Within a couple of months of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was clear to Bush and Baker that, as the president dictated to his diary, “reunification appears inevitable.” But that did not mean they had any real plan yet for making it happen, other than assuming it was too important a matter to leave to others. Both the president and secretary of state took it for granted that the United States had to set the course. “We’ve got to lead,” Bush told Baker and Brent Scowcroft after one particularly nerve-wracking round of conversations over a weekend in February 1990 with Helmut Kohl at Camp David and then Margaret Thatcher by telephone. The formidable British prime minister was still extremely wary of a reunified Germany, telling the Americans she was more worried about it now than about the Soviet threat.
At the same time, Baker realized how sensitive the Germans were to the notion that their future would be determined by the Four Powers who still held some measure of authority by virtue of their victory in World War II. In the past, meetings of the representatives of the Four Powers with the two Germanys had come across as demeaning to the Germans, as if the four grown-ups were at one table and the two Germans were at a small side table. “We called it the cat table,” said Horst Teltschik. When Vernon Walters seemed to be repeating that with his meeting on the eve of Baker’s Berlin visit, Hans-Dietrich Genscher quickly complained to Baker. The American secretary reassured the foreign minister. “Hans-Dietrich, we understand you,” he said.
Baker knew that the Soviets also had to be assuaged and made to feel as if they still had some sway over what was to come. Having lost 27 million people in World War II fighting the Germans, the Soviets did not consider Germany’s status some abstract historical curiosity. Practically no Russian family had been spared from devastating loss. Even if Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze were privately willing to accede to German unity, they had complicated domestic politics to navigate, both with hard-liners in the security agencies and with the broader population. Baker was searching for a diplomatic approach that would, at the very least, give Moscow some face-saving role in the coming negotiation.
The solution he seized on was a formula cooked up by his advisers at the State Department called Two Plus Four, meaning the two Germanys plus the four World War II victors. Over time, a debate would develop over who exactly first conceived the idea—Frank Fukuyama and other members of the policy planning team had worked all through the Christmas holiday on the proposal and Dennis Ross sent their plan on to Baker by late January. Baker had no pride of authorship on this one; his practice was not to come up with ideas so much as to recognize the good ones and run with them. Under the plan, the two Germanys would take on the central task of negotiating between themselves with the four others playing a subsidiary role confined to issues dealing with external security. This would give the Soviets cover, to make it look like they were a part of the process rather than having it imposed on them. “You had to make it appear that this wasn’t a total defeat for them,” said Ross. Brent Scowcroft, however, was dubious. He thought the Two Plus Four concept would add too many players to the process and, ultimately, slow it down. Still, he was willing to defer while Baker tested the idea with the other parties.
Genscher reacted favorably as long as it really was “Two Plus Four and not Four Plus Two,” which Baker understood. Baker also adopted an idea that Genscher had advanced in a meeting in Washington that would reassure the Soviets by agreeing that NATO territory would not move eastward with a united Germany and that the alliance would not advance its forces beyond the old lines. Baker then flew to Moscow to try out his concept on the Soviets. Along the way, he met with Roland Dumas, the French foreign minister, during a 2 a.m. refueling stop in Shannon, Ireland, and secured his support. From there, Baker stopped in a foggy Prague, where he met with Václav Havel, the leader of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution.
By the time Baker made it to Moscow, the Soviet capital was consumed by its own political tumult. On February 7, just as he was arriving, the Central Committee of the Communist Party agreed to the latest Gorbachev reform proposal and voted to give up its monopoly on political power. Other parties, banned since the days of Lenin, would now be allowed. The world seemed to be spinning so quickly that neither Baker nor anyone else could keep up. As he traveled, a debate broke out among his staff about whether he should stop in Bulgaria after Moscow, a decision complicated by uncertainty over whether the government in Sofia would still be in office by the time he got there. In case that were not enough, in South Africa, the anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison after twenty-seven years of captivity, presaging the eventual collapse of white minority rule.
