CHAPTER 19
The Closers
DICTATORSHIPS SELDOM COME AND GO on little cat’s feet. They are born when angry mobs topple the old order, dispatch the ancien régime on a tide of blood, then abandon power to one man or his political party. At the end, the aging dictator either dies, is toppled by new mobs, or his capital is reduced to rubble by an avenging army. He and his cronies seldom go quietly. So it is astonishing that the dictatorship of the Soviet proletariat, armed with perhaps 20,000 nuclear weapons and supported by a fearful police state, simply closed itself down. The world of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) ended not with a bang, but with a whimper—delivered on television and followed by a “Merry Christmas and good night” to the Western world. How could mankind have been so lucky? It all came down to two men: the Closers.
Every big deal needs a closer, for it is one thing to marshal one’s arguments, money, votes, or armies for battle, and quite another to pull the camel through the eye of the needle, to assemble all of those pieces into a peaceful settlement. Ronald Reagan put the assets in place for the American people, and a string of aging dictators did the same for the Soviet Union. But then, in 1985, history cast up two intelligent, self-effacing men to bring the Cold War to a peaceful end. In that year, George H. W. Bush was inaugurated into a second term as Vice-President of the U.S. By so doing, he became the heir apparent to an aging leader. At the same time, Mikhail Gorbachev took over as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The two first met in March of that year, in Moscow, at the funeral of Gorbachev’s predecessor. Yet as these two men proceeded to make political love, not war, each also gave birth to his own Nemesis, the death star that would in time draw him into the darkness of political outer space. It is an odd story that did not turn out the way Vladimir Lenin or Whittaker Chambers thought it would.
THE PASSING OF THE SOVIET OLD GUARD
As noted earlier, Leonid Brezhnev died under mysterious circumstances on the morning of November 10, 1982. When he came to power, twenty-one years before, Brezhnev put the Soviet Union on a regimen of nuclear steroids; by the 1970s it was the world’s preeminent nuclear power. He thought he sat atop the globe like a mighty colossus. In early 1973, Brezhnev presided over a secret meeting of East European communist rulers gathered in Prague. He gave his audience a tour d’horizon, his vision of the final stages of the Cold War. He observed: “We are achieving with détente what our predecessors have been unable to achieve using the mailed fist. . . . By 1985 . . . we will have achieved most of our objectives in Western Europe. . . . Come 1985 we will be able to extend our will wherever we need to.” 64
Brezhnev was right about 1985 being the turning point, but not in the way he intended. By then he would be dead. His wasteful ways would have bankrupted the Soviet system. The Politburo, having turned to a series of elderly hard-liners in an attempt to preserve the status quo, would finally give in to glasnost, perestroika, and a different world order.
First came Yuri Andropov, selected to serve as General Secretary of the CPSU the day after Brezhnev died. He was sixty-eight years old at the time, and had served as Chairman of the KGB for the prior fifteen years. Earlier in his career, Andropov was their man in Budapest, on hand to oversee the brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956. These are not the credentials of a great libertarian or reformer, but that misses a key point. The KGB was the custodian of information— real-world information—and never was that real world more visible than from Andropov’s Soviet Embassy window in 1956 as he watched members of the Hungarian security service, the AVH, being strung up by the revolutionaries in the streets below. As keeper of the facts, Andropov knew, even in 1982, that the game was up. The Soviet Union could no longer compete with the United States. In every sphere that mattered—military, technical, or economic—the U.S. was on a roll and the USSR was falling farther behind with every passing day.
Reagan and Andropov started to exchange handwritten letters. It was an interesting process: the Soviet Embassy called National Security Adviser Bill Clark’s office to advise there was a message waiting. Clark confirmed his readiness to receive it, telling that embassy of the preferred delivery point, home or office. A courier would then make the delivery. This short-circuiting of the State Department system drove Secretary of State Schultz wild, but by the end of 1982 this did not bother Clark. Nixon warned Clark that Shultz was a “cafeteria cabinet member,” a man who would pick and choose the crises he would touch. Clark and Schultz had strongly differing views on how to deal with the Soviet Union.
