I wrote this book to tell a story, largely unknown, and to do so simply and straightforwardly, in plain language for ordinary people. I would not presume to call it definitive history; this book might better be thought of merely as a firsthand account of the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Unusually among foreign correspondents, I was on scene for most of the events described, with few exceptions. My beat for Newsweek ran from Germany through every country of the East. Most other news organizations, by contrast, divided assignments among a few (and in some cases many) correspondents.
That is at once a strength and a weakness. If I can say with a certain authority how things happened on the ground, or at least how I saw them happen, I cannot claim the same about events elsewhere. I was not in Washington, reporting from inside the White House or the State Department. Nor do I have much sense, firsthand, of how Americans at home perceived them. I didn’t watch U.S. television. I read contemporary news accounts only when I could get them—not easy in an Eastern Europe cut off from the West, before the days of the Internet. I have since done considerable research to fill the gaps. But this book’s strength, in the end, derives from its eyewitness experience.
Last, it goes without saying that the views expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of my employers, past, present or future.
CHAPTER 1
It is no revelation that George W. Bush modeled his presidency on Ronald Reagan’s. Lou Cannon and Carl M. Cannon make perhaps the best case in their biography, Reagan’s Disciple, 2008, in which they describe the Reagan legacy as the “gold standard” for Bush’s own. I also recommend Steven Hayward’s Lion at the Gate, 2005, as well as a New York Times Magazine article, “Reagan’s Son,” by Bill Keller, dated January 26, 2003, seven weeks before the invasion of Iraq—at which point, the Cannons argue, Bush broke with the Reagan model.
Quotes attributed to the president are drawn from transcripts of his speeches and remarks. Among others: Remarks Announcing the End of Major Combat Operations in Iraq Aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, May 1, 2003; Remarks at the Twentieth Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, November 6, 2003; Eulogy at the National Funeral Service for Ronald Wilson Reagan at the National Cathedral in Washington, June 11, 2004; Speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, October 6, 2005; Commencement Address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, May 27, 2006; Remarks at the Dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial, June 12, 2007; Remarks to Conservative Union at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, February 8, 2008.
I drew additional background from contemporary news accounts, including “Raze Berlin Wall, Reagan Urges Soviet” by Gerald M. Boyd, the New York Times, June 13, 1987, as well as retrospectives on the twentieth anniversary of the speech: Bild, “The Great Speech That Changed the World”; Associated Press, “Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Speech Turns 20”; Time, “20 Years After ‘Tear Down This Wall’ ”; American Conservative, review of Rise of the Vulcans, by Georgie Anne Geyer, June 7, 2004.
For George H. W. Bush’s reaction to the fall of the Wall, see Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War, 1993. Peter Robinson’s fascinating book, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, 2003, was a key source for the background on Reagan’s immortal speech. Additional references: Hoover Digest, “Tearing Down That Wall,” by Peter M. Robinson, reprinted from the Weekly Standard, June 23, 1997. Also by Robinson, “Why Reagan Matters,” Speech to the Commonwealth Club, January 7, 2004. Ronald Reagan: Remarks at the Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin, June 12, 1987; Address to the Students of Moscow University, May 31, 1988.
I cite James Mann’s masterly history of the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy and its ideological antecedents, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, 2004, further elaborated in “Tear Down That Myth,” a New York Times op-ed, June 10, 2007. An excellent analysis of Ronald Reagan’s transition from intransigent Cold War warrior to flexible partner in peace can be found in Bradley Lightbody’s The Cold War, 1999.
For the ultimate indictment of communism, I refer to Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, Mikhail Gorbachev, 1987. “Chernobyl turned me into a different person,” Gorbachev writes in his book Manifesto for the Earth, 2006. The higher the future Soviet leader rose in the party hierarchy, the more clearly he saw the gravity of the social and economic crisis gripping the country: how heavy industry devoted mainly to military production was not only fueling an arms race and beggaring the civilian population but was, quite literally, poisoning the nation in its environmental effects. Chernobyl, as he saw it, was only the tip of the iceberg of a much deeper problem, propelling him to think differently about everything, from state policies on secrecy and information to Soviet foreign policy.
As for the account of the evening of November 9, 1989, at Checkpoint Charlie, I was there, on the Eastern side, watching events unfold. For further details on Gunter Schabowski’s press conference, from 6:53 p.m. to 7:01 p.m., see the transcript filed as Document No. 8 at the Cold War History Project. The exchanges between Egon Krenz and Gunter Schabowski are based on interviews with both men, Krenz in 1990 and most particularly Schabowski in March 1999. The reporter who asked the fatal question was a friend, the British journalist and eminent literary critic Daniel Johnson. He, too, deserves a measure of credit for bringing down the Wall.
CHAPTER 2
My travels along the Wall and to East Berlin, at least as they relate to this chapter, took place in the fall of 1988 and early 1989 and culminated in a February cover story for Newsweek International. I spoke to diplomats, government officials on both sides of the Wall, analysts, polling experts, academics and many, many ordinary people from both East and West. To my shame, I began writing the article convinced that the Wall would come down within a year or two—and ended, persuaded by my largely West German sources, with an embrace of the conventional wisdom that it would be around for decades, if not forever.