In Moscow, Baker rolled out his Two Plus Four proposal to Shevardnadze, offering what he called “iron-clad guarantees that NATO’s jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward.” Baker met with Gorbachev in St. Catherine Hall in the Kremlin on February 9. The Soviet leader exuded self-confidence and strode into the hall as if he did not have a care.
“Events are moving rapidly in the world since Malta, more rapidly than any of us would have thought,” Baker told him. But “for what it’s worth, our relationship has moved from competition to cooperation.”
“Those are my feelings,” Gorbachev replied. “I have to tell you, there are one or two persons in your country who still regard us as the enemy. Let’s face it. That’s reality.”
“There are fewer of those,” Baker said, although in fact back home he and Bush were getting more and more fed up with the “right-wingers,” as Bush called them, who seemed increasingly out of step with the rapid warming of relations with the Soviets.
Baker and Gorbachev discussed the status of ongoing nuclear arms talks as well as Bush’s latest plan for a cap on conventional forces in Europe. Then they moved on to possible agreements on chemical weapons and a nuclear test ban. “I saw our negotiator yesterday in the men’s room,” Baker said, “and he told me he was making progress.”
“All important business is always done in men’s rooms and smoking rooms,” Gorbachev joked.
But the electric question of the moment remained Germany. Baker explained his Two Plus Four concept to Gorbachev, who said he had been thinking about a six-power forum himself.
“I say Four Plus Two, you say Two Plus Four,” Gorbachev said. “How do you look at this formula?”
“Two Plus Four is a better way,” Baker said. It put the German states first.
To reassure Gorbachev, Baker brought up Genscher’s idea and took it a step further. “There would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east,” he told Gorbachev, coming back to the formula three times in the course of the conversation. The addition of the word “jurisdiction” was a mistake, a careless change in vocabulary of the sort that the lawyerly Baker usually avoided. It would come back to haunt him.
Gorbachev seemed resigned to the merger of East and West. “There is nothing terrifying in the prospect of a unified Germany,” he said. But he insisted it should not be part of NATO, as Bush and Baker wanted, and broached the idea of a neutral Germany, belonging to neither Eastern nor Western alliance.
“A neutral Germany does not necessarily mean a demilitarized Germany,” Baker cautioned, as he reverted to the official line, arguing that Europe would be better off with a reconstituted Germany firmly anchored in NATO. He asked Gorbachev if he would rather see an independent Germany outside NATO with no American forces present or a united Germany tied to NATO with the stabilizing presence of the United States.
Gorbachev said he would think about that. But, he quickly added, “Any extension of the zone of NATO is unacceptable.”
“I agree,” Baker said.
Back in Washington, Scowcroft’s staff was alarmed when it learned about Baker’s language. The word “jurisdiction” could imply that the NATO doctrine of collective defense, encapsulated in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, would apply only to part of German territory. That would unacceptably limit German sovereignty. It was one thing to agree not to move troops into the East right away, but all of Germany had to be part of NATO. “The NSC got to him pretty quickly and said that language might be misinterpreted,” remembered Condoleezza Rice, then a Soviet adviser to Bush. At Baker’s next stop, in Sofia, Bulgaria, he got a call from Scowcroft and his own deputy, Larry Eagleburger, expressing concern that he had shown too much flexibility on the issue of a reunited Germany in NATO. On the call, Baker maintained that he really had been insistent with the Russians, stressing “membership, membership, membership,” as Bush recorded in his diary. But Baker heard the White House message and, without conceding a mistake, began walking back his words by ditching the term “jurisdiction” from all future discussions.
After Moscow and Bulgaria, Baker flew on to Romania, touring the outer reaches of the rapidly fraying Soviet empire. In Sofia, he had addressed a crowd of opposition activists chanting, “Bye-bye, Commies!” In Bucharest, he passed the palace where Nicolae Ceauseşcu had ruled for nearly twenty-five years and saw smashed windows and hundreds of bullet marks on the exterior of the building.
