The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  Havel, like his country, was beginning a new life, not merely as president but as a person. But instead of asking more about this, continuing the conversation as a conversation, I lapsed into journalist mode. How did he feel about a writer as president? “Well, I could at least write my own speeches.” He laughed, but he was torn. He wanted to return to being a playwright, and he wanted to be president. If asked, he said, “I would accept this post on the condition that I hold it only until another president is elected to a full five-year term.” After that, he would prefer to complete the play he was writing when events interrupted. What would it be called? He didn’t know, just yet. But his last one was aptly titled, didn’t I think? Slum Clearance. It was about to open in New York, he added, and close in Prague.

  As if in keeping with the quiet way in which it began, the year ended in Budapest with only the faintest echo of the celebrations elsewhere. A new national parliament adopted Kalman Kulcsar’s cherished Constitution, modeled on that of the United States and enshrining free speech and private property (not to mention the pursuit of happiness) as inalienable rights of man.

  Imre Pozsgay abolished the communist party and expected to lead a revived Socialist Party to the presidency. But voters would not elect a former communist to high office, however heroic a patriot he might have been, and he returned to teaching at the University of Debrecen, just as when he was on the outs with the ruling regime of yore.

  In contrast to Poland, whose communists enjoyed a protected place in parliament, Hungary had scheduled completely free elections for March 1990. That fully democratic free-for-all would unseat all those most responsible for Hungary’s freedom. Unlike Pozsgay, Miklos Nemeth anticipated that his term as prime minister would end with that historic ballot. “I saw it coming long before,” he told me. “I belonged to the party. A member of the former regime could never last, no matter how good his works.” His reward for changing the world would, when I first saw him again ten years later, be a job as a mid- to upper-level vice president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, in charge of human resources.

  Yet Nemeth had one last victory in those final days, a secret one that few ever knew about. Toward year’s end, he received a letter hand-delivered from the Soviet ambassador in Budapest, accompanied by armed guards. The ambassador did not know what the letter contained, nor was he allowed to stay while Nemeth read it.

  Privately he opened it. The Soviet Union is pleased to inform you, it read, that all nuclear weapons have been removed from Hungarian soil—weapons that Moscow had always denied deploying in Hungary or other Warsaw Pact nations.

  This was the grim secret that Nemeth had become privy to in December 1988, after being named prime minister. He had raised the matter with Gorbachev in March, insisting that the weapons be withdrawn despite his only being in office four months. “I’ll get back to you,” the Russian leader had said. To this day, Nemeth does not know how the Soviets got them out without anyone in his government knowing, just as he does not know how they got them into Hungary in the first place. He went to inspect the bunkers, not far from his mother’s village near Lake Balaton: empty, stripped to their twenty-foot-thick concrete walls. He liked to think of it as an independence gift.

  Epilogue

  “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

  —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

  Some memories fade, others remain vivid despite the passing years. Why? Perhaps they carry some bit of unrealized experience, a message not fully decoded that can help us decipher the future.

  For whatever reason, I’ve never forgotten an image from nearly twenty years ago, scribbled in a reporter’s notebook dated November 2, 1990. It was a beautiful autumn day in Berlin. The first anniversary of the fall of the Wall was coming up. A few weeks earlier, East and West Germany had been reunited. Almost overnight, it seemed, the once-divided city had become the world’s top tourist destination. We journalists joked about it as a Cold War theme park, a sort of Disney East. Everyone wanted to come—to see what communism was really like, to savor victory—before it all disappeared.

  Among the dinosaurs in this park, besides the remnants of the Wall and the oddly dressed Volk who lived to the east of it, was the Soviet Red Army. Within a few short months of diplomatic negotiations, Moscow had agreed to call its soldiers home—380,000 in twenty-one battle-ready divisions across a geography stretching a thousand miles from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. Meanwhile, there they were, smack in the heart of what was now democratic Europe.