Basic facts about the Wall are drawn from many sources, among them: The Wall, Press and Information, Office of Land Berlin, 2000/2001; Bilanz der Todesopfer, Checkpoint Charlie Museum, 1999; Die Berliner Mauer, Fleming/Koch, 1999; Encyclopedia Britannica, Berlin Wall; a variety of Web sites pertaining to the Berlin Wall. Other useful references include Frederick Taylor’s fine history The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–1989, 2006; Peter Wyden’s tour de force Wall: The Inside Story of Divided Berlin, 1989, which among other things is the source of the Allensbach data on West German attitudes toward the Wall and reunification; William F. Buckley Jr., The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 2004. One of the best travelogues of this genre ever written is Anthony Bailey’s The Edge of the Forest, a reporter-at-large feature published in the June 27, 1983, New Yorker.
For the “butcher’s bill” on the Cold War, great credit is owed to the Brookings Institution and its comprehensive Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940, 1998, compiled by Stephen I. Schwartz and his research team. See also “The Hidden Costs of Our Nuclear Arsenal,” Schwartz, June 30, 1998, Brookings Publications; “U.S. Military Spending in the Cold War Era,” Robert Higgs, Policy Analysis, November 30, 1988; We All Lost the Cold War, Richard Lebow and Janice Stein, Princeton University Press, 1994; “Four Trillion Dollars and Counting,” the Journal of Atomic Scientists, 1995; The Cold War, Martin Walker, 1993; The Black Book of Communism, 1997. Statistics on casualties in Cold War conflicts drawn from Warfare and Armed Conflict. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “The Chance for Peace,” a speech delivered to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953, should be required reading for contemporary policymakers.
Anyone who traveled in the East bloc, and to East Berlin in particular, will be familiar with the phenomenon of “sticky” air and the gestalt of a communist police state. For those who are not, I recommend Anna Funder’s Stasiland, 2003. A series of popular movies, growing out of what the Germans today call Ostalgia, or nostalgia for the old East, capture something of its spirit, among them The Lives of Others. I am grateful to Wikipedia and its wonderful link to GDR jokes. The DDR Museum, on Karl-Liebknecht Strasse in Berlin, offers a vivid evocation of daily life in the former East Germany.
As a final note, I should clarify my use of socialism and communism. The rulers of Eastern Europe employed the terms interchangeably. Needless to say, their “socialist” workers’ states, ruled autocratically by themselves, bore little resemblance to modern Europe’s socialist or social-welfare parties.
CHAPTER 3
Interviews with Nemeth, Kulcsar, Pozsgay and others, including many of the leaders of Hungary’s future political parties, were conducted in Budapest in November and December as part of a Newsweek International cover story dated December 12, 1988. The interview with Karoly Grosz was in Budapest in July 1988.
The best book I’ve found on Hungary’s break with communism is Rudolf L. Tokes’s Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution: Economic Reform, Social Change and Political Succesion, 1996. For additional background: Charles Gati, The Bloc That Failed: Soviet–East European Relations in Transition, 1990; “Reforming Communist Systems: Lessons from the Communist Experience,” paper by Charles Gati, June 1988; Tabor Hajdu, “Setting the Points,” Hungarian Quarterly, Winter 1999.
See also George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 1998. Gorbachev’s remarkable comments to President-elect George H. W. Bush can be found in The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era by Don Oberdorfer, 1991, as well as Richard Rhodes’s admirable case study in the perils of geopolitical blindness, Arsenals of Folly, 2007. See also CNN interview with George Bush and James Baker, October 1997.
CHAPTER 4
Reporting and interviews—with government officials, Solidarity activists and ordinary people—conducted during frequent trips to Poland for Newsweek beginning in September 1988 through June 1989. I am particularly indebted to Bronislaw Geremek and Janusz Onyszkiewicz, the Solidarity activists I visited most in Warsaw, as well as Andrzej Wiecko, Newsweek’s office manager and translator extraordinaire.
For further background, I recommend: speech by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, 105th Landon Lecture, Kent State University, March 11, 1996, in which the Polish leader likens himself to a geopolitical “Hamlet” caught between the rocks of Polish patriotism and what he considered the reality of Russian occupation. See transcript, Brezhnev-Jaruzelski telephone conversation, October 19, 1981, National Security Archive; text of oral message from Brezhnev to Jaruzelski dated November 21, 1981, the Cold War International History Project. For a vivid sketch of life in communist Poland, I refer to Janine Wedel, The Private Poland, 1986, as well as The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism, Tina Rosenberg, 1996. Perhaps the best reportage on the breakup of the East bloc, including Poland, is Timothy Garton Ash’s The Revolutions of ’89, 1990.
