The next day, Baker was hosting a luncheon in the ornate Benjamin Franklin Room at the State Department in honor of President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines, the popular hero of a “people power” revolution that had toppled the dictator Ferdinand Marcos a few years earlier. About 150 diplomats, officials, and business leaders were seated at tables around the room, including Baker’s Democratic superlawyer pal Robert Strauss, as well as Dick Cheney and General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Baker had just returned from an eight-day trip to Australia, where he attended an Asia-Pacific summit meeting, and he was understandably tired from the twenty-five-hour flight home. But the memo handed to him in the midst of the meal provided a jolt that would have woken up anyone. In careful, restrained language, the typed note from his special assistant, J. Stapleton Roy, let Baker know that the world had changed while he was at lunch.
Mr. Secretary:
The East German Government has just announced that it is fully opening its borders to the West. The implication from the announcement is full freedom of travel via current East German/West German links between borders. We are asking EUR to give you an analysis.
Stape
Baker stared at the page. He did not need an analysis from the State Department’s European Bureau to know this was momentous. Twenty-eight years after the Berlin Wall was erected, the forbidding barrier that had divided Germany and, by extension, Europe itself was coming down. Baker called for attention around the room, read the note to the assembled group, and offered a toast to a day that would go down in history.
After escorting Aquino out, Baker spoke briefly to reporters, for once not prepared by extensive talking points. If the reports were true, he said, still cautious, the United States would welcome the East German decision after so many years of waiting. But he begged off saying more, then hopped in a car and rushed over to the White House. On the back of a news summary, he scrawled out his first thoughts: “Something we’ve wanted for 40 years. Eur. that’s whole & free.” And then, looking ahead to the implications, to the diplomatic haggling he knew would inevitably follow, he added: “Premature to deal w/issue of reunification. Reunification ‘on basis of Western values.’ ”
At the White House, Bush was at his desk when Brent Scowcroft rushed in to tell him the news. There was no plan for this. They would, like the rest of the world, watch and react. The two went to the study off the Oval Office and turned on a television to find images of jubilant crowds gathering in Berlin. Baker arrived. Soon, the president summoned reporters to hail the breakthrough, but even as he did, he remained deliberately reserved, wary of looking triumphal lest he be seen as taunting Mikhail Gorbachev or, worse, provoking hard-liners in Moscow to take action to stop what was happening. The last thing Bush wanted was to inadvertently goad the Soviets into a Tiananmen Square solution in East Germany.
“Of course, I welcome the decision by the East German leadership to open the borders to those wishing to emigrate or travel,” Bush said tepidly to the reporters hurriedly gathered around his desk in the Oval Office. “I am very pleased with this development.”
The reporters were mystified at his restrained, even bland reaction. Exuberant Germans were breaking through the wall that had represented the worst of the Cold War and the most expressive word the president of the United States could come up with was “pleased”?
Lesley Stahl of CBS News pressed him on it. “This is a sort of great victory for our side in the big East-West battle, but you don’t seem elated,” she pointed out.
“I am not an emotional kind of guy,” Bush said.
“Well, how elated are you?”
“I’m very pleased.”
It hardly seemed equal to the moment. Even as Bush spoke, tens of thousands of East Germans who until recently would have been shot merely for approaching the wall now fearlessly climbed on top of it and headed west. Some took ice picks to crack away at it. Others danced in the streets. Tom Brokaw, the NBC News anchor who by chance had picked that week to broadcast from Berlin, beamed the revelry to the rest of the world, pronouncing it “a historic moment, a moment that will live forever.”
Taking his cue from Bush, Baker remained undemonstrative even as he went on ABC and CBS to talk about the remarkable changes. Then he headed off to the State Dinner for Aquino, still jet-lagged from the long flight from Australia but exhilarated by the day’s events and already calculating in his mind what might come next.
After letting the moment sink in, Baker the next day called Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister. As Baker waited for him to come on the line, the West German phone operator spoke up.
“God bless America,” she told Baker. “Thanks for everything, sir.”
BERLIN SAT UNEASILY at the center of the Cold War from the start. Located within East Germany, but divided by the four victorious powers at the end of World War II, the city remained a camp filled with hostile parties living uneasily next to each other, part capitalist and democratic, part Communist and totalitarian.
When Joseph Stalin cut off West Berlin from the rest of West Germany in 1948, Harry Truman ordered an airlift to keep its citizens fed and supplied until the Soviets finally backed down nearly a year later. By 1961, the Communist leadership had grown so aggravated by citizens of the eastern part of the city traveling to the West that one night under cover of darkness, it erected barbed wire fences to stop them. What became known as the Berlin Wall was in reality a series of fortified barriers over twenty-seven miles, a mix of concrete walls, ditches, fences, and tank traps. It was a physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain that Winston Churchill had so memorably described dividing Europe. Over the course of its history, East Germans tried to escape by tunneling under, flying over, or crashing through the barricades. Some hid in trunks or falsified documents. At least 140 people were shot or died of accidents or suicide at the wall and, by some estimates, significantly more. As late as February 1989, a twenty-year-old waiter became the last wall jumper shot and killed by East German border guards, cut down by a hail of ten bullets.
American presidents saw the wall as the front line in the ideological struggle with Communism. In 1963, two years after the wall went up, John Kennedy traveled to West Berlin to show solidarity with the enclosed city, famously proclaiming “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Ronald Reagan came in 1987 to insist that it was time to end the division, using a memorable phrase added to his speech over the objections of nervous advisers. “Mr. Gorbachev,” he declared, “tear down this wall.”
