of the big office to watch the television in Bush's small study.
East German officials had announced that the country's restrictions on travel were being relaxed, but the details were fuzzy. As word spread that long-closed borders were being opened, restive crowds in East Berlin took that to include the wall itself. Communication between different government agencies and the guards along the wall was poor to nonexistent, and soon thousands were crossing from East to West Berlin.
It was dazzling, epochal news. Since its construction in 1961, the Berlin Wall had been perhaps the world's most tangible manifestation of the deep division between East and West, tyranny and liberty, fear and hope. In 1983, Bush had gone to the wall and been horrified by its ugliness and by its stark finality. In 1987, President Reagan had stood at the Brandenburg Gate and put the ultimate challenge to the Soviet leadership: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" And six months earlier, in Mainz on the last day of May 1989, President Bush had struck the same notes, albeit less dramatically, saying that the "wall stands as a monument to the failure of communism. It must come down."
Now it had. Bush watched the television coverage with a kind of wonder. A moment American presidents had hoped for since John F. Kennedy had come on George Bush's watch, and he had to manage the spiraling forces of freedom.
In his study in the West Wing, Bush knew it could all quickly go to hell. High emotion, surging crowds, anxious Communist authorities: Such factors had led to deaths in Beijing only a handful of months before. The same, perhaps on an even worse scale, could happen here, now.
Bush's concerns were justified. There were signs that the East Germans had drawn inspiration from the Chinese regime's brutal suppression in Beijing in June, and might open fire on demonstrators in the same way. The East German secret police chief, Erich Mielke, approved of the Chinese government's tactics at Tiananmen, calling them "resolute measures in suppression of...counterrevolutionary unrest." The historian John Lewis Gaddis noted that East German television had been broadcasting a documentary about "the heroic response of the Chinese army and police to the perfidious inhumanity of the student demonstrators." The CIA had told the president as early as April 1989 that Gorbachev's reforms were "threatening the stability of the [Soviet] regime" and "could lead to a conservative reaction."
In these autumn hours, Bush's cautious reaction was rooted in his concern that hard-liners in East Germany and in the Soviet Union might strike back against the falling wall and the surging visitors to the West, precipitating violence and possibly a shooting war. Gorbachev sent a message to Bush "urging that we not overreact," Bush recalled. "He worries about demonstrations in Germany that might get out of control, and he asked for understanding."
He would get it from this American president. Borrowing a phrase from Scowcroft, Bush was determined not to "gloat" over the breaching of the wall. Marlin Fitzwater, Bush's press secretary, recommended an exchange with the media in the Oval Office rather than a more formal session in the briefing room. Bush agreed, reluctantly. Events were moving swiftly, and Bush's mind was less on the poetry of the occasion-the fall of the wall-than it was on the practicalities of a world crisis.
As the press corps came into the Oval Office, the reporters crowded Bush, who found the session "awkward and uncomfortable." In a prepared statement, he welcomed the border decision, calling it "a positive step toward the free movement of peoples" that meant "the tragic symbolism of the Berlin Wall...will have been overcome by the indomitable spirit of man's desire for freedom." Stirring words, but he declined to speak with great emotion or sweep. "Of course, I was thankful about the events in Berlin," Bush recalled, "but as I answered questions my mind kept racing over a possible Soviet crackdown, turning all the happiness to tragedy." Lesley Stahl of CBS News had taken up a position close to the president. Bush was seated. Stahl, he recalled, was "poised over me."
"This is a sort of great victory for our side in the big East-West battle, but you don't seem elated," Stahl said. "I'm wondering if you're thinking of the problems."
"I'm not an emotional kind of guy," Bush said.
"Well, how elated are you?" Stahl asked.
"I'm very pleased," Bush said.
"The press gets all over me," Bush told his diary a few days later. "'Why aren't you more excited?' 'Why aren't you leading?' 'Why aren't you doing more?'" Convinced that the greater the American elation the greater the danger the Soviet Union could lash out in a last, prideful bid to hold on to its Cold War empire, Bush chose caution over Cold War rhetoric.
