At the Highest Levels
The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War
To our wives, Afsaneh and Brooke
PREFACE
At the beginning of 1989, we decided to write a book about relations between the United States and the Soviet Union over the next three years. No one could have foretold that our story would encompass the liberation of Eastern Europe, the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact, the suspension of the Soviet Communist party, the death of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War.
The title of this book reflects its central theme: in managing the U.S.Soviet relationship during its climactic phase, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev relied on understandings reached “at the highest levels,” often in secret and in consultation with only their very closest advisers. They developed what they came to call a “partnership.” The term suggests how they transformed the East-West rivalry. They were able to preserve and strengthen their cooperation despite international crises and flare-ups of domestic opposition on both sides.
Still, conducting state-to-state relations in this highly personal fashion had its costs. Bush and Gorbachev were so closely attuned to each other that it eventually caused both men to lose touch with their domestic constituencies.
Gorbachev came to believe that it was more important for him to cultivate his relationship with Bush and his fellow Western leaders than to reach an accommodation with Boris Yeltsin and other champions of democratization, decentralization, and free-market economics.
Bush was so intent on shoring up Gorbachev that he was slow to perceive that by the summer of 1991, the Soviet leader was largely a spent force. Bush created the impression that he cared more about his friend in the Kremlin than about the principles of freedom and independence. His ties to Gorbachev—and his reluctance to support Yeltsin—ultimately became a political liability in Bush’s campaign for reelection.
Early in our work, we quietly asked a large number of American and Soviet officials if they would speak with us on a regular basis about what was happening within and between their two governments; many consented, on the condition that we not identify them as sources. We made similar arrangements with officials of other NATO and Warsaw Pact states.
For more than three years, we kept in frequent touch with contacts in Washington, Moscow, and several European capitals. We often saw our sources within days—sometimes even within hours—of the closed-door meetings, negotiating sessions, telephone calls, and other diplomatic exchanges described in these pages. The information they provided was not just reproduced from fresh memory but often drawn from written talking points, memoranda of conversations, reporting cables, and other documents. We have used direct quotations only when our sources had firsthand, immediate knowledge of what was said. As far as possible, we have checked information about each meeting, conversation, or episode with a variety of sources.
Just as the official written record of these events will eventually be declassified, so we are placing our research and interview notes in the Williams College Library in Williamstown, Massachusetts, under time seal for use by future scholars.
Since so many of our sources must remain anonymous, we cannot acknowledge our debt to them here, but our gratitude to them is immense.
Among those we can thank are several officials responsible for informing the public about the workings of government. In Washington: Marlin Fitzwater, the presidential press secretary, his deputy, Roman Popadiuk, and their colleagues in the White House and National Security Council staff press offices; Margaret Tutwiler of the State Department; Pete Williams of the Defense Department; Captain Jay Coupe and Colonel William Smullen of the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and E. Peter Earnest of the Central Intelligence Agency.
In the Soviet government: Vitali Ignatenko, Igor Malashenko, and Andrei Grachyov of the Kremlin; Gennadi Gerasimov of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and Boris Malakhov, Leonid Dobrokhotov, and Georgi Oganov of the Soviet embassy in Washington.
We also appreciate the assistance we received from the Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, its director, Academician Georgi Arbatov, and its Washington representative, Vladimir Pechatnov.
For help in making our way through the thickets of arms control, we would like to thank Spurgeon Keeny, Jack Mendelsohn, Matthew Bunn, Dunbar Lockwood, and Lee Feinstein of the Arms Control Association in Washington.
Several editors at Time supported our efforts and guided into the pages of the magazine excerpts from our work while it was still in progress: Henry Muller, John Stacks, Ron Kriss, James Kelly, Johanna McGeary, and Brigid Forster. Michael Duffy, Dan Goodgame, Michael Kramer, and J. F. O. McAllister were generous with their counsel and the fruits of their own reporting.
We are especially grateful to Walter Isaacson, who encouraged this project from its inception and gave us an expert and detailed critique of the final manuscript.
The Moscow bureau of Time—John Kohan, Jay Carney, and Felix Rosenthal—were most hospitable during our frequent intrusions. Yuri Zarakhovich helped us with a variety of queries while we were finishing the book.