Baker next flew to Ottawa, where envoys from twenty-three nations were gathering for a conference on an open-skies initiative intended to lead to a treaty allowing the United States, the Soviet Union, and other signatories to launch unarmed aerial observation flights over one another’s territories on the theory that transparency would reduce the chances of conflict. Baker effectively commandeered the gathering in Ottawa’s grand converted central railway station, turning the Beaux-Arts hallways into his personal venue for securing approval of his Two Plus Four approach. He hoped to strike quickly and announce it right away. Baker met with Shevardnadze and Hans-Dietrich Genscher separately at least five times in a single day as well as France’s Roland Dumas and Douglas Hurd, the British foreign minister. Shevardnadze and Genscher also met without Baker, arguing for two hours over the terms “unity” versus “unification.” The negotiations, Baker’s speechwriter Andrew Carpendale said later, were “wild and wooly.”
Shevardnadze was not happy with what he saw as the hijacking of the open-skies conference to discuss Germany, telling an aide it was a “stupid situation” and, when Baker pressed him, he refused to specify what Moscow’s conditions for reunification really were. Still, Baker clinched a conventional forces agreement with Shevardnadze, codifying the massive withdrawal of troops from Europe that Bush had been seeking. Under the deal, each side would station no more than 195,000 troops in Central Europe, while the United States could keep another 30,000 elsewhere in Europe, primarily in Britain and Italy. That would force the Soviets to pull far more troops out of the middle of Europe than the United States would have to because Moscow had so many more there to begin with.
But back in Washington, Scowcroft was disturbed by how quickly all of this was coming together. He had thought Baker was merely going to test the viability of the Two Plus Four idea, not race ahead and make it a reality. And Scowcroft thought the conventional forces limits would be flexible, allowing the United States an aggregate 225,000, rather than committing to rigid, geographically specific sublimits. “Hit the roof twice,” a Baker aide wrote of Scowcroft in notes from the day.
For once, Baker found himself at a real disconnect with the White House. Bush had not come up with a proposal of his own, but neither was he fully committed to Baker’s idea and he wondered whether Helmut Kohl really was on board with the Two Plus Four concept, which was exactly what Kohl wondered about Bush. To clear things up, Bush got Kohl on the phone to confirm his position, a call that unintentionally had sent the signal that Bush was himself ambivalent. Did that mean Baker was freelancing? When Genscher told Baker that the chancellor’s office had doubts about the White House commitment to the strategy, the secretary firmly assured him that the president did in fact support the plan. According to Dennis Ross, an aggravated Baker then headed back to his suite and called Bush, complaining that he had been undercut. “If I’m ever put in that position again,” Baker snapped, “you’ll be looking for a new secretary of state.”
But Bush needed reassurance himself. While Genscher had told Baker that West Germany would go along with the Two Plus Four structure, Bush was not sure Kohl had really agreed. So Baker quickly found Genscher and told him to have Kohl call Bush to reassure him. Kohl did, but even then their conversation was vague enough that Bush felt compelled to call back to get a more explicit assurance. Finally, Bush conceded. “I had a long talk with Helmut Kohl,” Bush recorded in his diary. “He wanted to go with what Jim Baker proposed and so we have.”
It was hardly a ringing endorsement. Scowcroft was still not happy with all this uncertainty. He thought Baker was playing Bush. “He believed that Baker had presented Bush with a fait accompli and the president had been obliged, with some hesitation, to accept it,” Condoleezza Rice and Philip Zelikow later wrote in their history of German reunification.
Baker was not above such maneuvering—and he pushed harder on Bush in this case than in almost any other. Here was an opening, his opening. In Ottawa, he seized it.
IT TURNED OUT that even Mikhail Gorbachev considered Baker a leaker. After the Ottawa summit, Gorbachev evidently saw a news account quoting an unnamed American official bragging that the Soviets had blinked. Gorbachev groused about it to Admiral William Crowe, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was visiting Moscow, and blamed it on Baker. Crowe duly reported back to the secretary.
