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 f
rom 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.”
CHAPTERS 13 AND 14
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). T
he 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.
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