Several friends—notably James MacGregor Burns, Elizabeth Drew, William Hamilton, Richard Holbrooke, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Don Oberdorfer, and Louise Walker—provided us with substantive advice and moral support at key moments. Two others, both masters of the subject of East-West relations, William G. Hyland and Michael Mandelbaum, read early versions of the manuscript and gave us useful comments.
We express a special debt to Maryam Mashayekhi, Martha Clark, and Galit Zolkower, who helped in gathering research material for this book and aided us in innumerable other ways. Vladislav Zubok and Kathy Lavinder provided us with additional research.
Thanks, also, to Ed Turner, Gail Evans, Bernard Shaw, Frank Sesno, Charles Bierbauer, Steve Hurst, Claire Shipman, Patrick Reap, and Jill Neff of CNN, to Newton Minow and Yvonne Zecca of the Annenberg Washington Program, and to Patricia Lee Dorff of Foreign Affairs.
We relied particularly on the professionalism of our literary agents, Timothy Seldes and Esther Newberg. Their confidence in us kept us going. We also feel very lucky to have ended up in the honorable and capable hands of Charles Hayward and William Phillips at Little, Brown and Company. Our editor there, Roger Donald, along with his colleagues Dorothy Straight and Geoffrey Kloske, saw our manuscript through to publication with great skill, high standards, and good cheer.
Finally, we are grateful to all members of our households who had to live with this project for four years. Devin and Adrian Talbott took an active interest in the subject and indulged their father in his preoccupations. Our wives, Afsaneh and Brooke, encouraged our collaboration with each other even when it strained our collaborations with them. They also read large portions of the manuscript at various stages and gave us the benefit of their excellent advice. For those and many other reasons, this book is dedicated to them.
Michael R. Beschloss
Strobe Talbott
Washington, D.C.
November 4, 1992
CONTENTS
Preface
1 “His Heart Is in the Right Place”
2 “I Don’t Want to Do Anything Dumb”
3 “More! You Must Do More!”
4 “Look, This Guy Is Perestroika!”
5 “The Makings of a Whole New World”
6 “I’m Not Going to Dance on the Wall”
7 “Eye to Eye”
8 “I’m Going to Hold a Seminar on Germany”
9 “I Don’t Want to Make the Wrong Mistakes”
10 “Two Anchors Are Better”
11 “A Fantastic Result”
12 “This Is No Time to Go Wobbly”
13 “You Can’t Back Off”
14 “I Want to Preserve the Relationship”
15 “You’ve Got to Understand”
16 “He’s All They’ve Got”
17 “I Really Hit Him over the Head”
18 “Business Is Business”
19 “We’re Counting on You”
20 “We’re Not Going to Let Him Use Us”
21 “I’m Afraid He May Have Had It”
22 “What We Have Accomplished Will Last Forever”
Afterword
Epilogue to the Paperback Edition
A Chronology: Three Eventful Years
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Authors
CHAPTER 1
“His Heart Is in the Right Place”
On Thursday, December 10, 1987, at the end of his first visit to the United States, Mikhail Gorbachev stepped out of the White House, bade farewell to Ronald Reagan, and then slipped into the backseat of his black ZIL limousine, where he was joined by Vice President George Bush.
As the car rolled down the White House driveway, under a soft rain, for the trip to Andrews Air Force Base, Bush told Gorbachev that he had something on his mind and would prefer that Gorbachev never publicize what he was about to say. Gorbachev nodded.
Even though the presidential election year of 1988 would not begin for another three weeks, the vice president was already campaigning hard for the Republican nomination. His party’s Senate leader, Robert Dole of Kansas, was running ahead of him in several polls.
Bush said, “There’s a good chance that I’m going to win the presidential election next year. Dole looks pretty dangerous right now, but I think I’ll get the Republican nomination. If I’m elected—and I think I will be—you should understand that I want to improve our relations.”