  This made for some surreal experiences. Driving in the newly open countryside of East Germany, or hiking in dense woods, you might hear a low heavy rumble. Suddenly, a long line of troop carriers and tanks would come into view, emblazoned with the Red Star. Hello, you were in the middle of a Warsaw Pact military exercise. Not so long ago, you got shot for less. On one such excursion, I drove south to Wuensdorf, headquarters of the Soviet high command. I had heard rumors that Russian forces were selling off weapons on a new black market and thought I would investigate. For reasons that seemed to make sense at the time, this adventure culminated in my climbing a pine tree to see over the concrete wall of a Russian base deep in a forest accessible only by a rutted logging road. I fell, broke my arm and had to be transported, whimpering, back to a hospital in Berlin. The doctor laughed at this tale. “You don’t have to fall out of trees to see Russians,” he told me. “Just go to the city dump.”

  Which brings me to that image from long ago, a mental snapshot of a day trip to a Berlin suburb called Dallgow, home to a municipal garbage dump and a Soviet garrison. Picking through mountains of stinking debris were a dozen uniformed Russian soldiers. These were not conscripts, notoriously underfed and seldom paid. They were officers: lieutenants, captains, colonels—field commanders in the vaunted Red Army that had vanquished Hitler and held half of Europe in thrall. One carried a plastic bag into which he stuffed recovered treasures: a broken toaster, an abandoned toy. Another stood amid the garbage casually smoking a cigarette, a scrap of frayed carpet rolled under his arm, along with a soiled corduroy pillow. He looked me in the eye and spat.

  For decades Americans lived in fear of these men. Braced for war, we stationed hundreds of thousands of troops in Germany. We spent trillions of dollars on weapons, waged a nuclear arms race, battled the communist menace in Vietnam and Korea and underwrote proxy wars in a dozen countries from Somalia and Nicaragua to Afghanistan. All to fight off … these poor scavengers? Here was the true Russian army, a shell of a once mighty force, capable of spitting at a victorious America but scarcely able to clothe and equip itself let alone charge through the Fulda Gap into West Germany and on to the English Channel.

  I wrote a colorful post–Cold War feature article to this effect, full of moody atmospherics. Recalling it twenty years later, I am a bit embarrassed, most of all by its triumphalist tone. Humbled though it may have been, the Red Army remained formidable. Russia was still a great power and remains so today, as its sway in Europe’s energy markets amply demonstrates. As a matter of historical record, I knew the Russians were the chief victors in World War II. They bore the brunt of Nazi Germany’s aggression; they battled back from the gates of Moscow and across the map of Europe to Berlin. They paid for that victory with 23 million lives. (U.S. losses were less than half a million.) And yet there I was, in that dump at Dallgow, spinning out my yarn that put us at the center of everything, from defeating Hitler to facing down the “Red menace” and, finally, emerging triumphant at the end of the Cold War.

  Of the various interpretations one could give to this scene, more or less accurately, I chose what I wanted to see. Lewis Carroll’s metaphor is apt. The world is always partly a mirror of ourselves. We see all things, enemies especially, through the lens of our own hopes and fears and desires, inevitably distorted. Memory works not only backward but forward, shaping the present and prefiguring the future
. We live as much by what we believe happened to us as by what actually did.

  I found myself thinking about all this, not long ago, at the George Bush Library and Museum in College Station, Texas. It is an odd place, so starkly in contrast to, say, the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta. Carter’s memorial is a quiet refuge in a leafy park, a sober and respected center for scholarly research and substantive conversation on weighty global issues—climate change, child health care in Africa, the war against world poverty. The Bush library, by comparison, felt like a huckster’s carnival. The former president’s baseball glove from his college days is lovingly displayed, along with bats, balls, uniforms and photos of the star Yale athlete running, diving, catching and lounging—just a few of the two million photos, ten thousand videos, innumerable souvenirs and mementos documenting his life. The 1947 Studebaker in which he drove to Texas is there, not to mention the plane he flew as a pilot during the war and the cigarette boat in which he liked to race around Kennebunkport, Maine. Then, amid all this boy-racer bric-a-brac, one comes across something much more serious: a slab of the Berlin Wall, encased in Plexiglas. An accompanying video explains what it represented and how it came to fall, with America and the Bush administration very much at the center of the narrative. Lest one miss the point, a massive bronze sculpture of a herd of wild horses, unbridled and free, stands outside the library doors. The symbolism is far from subtle, and it takes only a moment to grasp the meaning of this Ceausescu-scale statuary: beneath the flashing hoofs of these mighty mustangs is the rubble of the wall that once separated the West from those oppressed under communism.

