It's My Party

by Peter Robinson

  I know how the poor monk felt. Just as John Moschos had a place, his desert monastery, that made life seem straightforward, I had a person, Ronald Reagan, who made the Republican Party seem straightforward. I admired Reagan when I was in college and graduate school, then I spent six years working in his White House, devoting a year and a half to writing speeches for Vice President Bush, then four and a half years to writing speeches for President Reagan himself. While Ronald Reagan led the Republican Party, all the important questions for the GOP appeared settled to me. I knew who was in charge. I knew where the GOP stood on every issue. Just as John Moschos, confused on a point of doctrine, needed only to consult his abbot, I, wondering about a point of Republican philosophy, needed only to consult Ronald Reagan’s old speeches, radio talks, and newspaper columns. Today nothing about the GOP appears settled to me, and if you are to understand why in the following pages I, like the monk, often sound amazed and perplexed, you will need to take into account my point of departure. John Moschos began on a mount near Bethlehem. I began, if you will, on Mount Reagan.

  * * *

  Probably the best way for me to tell you about Ronald Reagan is to describe the events leading to his 1987 Berlin Wall address.

  You may be familiar with the address. The president stood on a blue platform directly in front of the Berlin Wall. In recent months, the president explained, we had been hearing a great deal from the Soviet Union about a new policy of glasnost or openness. If General Secretary Gorbachev was serious about his new policy, the president said, he could prove it. The president set his jaw, then spoke with controlled but genuine anger—not long before, he had learned that a crowd had gathered in East Berlin to hear him, then been forcibly dispersed by the East German police. The last four words of his challenge, each just one syllable, sounded like blows. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

  In May 1987, when I was assigned to write the speech, the celebrations for the 750th anniversary of the founding of Berlin were already under way. Queen Elizabeth had visited the city. Mikhail Gorbachev was due in a matter of days. Although the president hadn’t been planning to visit Berlin, he was going to be in Europe in early June, first visiting Rome, then spending several days in Venice attending an economic summit. At the request of the West German government, the president’s schedule was adjusted to permit him to stop in Berlin for a few hours on his way back to the United States from Italy. I was told that the president would be speaking in front of the Berlin Wall, that he was expected to draw an audience of around ten thousand, and that given the setting, he probably ought to talk about foreign policy.

  I spent a day and a half in Berlin with the White House advance team—the logistical experts, Secret Service agents, and press officials who always went to the site of a presidential visit to make arrangements. All that I myself had to do in Berlin was find material. When I met John Kornblum, the ranking American diplomat in Berlin, I assumed that he would give me some.

  John Kornblum had an anxious, distracted air. A stocky man with thick glasses, he kept glancing at the door while he was speaking with me, as if hoping for someone more important to walk in. Kornblum gave me quite specific instructions. Almost all of it was in the negative. He was full of ideas about what the president shouldn’t say.

  West Berlin, Kornblum explained, was the most left-leaning of all West German cities. Its citizens were sophisticated. Reagan should avoid looking like a cowboy. He shouldn’t bash the Soviets. He certainly shouldn’t mention the Berlin Wall, because the people of Berlin had long ago gotten used to it.

  Kornblum offered only a couple of positive suggestions. Reagan should mention American efforts to obtain more air routes into West Berlin. He should play up American support for West Berlin’s bid to host the Olympics.

  After I left Kornblum, several members of our party were given a flight over the city in a U.S. Air Force helicopter. I’m told that in Berlin these days it is all but impossible to imagine the wall ever existed. I cannot imagine Berlin without it. From the air, the wall seemed less to cut one city in two than to separate two different modes of existence. On one side of the wall lay movement, color, modern architecture, crowded sidewalks, traffic. On the other side, all was drab. Buildings still exhibited pockmarks from shelling during the war. There were few cars. Pedestrians were badly dressed. When we hovered over Spandau Prison, a rambling brick structure in which Rudolf Hess was still being detained, soldiers at East German guard posts peered up at us through binoculars, rifles over their shoulders. The wall itself, which from West Berlin had seemed a simple concrete structure, was instead revealed from the air to be an intricate complex, the East Berlin side lined with dog runs and row upon row of barbed wire.

  That evening, I broke away from the advance team to join a dozen Berliners for dinner. Our hosts were Dieter and Ingeborg Elz, who had retired to their hometown of Berlin after Dieter completed his career at the World Bank in Washington. Although we had never met, we had friends in common, and the Elzes had offered to put on this dinner party to give me a feel for their city. They had invited Berliners of different walks of life and political outlooks—businessmen, academics, students, homemakers.

  We chatted for a while about German wine and the cost of Berlin housing. Then I related what Kornblum had told me. “Is it true?” I asked. “Have you gotten used to the wall?”

  There was a silence. The Elzes and their guests glanced at each other uneasily. I thought I had proven myself just the sort of brash, tactless American that John Kornblum was afraid the president might seem. Then one man raised an arm and pointed. “My sister lives twenty miles in that direction. I haven’t seen her in more than two decades. Do you think I can get used to that?” Another man spoke. Each morning on his way to work, he explained, he walked past a guard tower. Each morning, the same soldier gazed down at him through binoculars. “The soldier speaks the same language. He shares the same history. But one of us is a zookeeper and the other is an animal, and I am never certain which is which.”