Bush said that during his seven years as Ronald Reagan’s vice president, he had had to keep his moderate views to himself. He explained that-Reagan was surrounded by “marginal intellectual thugs” who would be delighted to seize on any evidence that the vice president was a closet liberal. Therefore, during the 1988 campaign, he would have to do and say many things to get elected. Mr. Gorbachev should ignore them.
Gorbachev said that he understood. Long afterward, he recalled this conversation as the “most important talk Bush and I ever had.” Over the next four years, each time the Soviet leader’s close aides complained that Bush was pandering to Republican conservatives, Gorbachev would remind them of their talk in the limousine, saying, “Don’t worry. His heart is in the right place.”
The first forty-six years of George Bush’s life gave him only occasional opportunities to deal with the Soviet Union. As Richard Nixon’s ambassador to the United Nations in 1971 and 1972, he took his Soviet counterpart, Yakov Malik, to see the New York Mets (owned by his friend Joan Whitney Payson), without notable diplomatic result.
When Bush was director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the administration of Gerald Ford, conservative critics of détente and proponents of an American arms buildup accused the agency of having consistently underestimated the Soviet military threat. Rather than standing up for the professional intelligence officers over whom he presided and shielding the agency from political pressure, Bush tried to mollify the right wing. He invited a group of outsiders to serve as a kind of visiting committee to monitor the CIA’s methods. He gave them security clearances and authorized them to prepare a report second-guessing the agency’s evaluation of top-secret intelligence data on various Soviet activities.
Predictably, the group, called Team B, pronounced the CIA guilty of being soft on the USSR and added its voice to the rising chorus calling for new American weapons programs. One of Bush’s CIA lieutenants recalled that his boss “never showed deep convictions when reviewing strategic estimates. His main concern was to try to reconcile differences of opinion.… He’s a problem solver. ‘Get the goddamned problem solved. If it takes a Team B, do it.’”
After Ford was defeated, in 1976, Bush offered to stay on as CIA director, but Jimmy Carter refused. In the fall of 1978, Bush flew up from Houston for a private dinner in New York. Other guests included eminent figures in the Northeastern foreign policy community, most of them Democrats. After dessert, Bush denounced Carter’s failure to stand up to the Soviet threat. He cited Communist advances in Somalia and Ethiopia and the president’s waffling over deployment of the neutron bomb.
One Democratic alumnus of the Kennedy-Johnson State Department derided Bush’s monologue as “simplistic” and “ignorant.” Bush angrily retorted that the Democrat was “arrogant” and “soft,” just like the liberal foreign policy establishment he represented—no wonder it was in trouble!
The Team B experience and Ronald Reagan’s nearly successful challenge to Ford in 1976 had demonstrated that the Republican party’s soul had moved toward the Southwest and the Right. The internationalist, Atlanticist wing of the party was losing ground to its more conservative elements. In 1978, Bush publicly resigned from the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, which he pronounced “too liberal.”
When Bush was sworn in as vice president in 1981, he knew that both his ideological purity and his mettle were objects of suspicion among the Reaganites. Reagan was determined to put Moscow on notice that there was a new, hard-line regime in Washington. He did not wish to dilute that message by giving prominence in foreign affairs to Bush, with his reputation for moderation.
The vice president admitted, though only in private, that he was uncomfortable with some of Reagan’s harsh rhetoric and gestures toward the Soviets at the start of their first term. In November 1982, when Leonid Brezhnev died, Bush and his wife, Barbara, were traveling in Africa. Bush hoped that Reagan would choose him to represent the United States at the Moscow funeral, but he did not wish to seem to be grabbing at it. He barked at his national security aide Admiral Daniel Murphy, “No planning!”
When Reagan gave him the assignment, Bush flew to Frankfurt, where he was briefed by a young CIA Soviet analyst, Robert Blackwell. Blackwell scoffed at widespread rumors that the new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, the former chairman of the KGB, was a closet Americanophile who gorged himself on Jacqueline Susann novels and guzzled scotch: Andropov could be expected to use strong leadership and his “formidable intellect” to reassert “socialist order and discipline” after years of drift under Brezhnev, Blackwell believed.
