Extraordinary, Ordinary People

by Condoleezza Rice

  The formal wedding was set for July 1, 1989, at Clara’s house in Palo Alto. Greg and I were the witnesses, and I arranged to host the reception at the Stanford Faculty Club. At the reception, I realized that Daddy had made many new friends since my departure for Washington, and that was gratifying. Clara was clearly very good for him: compassionate and kind, she gave him a new lease on life. To this day she and I remain close. I must admit, though, that I felt a tinge of remorse at the wedding. I was glad that Daddy had found a companion, but his marriage opened the wound again of my mother’s untimely death at the too-young age of sixty-one.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “I Don’t Think This Is What Karl Marx Had in Mind”

  I STAYED IN Palo Alto for just two days. With the quickening pace of international events, I simply couldn’t afford any more time off. President Bush had decided to visit Eastern Europe in order to signal American support for what was unfolding there. Any doubts about the momentous nature of the changes were wiped away when we arrived in Poland on July 9 and in Hungary two days later.

  Hungary had been a center of reform, managing even in the depths of the Cold War to gain some modicum of independence from Moscow. But now the Hungarians were challenging Soviet power directly and moving toward multiparty elections. More astonishingly, Hungary had decided to dismantle the barbed wire demarcating its border with Austria. In fact, during our time in Budapest, Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Németh gave President Bush a piece of that twisted metal fence. He proudly and rightly told the President that his country had been the first to breach the Iron Curtain.

  It was in Poland, though, that the Cold War had begun in 1945, and it was now clear that it was in Poland where it could end. Air Force One landed on a muggy, hot evening in Warsaw. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the communist general who’d imposed martial law in 1981 and was now the president of Poland, greeted President Bush. A goose-stepping military band paraded in front of us and played the national anthems of the two countries. I flashed back to the last time I’d been at this airport. Returning from the Soviet Union in 1979, I’d had to make an unscheduled stop in Warsaw, where we were told to get off the plane and leave all of our belongings. Cris, Lisa, and I had sat nervously in the lounge wondering if we were going to be detained by the communist authorities. After a while the passengers were permitted to reboard the Air France flight. The whole plane erupted in cheers as we ascended into the air and out of harm’s way.

  But now communism in Poland had lost its ferocity. That night at the state dinner, held in a tacky, faded dining hall, the room suddenly went dark due to a power surge caused by the hot television lights. It was a metaphor for the Communist Party’s coming fate.

  It was clear that the party’s demise was sealed the next day when we went to Gdansk, the home of Solidarity. In contrast to the stultifying arrival ceremony, President Bush was greeted in the town square by hundreds of thousands of cheering Polish workers. “Bush, Bush, Bush!” they chanted, waving American flags. “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” I turned to Bob Blackwill and said, “I don’t think this is what Karl Marx had in mind when he said, ‘Workers of the world, unite.’ ”

  BY THE end of August 1989, it was clear that the cascade of events would not stop in Poland and Hungary but would roll back into Germany—the epicenter of the Cold War—and sweep away the line that had divided East from West for more than forty years.

  At the time, the division of Germany into two parts was one of those givens of international politics. Each year West German leaders would mechanically repeat platitudes about the coming day when all Germany would be united. But nobody actually believed it. After 1971, a workable modus vivendi was put in place so that the divided city of Berlin could function more efficiently. By September 1973, East and West Germany had become separate members of the United Nations and competed in the Olympics as separate countries (the East Germans as a sports superpower).

  Although the two countries had learned to live next to each other, their continued division hardly bred stability; the best troops of NATO and the best troops of the Warsaw Pact stood stationed on high alert at the border between East and West. War between the Soviet Union and the United States seemed unlikely, but if it were to start, the most plausible scenarios always involved these frontline troops, facing each other across the Fulda Gap.