  Our hostess broke in. A gracious woman, she had suddenly grown angry. Her face was red. She made a fist with one hand and pounded it into the palm of the other. “If this man Gorbachev is serious with his talk of glasnost and perestroika, he can prove it. He can get rid of this wall.”

  Back at the White House I adapted my hostess’s comment, making it the central passage of the speech I drafted. A week later, the speechwriters met the president in the Oval Office. My speech was the last one we discussed. Tom Griscom, the director of communications, asked the president for his comments on my draft. The president simply replied that he liked it. Griscom nodded to me.

  “Mr. President,” I said, “I learned in Germany that your speech will be heard not only in West Berlin but throughout East Germany.” Depending on weather conditions, I explained, radios might be able to pick the speech up as far east as Moscow itself. “Is there anything you’d like to say to people on the other side of the Berlin Wall?”

  The president cocked his head and thought. “Well,” he replied, “there’s that passage about tearing down the wall. That wall has to come down. That’s what I’d like to say to them.”

  With three weeks to go before it was delivered, the speech was circulated to the State Department and the National Security Council. Both attempted to squelch it. Rozanne Ridge-way, the assistant secretary of state for Eastern European affairs, challenged the speech by telephone. Peter Rodman of the National Security Council protested the speech in memoranda. Weighing in from Berlin, John Kornblum objected to the speech by fax. The speech was naïve. It would raise false hopes. It was clumsy. It was needlessly provocative. State and the NSC submitted their own alternate drafts—as I recall, there were no fewer than seven, one written by Kornblum himself. In each, the call to tear down the wall was absent.

  The week before the president left for Europe, Tom Griscom began summoning me into his office each time State or the NSC came up with a new objection. Each time, Griscom had me tel
l him why I believed State and the NSC were wrong and the speech, as I had written it, was right. (Once I found Colin Powell, then national security adviser, in Griscom’s office waiting for me. I was a thirty-year-old who had never held a job outside speechwriting. Powell was a decorated general. We went at it nose-to-nose.) Griscom was evidently waiting for an objection he thought Ronald Reagan himself would find compelling. He never heard one.

  In Venice the day before the speech was to be given, the deputy chief of staff, Ken Duberstein, decided that the objections from State and the NSC had become so strident that he had to present them to the president himself. When he finished briefing the president, Duberstein tells me, an exchange along the following lines took place.

  REAGAN: (A twinkle in his eye) I’m the president, aren’t I?

  DUBERSTEIN: Yes, sir, Mr. President. We’re clear about that.

  REAGAN: So I get to decide whether the line about tearing down the wall stays in?

  DUBERSTEIN: That’s right, sir. It’s your decision.

  REAGAN: Then it stays in.

  As Air Force One left Venice for Berlin the next morning, the fax machines on board began to whir. Making a final effort to squelch the speech, State and NSC were submitting yet another alternate draft. Tom Griscom never even took the fax to the forward cabin.

  The reasons I gave my heart to Ronald Reagan are all right there. The boldness. The clarity of vision. No one else would have given that speech—certainly not George Bush. I liked Bush, as I have said, but I had worked with him long enough to know that his first reaction on seeing my draft would have been to ask, “What’s State say about this?” Reagan didn’t care what State said. He cared about tearing down the wall.

  There is a school of thought that Ronald Reagan managed to look good only because he had clever writers putting words in his mouth. But Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, and Bill Clinton all had clever writers. Why was there only one Great Communicator? Because Ronald Reagan’s writers were never attempting to fabricate an image, just to produce work that measured up to the standard Reagan himself had already established. His policies were plain. He had been articulating them for decades—until he became president he wrote most of his material himself. When I heard Frau Elz say that Gorbachev should get rid of the wall, I knew instantly that the president would have responded to her remark. And when the State Department and National Security Council tried to block my draft by submitting alternate drafts, they weakened their own case. Their drafts were drab. They were bureaucratic. They lacked conviction. They had not stolen, as I had, from Frau Elz—and from Ronald Reagan.

  In my judgment, Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the last five decades and one of the half dozen greatest in our history. When he gave the Soviet Union a few good kicks, causing it to fall in on itself, he drew the Cold War to a peaceful end. When he enacted his economic program, he set in place the conditions that have led to eighteen years of almost uninterrupted economic growth. When he spoke of his beliefs—in God, in the goodness of the nation, in the wisdom of the people—he changed the very spirit and temper of the country, replacing the bitterness of Vietnam and Watergate with a buoyant, self-confident patriotism.

  The worst that can be said against Reagan is that he allowed federal deficits to pile up. Although often repeated, the allegation is silly. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives during all eight years of the Reagan administration, making it impossible for Reagan to cut domestic spending as much as he wanted. Yet while Reagan’s economic program added $1.4 trillion to the federal debt, it added $17 trillion to American asset values—the market value of land, stocks, houses, patents, and all other assets in the United States rose from $16 trillion in 1981 to $33 trillion in 1989—providing a return of twelve to one.