When Bush met Andropov in Moscow, he joked that as former intelligence chiefs, the two of them had been “in the same business.” Afterward, the vice president retired with Ambassador Arthur Hartman, Secretary of State George Shultz, and their aides for caviar and champagne at Spaso House, the official U.S. residence. Hartman reminded the others that the old mansion was bugged. The vice president said he had found the new leader hard-nosed and abrasive: “I feel he’s intelligent. Maybe we can deal with him. But let’s be careful.”
In February 1984, when Andropov died of kidney failure, Reagan asked his vice president to fly back to Moscow. In Bush’s private quarters aboard Air Force Two, Robert Blackwell gave him a cursory CIA report on the new Soviet leader, Konstantin Chernenko. He confessed that the agency was startled that Chernenko had won the top job in the Kremlin, especially after losing out to Andropov in 1982.
Many in Washington recalled Chernenko as the man who had lighted Brezhnev’s cigarettes for him when Brezhnev was trying to cut down on his smoking. The CIA considered him a “weak sister.” But even Chernenko had made a speech in 1982 in Tbilisi, the capital of Soviet Georgia, warning that the Soviet Union was on the precipice of an internal crisis.
Bush’s national security aide Donald Gregg, a former CIA man, told him that Finnish intelligence was predicting that the seventy-two-year-old Chernenko would be a transitional figure. After his passing there would be a mammoth struggle for the future of the Soviet Union, between the regressive, hard-drinking Leningrad party chief, Grigori Romanov, whom the Finns by proximity knew all too well, and someone who might be a change for the better, “this new guy Mikhail Gorbachev.”
In Moscow, after seeing the ailing Chernenko atop the Lenin Tomb and at close range, the vice president expected to be back soon for another funeral. He gave Ambassador Hartman’s wife, Donna, a photograph of himself, inscribed, “Next time the funeral’s on me (Don’t show this around).” To embassy staff members he cracked, “See you again, same time, next year!”
The change in Soviet leadership and the approaching 1984 presidential election moved Reagan to seek a summit with Chernenko, preferably in July, just before the two political conventions. The Democrats were already complaining that American-Soviet relations were in crisis, and that Reagan was the first president since Herbert Hoover who had not met with his Soviet counterpart.
Bush encouraged the president to pursue a summit. To sound out the Soviets, he suggested that Reagan send General Brent Scowcroft, who had been Gerald Ford’s national security adviser, to Moscow with a private letter from the president to Chernenko. Reagan agreed. When Scowcroft arrived in Moscow, however, not a single high Soviet official would see him. One asked Ambassador Hartman, “If they’ve got something to tell us, why don’t they tell us officially?” Chernenko wrote the president to refuse his summit offer.
In March 1985, Chernenko died. In Geneva, on his way to Moscow, Bush learned that the new chief would be Gorbachev. When Robert Blackwell met the vice president in Moscow, he reported that the CIA had been predicting Gorbachev’s succession for months: Gorbachev was already the number two man in the Soviet Communist party; Andropov had been his principal patron.
Members of Bush’s party joked about how well they knew the funeral routine by now: the viewing of the corpse, the military parade in Red Square, the reception in Saint George’s Hall, the spaghetti dinner prepared by the excellent Italian chef at Spaso House.
The vice president and Blackwell were startled by how glad Muscovites seemed to be rid of their “doddering old men.” Not more than thirty minutes after the funeral procession, they saw workmen tearing down Chernenko posters and throwing them into the trash. Bush said that their hosts seemed hardly able to wait to get the old man buried and to turn the fate of their country over to their new, fifty-four-year-old leader.
Gorbachev received Bush and Secretary of State Shultz in Saint Catherine’s Hall. In a forty-five-minute monologue, he said that the Soviet Union was not interested in confrontation with the United States. He hoped that Washington would negotiate seriously in Geneva with the Soviets over nuclear arms. When Bush and Shultz brought up human rights, however, Gorbachev, like his predecessors, reacted with indignation at the American attempt to “interfere in the internal affairs of the USSR.”
After the meeting, Blackwell predicted to Bush that Gorbachev would move fast. One clue was Gorbachev’s obvious self-confidence; also, the military was already less visible on Soviet television than it had been before. The vice president agreed that there was “something different” here. Unlike Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, Gorbachev was “very smooth. He’s young, tough, wants to change the Soviet Union, testy on human rights. A formidable man.”