  As I surveyed this epic and extravagant tableau, I couldn’t help but wonder what it had to do with George H. W. Bush. This was a man, after all, who in the middle of the most dramatic events of the past half century worked so skillfully to keep the drama of Eastern Europe’s revolutions from cascading into a broader East-West crisis. He shunned inflammatory rhetoric. He avoided rubbing Moscow’s face in the reality of its collapsing empire and, indeed, went out of his way to engage America’s erstwhile enemy in the responsible management of the Cold War’s end, most masterfully in negotiating German reunification and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from central Europe. In other words, he disdained the crass triumphalism that today pervades his own library. What happened? Who hijacked George H. W. Bush’s legacy? We might as well ask who hijacked American foreign policy.

  The easy answer, embraced by many, is George W. Bush and the swaggering band of neocons who took us into Iraq. The truth, of course, is more complicated. Bush junior came to power at the dawn of the new millennium—January 20, 2001. Savoring the calendrical symmetry, he sought to portray himself and his administration as a breed apart from his last-century predecessors. He took office speaking of a “humble” America, one that played well with others. Yet he made clear that he hoped to break the mold of past presidencies, defined as he saw it by inertia and an unwillingness to make tough decisions. Most particularly, he shunned the restraint and caution of his father. His administration, he promised, would be defined by boldness and big thinking. It would, he liked to say, leave a “big footprint.”

  It’s tempting to find in this the early signs of hubris, a classically Greek presentiment of decline and fall. Yet for all his rhetoric, it would be a mistake to see George W. Bush as representing a sharp break with the past. He was, rather, the extreme end of a continuum, the culminating expression of a deeper and more general and ultimately very American way of seeing the world.

  It is eerie, and unsettling, the contrast between father and son. In the aftermath of 1989, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire, the administration of George H. W. Bush was distinguished by its collective cool. Partly because of who he was, and partly because his worldview was so shaped by the Cold War, the elder Bush recognized—and accepted—the limits of American power. The United States may have emerged as the world’s preeminent military and economic power, but that did not mean it could cut loose from its traditional moorings in the larger world. His New World Order had America at its center, but only as first among equals.

  This sense of proportion—of geopolitical “place”—found expression first in his administration’s deft handling of the potentially explosive issue of German unification. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher viscerally opposed it. So did the French under President François Mitterrand. Other European countries were similarly wary, not least the Soviet Union. Washington was the future Germany’s only champion. Without Bush, it would not have come to pass as smoothly and harmoniously as it did.

  Then came the horror of Yugoslavia. If you were on the ground, as I was in the early 1990s, you saw the war in the Balkans for what it was: a manufactured conflict, orchestrated by nationalist politicians in Zagreb and Belgrade. But from afar, and especially in the United States, it looked quite different. Reporters confused by the country’s ethnic complexity reduced it to a stick-figure analogy. The civil war in Yugoslavia, most wrote, was the product of “ancient ethnic hatreds,” unleashed with the collapse of communism and thousands of years in the making, as inexplicable and irresolvable as our own legendary feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

  In fact, the Balkan holocaust might have been prevented. Early on, the thugs plotting war could have been confronted. But Europe would have had to do it, acting in concert with the United States and NATO, and that was not yet in the cards. Rightly or wrongly, the Bush administration read the situation and stood back. “We don’t have a dog in that fight,” said James Baker. In any case, the first Iraq war shifted the world’s focus. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush declared, “This shall not stand.” But he did not go on to Baghdad, fearing to embroil U.S. troops in a Middle East civil war from which there might be no exit. Hard-line conservatives never forgave him. Bush, as they saw it, was “pusillanimous” and “weak.” At the time, the decision to stop the war echoed what Newsweek’s editors once memorably dubbed “The Wimp Factor.” With two decades’ hindsight, however, Bush’s restraint might go by another name—judgment, perhaps, or wisdom.