  Even with the collapse of communism in Poland and Hungary, few believed that the Soviet Union was ready to contemplate the unification of Germany. Moscow still wore the victory over Germany in “The Great Patriotic War” as a talisman against decline at home. And for the Kremlin, East Germany was a source of pride. Widely believed to be the most successful state in the Eastern Bloc—more efficient and advanced than even the Soviet Union itself—Berlin was proof that communism could work.

  By the fall of 1989, the impact of Gorbachev’s policies was becoming evident. Erich Honecker, the hard-line leader of East Germany, had been forced from power, ironically because he was unwilling to pursue Moscow’s liberalizing policies at home. Now, because of the refusal of other Warsaw Pact states, particularly Hungary, to enforce the border controls between their countries, hundreds fled East Germany without fear of being returned to the German Democratic Republic—the official name of a country that was anything but democratic. As the Hungarians put it, East European states stopped being “Honecker’s border guards.” The flow quickened until it was a veritable flood. One news cartoon, captioned “Germany Unifies,” depicted West Germany full of people and East Germany empty. That wasn’t far from reality.

  The GDR was dying and, increasingly, Germans were speaking about what had only months before seemed impossible. I attended a meeting in Germany at the end of October. Usually these transatlantic conferences were filled with talk of arms control and relations between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. This time, however, Germans wanted to talk to each other across the political divides of socialist and conservative, East and West. As an American, I felt like a bystander. On the plane ride home, I penned a memo for the President reporting that German unification was suddenly on the agenda. But before I could send it, the unthinkable happened: the Berlin Wall fell.

  It turns out that the most momentous event in forty years of international history occurred thanks to a gigantic bureaucratic screw-up in the GDR. To stem the exodus of its citizens, the East German government decided to develop new, liberalized travel policies that would give East Germans the ability to leave the country. The hope was that in making it easier to travel back and forth, people would visit other nations but ultimately return home. Interior Ministry officials intended to have these relaxed restrictions apply to the border between East and West Germany, but not in Berlin, which had a different status as an occupied city. That point, however, was somehow left out of the draft regulations.

  The new policies were written on November 9, 1989, but the internal security forces didn’t yet have clear instructions on how to implement them. That night the party press secretary spotted the draft policies on a table as he headed to the podium for what had become a daily press conference to try to calm the waters. He read the regulations to the astonished press and almost immediately realized that he couldn’t explain what they meant. But it was too late. People began to flock to the Berlin Wall, the symbol and reality of Europe’s division for decades. The Interior Ministry guards didn’t know what to do. Faced with the flood of people, the commander made a historic decision: he ordered his troops to withhold fire. The Berlin Wall collapsed in joyous celebration.

  At about three that afternoon Washington time, the phone rang in our suite of offices in the Old Executive Office Building, the place within the White House complex where most of the President’s staff works. The assistant to Brent’s deputy, Bob Gates, was on the phone. “The General”—as we called Brent—“wants you and Bob Blackwill to come over and talk to the President about what is going on in Berlin,” Dianne said.

  Unfortunately, we had all been too busy doing other things to know what w
as happening. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Turn on CNN,” she said. “The Wall has come down.”

  Bob hastily called his contacts at the CIA, while Philip Zelikow and NSC Eastern Europe Director Bob Hutchings called the State Department and I monitored the news coverage. Within a short time we were in Brent’s office, trying to recover from the fact that the crack staff of the NSC had been scooped by CNN. The President was already in the Oval Office with the press. He was careful and guarded in his public reaction to the unfolding events, telling reporters that he was very pleased with the development. “We are saluting those who can move forward with democracy,” the President said. “We are encouraging the concept of a Europe whole and free.”

  Some pundits criticized the President for what they interpreted as a relatively subdued response to a clear victory for freedom. The truth was that the President did not want to alarm the Soviets or get too far ahead of the West Germans in pushing for reunification.