General Jaruzelski’s critics often accused him of misrepresenting the Soviet threat in 1981. Though not “quivering with desire for military intervention,” as he put it in his speech at Kent State, the Russians nonetheless sent unmistakable signals. Under the pretext of holding maneuvers, they mobilized the Red Army on Poland’s eastern border. Leonid Brezhnev, the Russian leader, telephoned Jaruzelski on October 19, urging him to “take the decisive measures you intend to use against the counterrevolution,” according to the official transcript of the telephone call. On November 21, the Soviet ambassador demanded a private meeting and read out an oral message from Brezhnev, suggesting that Poland was “losing control of the situation” to the point that the very existence of socialism in Poland (and elsewhere) might be threatened. “Doesn’t this suggest to you that a failure to take harsh measures will cost you?” Brezhnev asked, urging the Poles to increase their “combat readiness.”
That letter, for all its threatening rhetoric, was a masterpiece of ambiguity. Never did it specifically direct Jaruzelski to use force; neither did it indicate whether the Soviets were prepared to intervene. Yet he had no doubt. “Brezhnev’s message was very similar in tone to the notorious letters addressed to Alexander Dubcek in 1968,” he later said. No less threatening, he added, was an ultimatum announcing a drastic cut in gas and energy deliveries, to take effect on January 1, 1982—a use of Russia’s energy weapon that, in Poland’s economic straits, would have proved devastating.
By early December, the pressures had apparently grown too great. At a meeting with the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces, according to CIA documents, Jaruzelski ordered his generals meeting with their USSR counterparts to endorse a plan to admit into Poland, under the pretext of maneuvers, the Soviet Army, the National People’s Army of the GDR and the Czechoslovak People’s Army. Documents presented at the meeting showed that the Soviets were readying three armies consisting of eighteen divisions across Poland’s borders. The invasion date was set for December 8. According to the Soviet plan, the Polish Army was to remain in its bases. Source: Wilson Center, Cold War History Project, document dated December 1, 1980. As Jaruzelski told it in his Kent State address, his only choice was the “lesser evil”—cracking down on Solidarity.
CHAPTER 5
The story of Nemeth’s mission to Moscow in March 1989 is drawn from interviews with Nemeth in March 1995 and April 2008. Nemeth was absolutely right in fearing that Grosz would seek to undercut him. See “Memorandum of Conversation between M. S. Gorbachev and Karoly Grosz, General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, Moscow, 23–24 March 1989,” National Security Archive. According to the secret minutes, Hungary’s communist leader briefed Gorbachev on events in Hungary and, while praising their general direction, suggested that “their pace is somewhat disconcerting.” Ideally, Grosz said, the communist party would “retain power by political means, avoiding armed conflict.” Gorbachev’s response was revealing. “Democracy is needed,” he agreed, yet he added that it was important to “clearly draw boundaries.” The “limit,” he suggested, should be “the safekeeping of socialism and the assurance of stability.” He apparently did not recognize the degree to which those twin goals had grown incompatible.
It is interesting to note that (1) Nemeth first met Gorbachev in 1985, when the future Soviet leader visited Hungary for three weeks to study Hungarian agriculture. Excerpt from an unaired CNN interview dated October 1997: “That was the first time I [Nemeth] saw him in action, not like that sort of stupid old-guard representative from the Politburo, but someone who really asked real questions.” Hence Nemeth’s surprise at Gorbachev’s subsequent hard-line defense of socialism. (2) In the run-up to this phase (late 1987 and early 1988) Gorbachev asked working groups headed by Alexander Yakovlev and others to delve into the relationship of Leninism to perestroika and to investigate how and why classic socialism had gone wrong. He seemed to think that if communism could be put back on the right track, it could be saved and even become a model for egalitarian prosperity.
Sources for the material on the Bush transition include A World Transformed, George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, 1998; Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, 1995; George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State, 1993; James Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 1995; American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War, Robert L. Hutchings, 1997; Adam Michnik, Sleepwalking through History, 1999; Elizabeth Pond, Beyond the Wall, 1993; Harvey Sicherman, “The Rest of Reagan,” Orbis 44, 2000. For an analysis of the CIA National Intelligence Estimates on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, in the original, few compilations are better than At Cold War’s End, edited by Benjamin B. Fischer, available on the Internet at www.cia.gov/csi.
The quote from Cheney concerning Gorbachev’s possible ouster comes from an interview with CNN on April 29, 1989, as cited by Hutchings. The astonishing admission by Rice that she “missed” the revocation of the Brezhnev Doctrine—one of the decisive moments of the century—comes from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July/August 2004. Former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock describes his fruitless efforts to persuade the Bush transition team, and later the White house, of Gorbachev’s bona fides in his memoir Autopsy on an Empire, 1995.
George H. W. Bush’s inaugural address was rather like the man, decent but a bit wooden. He spoke about the passing of the totalitarian era, “its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree,” and about a new American engagement in the world, refreshed by its freedoms but circumspect in the use of power. “Some see leadership as high drama, and the sound of trumpets calling, and sometimes it is that,” he said in one memorable passage of the speech, as personally revealing as it was wise. “But I see history as a book with many pages, and each day we fill a page with acts of hopefulness and meaning. The new breeze blows, a page turns, the story unfolds.”