Neither they nor any other American leader, however, did anything tangible to make it happen. The East German people did that themselves. Throughout 1989, unrest grew throughout the country as it did across Eastern Europe. Hungary was the first to open its border to the West via Austria and, disabling the electric alarm system and cutting through barbed wire, thousands of East Germans made their way to West Germany via the circuitous route. Demonstrations broke out not just in East Berlin but in places like Dresden, where a KGB officer named Vladimir Putin personally confronted protesters with a pistol outside the tan, two-story villa that served as the local headquarters for the Soviet spy agency, brandishing the gun to keep the mob from breaking in as his KGB colleagues frantically burned papers inside.
Erich Honecker, the aged, iron-fisted Communist ruler of East Germany, was forced out on October 18 and replaced by his protégé, Egon Krenz, who promised reforms. In the first week of November, at least a half million people and perhaps twice as many poured into the streets of East Berlin demanding free speech, open elections, and elimination of the Communist monopoly on power. The fall of the wall a few days later was, in reality, an accident, the result of a string of misunderstandings and miscalculations. The days leading up to the event had been marked by East Germans trying to transit to the West through Czechoslovakia. Hoping to ease the situation, Krenz and the Politburo decided to issue a new temporary travel regulation meant to allow East Germans to cross the border into West Germany at a single transit point in the countryside, creating in effect a hole that would let off steam. But it did not turn out that way; once television erroneously broadcast the decree as if it were an unconditional opening, it in effect became one. There was no way to undo the rapturous night of November 9, 1989.
Soon, the unforgettable scenes in Berlin were followed by a cascade of uprisings throughout Eastern Europe. On the day after the wall fell, Bulgaria’s president, Todor Zhivkov, stepped down, ending thirty-five years in power. Two weeks later, amid massive demonstrations in Prague’s Wenceslaus Square, Miloš Jakeš, the Communist Party boss in Czechoslovakia, resigned. Barely a month after that, the dissident playwright Václav Havel was elected president, the climax of the country’s Velvet Revolution. On Christmas Day, Romania’s brutal leader Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife were convicted by a military court and summarily executed by firing squad as tears streamed down the dictator’s face. By spring, Hungary would hold its first direct presidential election and by the end of that year the Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa would be elected president of Poland.
For Baker, the series of earth-shattering events cut through all the months of pointless bureaucratic wavering and Washington infighting about Soviet policy. They would have to act. But Baker was not wired for revolution. He was not the type to jump on a wall, figuratively or literally. His first instinct was for stability. As a young man, he was so wedded to order that he did whatever the Warden told him, even after graduating college and serving in the Marines. So Baker watched what was happening in Berlin and Prague and Warsaw with a sober eye, wondering how to harness the revolutionary energies now unleashed and channel them to a secure outcome with a minimum of damage.
By his own account, Bush had “given little thought to reunification” when he took office. Few imagined the two Germanys would merge into one quickly, or even on Bush’s watch. “Virtually no West German expects German reunification to happen in this century,” Philip Zelikow and Robert Blackwill, two National Security Council officials, wrote in a memo sent to Bush on March 20, 1989, two months after his inauguration, although “there is no German of any age who does not dream of it in his soul.”
But events were moving swiftly. In a May 15 memo to Baker ahead of the NATO summit, Robert Zoellick thought there was more of a chance to finally end the division of Germany and he urged the secretary of state to embrace the goal. “This is the real opportunity to get ahead of the curve and to exceed expectations,” he wrote. “The real question is whether Gorbachev will grab it first. (Or else the Germans will grab it, especially after Honecker passes from the scene.)” Zoellick recommended that the Bush administration advocate for “normalization,” not “reunification,” and make clear that any future Germany be firmly anchored in the West.
When the wall finally fell that November, no one could say for sure what would happen next. The East German government could have reacted by cracking down. So could Gorbachev, as his predecessors did during brief moments of reform in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. With some 380,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany, the Kremlin still held the real power to decide. But Gorbachev opted not to intervene, letting East Germany go its own way, a decision that effectively set free all of the Warsaw Pact countries. It might not have been obvious in the moment, but Gorbachev’s action—or lack thereof—would become perhaps the most critical turning point on the path toward the end of the Cold War.
The sense of jubilation was hard to overstate. Nine million East Germans visited the West just in the first week alone after the wall fell, which was more than half of the country’s population, and while most returned home it was clear that no wall could keep Germans apart any longer. Reunification was not only possible now, it appeared to be happening. But after four decades of division, no one knew how to proceed with making the two Germanys one nation again, whose interests that would serve, or what that would mean for the superpowers whose nuclear-armed forces confronted each other across Europe’s dividing line. “We were all caught off guard,” said Dieter Kastrup, a top adviser to the West German foreign minister. “That meant we had no blueprint or master plan in our drawers.”
Four days after the fall of the wall, Baker joined Bush and Brent Scowcroft for dinner with Henry Kissinger at the White House residence. The former secretary of state, who had been born to a Jewish famly in Bavaria and fled Hitler’s Germany as a boy in 1938, believed that reunification was now inevitable. Yet even with millions of people streaming across the open border, a merger still seemed daunting. In one of their first conversations after the wall fell, Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany predicted to Bush that reunification would probably take five years. Within weeks, he was talking about as quickly as three years. Not long after that, the time frame accelerated even further and it was clear that Kohl would press for the fastest possible merger. Every day, facts on the ground were outpacing political leaders struggling to adjust to a reality that seemed increasingly beyond their control.