The Andropov-Reagan letters began to exchange ideas on the zero-zero option—the disposal of all nuclear weapons held by each side. This exchange of correspondence is remarkable in light of Andropov’s paranoia about a possible U.S. surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. In May 1981, as Chairman of the KGB, Andropov had initiated Project Ryan, 65 a coordinated collection of intelligence on a presumed, but nonexistent, Reagan plan to launch a nuclear first strike. The Andropov-Reagan correspondence survived NATO exercise Able Archer 83, which practiced nuclear release procedures and which the KGB thought might be a mask for the feared nuclear attack. It survived their confrontations over the KAL 007 shoot-down in August 1983, as well as the deployment of U.S. Pershing II missiles to Europe during that same year. Shortly afterward, however, the correspondence came to an end.
In late 1983, Reagan showed Clark the most recently received Andropov note, personally handwritten in Russian. It was the scrawl of a very sick man. CIA analysts confirmed their joint view: “He’ll be dead in a few weeks.”
He was. On February 9, 1984, Yuri Andropov died of kidney failure in a Moscow hospital. Attempting to postpone the inevitable, the Politburo turned to one last representative of the gerentocracy, seventy-three-year-old Konstantin Chernenko. He lasted for a year, his presence barely noted. Then, on March 11, 1985, the Politburo knew it had to face reality. It turned to its youngest member to save the Soviet system.
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
Mikhail Gorbachev was born and raised in the town of Privolye, near Stavropol in southern Russia. He was not yet a teenager during the war years, and since Privolye is well east of the Volga, he was spared the grisly wartime experiences of so many of his peers. No Russian escaped the loss of family or the horror stories from the front. Fifty million Soviet citizens perished during what they call the Great Patriotic War, but Gorbachev fought his war at the state farm, producing food for the troops and factories. By the time he headed off to Moscow State University Law School in 1952, Gorbachev was a fully qualified combine harvester operator. He became First Secretary of the Stavropol regional Communist party committee in 1970, was elected to probationary membership in the Politburo in 1979, then graduated to full membership in 1980; he was only forty-nine years old at the time.
Gorbachev had already been discussing the disastrous condition of the Soviet Union in private conversations with others. When elected to the post of General Secretary at age fifty-four, Gorbachev believed he could save communism, that only its management was in disrepair. He erroneously believed the foundation was sound. Gorbachev came to power on a platform of glasnost and perestroika, 66 bringing with him a new wave of bureaucrats. One of the new hands was Boris Yeltsin.
Yeltsin was born in Sverdlovsk and trained as an engineer. He avoided the Communist party until the age of thirty. In 1985, upon his accession to power, Gorbachev brought Yeltsin into the inner circle of the Soviet establishment, using him to replace a hard-line old-timer as First Secretary of the Moscow party committee. During those early Gorbachev years, Yeltsin built a reputation for effective administration, a disdain for communist dogma, an earthy political style, and a growing network of followers. In October 1987 he created a stir by resigning his posts on the party central committee, citing the slow pace of economic reform and the incompetence of his superiors. In March 1989, the Gorbachev government allowed the first truly free elections in the USSR. The legislative body up for grabs was the national Congress of Peoples Deputies as well as some local offices. Boris Yeltsin was elected mayor of Moscow, with five million voters supporting him. He now had a base of his own, and he would use it.
NUMBER FORTY-ONE
George H. W. Bush was a Yankee by birth. At the start of World War II, fresh out of high school, he enlisted in the Navy to become an aviator. In the war that followed, he was on his fifty-eighth mission when he was shot down. He was rescued at sea by a U.S. Navy submarine, but his two crew members were killed. As the Navy’s youngest pilot, he came to understand duty-honor-country better than most politicians. With the end of the war, George Bush came home, married Barbara Pierce, attended Yale, then moved to Odessa, in West Texas, to learn the oil business. In 1954 he started his own oil and gas exploration company. As the company grew, Barbara and George moved to Houston. Upon their arrival, they stayed with my aunt and uncle, Sally and Lawrence Reed, until they were established in a home of their own.
As the 1960s began, Peter O’Donnell was building a Republican Party from scratch in Texas. He started with the election of his neighbor, Bruce Alger, to the U.S. House of Representatives from their home town of Dallas. In 1961 Texas, which had once been part of the Confederacy, elected the first Republican senator from the South since the end of Reconstruction. With the help of the solid O’Donnell organization and conservative Texas money, John Tower won the seat vacated when Lyndon Johnson became Vice-President. In 1962 there were more GOP Congressional victories, and the Republicans took aim at the other U.S. Senate seat in Texas.
