Today, there are no buildings left at the camp. There are just huge mounds surrounded by stone walls with plaques that note the number of people buried beneath them.
Deaver scheduled the stop at Bergen-Belsen for the morning event and Bitburg for the afternoon event.
That settled, Deaver, Henkel, General Walters, and I had dinner at a small restaurant where Gen. George Patton and his staff had once stayed. According to General Walters, the woman who ran the restaurant—who was then in her seventies—had also been Patton’s girlfriend while he was in residence. She never confirmed the rumor, but she did dance on the table at the end of the evening. Sometime between the story of her fling with Patton and her cabaret act, Deaver mentioned a call he’d received at the White House just after the story broke that there were SS graves in the cemetery in Bitburg. The voice on the other end of the phone said, “Mr. Deaver, this is General Ridgeway. My president is in trouble. I will lay the wreath at Bitburg.”
Matthew Ridgeway, who was ninety at the time, had succeeded Gen. Omar Bradley as commander the 82nd Airborne Division in 1942 and had jumped with his troops into France during the D-Day invasion. He’d also led the XVIII Airborne Corps in the Battle of the Bulge, commanded the 8th Army in Korea, and had succeeded Gen. Douglas MacArthur as supreme commander of the United Nations and United States forces in the Far East. He’d served as supreme allied commander-Europe and, after that, had become chief of staff of the United States Army.
So here was a genuine American hero still wanting to serve his country and to protect his president. You didn’t have to be a political animal of Michael Deaver’s intellect to see the value of Ridgeway’s offer. But it took Deaver to realize that Ridgeway couldn’t lay the wreath all by himself, that he had to do it with a German general. Ambassador Walters was assigned the task of finding one. He eventually came up with Lt. Gen. Johannes Steinhoff, a Luftwaffe ace who’d spent almost the entire war flying on the eastern front against the Russians. After the war, he’d joined the West German air force and had served there for a time as chief of staff.
Deaver’s plan was to bring General Ridgeway together with General Steinhoff at Kolmeshohe; together, they would lay the wreath in the cemetery. The media would not be told about this part of the ceremony until the last minute. So Ridgeway was flown secretly to Germany, where he spent a few days resting at the base in Bitburg. At the same time they brought General Steinhoff into the area.
At around eight o’clock on the morning of the visit, just before leaving for Bergen-Belsen with the president, I got a call from the advance agent at the cemetery, who said, “You’re not going to believe what happened. Somebody got in here last night and placed fresh flowers on each of the SS graves.”
The flowers were removed immediately. I can’t draw any conclusions from the flowers, other than the obvious. It made me feel very uneasy.
The visit to Bergen-Belsen was very emotional. There is no way to describe what it’s like to be at a concentration camp. Anyone who has ever visited one knows that words fail while you are there, and there isn’t much to say when you leave. The president and first lady were deeply moved by what they saw. Later he would say about Bergen-Belsen that the horror of the Holocaust had been forever burned into his memory there.
Once we were in the air, heading for Bitburg, the White House released the news that two combatants who’d never met, Gen. Matthew Ridgeway and Gen. Johannes Steinhoff, would lay the wreath at the cemetery. By doing that together, in the presence of the president of the United States and the chancellor of West Germany, the American people and the German people would finally be putting World War II behind them. To me, the symbolism was staggering.
We arrived at the cemetery. The president and the chancellor walked in together and stood next to each other. Then the two old generals walked in separately, and stood on the outside flanks. The moment came when they turned and faced each other, paused, and then they shook hands.
By design, the president never touched the wreath, which was unusual. The two old men laid the wreath, then walked with the president and the chancellor to the rear of the cemetery, where Deaver sprung his next surprise. Waiting for the official party were relatives of the July 1944 conspirators’ coup against Hitler. He’d assembled members of Von Stauffenberg’s family and members of Rommel’s family, and members of the families of the famous generals who were executed for plotting against the Führer.
A report later noted that we were at the cemetery for only eight minutes. We returned immediately to Bitburg Air Force Base, where President Reagan spoke about the day. In his speech he mentioned that not everyone was happy that he’d come to Germany. “This visit has stirred many emotions in the American and German people, too. I’ve received many letters since first deciding to come to Bitburg cemetery, some supportive, others deeply concerned and questioning, and others opposed. Some old wounds have been reopened, and this I regret very much, because this should be a time of healing.”
Here we were, forty years after the end of the war, and for the first time—and for the final time—two generals on opposite sides shook hands and laid a wreath. Then, together with the president of the United States and the chancellor of West Germany, they greeted the families of the men who had plotted to assassinate Hitler. But the media missed Deaver’s point. The message he had been hoping to send didn’t get home. The news back in the States that day was all about the SS graves.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THREE WORDS IN GENEVA
For the first time in United States–Soviet cold war relations, both countries had strong, healthy, and politically determined leaders. For a time it seemed as if they were on a collision course. Then they met face to face.
Some historians have written that the cold war began to thaw when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev sat down together at a dining-room table in a small house just outside Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986.