On November 28, Kohl announced a ten-point plan for closer ties with East Germany, although he did not yet propose negotiations for reunification. “When Helmut Kohl gave his ten-point speech, we thought it would take five to ten years to unify Germany,” said Horst Teltschik, the chancellor’s national security adviser. “The high speed just came from the people of the GDR,” as the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was called.
While peeved at the lack of advance warning, Bush broadly supported Kohl’s approach. Inside Baker’s State Department, a fight had been raging since almost the minute the wall was breached. The cautious careerists in his European bureau had produced a paper counseling Baker to avoid being “stampeded” into premature diplomatic initiatives. Zoellick and Dennis Ross vehemently disagreed, and Zoellick kept a copy of the memo on his desk for years afterward, often pulling it out to remind diplomats about the overly cautious mind-set of their profession. Ross set his policy planning staff to work on ideas for Baker to put America into the center of the conversation and by mid-November a brilliant young academic who had recently become his deputy, Francis Fukuyama, proposed that the secretary seize the initiative by announcing a series of principles to guide the reunification process.
Fukuyama, whose wonkish cover story in that summer’s National Interest proclaiming “the end of history” had made him an unlikely celebrity, had written a memo back in May arguing with the career experts that a revolution in East Germany was imminent. Days before the fall of the wall, he had been in Berlin to meet with Ross’s counterpart in the West German Foreign Office, who confidently assured Fukuyama once again that he was wrong. “Germany will not unify in my lifetime,” the diplomat told Fukuyama. Now Fukuyama would have the chance to write his own script for “the triumph of the West” his article had envisioned. He suggested four main points for the secretary, and the day after Kohl’s speech Baker rolled them out publicly, saying that any move toward unity should be gradual and peaceful; based on the self-determination of the German people, not the dictates of outsiders; ensure that a single Germany remain in NATO; and guarantee that current borders with Germany’s neighbors remain inviolate.
Not everyone was as supportive of an integrated Germany. After two devastating world wars sparked by German militarism, other European powers remained understandably nervous. Gorbachev was hardly more enthusiastic than the hard-liners in the Soviet security agencies about a powerful German neighbor, much less one still anchored in NATO. Poland worried that a new Germany would seek to reclaim territory it lost to its eastern neighbor in the aftermath of World War II. President François Mitterrand of France was wary. Britain’s Margaret Thatcher was downright hostile. “Mitterrand was not the problem,” Teltschik recalled. “The problem was Margaret Thatcher.” At a dinner of European leaders ten days after Kohl’s speech, Thatcher stunned him by telling the heads of state, “We beat the Germans twice and now they’re back.” Mitterrand encouraged her, warning in a private lunch at the Élysée Palace memorialized by a British note taker that a reunited Germany could give the country more influence even than it had under Adolf Hitler.
NEVER MIND HIS STINT afloat in the Mediterranean as a Marine; Baker was not much of a sailor. He had a habit of getting violently seasick, so the much-anticipated meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev scheduled aboard American and Soviet ships docked at Malta would have been a challenge for Baker no matter what. But when they arrived for the non-summit, the weather was treacherous. The waters off the island republic were roiling and the ships were pitching back and forth like plastic toys in a bathtub. Baker never did throw up, contrary to subsequent rumor, but he felt like it and headed for the sick bay, where doctors gave him a patch to put behind his ear to settle his queasy stomach.
No one had anticipated the storm that hit Malta just as the leaders of the world’s two nuclear superpowers arrived for their first official meeting since Bush became president. It was less than a month since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rain came down in sheets as Bush and Baker stepped off Air Force One to find a drenched military band welcoming them. After a courtesy call on Malta’s prime minister, they took off by helicopter for the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. Getting off the choppers onto the slippery deck was hazardous enough but the howling winds and backwash from the rotor blades prompted some Baker aides to worry about getting blown out to sea.
Baker was brought to the admiral’s loft to watch as nineteen aircraft took off in a demonstration of American might—F-14 fighter planes, E-2 Hawkeyes, A-7 bombers, and more. After Bush addressed the crew, he and Baker headed by helicopter to the USS Belknap, a guided missile cruiser that would be their headquarters for the summit. Baker then went ashore for dinner with Brent Scowcroft, John Sununu, and Margaret Tutwiler. The Maltese capital of Valletta, known for its narrow avenues and limestone palaces dating as far back as the sixteenth century, was eerie amid the storm—there were no streetlights, traffic was light, and the shops were nearly empty. At the end of the evening, the owner of the restaurant asked Baker to sign the menu.
For a non-summit with no formal agenda, Baker and Bush spent a lot of time coming up with a formal agenda. Gorbachev had repeatedly gotten the better of them over the year since Bush’s election, presenting headline-grabbing initiatives that left the Americans looking unimaginative. Advice streamed in on how Bush could turn the tables. Nixon sent a six-page letter with ideas. Bush zeroed in on one suggestion on page five that suggested “a possible PR ploy” for the president, specifically a Bush-Gorbachev Mediterranean Charter, modeled after Franklin Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter with Winston Churchill. It would endorse Western values like free elections, free speech, and self-determination. “He won’t abide by such an agreement, just as Stalin did not abide by his agreement at Yalta for elections in Poland,” Nixon wrote. “But it would be very useful to nail him down.” He added: “The greatest PR danger is that the nuts on the right will try to make the case that Malta was simply a second Yalta. The answer to that is that Yalta divided Europe. Malta laid the groundwork for uniting it through agreement on and adherence to the great values which the United States and our Western European allies have always cherished.”