  Today the federal budget is no longer in deficit but in surplus. Why? For two reasons. The economy continues to boom—thanks to Ronald Reagan. And we have been able to scale back our military, saving tens of billions each year, because the Cold War is over—thanks to Ronald Reagan. President Clinton may take all the bows he wishes, but his principal contribution to the surplus was to stay out of the way as the budgetary implications of Reagan’s policies worked themselves out.

  Reagan accomplished all that he did without ever losing his sense of proportion about life itself. He remained sane. I witnessed a particularly telling instance of Reagan’s normalcy just a few months after he left office.

  In Los Angeles for a couple of days in the spring of 1989, I stopped by the suite of offices that had been set up for former President Reagan and his staff. As he stood to greet me, Reagan had the same twinkle and shine in his eyes and the same knowing nod that he had possessed during eight years in the White House. “Just doing a little writing,” he said, gesturing to a pad of paper on his desk. “Now that I’m out of office, I have time to get back to writing my speeches myself.”

  After a moment of small talk, the former president frowned and asked if I had seen the morning newspaper. I had, noticing over breakfast that the Los Angeles Times referred to Reagan in two front-page stories. “Saw Risk of Reagan Impeachment, Meese Says,” one headline read, while the other stated, “ ‘Star Wars’ Was Oversold, Cheney Says.”

  “I just don’t understand it,” Reagan said.

  “Neither do I, Mr. President.”

  “How can a judge decide the outcome of a sporting event?”

  It took me a moment to realize Reagan was not talking about his administration. He was commenting on the America’s Cup. A judge in New York had just awarded the cup to the boat from New Zealand, even though the American boat had put in a faster time. “San Diego Loses America’s Cup,” the headline stated. “Conner’s Use of Catamaran Ruled to be Violation of Governing Deed.”

  “Well,” the former president said, the twinkle returning to his eye, “at least it wasn’t a judge I appointed.”

  When I left, I was disappointed at first that the former president hadn’t even mentioned world events, let alone imparted any secrets or insights of historical moment. I had had my moment with the man who won the Cold War, and all I had managed to come away with was some talk about a boat race. How could Reagan have done that to me?

  But by the time I was back in traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway, I recognized that the former president had given me a very good example of the wisdom and simplicity of spirit that I had always cherished in him. For eight years he had been the most powerful man in the world. Then he set it all down and went back to being as ordinary an American as a former president can be. When Reagan looked at the newspaper, he read about sports.

  * * *

  Pity John Moschos. After his monastery, the world seemed so confusing. Pity me. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War, turned the economy around, and set an example of sanity that makes Republicans today seem ridden with angst. As I set out to learn what the Republican Party now stands for, I scarcely knew where to turn.

  Chapter Two

  ALONG THE RIPPLING

  SUSQUEHANNA

  Journal entry:

  Cast my mind back over the history of the Republican Party, and what do I see? Images of Republican conventions—confetti flying, balloons drifting toward the ceiling, and delegates, festooned with campaign buttons, straw hats perched atop their heads, waving placards as they parade around the floors of huge convention halls to demonstrate for their favorite presidential candidates. I can picture perhaps half a dozen conventions, no more. I see them first in color, gaudy, red-white-and-blue spectacles nominating Bob Dole in 1996, George Bush in 1988 and 1992, and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Then the conventions change to black-and-white—my father held on to our old Zenith long after everybody else in the neighborhood had bought a color set. In black-and-white I can go back as far as 1964, calling to mind grainy images of the liberal sophisticate, Nelson Rockefeller, being booed as he attempted to address the convention, which rejected Rockefeller to nominate the rough-hewn conservative, Barry Goldwater, instead. Bef
ore that? The conventions begin to flicker, shifting from our family television set to newsreels that I must have been forced to sit through in a high school history class. Dimly, I can see Thomas Dewey at the convention of 1948 and Alf Landon at the convention of 1936. Then the conventions fade to black.

  Nineteen thirty-six. I can get back that far and no farther. Yet the Republican Party was founded in 1854, more than 80 years earlier. Some Republican I am.

  I began my journey by turning to the past. Perhaps, I reasoned, I could find the meaning of the present-day Republican Party by reaching back across the decades, beyond Ronald Reagan, to the very founding of the GOP. Disappearing into the library for a couple of weeks—as my journal records, I realized at once that I had some remedial work to do—I discovered bad news. To understand the history of the GOP you have to learn a little bit about the Whigs—yes, the Whigs—and to learn about the Whigs you have to acquaint yourself with the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. Even in an account as brief as this one, there is no way to go about it but to begin at the beginning.

  How did we end up with a two-party system in the first place?

  THE BLUES AND THE GREENS

  When they drafted the Constitution, the founding fathers left out political parties, making no provision for them whatsoever. The oversight was intentional. The founders detested parties. James Madison devoted an entire tract, Federalist Number Ten, to denouncing parties, or, to use the eighteenth-century term, “factions.” “The violence of faction,” Madison wrote, leads to “instability, injustice, and confusion.” Yet before the nation was a decade old, nearly all the founding fathers, including Madison himself, had gone right ahead and formed themselves into two political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. Why? They had left themselves no choice.