Chagrined, Baker dashed off a handwritten note to Gorbachev saying that Crowe had told him about the conversation. “He said you had said that you thought the remarks came from me,” Baker wrote. “They did not. Nor did I authorize them, although they could have been said by a member of our delegation.” He added that he and Bush understood the pressures Gorbachev faced and wanted to help him, not make his task more difficult. “I am sorry if this statement was made,” he added, and then repeated, “It was not authorized.”
For German reunification to work, Baker knew that he had to find a way to keep Gorbachev on board. The danger of a rupture over Germany loomed large. If Gorbachev were provoked, he could use Soviet troops in East Germany to stop any merger and impose a new, Moscow-friendly government in East Berlin. He could also reverse his laissez-faire approach to the rest of Eastern Europe and reassert Soviet dominance, squelching the nascent democratic movement. Even worse, perhaps, the hard-liners in Moscow could turn on Gorbachev as a sellout to the West and topple him to form a revanchist regime that would roll back all of the gains of the last few years. The Cold War might be ending, but it was not over yet.
“We must find a solution where there won’t be any winners and losers but where everybody wins,” Baker told Shevardnadze at one point. At another, he plumbed Shevardnadze’s bottom line. “Tell us what you need to make what is happening more acceptable to you,” he said. “Tell us what you need and we’ll see what we can do.”
But this approach ran up against hard realities. Just weeks after Ottawa, in fact, Shevardnadze passed an urgent message to Baker through his ambassador in Moscow, warning that the situation for Gorbachev was now “critical” because of unrest in the three Baltic republics. The Soviet hold over the Baltics after a half century of Soviet rule seemed more tenuous than ever and mass protests practically defied the Kremlin to crack down. Baker was so worried about Shevardnadze’s warning that he personally brought it to Bush at the White House on the morning of March 7.
Shevardnadze was right. On March 11, the crisis hit in full as Lithuania declared its independence, becoming the first Soviet republic to do so. Gorbachev responded by imposing an oil embargo and economic blockade against the tiny republic. For Washington, any response promised to create further problems as the United States was officially on record supporting Baltic independence, yet Bush and Baker were reluctant to push Gorbachev too hard for fear of triggering a backlash. The only way Lithuania and the other Baltic states could actually achieve independence was by convincing Gorbachev to let them go. So while Baker pressed Shevardnadze not to use force, critics in Washington were assailing the administration for not taking a stronger stand on behalf of Lithuanian national aspirations.
At a national security team meeting one early evening in April, Bush and Scowcroft looked for ways to toughen the American response to the Soviet embargo on Lithuania and discussed imposing sanctions against Moscow. Baker urged caution, suggesting that their two goals should be to protect the overall relationship with the Soviet Union and to avoid a fight with America’s allies in Europe. Bush agreed, deciding to forgo sanctions and proceed with a summit with Gorbachev in Washington in the spring. This did not go over well on Capitol Hill or among the Baltic dissidents making a revolution against Moscow. Vytautas Landsbergis, the fifty-seven-year-old music professor in a worn suit who was leading the independence movement and had been named head of the new Lithuanian state, complained of “another Munich,” while the United States Senate voted overwhelmingly against proceeding with a new trade agreement that Bush was negotiating with the Soviet Union until the embargo was lifted.
For Baker, Germany was the bigger priority, one that he was not willing to sacrifice in favor of the Baltic states. He remained determined to help Shevardnadze, his friend and negotiating partner. But he and Bush were feeling the political heat at home and looking for a way out. At one point, Baker even inserted himself into this Soviet internal dispute. What if, he asked Shevardnadze, Landsbergis agreed to “suspend” Lithuania’s independence decree to pursue talks with the Kremlin? Shevardnadze was unmoved, but Bush at least was relieved that Baker seemed determined to get them out of what was starting to feel like an increasingly untenable situation. “After the Baker conversation, I felt like a kettle whose steam had been drained off a little bit,” the president told his diary.