Baker had another thought. He recommended that Bush come up with as many initiatives as he could in all sorts of areas—not grand bargains, not historic advances, but a collection of ideas that, by sheer volume, would give the impression of Bush as a man of action. Since Gorbachev had been told this was just a get-to-know-you meeting, it was possible that he would not have anything to put on the table, but if he did, Bush at least would be ready. Brent Scowcroft did not think much of Baker’s idea, deeming it “unprofessional at best and corny at worst,” but Bush liked it and the national security team assembled seventeen proposals on issues like arms control, human rights, Central America, and the environment for him to present. It was diplomacy by ambush, not the way Baker usually liked to operate, but he was determined not to be outplayed again by the drugstore cowboy from Moscow.
On the morning of December 2, winds roared at practically gale force intensity and ocean waves reached as high as sixteen feet. The weather was so rough that the meeting could not be held on the Soviet ship Slava as originally planned, so Baker and Bush agreed to meet Gorbachev instead on the Maxim Gorky, where he was staying. Just getting onto the launch was a challenge for the president and secretary of state. The captain of the Belknap told the president that in a quarter century in the Navy he had never experienced such turbulent seas in harbor. At one point, Margaret Tutwiler tried for fifty minutes to reach Baker from shore before giving up and talking with him over an open radio.
As the two leaders and their teams sat across from each other on the Maxim Gorky, Bush opened by rolling out his seventeen initiatives, one after the other, clearly taking Gorbachev by surprise. He spoke for a long time before finally yielding the floor. “This is the end of my non-agenda,” Bush said lightly. For once, he and Baker had the advantage.
Perhaps more important, though, Bush made a point of reassuring Gorbachev that he had no interest in trumpeting the changes in Eastern Europe.
“I have been called cautious or timid,” Bush noted. “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 and appreciate that,” Gorbachev said.
Gorbachev expressed reservations about German reunification. “Unlike they—and you—I am saying there are two states, mandated by history,” he said. “So let history decide the outcome.”
Bush nodded. “We will do nothing to recklessly try to speed up reunification,” he promised.
After four and a half hours, Bush and Baker and their advisers left the Soviet ship, but as swells lifted and dropped their barge fifteen feet in a second, they had a hard time even getting back on board the Belknap. Their barge smashed the starboard landing platform to pieces, keeping them lurching around the harbor longer as the barge made its way, with great difficulty, to the port platform instead. Gorbachev never made it at all. He was supposed to visit the Belknap himself for dinner that evening, but when he could not get there, Bush and Baker feasted on swordfish and lobster without him. They were bunkmates in the captain’s quarters as Tom Brokaw said on NBC News that the Soviet-American get-together should be called the “seasick summit.”
Back on shore, Margaret Tutwiler realized that the treacherous weather was becoming the story and desperately called Baker. “Mr. Baker, this is a drowning rat calling for help,” she shouted over the winds. “I know you and the president are out there all by yourselves, sipping champagne or whatever, and you can’t know what’s going on here on the mainland. But I’m going to tell you, we’re getting crucified. We’re getting absolutely stomped.”
Baker understood immediately and instinctively came up with a plan to recapture the public relations initiative. Rather than wait until the end of the summit to unveil the seventeen proposals Bush had brought for Gorbachev, Baker told Tutwiler to announce them right away. “Dump!” he yelled into the phone.
With the reporters fed a fresh story, Bush and Baker returned to the Maxim Gorky the next morning to talk with Gorbachev about the Baltic states, which were straining for independence from the Soviet Union. The United States had never recognized the Soviet absorption of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia during World War II, so Bush could hardly fail to back their efforts now to finally break away from Moscow. At the same time, he worried about encouraging a violent revolt that the United States would not be able to support, much as happened in Hungary in 1956 when Dwight Eisenhower sat on the sidelines. Bush used the meeting to press Gorbachev not to use force with the restless Balts.
Gorbachev did not take to lecturing, however. At one point, when Bush said the division of Europe could only be overcome on the basis of “Western values,” Gorbachev bristled at the phrase.
“We share the values of democracy, individual liberty and freedom,” he insisted.
Hoping to smooth over the matter, Baker offered alternative wording. “What about calling them democratic values?” he asked.
“That’s good!” Gorbachev agreed.
While they were still at odds over important issues, Bush and Gorbachev had begun to develop the kind of partnership that Baker and Shevardnadze already had, and all four of them thought this would be key to managing the forces of change that were just then washing over Europe. Baker believed Gorbachev at Malta had made concessions to the evolving reality that other Soviet leaders never would have. “Gorby went out of his way to emphasize importance of U.S. staying in Eur.—even talked about importance of U.S. troop presence,” Baker wrote by hand on a cable sent to the American consulate in Leningrad summing up the meetings.
After nearly a year on the defensive, Baker felt the administration was finally on the right track. Gorbachev characteristically pressed them for even more. Why not get rid of NATO and the Warsaw Pact altogether? he asked in Malta. This was still too fanciful, almost unimaginable. Baker and company were fighting their own wars back in Washington, with anti-Communist hard-liners who wanted to talk about how to get the Soviets out of Nicaragua and Cuba and all the rest. But for the first time, Baker believed that Gorbachev was no longer looking to show up the Americans.