The topic on the agenda at that meeting was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—the project that came to be known as Star Wars. President Reagan seemed determined to develop this antimissile satellite system against the express wishes of the Soviets. To ease the strain, the president had even offered to share Star Wars with the Soviets. However, Gorbachev wasn’t having it. “Excuse me, Mr. President, but I do not take your idea of sharing SDI seriously.”
The president responded, “If I thought that SDI could not be shared, I would have rejected it myself.”
The meeting in Iceland ended without an agreement, although it led to further talks, and the following year Gorbachev and Reagan signed a pact to destroy intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
But I would argue that the thaw in the cold war began one year before the Reykjavik summit, when the two leaders first met each other in Geneva, Switzerland, in November 1985.
There, in a cabana overlooking Lake Geneva, these two men had a private conversation that began with three words, and accordingly set the stage for their relationship. And I was one of only three other people who heard them.
The centerpiece of Ronald Reagan’s rise to the presidency and his first term in office might well have been his description of the Soviet Union as “the evil empire.” It was in a speech before the British House of Commons on June 8, 1982, that he first associated the Soviet Union with the word “evil.” “Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?”
Nine months later, in a speech in Florida, the president inexorably linked the two by referring to “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire …”
For the first four years of his presidency, Reagan had no one to deal with in Moscow. Leonid Brezhnev had been general secretary since taking power from Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. When Brezhnev died in 1982, the former head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, moved into the Kremlin. He lasted two years before he died and was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, another old man and the third of the three leaders whose career an
d political philosophy could be traced back to Joseph Stalin. But when Chernenko died in 1985, a new style of Soviet leader emerged.
Mikhail Gorbachev was younger, more astute, and openly less autocratic. He’d inherited a near-bankrupt economy, eastern bloc allies who had grown weary of Soviet rule, a political system that was simply not working, and a relationship with the West that was going nowhere. He recognized that there were radical changes happening in the world, among them the earliest stirrings of globalization, and somehow understood that if he did not force change, his country would be left so far behind that it could not survive. He shocked his own Communist Party, shocked the Russian people, and shocked the rest of the world, too, by putting two new words into the English vernacular—“glasnost,” which means “openness,” and “perestroika,” which means “reform.” Ronald Reagan finally had someone in Moscow that he could do business with.
We began planning the president’s meeting with Gorbachev in Geneva nearly five months before the event. On the survey trip, in mid-July 1985, I discovered that my Russian counterpart was KGB general Mikhail Dokuchayev, whom I’d first met in 1976 with Mrs. Rockefeller.
Ever observant, Bill Henkel—who was leading the US delegation—was intrigued by the way the Russians positioned their officials around the conference table. At our initial meeting in the Soviet mission in Geneva, with huge pictures of Lenin glaring down at us, Dokuchayev sat to the right of the foreign ministry man leading the Soviet delegation. After every question, the foreign ministry man would lean over to Dokuchayev to get a whispered response. As long as the KGB was pulling most of the strings, Bill therefore sat me next to him, directly opposite Dokuchayev. Not all advance people would have been astute enough to do that. It wasn’t a question of pampering my ego, it was Bill’s way of telling the Russians that security was at the top of our concerns.
At the end of that first meeting, we broke up into smaller groups. Dokuchayev and I went off on our own with an interpreter and quickly agreed that the best way to deal with our Swiss hosts was to show a united front. The Swiss were going to make the final decision on a whole host of activities and prerogatives, from the arrival ceremonies, to the makeup of the motorcades, to the size of our security requirements, to the many complexities of protocol, and to the actual venue for the summit. If the Russians and the Americans asked the Swiss for different things, they would stall; if we both asked for the same thing, they would cooperate.
It had been decided by the Swiss that they would orchestrate the arrival ceremonies at the airports and the formal opening ceremony at a beautiful estate with gorgeous grounds called Le Reposoir. The two sides would then alternate as hosts, starting with the Americans. I believe that was decided with the toss of a coin.
Bill determined that we needed two venues, one where the president would stay, another where we would host meetings. The main reason for that was to give the president some privacy. At the same time, Bill was particularly concerned with putting the president in the best psychological position, both personally and in the eyes of the world. So the decision was made to bring the Reagans over a day or two early. That would allow the president to get accustomed to the time change. Gorbachev was only a few time zones from Moscow after an easy daytime flight. But the president would be six time zones from Washington at the end of an overnight flight.
Because Bill was always thinking of the photo ops to demonstrate the youthfulness and the vigor of the president, he suggested that the day before the summit the president could go riding. I located a fabulous stable just outside the city, almost on the French border. Run by the Rey family, they had fifty-five quality horses, including some Irish thoroughbreds. On a subsequent trip, I returned with riding gear to find a horse for the president and to check out the trails we’d ride. Meandering through beautiful forests, a few trails crossed into France, which created a diplomatic complication, in as much as the president of the United States would be riding a horse in France, in the company of armed Secret Service agents without the French having granted permission or, for that matter, necessarily knowing about it.