In 1963, O’Donnell talked with Bush about that seat, which was held by liberal Democrat Ralph Yarborough. Conservatives in both parties disliked Yarborough intensely, so O’Donnell had the senator in his sights. George Bush was to be the silver bullet that would knock Yarborough off. O’Donnell urged Bush to enter the race and promised him organizational support. The O’Donnell machine already was functioning reasonably well in the major cities, and Bill Clements of Dallas had agreed to serve as the Bush finance chairman.
George’s father, Prescott Bush, had represented the state of Connecticut in the U.S. Senate for a decade, leaving it only the year before. George knew the ways of that august body and felt he could make a contribution. He was already part of the conservative political resurgence boiling around the country, so when O’Donnell made him an offer he could not refuse, the young oilman put his business on hold and entered the race. I was living in Houston at the time, running a high-tech company, but I spent substantial time on the Bush primary campaign. It was the first of a long string of such political endeavors. On May 2, Bush won that primary with 44 percent of the minuscule Texas Republican vote against a handful of other contenders.
In the summer of that year, 1964, I returned to California, attended the Republican convention in San Francisco, and moved out of George Bush’s orbit. But I left Texas having met and worked for a most unusual man. George Bush was one of the nicest, most genuine men I ever would have the good fortune to know. He exuded integrity. He had that self-confidence that comes from being part of the establishment— born to it in Connecticut, then validated by his own efforts in Texas. As a result, he was not haunted by self-doubts, nor by the need to prove himself at every turn. He had done that in the skies over the Pacific.
On the other hand, Bush was not a “man of the people.” He did not have that intuitive feel for those to whom fate has been less kind. Other wealthy political heirs such as John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt had it. George Bush did not. Thus, his advisers were drawn from the ranks of people just like himself, a dangerous political practice in our pluralistic society. George Bush just wanted to do what was right. He did not have a burning lust for power, just a gentlemanly desire to serve.
Nor was Bush a true Texan. He may have moved there, raised a family there, and built a business. He may have been a legal resident, but he was not a boot-wearing, odd-talking, truth-expanding, egomaniac with roots two generations deep. He was not Lyndon Johnson or Ross Perot. What’s more, the 1964 general election was not kind to Republicans in Texas. With Lyndon Johnson at the head of their ticket, the Democrats swept the election and swept George Bush back into private life.
He did not stay there for long. In 1966 he returned to the campaign trail, this time to run for a House seat from Houston. He won handily, and was reelected in 1968. In 1970, Bush was enticed into taking another run at Yarborough’s Senate seat. Unfortunately for Bush, the Democrats were beginning to break away from their post–Civil War tradition of absolute loyalty to Democratic incumbents. Ralph Yarborough was beaten in the Democratic primary by a conservative businessman from South Texas, Lloyd Bentsen, whom Bush now faced in his race for the Senate. Bentsen won and went on to serve four terms. It took eighteen years for Bush to even up the score; in 1988 he defeated Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen, the Democratic candidates for President and Vice-President, in his race for the presidency.
After Bush’s 1970 loss, Nixon put him to work at the UN, then as the first U.S. emissary to Mao’s China. President Ford moved George Bush to the CIA, a new and trustworthy broom badly needed there in the aftermath of Watergate. At the end of the decade, Bush was ready to run for the presidency. He was no match for Reagan, the Great Communicator, but he did finish a respectable second. Reagan tapped him as his running mate, and in January 1981, Reagan and Bush entered the White House together.
Reagan accorded Bush every courtesy, including important office space in the West Wing, just down the hall from the President. Bush was involved in virtually every meeting and significant piece of business that involved the President. He was almost always present at our morning national security meeting with Reagan, but he never debated the President in front of others. Bush held his advice for private discussions, but he now confirms that those discussions never turned philosophical. He discovered, as did many others, that Reagan was a man of clearly defined beliefs with no interest in discussing their ramifications.
As Vice-President, Bush handled the usual veep assignments, state funerals and Republican events, but he got some hot potatoes too. One of these was the matter of Ross Perot. That highly focused Texan had taken a renewed interest in POWs and MIAs, specifically those said to be left behind in Southeast Asia in the aftermath of Vietnam.
ROSS PEROT AND THE POWS
Some people think of Ross Perot as a great American; others view him as a hustler. Whatever his personal makeup, Perot, in the late 1980s, became irrational on the matter of POWs. In the process, he developed a resentment of the Bush family that would change the course of post–Cold War history.