BAKER FLEW the next day to Brussels, where he had dinner with Hans-Dietrich Genscher to fill in the West German foreign minister. Over venison steak and potatoes, the two spent most of their time talking about what was happening in the two Germanys. Genscher would be a key figure for Baker in the months to come. Genscher noted that he “inherited my tendency for harmony” from his father, a lawyer like Baker’s dad, who died when the boy was just nine. As a teenager, Genscher was pressed into service in Hitler’s Wehrmacht during the last months of World War II and became an American prisoner of war. After the war, Genscher joined a liberal party in East Germany until he fled to the West in 1952. He became leader of the Free Democratic Party in West Germany and led it into a coalition government first with one dominant party and then with another, taking on the role of foreign minister in 1974, a post he still occupied when the Berlin Wall came down.
Jowly with receding dark hair, a favorite yellow pullover sweater, and a crafty flair for politics, Genscher served in Helmut Kohl’s cabinet, in an uneasy alliance always strained by their political differences. After years of working together, they had come to despise each other personally as well as politically and were famously not on speaking terms much of the time. For Baker this meant negotiating not only with two different Germanys but with two different parties within one of those Germanys. Indeed, the situation was so complicated that Baker deliberately took Genscher to dinner in Brussels rather than attend Bush’s meeting with Kohl so as to keep the foreign minister away and allow the chancellor to speak more frankly with the president. Baker would find in the months to come that Kohl did not always clear his plans with Genscher or vice versa. “What Baker learned very fast was that he had to take care what Genscher said and what Helmut Kohl said because there was not always full agreement,” remembered Horst Teltschik, the Kohl adviser. Teltschik regularly received calls from Baker after a Genscher meeting to confirm the chancellor’s position.
Even as American, Soviet, and West German leaders conferred in Malta and Brussels, the situation on the ground in East Germany was evolving by the hour. Egon Krenz resigned as the country’s last Communist chief, as did the Politburo, and several of its members were arrested. A warrant was issued for Erich Honecker, the previously deposed leader. Baker and his aides became increasingly nervous about the pace of change. The place seemed on the brink of anarchy. Baker’s team heard reports about Soviet troops being put on a higher level of alert. It was not hard to imagine a conflagration set off by a wrong move. Baker was heading next to West Berlin and for several weeks had been considering a trip into East Germany as well. Dan Quayle had wanted to be the first American official to visit following the fall of the wall, but Baker objected and got Bush to block it. “If I’d been in Baker’s position, I would have done the same thing,” Quayle later acknowledged.
The night before Baker arrived in West Berlin, the American ambassador, Vernon Walters, met with his counterparts from the three other victorious World War II powers at their insistence, a way of flexing muscle by London, Paris, and Moscow to make clear that they had not surrendered their rights to help determine the fate of Germany. Baker had instructed Walters to keep the meeting low-key to avoid antagonizing the Germans and grew angry when he saw pictures on the news of Walters posing with the other diplomats. As Baker had feared, the Germans were furious. “We were in fact appalled and up in arms about that,” said Dieter Kastrup, Genscher’s adviser.
When he landed, Baker met in his hotel room with Walters and Richard Barkley, the American ambassador to East Germany, and discussed his idea of taking a secret journey across the line into East Germany. Two previous secretaries of state had visited East Berlin but none had ventured into East Germany beyond the city and Baker was entranced by the idea of going where his predecessors had never gone, especially at such a historic moment. Barkley strongly supported it, urging Baker to come push the teetering East German government to reaffirm its commitment to holding new elections, the country’s first shot at a free and fair vote. But Walters opposed a visit, telling Baker flatly, “If you come, you will support the Communists.” Also opposed was James Dobbins, a top Europe official at the State Department. With Egon Krenz now out, East Germany was on its third leader in seven weeks. A visit by the American secretary of state, Dobbins argued, “would enhance the stature of a regime that was on its last legs.”
Baker was not one to forgive and forget. His discussion about venturing into East Germany would be his last substantive conversation with his ambassador to West Germany despite the intense focus on the country over the next year. Jovial and self-confident, Walters, a retired lieutenant general and former deputy CIA director who spoke a half-dozen languages, grated on Baker, who found him too willing to speak out of school, rather than stick to the company line. The two were opposites who did not attract. As Dobbins noted, “Baker’s mind was quick and analytical; Walters’s the polar opposite: ruminative, loquacious and anecdotal.” From then on, the American embassy in Bonn would essentially be excluded from the biggest issue on its turf. When Bush later hosted Helmut Kohl at Camp David, Baker gave orders that Walters not be allowed on the helicopter to join them. Walters, who twice threatened to resign, later attributed his troubles to the fact that he had publicly, and correctly, predicted German reunification more than six months before the wall fell. “Baker seemed not to forgive me for being right about German unity,” he wrote in a memoir. Either way, the freeze-out of America’s ambassador on the ground underscored Baker’s reliance on his own close advisers even at the expense of the rest of the State Department.