Would there be a Soviet military strike? Would the Warsaw Pact-the Moscow-allied nations-really do nothing in the face of such revolution? "This is what the press all ask me about-'what if?' 'What if?' 'What if there is a big attack-crackdown?'" Bush dictated. "I think publicly I simply do not speculate...but it is a reason to be prudent and be cautious and to stop short of the euphoria that some are exhibiting." From West Berlin, Helmut Kohl called Bush. "It is like witnessing an enormous fair," Kohl told Bush, describing the flow of people across the wall. "The frontiers are absolutely open." Two hundred and thirty thousand people, most of them young, many of them highly educated, had already crossed into the West. Kohl feared a permanent influx of refugees, saying that an overpopulated West Germany would be a "catastrophe for economic development."
There was a solution, of course, but these were early, early days: the reunion of the two Germanys that had been divided for so long and over which so much had been made in the bitter years of the Cold War. Gorbachev cabled Kohl to warn against talk of reunification, and the Soviet leader's message to Bush about the fall of the wall alluded, darkly, to "unforeseen consequences."
Gorbachev's tone had a profound impact on Bush. "This was the first time Gorbachev had clearly indicated genuine anxiety about events in Eastern Europe," Bush recalled. "Heretofore he had seemed relaxed, even blase, about the accelerating movement in the region away from communism and Soviet control. It was as if he suddenly realized the serious implications of what was going on." The president did what he could to project a sense of steadiness in the West and of fair play toward the East. At home, Senate Democratic leader George Mitchell recommended that Bush fly to Berlin to make a dramatic statement about the end of Communism; Bush thought "sticking it in Gorbachev's eye" a miserable idea. Bush sent Gorbachev a message arguing that Kohl had acted responsibly, "emphasizing the importance of a deliberate step-by-step approach to change in [East Germany] and the need to avoid destabilizing the situation in Europe." The United States, moreover, had "no intention of seeking unilateral advantage from the current process of change in [East Germany] and in other Warsaw Pact countries."
There were reports of violence in Moldavia, a Soviet republic. "It is this that really concerns me," Bush dictated. "Some violence coming out in the Soviet Republic, where the Soviets use force, and that tightens up what happens in Eastern Europe. [It] turns world opinion around against Gorbachev, [and] pushes us to take military action which, of course, we couldn't take way over there, and wouldn't take; and sets back, for proper reasons, the relationship that's moving in the right direction. This is the big dilemma."
- As the wall fell, Bush was pragmatic. He kept his options open and resisted alienating rhetoric or sweeping declarations. He led by checking here and balancing there, understanding that a world in convulsion was inherently unstable, and everything in him was about bringing stability, or a semblance of stability, to the unruliness of reality.
Many Democrats and commentators criticized his handling of the hour, finding him strangely emotionless. House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt declared that Bush was "inadequate to the moment." Noting the dissatisfaction with his evenhanded demeanor, Bush told his diary that the attacks on his failure to "dance" on the wall were "a far cry from the 'Evil Empire' days when they were pounding the President for too much rhetoric. Now they pound me for not being out front enough, so you can't win with these press people." He was amused, a little, at the preening of journalists in the crisis. "The thing that gets me is you see them at the Wall as instant experts," Bush dictated.
They learn the name of Egon Krenz [the last Communist leader of East Germany] and they sound like they've known him all their lives, or they know all about him, which is simply ridiculous. They were caught by surprise, as I admit we [were] on some of this, but they sound like they've got the marvelous advantage point of 20/20 hindsight. Just think if we had done something to exhort Eastern Europe to go to the barricades and...manifest freedom in the way we thought best. You would've had chaos, and the danger of military action, bloodshed, just to make a few critics feel good-crazy.
In these same days and weeks, the Cold War regimes in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia showed signs of going the way of the Wall. "It's spreading like wildfire through Eastern Europe," Bush dictated, "and yet I think back to George Mitchell's stupid suggestion that I go to the Berlin Wall, and I think to myself, 'God, the guy has got to have been nuts to suggest you pour gasoline on those embers.'" As the images from the newly liberated nations turned the autumn of 1989 into a springtime for democratic reform, Bush kept Moscow at the center of his thinking. What would Gorbachev do now that the Soviet empire was crumbling all around him?