East Germans, meanwhile, were not waiting for the superpowers to sort things out. They went to the polls in March and elected a parliament controlled by allies of Helmut Kohl’s party in the West, delivering an overwhelming mandate for reunification. But Kohl and Genscher were sending conflicting signals about the future of a merged German state in NATO. Genscher suggested that it might be reasonable to leave the former East German territory out of NATO, which Kohl quickly rejected. The first meeting of the Two Plus Four ministers, held in the World Room of the West German Foreign Ministry in Bonn, did not resolve the matter and Shevardnadze laid down an uncompromising Soviet position against NATO membership for the future German state.
BAKER ARRIVED in Moscow in May hoping to break the impasse. He offered what came to be called the nine reassurances, including a commitment to allow Soviet troops in East Germany to remain for a transition period and not to extend NATO forces into that territory until they left. This was hardly the promise not to extend the alliance east at all that he had once floated too casually. But he now insisted to the Soviets that this was the best the United States could do. Baker recorded his overall message to Gorbachev in notes: “Anchor Germany to West. Unless we do instability. History will repeat!” Gorbachev was not convinced. Reflecting increasing pressure from his security services, Gorbachev told Baker, “we cannot accept a unified Germany as a member of just NATO or the Warsaw Pact.”
Gorbachev was not the only one facing rebellious Cold Warriors reluctant to give up the fight. In Washington, Baker’s continuing nuclear arms control talks with the Kremlin were taken by some of the same hard-liners suspicious of Baker and Bush since the early days of the Reagan administration as nothing short of an American surrender. “Taking Baker to the Cleaners,” was the headline over a New York Times column by William Safire, who had an open line to the dissidents inside the Bush team. “The right wing is jumping on us about arms control,” Bush lamented privately. Incensed by the column, Baker fingered Bush’s special adviser on arms control, a lieutenant general named Edward Rowny, an outspoken hawk who, Baker told the president, had been seen coming out of Safire’s office the day before the column appeared.
Bristling at the friendly fire, Baker established a secret back channel to Colin Powell during the negotiations for a reality check on what was actually necessary for the national security and what was not. “Jim would come to me, quietly and surreptitiously, to ask about what was really tolerable,” Powell recalled. “ ‘Colin, can we really give up the Tacit Rainbow system?’ ” Tacit Rainbow was a jet-powered missile designed to suppress enemy air defenses. “I would give him a military opinion, which was, ‘Yeah, give it up.’ ”
During one negotiation in Moscow, the two sides were debating limits on the Tu-22M Soviet bomber, which NATO called the Backfire bomber. First introduced in the 1970s, the Backfire bomber gave headaches to Western militaries because of its ability to penetrate air defenses at low altitudes, which made it harder to track and counter. Western military planners anticipated that in the event of war it would likely be used to attack American aircraft carrier groups in the Atlantic and Mediterranean as well as European ports and airfields, but it could also be sent on intercontinental missions against the United States.
For years, the Russians had argued that the Backfire was a medium-range aircraft that should not be covered by the emerging treaty, but the Pentagon had estimated its range between 2,900 and 3,350 miles, which could be extended even farther with in-air refueling, making it a threat to the American mainland and therefore a weapon that should be restricted under any strategic arms agreement. Even if it were intended mainly for theater combat, leaving it out of the treaty would effectively give the Soviets a loophole so that they could replace what they gave up in long-range capacity with the Backfire. “It became a totem for the conservatives—you had to do something about the Backfire,” recalled Richard Burt, who was Baker’s arms control negotiator.
When Burt and his Soviet counterpart could not agree on how many Backfire bombers Moscow should be allowed, the issue got kicked upstairs to Baker and Shevardnadze. Rather than split the difference, Baker shifted course and proposed a cap of five hundred bombers, a number even lower than the original American position. Shevardnadze, who was under pressure from his own hawks, appeared as if he were in deep pain. “He looks at Baker with these pleading eyes and Baker just won’t give an inch,” Burt said. “He just won’t give an inch.” Burt waited, shifting uncomfortably in his chair, as if watching a game of chicken with two cars racing toward each other for a certain collision. He kept expecting Baker to finally say, fine, he would meet in the middle. “But Baker doesn’t do it. Baker does not move. And there’s a silence in the room that goes on for, I would say, over a minute or so. And finally, Shevardnadze says, ‘Okay, let’s move on to the next topic.’ ”
Baker had gotten a better deal than the American side had originally sought. As he and his team slipped into the car to leave the negotiations, Baker turned to a stunned Burt.