On December 12, Baker arrived at the Berlin Wall. He could see where people had chiseled holes through the graffiti-covered barrier and he could see the river where a young man had not so long ago had tried to swim across only to be captured. Baker’s motorcade then headed to the Glienicke Bridge, the famed site of prisoner exchanges during the Cold War, including the transfer of the downed American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and the Soviet Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky. Once Baker’s car reached the bridge, his West German police escort, an imposing phalanx of several dozen motorcycles and cruisers, stopped and turned Baker’s entourage over to their East German counterparts, a much more modest group. The transition to dilapidated East Berlin was stark. Baker’s extra-large six-passenger Mercedes drove to Potsdam at a slow pace, past tiny cars, empty streets, decaying buildings. “It was terrible,” he said later. “Everything was run-down. Lights were not bright. Just totally different.”
In Potsdam, site of the final Big Three summit near the end of World War II, Baker met with Hans Modrow, the new East German prime minister. Modrow updated him on the disarray in his country. The pull of the two Germanys toward each other was accelerating. “The process here is irreversible,” Modrow said. Afterward, arriving in the fading light of dusk, Baker visited St. Nicholas Church, a center of opposition to the old order. “A lot of people wish reunification to take place,” one of the church leaders told Baker. “We have a right to the same way of life as in the West.”
Baker returned to West Berlin that night increasingly convinced that reunification was coming—sooner than anyone had originally expected. And it was not going to be a merger. It was going to be a takeover.
IT WAS NOT EXACTLY the ideal moment for a war back home in the Western Hemisphere. Baker returned from Berlin jolted by the revolution in Eastern Europe and increasingly aware that, if the United States did not figure out something fast, the whole post–World War II order on the continent was about to unravel without any agreement on what would replace it. With that on his mind, the last thing he wanted to have to think about was Manuel Noriega. But it was not his choice.
Tensions with Panama had been growing throughout the year. In May, Noriega, the dictator who remained under indictment in the United States, had annulled a presidential election won by opposition leader Guillermo Endara, who was then attacked and beaten by a government-organized paramilitary squad. Noriega’s continuing provocations against American troops in the Panama Canal Zone were exacerbating long-standing antagonism with Washington. Having targeted Noriega during the 1988 presidential campaign, to the point of breaking with Reagan, Bush had little choice but to take him seriously now. In Bob Woodward’s The Commanders, Baker was quoted telling colleagues, “If we had known we would win the election by so much, we would not have dug such a deep hole for ourselves.” Baker later disputed the quote, but the sentiment rang true. By elevating Noriega as a signal enemy of the United States, Bush and Baker now had no choice but to confront him.
They resolved to push Noriega out of power but when a group of Panamanian military officers made an amateurish attempt to oust him in October, Bush and his team hesitated and what Baker later called a “comic-opera coup” collapsed. Bush and Baker resolved to take advantage when the next opportunity came, which it did soon enough. On December 16, an off-duty American Marine was shot to death at a Panamanian Defense Forces roadblock. The next day, Baker joined a meeting with other national security officials in the White House residence to discuss what to do. The Pentagon had an invasion plan called Operation Blue Spoon ready to go if the president so ordered.
“I think we ought to go,” Baker said. “As you know, the State Department has been for this for a long time.” He then launched into “the downsides of doing it,” which would include criticism by the Soviet Union and a protest by the Organization of American States. But Baker predicted that, whatever was said publicly, no major country would be genuinely upset if Noriega were dislodged.
Bush agreed and gave the order. Three days later, 12,000 American troops already stationed in Panama, joined by another 9,000 shipped in to help, launched what was now renamed Operation Just Cause aimed at toppling Noriega’s government and bringing him to justice. Baker and his team remained at the State Department and ordered in Chinese food as they waited for the invasion to begin. Baker lay down on the sofa in his office to rest. Shortly after midnight, Army Rangers parachuted in and the operation began. Baker called and woke up congressional leaders and the secretaries-general of the United Nations and the Organization of American States.
American troops routed the Panamanian Defense Forces in short order, and Endara was sworn in as president at the American military base. But Noriega could not be found. By 3 a.m., there was a rumor that he was dead. Then came another report that he was alive. “No news on #1—i.e. Noriega,” Baker wrote on notes during a 3 a.m. call with his ambassador in Panama City. “Emb has taken a few rounds but no one hurt.”
By December 24, the United States military had overwhelmed the organized resistance, with twenty-three American soldiers and three American civilians killed along with hundreds of Panamanian troops and civilians. Noriega eluded capture, moving from one hideout to another, before arriving with a gun and a knife on Christmas Eve at the door of the papal nunciature in Panama City. The Vatican refused to hand him over to the Americans.
In Houston for the holiday, Baker called Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, the Vatican secretary of state, catching the church official on his way to mass. “You must understand that, having lost twenty-five American lives to help restore democracy in Panama, we cannot allow Noriega to go to any other country than the United States,” Baker told him.
Noriega had been indicted for international drug trafficking, but Baker assured the cardinal that none of the charges would subject him to the death penalty, a prime concern for the church. “It’s not a political matter,” Baker said. “He’s a common criminal.”
For ten days, Noriega remained holed up at the nunciature until finally being told that his refuge would expire at noon on January 4, 1990. Given a choice of facing justice in his own country or taking his chances in a United States court, Noriega surrendered to the Americans. Bush had made his point. If the United States gave the impression of a superpower flexing its muscles to impose its will on a smaller country, it also sent a message that it still planned to exercise a dominant role in what the president would later call the New World Order.