One CIA paper made a particular impression on the president. "It argued that the [economic and political] reforms were strong enough to disrupt the Soviet system, but yet not strong enough to give the Soviet people the benefits of a market economy," Bush recalled. "Based on those conclusions, some people in the NSC began to speculate that Gorbachev might be headed for a crisis which could force him to crack down in the Soviet Union to maintain order, or might even force him out of power." As he prepared to meet with Gorbachev at the Malta conference, Bush absorbed the different perspectives within his inner circle.
As Scowcroft recalled it, Jim Baker was viewed as the "most optimistic" about Gorbachev's sincerity on the question of reform. "Dick Cheney was negative," Scowcroft wrote. "He believed that it was premature to relax Cold Warstyle pressure. The Soviet system was in trouble and we ought to continue the hard-line policies which had brought us and it to this point." Dan Quayle, Scowcroft believed, "was the most conservative of all. He came close to the notion that what was going on in the USSR was little more than a ploy to lull us into thinking the danger was over and we could dismantle our security structure."
Bush's appetite for debate and for data was enormous. Preparing for Malta, "Brent offered me about twenty topics to choose from: I took them all," Bush recalled. "I wanted to be prepared for everything." Though the president's own sense of things was closer to Baker's than to Cheney's or Quayle's, Bush's main goal was to put Gorbachev on notice that an authoritarian reaction to the revolutionary changes was unacceptable. "We were getting hints from Moscow that one of Gorbachev's objectives at Malta was to gain some sort of 'understanding' for his situation and for the measures he might take to crack down," Bush recalled. "I could not give him that, and if I did, it would have a lasting historical, political, and moral price."
- At Valletta Harbor in Malta, Bush stayed aboard the USS Belknap, the flagship of the Sixth Fleet. (Baker had bunked near Bush on the flight over on Air Force One. "No farting, OK?" Bush had scribbled in a note to his secretary of state before hitting the sack.) "How do I feel?" Bush dictated in the admiral's quarters as he went to bed on the eve of meeting with Gorbachev. "I'm criticized for not doing enough, but things are coming our way, and so why do we have to jump up and down, and risk those things turning around and going in the wrong direction?"
The president, who loved being shipboard, thought of his nights on the San Jacinto and slept well, looking forward to the morning. "Gales had been starting up outside...." Bush recalled, and "the weather got worse the next day." The president had a wild ride through swelling seas in a launch from the Belknap to see Gorbachev on the Maxim Gorky, a large Soviet cruise liner.
Greeting Gorbachev, who was dressed in a dark blue pinstriped suit with a red tie and a cream-colored white shirt ("like the ones I like," Bush noted), Bush thought his counterpart seemed tired. The Soviet leader's hair was grayer than before, "but he was smiling," which Bush took as a good sign. "Spot is prominent on his head," Bush told his diary, "but you don't notice it all the time."
Jim Baker had had an idea in the run-up to the summit: that Bush should take the initiative and lay out a series of proposals in the first moments of the meeting, thus disposing of the critique that the United States had been following Gorbachev rather than leading. Scowcroft found Baker's idea "unprofessional at best and corny at worst," but Bush liked it, as Scowcroft recalled, "feeling that, among other things, it would still those critics who continued to accuse us of drift and a lack of direction." Bush had seventeen different proposals on hand when the two sides sat down opposite each other in the salon of the Maxim Gorky.
As Bush opened his remarks, Scowcroft recalled, the president was "clearly nervous about the import of what was happening. He began to loosen up as he went along." The initiatives he raised ranged from trade to reuniting divided Soviet families; from chemical weapons to Cuba; from Nicaragua to conventional arms; from the environment to student exchanges. "This is the end," Bush finally said, "of my non-agenda." It was a joke, of course.
- Bush waited, wondering what Gorbachev was thinking. "This has been interesting," Gorbachev said-slowly, Bush noted, which was unusual for the voluble Soviet. "It shows the Bush Administration has already decided what to do." That initial remark was a bit of passing defensive bluster. In truth, Gorbachev was relieved as he listened to Bush's proposals for new cooperation. The Soviet leader had been worried that the president might be overly influenced by conservative voices skeptical of Soviet intentions. Now he believed Bush took him and his reforms seriously.