A former colleague of Condoleezza Rice recalled a discussion of Gorbachev and Soviet military capabilities from the time when she sat on the board of the Institute of East-West Strategic Studies in New York. Rice insisted that the Soviet leader’s talk of peace and a “common house of Europe” was merely a facade for a dangerous Warsaw Pact military buildup. To her mind, it was a ruse to lull the West into complacency. She spoke forcefully of the money Moscow was spending on new weapons, and the prospect of Soviet tanks rolling through the Fulda Gap on the intra-German border and on toward Frankfurt and the heart of Western Europe.
“Condi,” said the colleague, a former British diplomat and intelligence officer named Ian Cuthbertson, director of studies at the think tank, “this simply is not a true picture.” He walked her through his particular specialty, the Soviet order of battle. His picture of the real Red Army was very different from the impressive force on paper. He essentially counted out which tank battalions had been cannibalized for spare parts, how badly trained Warsaw Pact forces had become, how low on supplies they were, from ammunition to petrol. (Of a typical eight-hundred-tank division, usually no more than a hundred tanks would be operational; a small fraction of that number could be considered combat-ready; and an even smaller number had crews well enough trained to do more than drive the tanks around a parade ground.) His bottom line, as he told Rice: “The Soviet army can barely roll out of its barracks, let alone through the Fulda Gap.” Subsequent scholarship has borne him out. At the time that Rice was urging uncompromised vigilance against the Soviet threat, the enemy was essentially decomposing.
CHAPTER 6
Material for the May Day celebrations is based on a reporting trip to Budapest for Newsweek. The reconstruction of the critical events of May 1–3 and their aftermath is told by Miklos Nemeth and Gunter Schabowski, a member of the Politburo and party chief of Berlin who had formerly been editor in chief of East Germany’s official newspaper, Neues Deutschland. Both Nemeth and Schabowski have been interviewed elsewhere concerning the exchange between Kessler and Karpati, including an exceptional BBC–Spiegel TV documentary The Fall of the Wall, by Brian Lapping Associates (under the direction of David Ash and Stephen Clark) in 1994, and CNN’s 1998 series called The Cold War Project. All quotes either appear here for the first time or were confirmed with the original source.
A further word on Schabowski. Among the most powerful men in the country, he was at one point considered a possible successor to Erich Honecker. I met him in early 1999, just after his seventieth birthday. A genial and engaging man, he was remarkably straightforward (and startlingly critical) in discussing his central role in the events of 1989. It was long ago, but they remained vivid. No one who was immersed in them forgets. Unlike Schabowski, some never move on.
The material on Horst Teltschik’s secret visits to Budapest and his relationship with Hungary’s reformers, and Nemeth in particular, is drawn from a conversation in the spring of 1999 in Munich at the headquarters of BMW, where Teltschik was a member of the board of directors. Nemeth confirmed details of these meetings, saying that Kohl offered to ship “trains full of coal” to Hungary to counter a cutoff of Soviet energy supplies, should it occur. Kohl also promised to intervene with the International Monetary Fund in lightening the burden of Hungary’s debt. “The Hungarian government had lied to the IMF, cheated them for years,” Nemeth told me in April 2008. “I wanted to set the record straight—but also to protect ourselves in doing so.” He stressed his desire to move toward what was then the European Community and away from the Soviet counterpart, COMECON. In all this, said Nemeth, “I got Kohl’s very, very strong support.”
Genscher’s visit to Washington is described in his memoir, Rebuilding a House Divided, 1998. See also Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 1995, for the insider reaction to Genscher’s visit and to the subsequent flap over the Lance missiles. What made this diplomatic interlude so surreal was its almost complete geopolitical irrelevance. By April, nearly all aspects of military power had become open to negotiation, from intercontinental missiles to chemical weapons and conventional armaments. Following his agreement with Ronald Reagan to reduce ballistic warheads, initialed the previous year, Gorbachev had in December announced massive unilateral cuts in Russian forces in Eastern Europe—a move that the New York Times editorial board likened in global effect to the 1918 declaration of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, or Churchill and Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter of 1941. Adding insult to injury, many of the United States’ other European allies had begun lining up with Germany. With the exception of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, whom Kohl irritably referred to as “that woman,” few saw the logic of pushing new weapons on Europe at the very moment that the threat was receding.
How vast was the gulf between the doyens of the Bush administration and someone such as Teltschik. In contrast to the American national security team, he saw events in the East as a “historic opportunity,” as he put it to me at the time. His individual role was critical to events in Hungary, and therefore to the revolutions elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Yet it is almost entirely unknown, even in Germany. “No one has told this history,” Teltschik told me in our meeting in Munich. “Not even me in my book, nor Kohl in his.”
CHAPTER 7
I took a series of reporting trips to Poland during the election campaign and its aftermath, traveling and interviewing extensively around the country. I was repeatedly struck by the comparative innocence of both sides. Solidarity had no inkling of how well it would do. Lech Walesa, in particular, railed at being drawn into early elections, convinced they would favor the communists—who he assumed, mistakenly, would use their superior organizational power to stage an effective, all-out campaign.