Another conflict in Central America came to a resolution of its own a few weeks later. On February 25, Nicaraguans went to the polls in the election that was key to Baker’s strategy to end the contra war. Just days before the vote, Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista revolutionary turned president, had boasted that his opponent did not have “even a hypothetical possibility” of winning. But Violeta Chamorro, the widow of the opposition newspaper publisher whose assassination fueled the rebellion that brought the Sandinistas to power, ran away with the election, outpacing Ortega with 55 percent of the vote to 41 percent. Ortega had miscalculated.
The result surprised Baker, who all along had assumed that the Sandinistas would win and that Washington would have to accept their government. Indeed, just a few weeks earlier, Baker and Bush had argued in the Oval Office about it. Reading out loud from a secret cable on Nicaragua filled with critical reports about the Sandinistas, Bush had chided Baker for betting too heavily on the Soviets’ horse. When Baker heatedly objected, Bush admitted, as he later dictated to his diary, that “the intelligence was given to me by Quayle’s office.” Baker had been feuding with the hard-line conservatives on Quayle’s staff for months and he seized on this as the latest example. They are “poisoning the well,” he told the president. They “keep trying to push for outdated, kind of right-wing reactionary positions.” This time, though, Bush was more or less on their side, even if he had exposed the Quayle team’s backdoor attacks on his secretary of state.
When Nicaraguans went to the polls, Jimmy Carter was on the ground as an election observer and his presence proved critical. The Sandinistas initially refused to admit that they had lost until the former American president forced Ortega to face reality and personally took him over to Chamorro to concede defeat. Around 4:15 a.m., Carter finally called Baker in Washington to tell him the news and urged him to welcome the results without gloating.
“I hope that you’ll make a statement along those lines,” Carter said.
“I really don’t know what to say,” Baker replied.
“Do you have pencil and paper?”
“Yes.”
So Carter dictated the outlines of a statement, the gist of which Baker would later polish and release. It was an extraordinary collaboration between a Democratic former president and a Republican secretary of state who had twice worked to defeat him at the polls.
Around 4:30 a.m., Baker called Bush to update him and they savored the moment, Baker in particular given all that he had gambled on the election and even argued with Bush about it. “They were like sky high,” remembered Bernard Aronson, the assistant secretary of state, who had been the target of Quayle’s backdoor complaining to Bush about the State Department’s supposedly weak policy. When Baker called Aronson, “we sort of high-fived over the phone.”
Baker had shown what could be accomplished through negotiation, achieving through diplomacy what Ronald Reagan and his band of Cold Warriors had not through military action. Baker had eased out a Communist dictatorship in America’s backyard by democratic means, albeit after years of war increased the pressure for an open election. “It was a much more important defeat of the Sandinistas than if we had overthrown them through military aid,” Aronson reckoned. “Then their supporters would always say it was imperialism and they were popular.” Instead, “we demobilized the contras, we had a democratic government, and everybody could claim victory.” In the United States, “the right could say we defeated the Sandinistas; we got them out. The left could say we ended the contra war.”
It was not a permanent solution. In 2006, long after Baker left office, Ortega mounted a comeback and won back the presidency. But for America, at least, the war was over.
AS BAKER PREPARED to head back on the road to negotiate the fate of Germany, he had an advantage that no secretary of state before him ever had. Everyone knew that he was Bush’s good friend and that when Baker spoke, he was speaking with the authority of the president of the United States. No one could go around him or over his head. Quayle and others had already tried and Baker invariably shut them down, often by directly intervening with Bush. If Baker declared a position on behalf of America, his interlocutors knew it would stick. And if he made a promise, they knew he could deliver. For nearly four years, it was almost as if the country had a second president to send overseas to negotiate and lay down the law.
The relationship between Bush and Baker was forged in personal friendship and deepened by Mary Stuart’s untimely death. “Very close friend—probably closest,” Bush recalled years later. “And I think they knew it. The closeness was evident to all.” That was unlike any president and secretary of state before or since. Some secretaries were chosen because of their expertise in foreign affairs like Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, or Henry Kissinger. Others were political allies or even adversaries of the president like William Jennings Bryan in the early twentieth century. Many were clearly subordinates, not equals. Probably not since James Madison served Thomas Jefferson had a president and secretary of state enjoyed a genuine friendship before entering office.
For Baker, the relationship with Bush was an asset, invaluable political capital that he knew how to spend. “That empowered him in Washington during tough troubles,” said Aaron David Miller, who saw it up close as a Middle East negotiator for Baker. “It empowered him abroad. When you showed up, when you landed in capital X and got off that plane, I saw the difference in the way people reacted to Baker and the others. I mean, it was like mounting a small invasion of a foreign country. People were on edge. They were nervous. They were worried. They were sitting on the edge of their chairs in meetings wondering, ‘What’s he going to ask me to do? Can I do what he wants me to do? Is he going to get mad at me?’ And a lot of that mystique was certainly deliberately cultivated. But it reflected a reality that everyone understood—there was no daylight, zero, between the two institutions and the two individuals.”
Baker talked with Bush nearly every day and made a point of haunting the halls of the West Wing as often as possible. “Baker seemed to spend almost as much time in the White House as at State,” noticed James Dobbins, the Europe adviser. To Dobbins and other State Department institutionalists, that was not necessarily a compliment. But they did not deny that their boss had clout where it mattered. Baker had two private, thirty-minute meetings with Bush in the Oval Office each week, on Wednesdays and Fridays, when they were in town. Wherever he was in the world, Baker also sent Bush a one-page overnight summary each day called the “Secretary’s Night Letter to the President” covering at least three topics. “He’d tell it like it was,” Bush recalled. “He didn’t shield any bad stuff for fear or worry about him. It’s great. Having someone there that you totally trusted was a good thing for me.”