  In private conversations within the West Wing, however, his support for unification was unequivocal. The President didn’t wait for a careful analysis of the pros and cons of German unification. He reacted based on principle and his gut instincts. Germany should unify as quickly as the Germans themselves desired, he told us. He had faith in German democracy; there was nothing to fear.

  This was a momentous decision. George Bush’s certainty meant that it was no longer a question of whether Germany should unify but how to make it happen. America would be resolutely at the side of Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor. Leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union party, Kohl was staunchly pro-American and ready to make difficult decisions in order to seize the opportunity to do what no chancellor had ever thought possible. He no longer had to worry about where America stood on reunification.

  Nevertheless, when we suggested on that momentous day that President Bush go to Berlin, as Kennedy and Reagan had done, the President demurred. “This is a German moment,” he said with characteristic modesty. “What would I do? Dance on the Wall?”

  Blackwill and I returned across West Executive Way to our offices. We plopped down in the large wing chairs in his office in front of the fireplace, exhausted and exhilarated at the same time. As we continued to watch the extraordinary pictures from Berlin, Bob said that I should write something for the President. Clearly, everyone would worry about the reaction of the Soviet Union. “You need to write it before you leave tonight,” he said.

  I sat down at the word processor. “Mr. President,” I wrote, “we have now entered the end game of the Cold War.” What I really wanted to say was that I couldn’t believe our good fortune: we were lucky enough to be charged with making history come out right. We couldn’t afford to fail.

  THE NEXT day, Bob Gates and I received a letter that Gorbachev had sent to the other three “occupying powers”—France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—as well as a copy of the somewhat tougher letter he’d sent to Chancellor Kohl. The Soviet leader suggested that any attempt to unify Germany in light of these events amounted to “political extremism” that could bring about “not only the destabilization of the situation in Central Europe, but also in other parts of the world.” It sounded a bit ominous, but we’d come to know Gorbachev as one who didn’t threaten. We began to consider how we would manage the unification process. We knew where we stood thanks to the President’s clarity. The French and British, however, particularly Margaret Thatcher, weren’t so sure that it was a good idea. Whenever she would talk about German unification, Thatcher would bristle, recalling how the Germans had sent her family scurrying into bomb shelters when she was a child. Clearly, alliance management would be a huge task. And what of the Soviet Union? Was Moscow really prepared to see Germany unify, and on what terms? We wanted to be sensitive to Soviet interests. After all, with about thirty-five thousand nuclear weapons and nearly five million men under arms, the Soviet Union was a weakening but still formidable force. The United States would need to be Germany’s anchor and advocate. But we would also need to make sure that U.S. interests were protected. We couldn’t allow Germany to make a deal that gave us half a loaf—for instance, we would not want them to take the unified state out of NATO. American power needed to be preserved in Europe even as the Soviet Union retreated. The Cold War was almost won after forty years. We didn’t want to make a fatal mistake at the very end.

  President Bush decided that he needed to sit down with Gorbachev. Events were unfolding very rapidly, and the President wanted to take the temperature of the Soviet leader in a face-to-face encounter. Perhaps naively, we hoped to arrange a low-key meeting between the two and worked with the Soviets to hold talks in the island country of Malta on December 2–3, 1989. The arrangements were to be kept secret until the last minute to prevent too much buildup.

  Unfortunately, we didn’t anticipate two problems. First, we could not keep a meeting between the two world leaders quiet, and when it leaked, the expectations for the summit were even greater, since the secrecy itself fueled speculation about what would happen.

  Second, Malta is a beautiful place—but not in December. When we told our secretaries of the upcoming summit, one of them who had served there said, “Are you crazy? Have you ever seen the weather in Malta in December?” She was right. Storms and gale-force winds forced the cancellation of the first session and the summit dinner since they were to be held at sea aboard an American destroyer.