“Rick, you’re probably pissed at me, right?” Baker asked. “You have to deal with these guys tomorrow.”
“No, I’m not pissed,” Burt answered. “You have this relationship with Shevardnadze so I’m surprised you pressed him that hard.”
“Let me tell you something,” Baker said. “This wasn’t really a negotiation between me and Shevardnadze or the U.S. against the Russians. This has more to do with the negotiations within the U.S. government.”
His adversary, in other words, was not the Soviet Union; it was the Pentagon. When they returned to the embassy, Baker went to report on the results of the talks to a roomful of military officers. He walked through all the other results but left out the Backfire until someone brought it up.
“How many Backfires did they get?” one of the military officers asked, as if to say, how many did you give away?
Baker leaned over the table. “Five hundred,” he said.
Triumphantly, he added: “Fuck you.”
THE POLARIZED POLITICS in both capitals set up a climactic encounter in Washington at the end of May, when Gorbachev visited for his second meeting of the Bush presidency. Unlike Malta, this was meant to be a full-fledged superpower summit, complete with red carpets and monumental agreements to sign. On the morning of May 31, Bush welcomed Gorbachev on the South Lawn with a formal ceremony including a fife and drum corps in Revolutionary garb and a twenty-one-gun salute. In the evening he hosted a glittery State Dinner, serving Maine lobster en gelée to the Soviets on a perfect, balmy Washington spring night. But Lithuania complicated what had promised to be a display of the new friendship between longtime adversaries.
When the two presidents sat down in the Oval Office for the first of their meetings over four days, Gorbachev seemed most focused on securing the trade agreement that Bush under pressure from Congress had effectively shelved because of the Lithuania crisis. Baker heard the same from Shevardnadze in a separate meeting in another room. Shevardnadze was unusually passionate, almost beseeching Baker, making clear that Gorbachev’s standing at home depended on his leaving Washington with something tangible to justify his outreach to the West.
The afternoon session in the Cabinet Room of the White House brought the presidents and foreign ministers together with their aides and focused intensely on the German question. The two sides ran through their well-rehearsed arguments over German membership in NATO until finally Bush cited the Helsinki Final Act, an accord signed in the Finnish capital in 1975 by thirty-five nations including the Soviet Union to ratify the rights of nations and peoples in postwar Europe.
Given Helsinki, Bush asked Gorbachev, would not a united Germany have the right to decide for itself which alliance it would join?
Gorbachev shrugged. Yes, he said, that was true.
Suddenly, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, now Gorbachev’s senior military adviser, and other aides on the Soviet side were shifting in their seats uncomfortably as the Americans were waiting for the translation and still not sure what had been said. “It was as if everybody on the other side of the table just heard his mother died,” recalled Robert Blackwill, the national security aide. Just like that, the Soviet leader had conceded that the new German state could join NATO if it wanted to. It took a few moments for the Americans to catch up.
Shevardnadze, sitting next to Gorbachev, leaned forward and tried to whisper something to him, but the Soviet president just brushed him off.
Blackwill scribbled out a note and passed it to Bush: Get him to say it again. Do I understand you right?
Bush nodded. “I’m gratified that you and I seem to agree that nations can choose their own alliances,” he told Gorbachev.
“Do you and I agree that a united Germany has the right to be non-aligned or a member of NATO in a final document?” Gorbachev asked.
“I agree with that,” Bush answered, “but the German public wants to be in NATO. But if they want out of NATO, we will respect that. They are a democracy.”