Solidarity’s spokesman Janusz Onyszkiewicz laughed when I asked him how he thought the vote would go. “We have no organization. We have no money. Poland is a complete political wilderness. No one has any idea what will happen.” The communist party’s chief political pollster and campaign strategist, Colonel Stanislaw Kwiatkowski, advised official candidates that their “personality,” rather than their political affiliation would be what counts with voters. “We are confident,” he told me, sharing his projections that the communist party would win anywhere from a quarter to half of the Senate, as well as a majority of the contested seats in the lower house. Other party leaders, however, did not share his optimism. Jerzy Urban, the information minister, who was running as an independent in Warsaw, grumbled that Solidarity looked unstoppable. What would he do if he lost? He joked about opening a porno magazine. At least, I took him to be joking. In fact, that’s just what he did—and wound up making millions.
While Solidarity won the election decisively, it can be argued that both sides lost, as the eminent British historian Timothy Garton Ash notes with trademark irony in his account of 1989, We the People. Often forgotten in the hoopla accompanying Solidarity’s victory was an important fact: only 62 percent of Poles voted in this most important election in the nation’s history—far less than the 79 percent in the 1975 parliamentary elections, when only communists ran. Most Poles were too tired, too dispirited, too fed up with politics and politicians to bother. Those who did vote crossed out communists with the flair and vigor—pfft, pfft, pfft—bred of decades of anger, frustration and disappointment. But few thought Poland would much change with Solidarity in the government, or that their own lives would improve. Yes, June 4 marked the death of communism in Poland. But it died as much with a whimper as a bang.
I moved on to Budapest shortly after the Polish elections, meeting Erich Honecker in Berlin as a sort of geopolitical detour. The behind-the-scenes dimension comes from interviews with the principals, Pozsgay and Nemeth in particular, as well as members of the Committee for Historical Justice. Grosz’s calumny against Nagy at that decisive meeting of the Central Committee in the days leading up the funeral come from an interview with Nemeth by the National Security Archive in Washington, backstopped by Tokes, who also chronicled the downfall of Karoly Grosz and the mass defections from the party that would seal his fate. I also relied on the NSA interview for the material on the death threats Nemeth received during this period, as well as a CNN interview undertaken as part of the network’s 1997 Cold War History Project.
The interview with Honecker took place on June 7, 1989, with the Washington Post and Newsweek. For Honecker’s visit to Cuba, see Charles S. Maier’s brilliant Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany, 1998. The segment on the Warsaw Pact summit in Bucharest and the genesis of the plot against Honecker is based on interviews with Schabowski and Nemeth as well as transcripts of Honecker’s and Ceausescu’s speeches of July 7, 1989. Honecker’s mirror-image letters to Moscow, in 1980 and 1989, can be found online in the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War Archive. And, of course, Oskar Fischer should not be confused with Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister from 1998 to 2005.
Sources useful for the segment on America’s awakening include, among others, A World Transformed, George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, 1998; Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, Zelikow and Rice, 1997; American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War, Robert L. Hutchings, 1997; James A. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 1995. Nemeth’s account of his conversation with President Bush appears in an interview in the BBC–Spiegel Television documentary The Fall of the Wall, 1994.
It’s worth noting, too, that if the White House was slow to fully appreciate the magnitude of changes under way in the East, the U.S. embassy in Warsaw was not. Declassified cables from the period show Ambassador John Davis and a senior political officer, Daniel Fried, to have been genuinely foresighted in predicting Solidarity’s decisive victory in the elections and the general course of events on the ground. This cable traffic is available on the Web via the National Security Archive. U.S. reporting from Hungary was no less incisive, affirming once again that policymakers in Washington (as elsewhere) often hear only what they want to hear.
CHAPTERS 8–9
The saga of the Pan-European Picnic is chiefly based on interviews with Miklos Nemeth and the tenth-anniversary recollections of Laszlo Nagy, one of the key organizers. The bizarre tale of Frau Silvia Lux, an East German schoolteacher, and her children was told to West German television upon her arrival in Austria and reproduced in the documentary by BBC–Spiegel TV The Fall of the Wall, 1994. (Transcript 3/13, Liddell Hart Centre of Military Archives, King’s College, London.) Two quotes from Imre Pozsgay (“This invitation gave me a chance …” and “nerve-racking …”) come from the same source. (Transcript 3/25, Liddell Hart Centre.)
There is some confusion about the role of those “West German officials.” Bonn’s ambassador to Budapest at the time, Alexander Arnot, told me that his consular officers had no role in the Pan-European Picnic; yet on-scene accounts make clear reference to people who identified themselves as such. Nemeth said that roughly a dozen West German officials were involved in the plot, including Chancellery officials, members of the BND (West Germany’s intelligence service) and the Budapest chapter of the German Red Cross. Arnot was not informed, according to Nemeth, at least not directly. Genscher’s reactions to Nemeth’s visit to Bonn can be found in his memoir, Rebuilding a House Divided, 1998.