Perot was born in Texarkana, Texas, to a family of modest means. He worked at odd jobs during his boyhood, earned an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, then served in the Navy for the required four years. He went to sea on a Destroyer, the USS Sigourney, but Perot clashed with his newly assigned skipper and was reassigned. Navies around the world have a quaint view of the infallibility of their captains at sea. Perot was soon reassigned to the aircraft carrier Leyte, where he was but a face in the crowd.
In 1957, Perot completed his mandatory Navy tour and started work at IBM. Five years later he left that firm to found Electronic Data Systems, a company that would specialize in the complexities of the new and big number-crunching computer systems. The enactment of Medicare in 1965 was manna from heaven for Ross Perot. Every state’s Medicare contractor was overwhelmed by government inefficiency on one hand and provider fraud on the other. In Texas, Perot began to run data processing centers. He never invented novel electronic hardware in his garage, nor did he write trail-blazing software in graduate school. He was a Medicare hustler. In a 1971 report, Ramparts magazine described him as “the world’s first welfare billionaire.”
In 1969, Richard Nixon asked Perot to front a POW/MIA committee as part of the new administration’s peace-in-Vietnam initiatives. Perot accepted the challenge, chartering an aircraft to take some POW families to Paris to confront the negotiators. He chartered another, filled it with Christmas gifts for the POWs, and had it flown to Vientiane, Laos. The aircraft never made it to Hanoi, but his efforts won him the undying appreciation of the POWs and their families, a Medal for Distinguished Public Service from the Pentagon, and some less than visible benefits flowing to EDS. 67 Perot’s generosity to the returning POWs and to the families of those still missing became legendary. He hosted every POW reunion, built memorials, and funded the education of any POW/MIA child in need.
In 1979, when the Shah of Iran fell from power, two EDS employees were trapped in Tehran, imprisoned by the revolutionary regime. Perot organized an armed, covert incursion to get them out. The story of that rescue made headlines and became a best-selling Ken Follett book, On Wings of Eagles . By 1980, Perot considered himself an expert on the rescue of POWs.
Two years and a change of administration later, the issue of American MIAs resurfaced. PFC Robert Garwood, a turncoat during the war in Vietnam, returned to the United States. He was hardly a prisoner in the usual sense of the word, but he was walking, talking evidence that there were live Americans still in Indochina. Ross Perot decided there were prisoners being held in southeast Asia, and he decided to do something about it. He funded a totally unsuccessful mercenary incursion into Laos, but a flood of soldier-of-fortune movies followed. Rambo was the capstone; Ross Perot saw that the POW/MIA story had legs.
As the years passed, Perot was named to various federal POW/MIA review committees. He was not always in good company, as the families of missing personnel often were deluged with discredited rumors and phony evidence by scam artists in pursuit of ransom money. “Direct mail fund-raising by MIA organizations, claiming to represent veterans and their families was increasing. A number of these relied on ‘false reporting . . . false evidence, pictures, and fingerprints.’ ”68 In 1986, tired of the bureaucracy, Perot decided to conduct his own personal investigation of the POW/MIA matter. He traveled to Hanoi on his own, met with government officials there, and in the process, seriously disrupted U.S. negotiations on this delicate subject. When he returned to the United States he demanded a private meeting with President Reagan.
The meeting took place in the Oval Office on May 6, 1987. It was not private. Chief of Staff Howard Baker was there, as was Deputy Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci and National Security Adviser Colin Powell. During those discussions, Perot told the President of his “findings” in Vietnam, and he gave Reagan a seven page written report.
Immediate analysis by one of my associates on the NSC staff, Colonel Richard Childress, found the Perot report to be utterly useless. It contained no new facts, a lot of manufactured evidence, a full dose of unsubstantiated rumor, and plenty of political polemic. Vice-President Bush was given the job of telling his fellow Texan about the NSC’s analysis, thanking him for his time, and telling him to go away.
“That’s it,” Perot said. “I’ve given you [White House people] my advice for the last time.” He went home to sulk. When the nobility does that, it usually bodes ill for the king’s heirs.