“I agree to say so publicly,” Gorbachev said, “that the United States and the USSR are in favor of seeing a united Germany with a final settlement leaving it up to where a united Germany can choose.”
“I would put it differently,” Bush replied. “We support a united Germany in NATO. If they don’t want in, we will respect that.”
Gorbachev accepted that. His aides, however, were in a quiet frenzy. After the meeting broke up, Akhromeyev “practically assaulted” one of Gorbachev’s top foreign policy advisers, Anatoly Chernyaev, on the White House lawn, pressing to know whether the concession had been planned. Chernyaev said it was not; Gorbachev had spoken entirely off the cuff.
Impromptu or not, it was a landmark breakthrough. The Soviet Union had not only agreed to allow Germany to reunify but to do so on Western terms. Months of patient diplomacy had paid off. The challenge for Baker now was to keep hard-liners like Akhromeyev from unraveling the accord. One way to do that was to give Gorbachev a win. As the summit wound down, Baker and Bush came up with an impromptu formula of their own: What if the president signed the trade agreement, but told Gorbachev he would not send it to Congress for final approval until the embargo on Lithuania was lifted? Given the progress on Germany, Bush and Baker wanted to advance the trade agreement even though they knew it would generate considerable criticism at home. Publicly, they made it contingent on the expected Soviet passage of a law liberalizing emigration policy. Privately, they used Baker’s formula, letting Gorbachev know they would only send the agreement to Capitol Hill if he ended the Lithuania embargo.
This was a careful balance, reflecting Baker’s approach to international relations, taking a hit at home if necessary in order to give the other side something to hold on to. For Baker, the real goal here was a unified Germany anchored in NATO without a Soviet backlash—and to get it, he was willing to make concessions even at the expense of more conservative carping.
As the two leaders and their teams headed to Camp David for additional talks, the mood eased. Gorbachev threw a ringer his first time out at Bush’s favorite horseshoe pit and the two shed some of their summit shields. Gorbachev had a ribald, off-color sense of humor. Baker could remember one joke that Gorbachev liked to tell: “They say Mitterrand has 1,000 lovers. One has AIDS, but he doesn’t know which one. Bush has 100 bodyguards. One is a terrorist, but he doesn’t know which one. Gorbachev has 100 economic advisers. One is smart, but he doesn’t know which one.” He said it often and it always got a laugh.
When coffee was served at Camp David, Gorbachev was astonished to be offered regular or decaffeinated, which did not exist in the Soviet Union. “Drinking decaffeinated coffee is like licking sugar through glass,” he said wryly.
Then he looked around the room. “We’re all men here?” he said. “So, having intercourse with a condom is the same thing as licking sugar through glass.”
That was the kind of boys’ talk that Gorbachev liked to engage in. Baker and Bush did not mind. They had their own bawdy humor and there were no women on either side in the official delegations for the talks. Condoleezza Rice was Bush’s top Soviet adviser, a Russian speaker with a doctorate in political science, but she had gotten used to the fraternity atmosphere that surrounded her.
Rice would play a key role as the Bush team figured out how to confirm their negotiating breakthrough with Gorbachev at the end of the summit without unduly alarming their Soviet counterparts. In their mind, Gorbachev’s acknowledgment that Germany could choose its own alliances was the turning point in the struggle over reunification and Baker and Bush wanted to lock it in without calling so much attention to it that it would fuel what Bush later called the “virtually open rebellion” among the Soviet hard-liners. No formal announcement would be made. Instead, American officials decided to include a comment from Bush memorializing Gorbachev’s concession in the prepared remarks that he would deliver to open the joint news conference that the two leaders would hold at the end of the summit.
“We are in full agreement that the matter of alliance membership is, in accordance with the Helsinki Final Act, a matter for the Germans to decide,” Bush would say, according to the draft they came up with. Rice gave a copy to Alexander Bessmertnykh, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, to see if Gorbachev would protest the characterization. After studying it, the Soviets returned it with no objections, so Bush went ahead with the comment at their session with reporters on June 3, elliptically announcing the deal that for all intents and purposes would end more than four decades of division in the heart of Europe.