The related chapter, “The Great Escape,” draws on the same interviews, including one with Michael Jansen, the German diplomat tasked with organizing shelter for the tens of thousands of East German “tourists” holed up in Hungary with no plans for returning home. He spoke specifically of secretly shuttling personally between Vienna and Budapest in preparation for the Great Escape. Jansen went on to assist East Germans in Prague to escape to the Federal Republic during the events of late September and October.
See Rice and Zelikow for Fischer’s charge of “treason!” The statistics on the number of East Germans encamped around Lake Balaton and elsewhere come from Maier’s Dissolution, while the numbers on those who fled during the first days and weeks of the exodus are drawn from Rice and Zelikow. Gunter Schabowski colorfully described the reaction of the East German Politburo, as well as the story of Erich Honecker’s disastrous “Big Idea.” The reactions of ordinary East and West Germans, as well as government officials, are drawn from a series of reporting trips in Berlin and other cities during September and October for Newsweek.
For the account of George H. W. Bush’s July visit to Poland and Hungary, see A World Transformed, Bush and Scowcroft. The quote from Nemeth (“We both knew …”) also comes from the BBC–Spiegel TV documentary. For the murmurings of German unification, beginning in earnest that September, see Zelikow and Rice as well as American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War by Robert L. Hutchings, the unnamed NSC aide who counted himself among those “thrilled, not to say astonished, onlookers.”
The interview with Ceausescu was the fruit of a play to his vanity. Recognizing his thirst to be noticed on the world’s stage, I wrote through his ambassador in Bonn that Kenneth Auchincloss, my boss and the editor of Newsweek International, had always wanted to meet him. “Related to the Kennedys,” I intimated, precipitating an invitation with all the pomp and circumstance normally accorded a visiting head of state. As part of the deal I was given two weeks’ free run of the country in advance of the interview. It was an unprecedented license to go everywhere, largely uninhibited by the police, talking to peasants in their fields, townspeople, the few dissidents not in jail. If Ceausescu’s handlers hoped I’d write a flattering portrait of his tyranny, they were mistaken. The final result—a cover story published in August—was officially classified as a state secret, according to intelligence authorities I met in Bucharest after Ceausescu’s death.
One anecdote about the interview bears inclusion. Into the second hour of Ceausescu’s monologue, Ken Auchincloss decided enough was enough is enough, even from the Danube of Thought. “Well, thank you, Mr. President,” he said, hoping to end the show. Ceausescu stopped in midgesture, the torrent of his words suddenly arrested. A funny look, almost boyish, at once disappointed and disbelieving, crossed his face. He had probably never, ever been interrupted like this. His fist, momentarily frozen above his head, slowly came down. His eyes lost their manic intensity and seemed to slide back into the real world from somewhere in Outer Megalomania. “But … but … but,” said the dictator plaintively. “I’m … I’m … not finished yet.”
CHAPTER 10
The interval from early September through mid-October was a whirlwind of travel from one East European capital to another: Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, East Berlin, Bonn, Vienna and back again. I’ve confined the narrative to interviews with the principals in the drama: Nemeth, Pozsgay, Schabowski, Walesa, Mazowiecki, Havel. But many others played large roles in the events. Among them, in Poland: Bronislaw Geremek and Janusz Onyszkiewicz, a mathematician and alpinist who became Solidarity’s spokesman (and had spent years in jail) and went on to become defense minister and eventually vice chairman of the European parliament. In Czechoslovakia, besides Havel, Jan Urban, a dissident signatory of Charter 77, and his best friend, Ivan Gabal, both future founders of Havel’s Civic Forum movement, were very helpful, as was Jiri Dienstbier, also a Charter 77 signatory and future foreign minister, as well as others who figure in these pages and many more who do not. I still remember Milos Jakes with the greatest distaste.
Interviews in Budapest included U.S. ambassador Mark Palmer, various opposition-party leaders and foreign ministry officials. The scene featuring Imre Pozsgay was a great cameo moment of 1989, and highly ironic. By disbanding the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party when he did, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of members in his anticommunist zeal, Pozsgay destroyed his own career. Had he found a way to hang on to them, he might well have realized his ambition to be a democratic Hungary’s first president, according to Rudolf Tokes.
CHAPTER 11
I was in East Germany for most of the period covered in these final chapters. The insider’s account of Gorbachev’s visit on October 7 comes from Schabowski. Gorbachev’s aide was Anatoly Chernyaev; the story is excerpted from his diary in the Archive of the Gorbachev Foundation. Gorbachev had added, “I will not say a word of support for Honecker. But I will support the republic and the revolution.” Chernyaev himself clearly saw this as a critical moment. Protests in Dresden that day drew twenty thousand people. The next day the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party planned to disband. Poland’s communist party, he predicted, would not last past its next congress in February. “The dismantling of socialism as a world phenomenon has been proceeding. Perhaps it is inevitable and good. And a common fellow from Stavropol [Gorbachev] set this process in motion.”