1989
The year 1989 brought the tangible and audible beginning of the end. I will never forget hearing of that first crack in the Iron Curtain. It was a short news bulletin from a remote village along the Austro-Hungarian border. The Hungarians had grown tired of monitoring and enforcing their sector of the Iron Curtain, a simple fence between communist Hungary and free Austria. The Red army had left, and the Hungarians started taking down the barbed wire. Handfuls of others from elsewhere in Eastern Europe were showing up to help. How odd, I thought. I knew that the Soviet system could not coexist with a mobile population. If the Iron Curtain was beginning to leak near the village of Nicklesdorf, surely it would spring leaks elsewhere. With those leaks, the dam surely would burst.
These were small events in a small village half a world away, but they had incredible implications. As I listened to that radio bulletin in August, other minds were decompressing in Paris after a rigorous meeting of the G-7. George H. W. Bush and his closest advisers were brain-storming the matter of “what next.” His administration had been the target of growing criticism, both at home and abroad. The complaint was inaction. The new Bush team had been studying its Soviet options for months, but no new initiatives were forthcoming. Events were beginning to run ahead of the studies. In conversations with his National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and his Secretary of State, James Baker, Bush suggested that it might be time for a summit meeting with his Soviet counterpart.
Gorbachev and Bush had first met at Konstantin Chernenko’s funeral four years before. Their paths crossed again in Washington after a Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting in December 1987, then again in New York a year later. During all of these encounters, George Bush carried only the title of Vice-President, although by December 1988 he also was President-elect. Now that both were heads of their respective governments, Bush felt it was time for a brief and informal meeting with no agenda and minimum staff. He wanted a get-acquainted session in a remote location during December 1989.
Bush hates news leaks and loves to surprise the press, so he conveyed his suggestion to Gorbachev via the latter’s military adviser, Marshal Sergei Akromeyev, then visiting the United States. He did not want the State Department bureaucrats involved. It was an odd choice of channel, and annoyed the Soviet Foreign Ministry as well as Foggy Bottom, but Gorbachev responded positively. The men started negotiations, now with their staffs involved, and settled on Malta as the meeting site. They chose that small island nation to avoid the protocol issues associated with visits to world-power capitals, deciding to meet aboard each other’s warships to simplify logistics and security. No one told them about the miserable winter weather in the Mediterranean. With arrangements made for what they thought would be a simple, pro forma meeting, these two men returned their attention to the accelerating events in Eastern Europe.
The Baltic republics were declaring their sovereignty and hoisting long-unseen flags. Solidarity, the anticommunist coalition in Poland, won a major victory in that nation’s first free election in half a century. The government of Hungary formalized its open-borders policy. Large anticommunist demonstrations began to break out in East Germany, and on October 11, 1989, Erich Honecker, the longtime communist boss, quit. Chaos was beginning to descend. On October 23, Hungary declared itself to be a free republic. An East German government, now led by Egon Krenz, was in turmoil. At the end of the month he sought guidance in Moscow, but all he got was confirmation that the use of force was out of the question. On the evening of November 9, Krenz’s spokesman, Gunter Schabowski, made an announcement on state TV. Schabowski said that effective immediately, “East Germans were free to travel without meeting special provisions.”
Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jaeger nearly choked on his sandwich when he heard that. For twenty-eight years he had defended the east side of the Berlin wall. Over 450 people were killed trying to get through, over, or around it. That evening, Jaeger was in charge of the Bornholm Strasse crossing between East and West. He had no idea what the Schabowski statement meant, but he could see the crowds beginning to gather and had received the “no use of force” directive earlier in the week. Jaeger called his boss, Colonel Rudi Zeigenhorn, asking for instructions. On the third call, Zeigenhorn admitted that there were no orders from above, that Jaeger was on his own.
Jaeger vacillated for another half hour as the crowds grew into an angry mob. Then, at 11:00 P.M. on November 9, 1989, he gave the order to open the gates at Bornholm Strasse. The Berlin wall was breached. Within an hour crowds were dancing on its top, people with sledgehammers were demolishing it for souvenirs, and TV cameras were out in droves. As he watched all of this unfold, Jaeger once again called his boss, Colonel Zeigenhorn, to report what he had done. The resigned response: “You did right, young man.” 69
George Bush received the reports of this historic event in the White House. It was still afternoon in Washington. His instincts told him this was no time to gloat. He called an impromptu press conference, holding it in the Oval Office to keep it low key. His comments were cautious, supporting peaceful change, in order to avoid any precipitous Soviet military action.