Journalists failed to pick up on its significance. The next day’s Washington Post did not quote Bush’s statement until the twenty-third paragraph. The New York Times story only mentioned it in the twenty-ninth paragraph, adding that “administration officials said they did not read much significance into the comment.” A separate front-page news analysis concluded that the talks produced “no real progress on the German question.” Baker, however, knew better.
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, in early September, Baker was deep asleep in his hotel room around 1 a.m. in Moscow after taking a sleeping pill when the West German foreign minister demanded that he be roused. The treaty sealing German reunification was to be signed in the morning but now it looked like the whole thing was falling apart.
In the eventful summer since Gorbachev’s concession in Washington, Checkpoint Charlie, the most infamous crossing point in the old Berlin Wall, had been dismantled and East Germany had adopted the West’s deutsche mark as its currency. At points, the Soviets had seemed to backtrack on Gorbachev’s position, only to be persuaded to return. And now a formal treaty was ready. Not even Baker, the fanatic for preparation, had anticipated the possible collapse of the whole deal just hours before it was to be finalized.
The last-minute crisis began when Britain’s Douglas Hurd insisted that the agreement specifically permit NATO allies to conduct military exercises on the territory of the former East Germany. Over the course of the evening, Hurd’s narrow point had turned into a deal killer as Shevardnadze declared that the Soviet Union was canceling the signing ceremony. When Genscher, laughing and ebullient, returned from dinner and learned what was happening, he grew “deeply agitated” and insisted that he had to see Baker immediately.
The Germans called the Americans, who told them that the jet-lagged Baker had had a nightcap, gone to bed, and could not be disturbed.
“Well, I will disturb him,” Genscher declared and set off for Baker’s hotel.
Robert Zoellick and Margaret Tutwiler knocked on Baker’s door and woke him to let him know what was happening. Groggy, he put on pajamas and a grayish brown hotel bathrobe, then washed his face. Genscher arrived and explained the dilemma to Baker, who was out of sorts at the late-night disruption. “He was not in the best of moods,” conceded Dieter Kastrup, who accompanied Genscher.
But Baker quickly dissected the problem and agreed to finagle it. The treaty stipulated that foreign NATO troops could not be “stationed” or “deployed” in the former East Germany. Hurd wanted that interpreted to mean that short-term exercises involving small numbers of troops could still be held there, while Shevardnadze insisted on a total ban. Baker concluded that they should leave the word “deployed” in the text but agree verbally that there would be no large-scale maneuvers in the east.
In the morning, Baker met the other Western foreign ministers at 8:30 a.m. for what Hurd called “a dour autumnal breakfast” at the French embassy and struck a compromise. An annex to the treaty would make clear that the meaning of “deployed” would be left to the new Germany, which would interpret it responsibly “taking into account the security interests” of the other parties. Hurd thought the Russians and Germans had overreacted. “The late night flurry was unnecessary,” he said. “I had no intention of allowing a relatively minor argument to get out of hand.”
The signing then went ahead as planned. On September 12, 1990, Baker joined Gorbachev and the other ministers in the same hotel with drooping crystal chandeliers and teal blue cloth on the walls where the Warsaw Pact traditionally met when its leaders were in town, a fitting bit of symbolism. Under the treaty, the Four Powers relinquished their occupying rights over their defeated World War II enemy and Germany regained its complete sovereignty, forty-five years after the conflict. The treaty paved the way for East Germany to be absorbed into West Germany on October 3, with the enlarged state remaining in NATO. Soviet troops would depart by the end of 1994.
“The new Germany is here,” Baker declared, signing on behalf of the United States. Champagne was brought out and Baker, Gorbachev, and the others toasted. Ten months earlier, the moment had been unthinkable. Ten months later, it might well have been politically impossible.
The next day, Baker flew off to the Middle East. Iraq had invaded Kuwait only a few weeks before. He had a new crisis to manage.