I was a witness to the riots in East Berlin on the night of October 7, of course, but relied for background on events in other cities, including Leipzig, Plauen and Dresden, on contemporary news reports as well as two indispensable histories: Wir sind das Volk, a painstaking and ultra-detailed chronicle from October 7 through December 17, 1989, published in 1990 by Hannes Bahrman and Christoph Links, and Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany, 1997, an autopsy of East Germany’s final years by Charles S. Maier, a professor of history at Harvard University. The conversation between Egon Krenz and Milos Jakes, as well as the latter’s aside concerning Gorbachev’s behavior at the state dinner, is related in the BBC–Spiegel TV documentary, The Fall of the Wall. So is Jens Illing’s frightening account of the security preparations for the night of October 9 in Leipzig.
Precisely who prevented that bloodbath, and how, remains unclear. I’ve reached the best judgment I could based on interviews with Schabowski, Krenz and other sources. Krenz’s call to Soviet ambassador Vyacheslav Kochemasov is recounted by Maier as well as Zelikow and Rice, by way of the Russian envoy’s autobiography, Meine Letzte Mission, 1994. See also Elizabeth Pond, Beyond the Wall: Germany’s Road to Unification, 1993. The chilling directive announcing action against the “counter-revolutionaries … with weapons in the hand” can be found in Wir sind das Volk. The exchange between Helmut Hackenberg, the regional party chief, and Krenz comes from the BBC–Spiegel documentary. The eyewitness account of Erich Honecker’s downfall on October 17 is told principally by Gunter Schabowski. Officially, Honecker’s resignation would be for “health reasons.”
Krenz recalled his increasingly desperate efforts to keep his government together in an interview with Newsweek in the spring of 1990, likening the experience to “riding a whirlwind.” Wir sind das Volk documents how quickly and inexorably popular pressure built across the country during the interval between Honecker’s ouster and the fall of the Wall on November 9. The conversation between Bush and Kohl is drawn from a declassified White House transcript dated October 23, 1989, 9:02–9:26 a.m. EST. Concerning Krenz, the chancellor remarked, “I am not sure how courageous he is.”
CHAPTER 12
The climax of the Fall is based almost entirely on firsthand reporting from East Berlin the night of November 9 and afterward. The reconstruction of the press conference, as noted in chapter 1, is based on interviews with Schabowski and Krenz, as well as the official GDR government transcript and original video clips of the event. The drama of that bitter, internecine summit of the Central Committee, presided over by Krenz and dominated by Gerhard Schurer’s hair-raising portrayal of the country’s economic crisis, is recorded in rich and authoritative detail in Maier’s Dissolution. The dilemma of those who made the fateful decision to open the Wall—the commanders of the border crossings at Checkpoint Charlie and Bornholmerstrasse—is perfectly captured in the BBC–Spiegel TV documentary by the head of the East German visa office. He, too, had futilely been telephoning for instructions as the crowds built at the Wall. At the moment of the country’s existential crisis, he said, “I couldn’t find anyone to talk to.”
The Wall is long gone. But for a reminder of how it all happened, and who ultimately deserves credit, I suggest a visit to the new Reichstag, refurbished and reopened in Berlin on April 19, 1999. Tucked away on the northeast corner of the building, oddly far from public view, is an unobtrusive bronze plaque, missed by almost all who visit:
To the Hungarian people from the German people,
To whom we owe thanks for a united Germany,
A democratic Hungary, and a free Europe.
In Hungary, revolution came with little trace of popular upheaval. It would be too easy to suggest that knowledge of the people’s unhappiness forced the country’s reformers to act. It did not. They chose their own path, knowing that it did not necessarily bode well for themselves. “They are of historic importance,” Horst Teltschik would tell me, speaking of Nemeth and those around him. “If you look at the history of mankind, there are very few examples where the leadership of a dictatorship became a leading force for democracy, knowing that in elections they would lose.”
Years later, in a conversation with Teltschik, Hungary’s Prime Minister Jozsef Antall referred disparagingly to those “old communists.”
“Without those guys,” Teltschik tartly responded, “you would never have come to power.”
The conversation between Bush and Kohl comes from a White House transcript dated November 10, 1989, 3:29–3:47 p.m. My guides to the Velvet Revolution were Vaclav Havel, Jan Urban, Ivan Gabal and his wife, Zdenka Gabalova. I will always be indebted to them for opening the door to one of the most moving experiences of my life.
My thanks to Hanns Schumacher, then an aide to Hans-Dietrich Genscher at the German foreign ministry, for getting me on that military transport to Bucharest. Videos of the Ceausescus’ execution can be found on the Internet. Videograms of a Revolution, directed by Harun Farocki, captures the scene on Palace Square on December 21 and 22, 1989. The transcript of Ceausescu’s “trial” makes far more compelling reading than might be captured in these brief excerpts. The transcript of his dressing down his generals over Timisoara, setting the stage for the massive killings in the city, is if anything even more telling about the man and his nature. Miklos Nemeth is the source of the reference to Hungarian intelligence helping Ceausescu’s pursuers catch the fleeing dictator.