The press wanted a bigger show. In their stories that evening, they alleged that Bush either “did not grasp or did not care” about the events unfolding in Berlin. Senate Majority Leader Mitchell, who to this day Bush identifies as the most partisan man ever seen in that body, urged Bush to “go dance on the wall.” House Majority Leader Gephart echoed those thoughts. The media taunted Bush for his stay-at-home attitude, but the President was firm in his convictions. To this day George Bush views that proposed activism as “pure foolishness.” The Soviets were alarmed; it was a time for tranquility, and it was time for the closers to meet in person.
As fate would have it, the long-scheduled meeting in Malta was now only three weeks away. During those intervening weeks, the avalanche would continue. The day after the wall was breached, the old-time communist strong man of Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov, headed for the door. Then the Soviet Republic of Georgia, Stalin’s home, declared its sovereignty. Crowds growing to 200,000 appeared nightly in Prague’s Wenceslas Square. In Washington and Moscow national leaders realized something historic was afoot. George Bush was getting his act together by phone with the leaders of the Free World. Margaret Thatcher came to Camp David for a chat in person.
Many in Congress, in the press, and even in his administration wanted the President to lean on Gorbachev. They felt it was time to topple the whole house of cards. Bush felt otherwise. He and his small retinue, which included NSC staffer Condoleezza Rice, arrived in Malta on the morning of December 1, 1989, planning to extend a helping hand, not a clenched fist.
THE MALTA SUMMIT
Countless memoirs have been written about this meeting, held in the midst of a terrible storm on December 2-3, 1989, aboard the Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorky. My visual memories come only from TV. They are of a seaworthy U.S. President, born in New England, braving the ghastly weather aboard a small U.S. Navy tender to rendezvous with the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet. Gorbachev would not travel to his own warship, the Slava. He remained aboard the Gorky, tied up dockside in Valetta harbor. Bush was headquartered aboard the USS Belknap,flagship of the Sixth Fleet. The weather was so foul that the Belknap had to be anchored fore and aft, and it was from the Belknap that the President of the United States sallied forth by tender to end the Cold War.
Neither chief of state really understood that they were about to cross the Rubicon, but they both had forthright things to say. To paraphrase many a memoir, as well as my recent conversations with George Bush, the President decided the time had come to put away horse trading. From the beginning, he laid out all of his cards, saying, in effect: “You have terrible economic problems. The U.S. is prepared to help on a massive scale. Let us start trade negotiations at once so that the U.S. can waive Jackson-Vanik 70 as soon as possible. Let’s wrap up an agreement at a summit in June. Credits will be forthcoming.” They discussed other U.S. concerns: human rights, Central America, arms control. Then they discussed areas of possible cooperation: the environment, science, and student exchanges. But the core issue stood out: “You are bankrupt. We will help you.”
Gorbachev was taken aback but pleased. In their meetings the next day, still aboard the Maxim Gorky, he expressed appreciation for the American restraint as the Berlin wall fell. He responded to the issues Bush raised. Then he spoke the words a generation had waited to hear: The Soviet Union would never start a war, it no longer regarded the U.S. as an adversary, and if there was trouble in the Soviet republics, he [Gorbachev] would not use force to put it down. Brent Scowcroft described Gorbachev’s language as “elliptical in places,” but he felt that it confirmed the commitment; there would be “no coercive measures to deal with unrest.”
When the heirs of Joseph Stalin renounced the use of terror and force, the game was over. Only the mopping up remained. At the Malta summit, Gorbachev and Bush established a whole new relationship. It would guide them through the denouement—the collapse of the Soviet empire, which was to unfold over the next two years—but when they left Malta, the Cold War was over. Did George Bush understand that? Not at the time, he says, but in retrospect, absolutely. Gorbachev writes that it took him a while, perhaps several months, to appreciate the significance of what had happened. He feels that things might have turned out differently in the Baltics—meaning there could have been bloodshed—if those two men had not met in December 1989.
As it was, they built the relationship that would let them work together as the old order melted away. George Bush’s contribution to history was to extract a peaceful surrender from Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet empire, without anyone ever using that word nor firing a nuclear shot.
THE DEATH STARS STRIKE BACK
Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to save communism, but not by treading anywhere near the nuclear thresholds or Stalin’s Gulags. His restraint won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 just as the USSR was falling apart. The breach of the wall and the Malta summit were followed by the formation of a noncommunist government in Czechoslovakia, the bloody overthrow of the Romanian dictators Ceausescu and wife, the reunification of East and West Germany, the admission of Soviet guilt in the Katyn Forest and at the Ribbentrop-Molotov negotiations, and the growing disintegration of ties between Russia and the major republics.