If he needed to, Baker would call late at night or come by the executive mansion on a Sunday afternoon. When they traveled together, Bush and Baker would share quarters, as they had on the storm-tossed Navy cruiser during the Malta summit. Sometimes, they would conjure up the other part of their life together, getting back on the tennis court or dreaming up a hunting trip. When they flew in a helicopter over Barranquilla, Colombia, in February for a summit, Baker looked out the window at the landscape below and said to Bush, “This is a place where you and I could shoot some quail.”
Baker made a point of calling Bush “Mr. President” in front of others, but in more relaxed moments, Bush called his friend “Bake” and the secretary called the president El Jefe, Spanish for “the chief,” or Jef for short. Robert Kimmitt noticed that there was “a visible lightness, almost jocularity in the relationship between” the two. By protocol, the secretary of state sat to the president’s right during cabinet and National Security Council meetings, and before the formalities began, Baker and Bush would often poke each other over, for instance, who got to bed earlier the night before. “Bush would say, ‘Oh, I had to meet with this group or that group,’ ” Kimmitt said, “and Baker said, ‘Well, that’s why you’re the social butterfly and I’m not.’ ” Sometimes their poking had an edge to it. During a meeting with Eduard Shevardnadze, Bush said that his approach to arms control was not due to a love of power. “Well, I’m not sure about Jim!” Bush joked.
If they were like brothers, it was a relationship shadowed by sibling rivalry. “They’re good friends, but there was always that little bit of competition,” Dan Quayle observed. “Baker, he ran for office, didn’t succeed, his buddy Bush did and he’s president and I think Baker always thought he could have been president. However, it didn’t work out that way.” Bush no doubt sensed that. When Baker pushed too hard, Bush would push back. “If you’re so smart, how come you’re not vice president?” he would say during the Reagan years. That was modified after Bush won the White House. “If you’re so smart, how come you’re not president?” Whenever it got to that stage, Baker knew it was time to ease up. “Like most siblings, we’ve been known to argue and holler at one another in private,” Baker reflected, “and there’s a healthy measure of friendly competition between us.”
The imbalance in their partnership grated from time to time. No matter how far back they went, Bush was now president and Baker was not. When the two returned from a trip together to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, Bush boarded Marine One and flew to the White House in a matter of minutes. Baker had to return home via a half-hour car ride; to add insult to injury, by security protocol, he had to wait until the president’s helicopter was safely away before he could even leave the base.
Baker was not above using his friendship with Bush to swat away nuisances. After one too many times cooling his heels on the tarmac at Andrews, Baker personally appealed to the director of the Secret Service. “I hope that you can find a way to grant the Secretary of State an exemption,” he said. “What I am really requesting is that my limo and a follow-up car be permitted to leave the tarmac upon arrival rather than having to wait until the actual lift-off of Marine One, which on our last visit was some 12–15 minutes after arrival.” He even had the president of the United States personally endorse the request. “Let’s do this,” Bush wrote by hand on the top of the letter. “GB.” Baker did not hesitate to go directly to the president on more significant turf battles either and there were regular feuds with not only Quayle, but also the two men now filling posts that Baker had held during the Reagan administration: John Sununu, the White House chief of staff, and Nick Brady, the treasury secretary.
When dealing with Brent Scowcroft, Baker was usually careful not to flaunt the relationship with Bush, keenly aware that the national security adviser had his own equities and was in the White House every day. If Baker called Bush personally to brief him on a development or consult on a decision, he usually made sure that Scowcroft knew it. Yet he was acutely sensitive to any slights from the other direction. “Brent and Jim did get moderately crosswise, but very rarely,” Bush said after leaving office. “Jim worried that he might be excluded from a decision that affected his department. As a former chief of staff, Baker knew how a strong-willed presidential advisor, if backed by the president, can easily isolate a cabinet member.” And in some ways, Scowcroft was growing closer to the president than even Baker. The son of a wholesale grocer who became an air force pilot, Scowcroft, like Bush, flew in World War II. After the war, he crashed his P-51B Mustang in a New Hampshire forest, breaking his back and leaving him in a hospital for two years. After years of government service, he had learned to be the ultimate staff man and had become Bush’s alter ego inside the White House. It was Scowcroft, not Baker, who would later coauthor a book on foreign policy with Bush.
In status-conscious Washington, Baker’s high visibility was in and of itself a form of power and even many of his colleagues in the administration believed Baker’s priority was looking out for himself at the expense of his friend. “He demanded more loyalty of the president than he gave in return,” Robert Gates said years later. “When Baker would go beyond his brief, get in a jam, or get the president in hot water, he would call Scowcroft to insist that the president stand behind him. On the other hand, when convenient, he would at times take credit that in fact belonged to the president—or occasionally, in difficult circumstances, distance himself from the president.” Quayle concluded that Baker used his ties to the president as both sword and shield in internal fights but, in fact, was insecure about it. “Baker’s frequent invoking his ‘thirty-five-year friendship’ with Bush was taken as a sign of weakness by some,” Quayle wrote in his memoir.
The tensions were real and the next few months of intensive negotiations with the Soviets would test their friendship like never before. But if Baker pushed the limits at times with Bush, it was because the president let him. Baker was not only Bush’s friend. Bush would not have been in the White House without him.