I am indebted to Richard Andrew Hall for his exceptionally researched reconstruction of the revolution-turned-coup in his Ph.D. thesis for the University of Michigan, “Rewriting the Revolution: Authoritarian Regime-State Relations and the Triumph of Securitate Revisionism in Post-Ceausescu Romania,” 1997. One of the most exhaustive studies of the period is The Romanian Revolution of December 1989, 2005, by Peter Siani-Davies. Also useful was Edward Behr’s Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite, 1991, and Modern Romania by Tom Gallagher, 2005. Among the best compilations of academic writing on Romania and the events in Eastern Europe is The Revolutions of 1989: Rewriting Histories, edited by Vladimir Tismaneanu, 1999.
The closing remarks by Havel, Nemeth and Schabowski in the chapter entitled “Denouement” are all drawn from first-hand interviews.
EPILOGUE
The casualty figures come from World War II: Combatants and Casualties, 1937–1945. The Soviet Union lost 23 million soldiers and civilians; the toll for the United States was 418,000—a very considerable number, to be sure, but not commensurate with Soviet losses.
Charles Krauthammer’s article “The Unipolar Moment” appeared in the Winter 1990–91 issue of Foreign Affairs. In 1993, Samuel P. Huntington published an essay in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Clash of Civilizations?” He expanded it, eliding the question mark, in his book of 1996: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. See also Ronald Steel, Temptations of a Superpower, 1996, and Robert W. Tucker, The Imperial Temptation, 1992, coauthored with David C. Hendrickson.
Robert Kagan’s admirable essay in the Spring 2008 issue of World Affairs, “Neocon Nation,” traces the bipartisan history of American idealism from 1776 to the present. Notably, it concludes (with a nod to David Halberstam) that U.S. foreign policy historically trends to excess—and trouble—when its leaders “fail to examine the assumptions of the era.” The more absolutist the assumptions, the greater the ensuing troubles. This is very much the story of America’s post–Cold War interlude, all the more so as time went on.
For an early and somewhat unnerving example of the White House’s Manichaean vision, consider a speech by President Bush at Iowa Western Community College on January 21, 2000: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who ‘they’ were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who ‘them’ was. Today we are not so sure who the ‘they’ are, but we know they’re there.” The conversation on faith-based foreign policy was reported by Ron Suskind in the New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004, and amplified in his 2007 book, One Percent Solution. See also Mark Danner’s “Iraq: The War of Imagination” in the December 21, 2006, issue of the New York Review of Books. The quote from Cheney is cited by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in his book with Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty (2004). The full citation reads: “You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” O’Neill reports that the remark left him “speechless.”
I’ve stressed the military aspect of the Reaganite myth of Cold War confrontation, mainly for brevity’s sake, but there is also a strong economic component. The argument can be summed up fairly simply: by dramatically boosting American military spending in the 1980s, including the Star Wars missile defense, Reagan forced Moscow into an arms race it could not afford. The consequent economic pressures contributed to the collapse of the Soviet system. Intuitively, the case has a certain logic, for the Soviet Union did slide into economic crisis during the Reagan years. But while military expenditures were undoubtedly absorbing an ever-larger share of Soviet resources (again, chiefly because of falling oil revenues), it cannot be said this had much to do with the United States. If the Reagan administration substantially increased U.S. defense spending, the Soviet Union did not. Indeed, its defense budget was essentially unchanged through the 1980s, as Peter Scoblic notes in a thoroughly researched book, Us vs. Them, 2008. Mikhail Gorbachev, among others, long before he came to power and Reagan’s military buildup had gotten under way, recognized that Moscow should reduce its military spending. Scoblic’s conclusion, like that of other analysts: “The Soviet Union suffered no economic stress as a result of the Reagan buildup. Conservatives [who argue otherwise] are therefore retrofitting the Reagan administration—and themselves—with a degree of agency and optimism that they simply did not possess.”
Blinded by the light of its triumphal march through the post–Cold War years, the United States failed to fully come to terms with the enormous changes in the world around it. Fareed Zakaria brilliantly sketches out the perils—and opportunities—of this new global landscape in The Post-American World, 2008. See also Leslie H. Gelb, Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy, HarperCollins (2009). The quantitative backstopping for my brief discussion of this theme came partly from an article in the Financial Times, June 27, 2008, by Robert Hormats and Jim O’Neill at Goldman Sachs, “A New World for America’s Next President.” The caveat is this: The administration of George W. Bush did not create the myth of American triumphalism, even if his White House elevated it to cult status. Americans bear a collective responsibility, and no fresh start or clean slate is possible under a new president without that recognition. This is the point of Tony Judt’s important essay, “What Have We Learned, If Anything?” in the May 1, 2008, New York Review of Books. Building on the theme in his book Reappraisals, 2008, he argues that the United States is locked in an “age of forgetting,” such that it no longer knows where it came from, or what it stands for, with “calamitous” results and the prospect of worse to come.