  This sense of moderation, of national place in the world, did not last long. As early as 1990, Charles Krauthammer made a mark with an essay on the United States in a post–Cold War world. The end of communism, he argued, did away with the old order of checks and balances of power among allies and enemies. In this new “unipolar world,” as he called it, America could act with unfettered sway. Krauthammer might have been a neoconservative commentator, but his ideas reflected the temper of the time. Flush with Cold War victory, Americans of every political stripe embraced this robust new vision of the United States and its role in the world. If Bill Clinton won the White House on a domestic rather than a foreign policy agenda, he soon changed hats. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke of America as the “indispensable nation,” without which no good could happen. It was a nation with a mission, a manifest destiny stretching back over centuries, under Democratic presidents and Republican, from Woodrow Wilson’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s denunciations of colonialism and empire to Jimmy Carter’s campaigns for global human rights. “We stand tall,” Albright said. “We see further into the future.” It was our duty, as Americans, to carry freedom and democracy forward into the world. “Humanitarian intervention” gained new currency, as international law and as U.S. policy, in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.

  During these years, the rest of the world began to view American power with misgiving. Europeans accused Washington of throwing its weight around. French foreign minister Hubert Védrine dubbed America the “hyperpower,” riding roughshod over the sensibilities and interests of others. Samuel P. Huntington, author of a 1996 bestseller, The Clash of Civilizations, decried Clinton administration officials who “boast[ed] of American power and American virtue” and “lectur[ed] other countries on the universal validity of American principles, practices and institutions.” Public intellectuals from Ronald Steel (Temptations of a Superpower) to
Robert W. Tucker (The Imperial Temptation) warned against the perils of U.S. triumphalism. Chronicling this history in World Affairs, Robert Kagan pointedly noted that the epithets hegemonic and unilateral were first thrown at the United States during the Clinton era, not that of George W. Bush.

  All this became magnified under the second Bush administration, particularly after September 11. Just as the new president took office modeling himself on Ronald Reagan, so did many senior officials around him, few more happily than those who had been marginalized during Reagan’s later years, or marginalized once more under the first Bush administration. Born-again, they resurrected the in-your-face rhetoric of early Reagan and amped it up. They made his myth—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”—into operational dictum. Traditional American idealism—the United States as a lamp unto nations, enjoying a special providence—morphed into a crude Manichaean dialectic: good versus evil, us versus them. Confrontation clothed as strength through power became the order of the day. Diplomatic “engagement” was for wimps, a form of modern “appeasement.” Impatient with the perceived irresolution and half measures of the previous Bush and Clinton administrations, they wanted action—real solutions, not Band-Aids—and they derided those who thought differently.

  Years ago, I remember reading an exchange between a writer for the New York Times Magazine, Ron Suskind, and a senior Bush administration official. You guys, meaning reporters like me, you live in the “reality-based” world, the adviser famously told him with sheer condescension. By contrast, the aide went on, the Bush team moved in the faith-based world, a sphere where American might was transformative. “We are an empire now,” the man said. “We create our own reality.” In this brave new world, the United States was free of the constraints and limitations that bound normal nations. Again Ronald Reagan was the exemplar. He confronted the Evil Empire and the Berlin Wall fell. He ran an arms race that the Soviets could not afford, and communism crumbled. He confronted dictators, and they backed off. Their people, emboldened, rose up and democracy bloomed. It would take more than a decade for this vision of history to find its fullest expression in the faith-based foreign policy of George W. Bush, and it could be summed up simply: If you are America, you have only to will something for it to be. Stand up and confront the enemy, whoever he may be, and he will back down or collapse, by definition hollow at the core. This was the new American era.