In the meantime, we scouted more than a dozen venues. We drove around all day for several days in minivans. What a tiresome chore that was. In the end we wound up accepting an invitation from the Aga Khan to let the president and Mrs. Reagan borrow his magnificent eighteenth-century estate, La Maison de Saussure, bordering Lake Geneva in the small village of Creux-de-Genthod.
For the meeting venue, we selected the twenty-room Fleur d’Eau, a sensational villa also overlooking the lake. The main house was perfect for our purposes, but I’m sure what sold it to Bill was the stone cabana with a fireplace at the bottom of the grounds, alongside the lake.
The Russians elected to receive us at their mission in Geneva, a Soviet-style office building that had a substantially different atmosphere.
The next few trips narrowed down the options: what would happen at the airport; where we would hold press conferences; who would attend the various dinners each night; and the specific time frame throughout the entire visit into which everything had to fit. On each trip, I made it a habit of having lunch and dinner every day with Dokuchayev. Little by little, our relationship grew more personal. When he happened to mention over one meal how he loved walking hand in hand with his six-year-old granddaughter through a park, I thought to myself, what a paradox. Here was a senior KGB officer, who obviously must have done some pretty nasty things in his life, and yet his private joy was walking with his granddaughter through a park. On the last trip, we exchanged gifts. He gave me two books. The first was one he’d written about his World War II experiences. It was in Russian. The second was called World War II: Decisive Battles of the Soviet Army. This one was in English, written by a couple of Soviet generals from their perspective. I then gave him two gifts. The first was a copy of David Eisenhower’s account of his grandfather’s experiences, called Eisenhower at War. The second was a bottle of Old Grand Dad whiskey. I handed that to him with the words, “This is in honor of your granddaughter.”
Among the many problems we had to work out was the motorcade. The Swiss would have to approve it, to avoid having one country show up with a hundred cars and the other with a mere twenty-six. Dokuchayev and I agreed that the best thing to do would be to go to the Swiss with identical motorcades, so we each took a piece of paper and I lined up my motorcade while he lined up his motorcade. And all the time I kept thinking to myself that there would be plenty of differences. I was wrong. We lined up, almost identically, car for car.
From there we talked about how many agents would be in each building and who would go into which rooms. The meeting rooms at Fleur d’Eau and the Russian consulate weren’t huge, and if we each brought eight agents, they would fill up fast. So we choreographed the president’s arrival at the consulate and Gorbachev’s arrival at Fleur d’Eau. We made it very clear who would come inside with the president and with the general secretary; who would stay inside; and where the agents who didn’t come into the room could wait. After all, we didn’t want them standing outside in the cold. The question of guns did not come up because we all had guns.
There was some concern, though, about the motorcade and where the cars would stage. This was important because we each had twenty-six cars, and the Swiss might have nearly as many. Obviously we couldn’t park seventy to seventy-five vehicles at the front door. Both the general and I wanted to be certain that our vehicles weren’t blocked, that we both had access to our own control car and our own communications car, and all those things had to be taken into consideration. So now we went through each site and choreographed where the motorcades would arrive and where the motorcades would stage. It was a tedious but very necessary process. It was never a simple process, but it could have been a lot simpler had the State Department not made it more complicated.
Unlike Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who was protected by the KGB, Secretary of State George Shultz was protected by State Department Secur
ity (SY) and although they did their own advances, they weren’t party to these meetings. Whatever deals Dokuchayev made with us applied as well to Shevardnadze. But in the eyes of some SY agents, whatever deals the Secret Service made with the Soviets did not necessarily apply to them. Technically, they were wrong. Many years before, the Secret Service had signed a memorandum of understanding with the State Department that gave the Secret Service operational control over combined events. State Department Security could be part of the planning process, but we were in charge.
At Fleur d’Eau, for instance, it was our call who would be allowed into the meeting room with the president and general secretary. We decided there would only be one Secret Service agent and one KGB agent. There would not be an SY agent because if he was coming in, then Shevardnadze would want a second KGB guy, and there simply wasn’t enough room. Those were the arrangements, and we felt very strongly that everyone had to abide by them. But SY decided to move the goalposts.
A few days before the actual visit, I returned to Geneva for the fifth time to meet Dokuchayev and to iron out last-minute difficulties. As soon as I arrived, our lead advance agent there, Ed Russell, informed me that the State Department had unilaterally decided they weren’t bound by our agreements with the Soviets, and that the head of the secretary’s detail intended to be in the meeting room. I said he couldn’t come in, because that would mean, at the very first event, we’d already broken our agreement with the Soviets.
I went to speak with the SY agent in charge of the secretary’s detail, but his stance was that nothing the Secret Service decided with the Soviets applied to him. Technically, it did, so I needed to warn Dokucheyev that this fellow’s misinformed ego risked creating some diplomatic embarrassment.
The night before the summit, the Swiss put everyone through a full dress rehearsal. They wanted to go over every minute detail of the various ceremonies. At one point, the U.S. and Soviet motorcades were lined up side by side, which gave me a chance to explain my “State Department problem” to the general. I told him that State Department Security was refusing to honor our agreement by insisting on his right to go into the room.
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