Gorbachev's main concern: that familiar Cold War enmities would die hard, handicapping U.S.-Soviet relations as the world moved from superpower competition into what Gorbachev described as "a multipolar world with an integrated Europe, a strong Japan and China. India too was becoming more dynamic. He could imagine new and enormous issues would come into play, all related to competition over limited resources."
Gorbachev wanted to hear more from Bush about American ambitions. "The United States has not entirely abandoned old approaches," Gorbachev said to the president. "I cannot say that we have entirely abandoned ours. Sometimes we feel the United States wants to teach, to put pressure on others." Bush was quick to reply. "I hope you have noticed that as dynamic change has accelerated in recent months, we have not responded with flamboyance or arrogance that would complicate Soviet relations," Bush said. "What I am saying may be self-serving. I have been called cautious or timid. I am cautious, but not timid. But I have conducted myself in ways not to complicate your life. That's why I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall."
"Yes, we have seen that," Gorbachev replied, "and appreciate that."
A swordfish and lobster dinner aboard the Belknap had been planned for the American and Soviet parties that evening, but the stormy weather kept Gorbachev on the Maxim Gorky. The next morning the Soviet leader was cheerful. "I want to say to you and the United States that the Soviet Union will under no circumstances start a war-that is very important," Gorbachev said.
At 1:20 on the afternoon of Sunday, December 3, 1989, Bush and Gorbachev hosted the first press conference ever held jointly by an American president and a leader of the Soviet Union. Both men emphasized the intimacy and the candor of the discussions, and both spoke with an awareness of the historic moment. "For 40 years, the Western alliance has stood together in the cause of freedom," Bush said in an opening statement. "And now, with reform under way in the Soviet Union, we stand at the threshold of a brand-new era of U.S.-Soviet relations. And it is within our grasp to contribute, each in our own way, to overcoming the division of Europe and ending the military confrontation there."
Gorbachev expressed his appreciation of Bush's cautious nature, arguing that "in our position, the most dangerous thing is to exaggerate. And it is always that we should preserve elements of cautiousness, and I use the favorite word by President Bush." By the end of the sessions at Malta, it was clear that Bush and Gorbachev could work together. Flying home via Brussels, the president stopped to brief NATO allies. According to Bush's handwritten notes from his conversations, Mitterrand observed that the collapse of the Soviet empire represented the "greatest revolution of [the] last two centuries" (which still gave the French Revolution of 1789 pride of place); Denmark's prime minister thanked Bush for the president's "calm handling of changes."
Bush was happy. "We came out okay, [and] now I want to push, push, push on arms control, get something done," Bush dictated as Air Force One approached Washington on Monday, December 4, 1989. "I've got to and I will. I think I have a new level of confidence."
- The president arrived in Washington to find that Quayle, who owed Bush everything, was doing what Bush himself had refused to do for eight years during the Reagan administrations: drawing attention to himself at the expense of the president. "The general afterglow of Malta has been good; but the Vice President's office, seeing a chance to firm him up as the spokesman of the right, is doing some unhelpful things," Bush told his diary on Friday, December 8, continuing: They're selling the good copbad cop thesis. In other words, I've made these deals, and went to Malta, but now Quayle has to go out and shore up the right-wing....I find this disturbing....Dan makes a mistake. There isn't that much room to differ on this and, the big thing is, he's going to undermine his own Vice Presidency. The more I think back to my eight years, I think back [on] how determined I was to avoid this kind of flap....I'm thoroughly annoyed about it, and I'm trying to contain myself....We cannot have the Vice President's staff trying to shape the policy of this administration. They weren't at the meeting; they don't get the feel of it; and it undermines what I'm trying to do.
Bush had decided that Gorbachev was a man whom he could and should deal with as wisely as he could. Some conservatives-including Quayle and his advisers-remained wary at a moment in which the Cold War was growing more distant by the day.