Aside from a brief relapse in Lithuania, Gorbachev stood by his pledge to forswear the use of force. Political freedom came to Russia. Gorbachev was booed at the 1990 May Day celebrations in Moscow but no one was shot. Boris Yeltsin resigned from the Communist party and won election in his own right as president of Russia, with 57.3 percent of the vote. The Soviet government supported the U.S. in the Persian Gulf, and Mikhail Gorbachev survived an attempted coup.
Yet in the year following American victory in the deserts of Iraq and Gorbachev’s survival of the abortive coup attempt in Moscow, both George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev were peacefully removed from power by political opposition from within. That often happens in the aftermath of historic struggles. Winston Churchill learned that lesson in 1945.
As George Bush was orchestrating victory in the Persian Gulf and standing down the nuclear arsenal of the U.S., Ross Perot was fulminating in Dallas. Close friends of Ross Perot agree that his deep resentment of the wealthy and well-connected Bush family, with roots in New England, not Texas, flamed into uncontrolled hatred when Bush told Perot to take his POW/MIA crusade home to Texas.
Perot used his unlimited wealth and organizational skills to found a new political party, the Reform party. It achieved ballot status in every state. Perot caused himself to be nominated by that party, then named the most heroic of all POW’s, Jim Stockdale, to be his running mate. During the campaign that followed, Perot exploited the POW/MIA families and organizations to the fullest. He won 19 percent of the popular presidential vote in 1992. He won no electoral votes, but with his sequestration of basically Republican, conservative voters, he gave Bill Clinton the big industrial states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan by the narrowest of margins. 71 He helped Clinton win Georgia and Louisiana. Even in the mountain states Perot took his toll. By winning more than a quarter of the vote in Montana and Colorado, he delivered those states to Clinton. Taken together, those victories were more than enough. Clinton claimed the presidency with only 43 percent of the popular vote. Thus the nineties became the “Clinton Years.” Perot’s egomania set the course for post–Cold War America, arranging a rerun of the post–World War I years. The 1990s, like the 1920s, would be a fun-filled decade, untroubled by the fate of our fallen enemy, ignorant of the malevolent dictators taking root all about, and capped by a bursting bubble at its end.
In Moscow the communist old-timers tried to stem the tide of history. Vice-President Vanayev, Interior Minister Pugo, KGB Chairman Kryuchkov, and others initiated the August 1991 coup. They confined Gorbachev to his dacha in the Crimea, but they failed to capture or kill the greater threat, Yeltsin. He stood atop a defecting tank outside the parliamentary offices, and he worked the phones inside. The plotters did not properly organize their coup, and for that reason it collapsed within days. Gorbachev was returned safely to Moscow, but the balance of power would never be the same. Gorbachev talked about “saving” communism. Yeltsin outlawed it after forcing Gorbachev to read out loud, to the Russian parliament, documents incriminating his own colleagues.
In December, Yeltsin orchestrated the disassembly of the former Soviet Union. On Christmas Day in 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of a country that no longer existed. The flags at the Kremlin changed as he spoke. He was not allowed to return to his official apartment, and he was locked out of his office by Yeltsin the next day. He called George Bush to wish him “a very quiet Christmas evening. . . . I am saying good-bye and shaking your hands.”
George H. W. Bush rode into office on the coattails of the Great Communicator. Once there, he found the cards already dealt, the pieces in place, for the last round in the great struggle of the twentieth century. A careless remark, a flamboyant gesture, or an arrogant speech by a man of lesser self-confidence could have destroyed the momentum. The American eagle flapping out of control might have driven the Soviet coup plotters of 1991 to greater cohesion, a more careful conspiracy, or a full-blown holocaust, but George Bush knew better. “No fingers in their eyes, no claims of victory, no ego trips,” were his guidelines. We are lucky God rolled these men out of history’s dice cup in 1985.
Former President Bush now lives in Houston, exhausted from watching the strange election of his son to succeed Bill Clinton in the White House and elated by his son’s leadership through the challenging events of the new century. Mikhail Gorbachev attempted a political comeback in 1996. He won only 1.5 percent of the presidential vote in Russia. Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jaeger is now retired, running a news-stand in Berlin. All three men are alive; none are in prison. In the context of the tumultuous twentieth century, that is no small achievement.