  When we did finally meet for the second session aboard the Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorky, it was clear the President’s instincts had been right. He and Gorbachev started to develop a relationship of trust, which served them well through the coming metaphorical storms at the end of the Cold War. It was also aboard the Maxim Gorky that I met Gorbachev for the first time. “She tells me everything I need to know about the Soviet Union,” the President said as he introduced me to the Soviet leader. “I certainly hope she knows a lot,” Gorbachev quipped.

  AFTER THE first of the year, Jim Baker’s State Department struck a deal to set up a negotiating forum for German unification called the Two-Plus-Four process; the two Germanys would be represented alongside the four Allied powers from World War II. There was some grousing among the NSC staff that we had not been properly consulted. But there wasn’t much time for bureaucratic politics. History was moving too fast.

  Brent called me into his office the afternoon of the announcement of the Two-Plus-Four negotiations. “I want you to be the White House representative on the negotiating delegation,” he said.

  “But this is about Germany,” I replied. “I’m your Soviet specialist.”

  “I know,” Brent insisted. “For us, German unification is a Soviet problem.”

  He was right, and I joined Bob Zoellick, Baker’s State Department counselor, and Raymond Seitz, the assistant secretary for European and Canadian affairs, on the team that would negotiate the unification of Germany.

  From that point on, we faced a daily cascade of events toward the Cold War’s end. It was, frankly, exhausting. The delegation traveled to Germany several times between March and September, arriving early in the morning, meeting all day, enduring heavy German cuisine at dinner, and then returning home the next morning. When we asked whether we might have longer but fewer sessions given how far we had to come, the French delegate replied, “Rather puts to rest that notion of America as a European power.” We ignored the dig and suffered silently through the brutal schedule.

  At the end of May 1990, Gorbachev came to Washington for a full-scale summit, his popularity in the West growing even as it declined at home. We wanted to make the visit special to shore up the Soviet president, whom we now saw as essential to ending the Cold War peacefully. There was a grand ceremony to sign an arms control treaty in the East Room, a magnificent state dinner, and a trip to Camp David, all underscoring the importance of the man and his excellent relationship with President Bush.

  It is not unusual that foreign leaders travel to o
ther parts of the country during a trip to the United States. George Shultz, who had returned to California, invited Gorbachev to visit the West Coast and give a speech at Stanford. President Bush called me to the Oval Office a few days before Gorbachev’s arrival in Washington. “Stanford is your home,” he said. “I want you to accompany Gorbachev to Palo Alto.” As I sat on the South Lawn of the White House waiting with Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, to take off in the presidential helicopter, Marine One, a thought crossed my mind: I’m awfully glad I changed my major.

  Gorbachev seemed to enjoy his time in California. “They ought to make you pay to live here,” he told George Shultz.

  “They do,” George replied, referencing the high cost of living in northern California.

  The trip was one of the highlights of my career and a remarkable moment for my father, who attended Gorbachev’s speech in Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium. He was so proud to see his daughter sitting next to the leader of the Soviet Union, representing the President of the United States. Unfortunately, this moment was followed by a well-publicized tussle with an overly aggressive Secret Service agent who tried to prevent me from going onto the San Francisco airport tarmac to say goodbye to Gorbachev. I wasn’t sure if he just didn’t have me on the list or if he couldn’t believe that the President’s Soviet advisor was a black woman. Whatever his motivation, the incident didn’t sit well with the President or with his chief of staff, John Sununu. I was assured that the offending agent had been dealt with appropriately.

  Across the Atlantic, our work was paying off. On October 3, 1990, Germany unified fully within NATO. It was an acquisition, not a merger, with the Federal Republic of Germany emerging as the legal successor to the German state that had been defeated in 1945. In short, the GDR was abolished, and with it Soviet power in Europe. Ironically, the agreement granting the unified Germany full sovereignty and ending the occupation was finalized on September 12 in Moscow. Standing behind Jim Baker as he signed the document, I caught a glimpse of Gorbachev, who was tucked away behind a number of midlevel Soviet officials. What must he be thinking? I wondered. And then another thought flashed across my mind: How long can he possibly last?