On Halloween 1989, a column by journalist Morton Kondracke had appeared in the conservative Washington Times headlined "Quayle, Baker Square Off." The piece quoted anonymous Quayle advisers casting doubts on Baker's toughness with the Soviets, even going so far as to suggest that Baker's support for perestroika was "'appeasement.'" Baker sent an annotated copy of the column to Bush with a firm handwritten message along the margin: "Mr. P-We have successfully avoided this kind of crap for 9 months! We won't be able to continue if these people keep it up. Please have it knocked off. JAB III." Kondracke wrote wisely of the conflict, noting: "At the moment...some of Mr. Quayle's allies are trying to build up their man's credibility on the right by disparaging Mr. Baker as a potential softy. They ought to quit. We don't know yet how tough Jim Baker can be with the Russians, but in internecine combat within the U.S. government, he's lethal." That was true. It was also true that the president believed in dealing with reality, and Gorbachev was, for now, a fact of life.
- On Saturday, December 16, 1989, Ellie LeBlond, Doro's three-year-old daughter, was sleeping in Barbara's office off the Bushes' bedroom in the White House. At four A.M., Bush recalled, Ellie walked in and stood next to her slumbering grandfather, who "felt aware of her presence" and opened his eyes. He pulled her into the big bed and tucked her in between her grandparents. "Be quiet and go to sleep," Bush whispered. She hugged him, and he thought of Robin, who used to cross the hallway on West Ohio Street in Midland in the middle of the night to climb into her parents' bed. Ellie "was a wiggly little thing...equally as beautiful."
That same night, in Panama, a young American marine was killed after a confrontation at a checkpoint. Shortly thereafter, a navy lieutenant and his wife were harassed at the same roadblock. "He was kicked and brutalized," Bush dictated on Sunday, December 17, 1989, "kicked in the groin." The December attacks on Americans in Panama brought a festering issue to the fore. The Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega had long been an American ally in Cold War Latin America. Essentially a paid anti-Communist in the region, Noriega was a drug trafficker and tyrant who had become more trouble than he was worth. He stole a presidential election, continued to be a center for destabilizing drug running and money laundering, and his erratic behavior raised concerns about the fate of the crucial Panama Canal. Noriega even declared war on the United States on December 15, but Bush had paid little attention until news of the harassment of Americans reached him two days later.
For Bush, that did it. On the afternoon of Sunday the seventeenth, after briefings from Colin Powell and Dick Cheney-Jim Baker and Scowcroft deputy Bob Gates were also present-Bush ordered an operation against Noriega's Panamanian Defense Forces. "We've had enough," Bush dictated, "and we cannot let a military officer be killed, and certainly not a lieutenant and his wife brutalized."
Code-named Operation Just Cause, Bush's invasion of Panama was, at the time, the largest projection of American force since Vietnam-larger than Reagan's liberation of Grenada in 1983. On the night the troops went into Panama, Bush managed only ninety minutes or so of sleep; he awoke with a crick in his neck after lying down on a small couch in his dining room off the Oval Office.
The American forces-Bush dispatched twenty-six thousand troops-quickly deposed Noriega, who took refuge in the Vatican embassy in Panama City for ten days before surrendering to the U.S. military and coming to the United States to face trial on narcotics charges. Over the course of the brief operation, 23 American servicemen died; 322 were wounded. For Bush, the action-filled operation in Panama capped a year in which prudence had dictated a cautious course in Beijing and Berlin. The three episodes demonstrated that Bush was a president capable of both diplomatic restraint (in the cases of China and of East Germany) and of effective military action (the toppling of Noriega in Panama). Comfortable with power, Bush was learning when to watch and wait, and when to strike.
- Christmas Eve fell on a Sunday in 1989, and Bush was in a reflective mood at Camp David. To check the political pulse of the nation, GOP chairman Lee Atwater had convened two focus groups-one conservative, one moderate. "The more moderate one [said], 'Well, Bush hasn't done anything,'" Bush dictated on Christmas Eve. "Not negative, but just somewhat mutedly critical, and I'm thinking, 'Gosh, look at all that's gone on, and sometimes you shape events by not making any mistakes.'"
He was optimistic yet temperate about the world and about himself. Looking over the White House News Summary one day early in 1990, he noticed an observation from the Baltimore Sun. "Bush is competent and confident, well meaning and well briefed," the newspaper had written, "but a long way from greatness." The president mulled the remark over. The press, for once, was on to something. "[I'm] inclined to agree with them," Bush said-a man at once self-confident and self-aware.
THIRTY-FOUR.