Asked by reporters whether such a vigorous Soviet leader was good for the West, Bush said, “That depends on us. We clearly want the Soviet Union to change. Here’s a man who wants to change it. But how he does so depends in part on how we interact with him. The challenge is not to ‘help’ him but to put forward U.S. interests in a way that affects his policy the way we want.”
In October 1986, Reagan met Gorbachev at Reykjavik, where the Soviet leader sprang a surprise proposal to reduce drastically both countries’ nuclear arsenals. The two men could not agree on final terms, but both endorsed the idea of eliminating all offensive strategic arms within ten years, a plan that would revolutionize the system of mutual deterrence that had kept the peace since the 1950s.
When Bush, who had stayed behind in Washington, learned about what had happened in Reykjavik, he was appalled that Reagan would deal on such fundamental issues without preparation or consultation with his Western allies. But he did not hint publicly at his disapproval.
In December 1987, Gorbachev made his visit to Washington, where he and Reagan signed a treaty banning intermediate-range nuclear missiles. During the three-day summit, Bush went to the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street for a breakfast of blinis and caviar with the Soviet leader. Gorbachev kept him waiting for almost two hours, which made the vice president furious.
Bush was accompanied at the breakfast by supporters from his upcoming presidential campaign, including John Sununu, the combative, deeply anti-Soviet governor of New Hampshire, who regularly observed Hungarian Freedom-fighters Day and Lithuanian Freedom Day—causes that in 1987 still had a quaint, quixotic ring. Avoiding controversy, Sununu rhapsodized to Gorbachev about American and Soviet accomplishments in science.
After the meeting, Gorbachev offered Bush a lift back to the White House in his limousine. “Welcome to my tank!” he said as they got in. The vice president said, “It’s too bad you can’t stop and go into some of these stores, because I think you’d find warm greetings from the American people.”
When they passed crowds at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and L Street, Gorbachev told his driver, “Stop the car!” He emerged from the limousine and cried in Russian, “I want to say hello to you!” Some of the onlookers gasped. As Gorbachev shook hands, Bush climbed out of the car and posed with him for photographers, but the cameras—and the crowds—were clearly focused on Gorbachev.
As they drove on to the White House, Bush, obviously impressed by the visitor’s mastery of public relations, asked, “Do you do this a lot?” Gorbachev said, “I do it in Moscow and I do it every time I go to the provinces.… Leaders should be equal to the people.”
Bush’s chief campaign pollster, Robert Teeter, advised the vice president that the more anxious Americans were about whether their next president was up to dealing with Gorbachev, the better it was for Bush; he should, therefore, play up the Soviet threat. In January 1988, Bush began using the kind of public rhetoric that he had just privately asked the Soviet leader to ignore. He told the National Press Club that Gorbachev was not a “freedom-loving friend of democracy” but an “orthodox, committed Marxist.”
As Reagan approached the end of his presidency, he unwittingly served as a smiling, glad-handing foil for Bush’s efforts to appear less captivated by Gorbachev’s charm and more inclined to drive hard bargains with the Kremlin. In a famous incident during Reagan’s visit to Moscow in June 1988, Gorbachev had picked up a small boy in Red Square and asked him to “shake hands with Grandfather Reagan.” A reporter asked Reagan if he still believed that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire.” The president said, “No, I was talking about another time, another era.”
Vacationing at his family home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush sounded a very different note. He warned reporters, “The Cold War isn’t over.” The following month he cautioned against a “euphoric, naively optimistic view about what comes next.” Privately he was disturbed by Reagan’s “sentimentality” about Gorbachev. He felt that the president and Secretary of State Shultz were “crashing too hard” to make a final deal with the Soviets before Reagan left office.
In September 1988, Bush invited Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, to a breakfast at his official residence on Massachusetts Avenue. Except for a State Department interpreter, the only other American present was Shultz. In the spirit of his limousine conversation with Gorbachev the previous December, Bush told Shevardnadze that after he was elected, he hoped to continue the relationship forged under President Reagan.
Bush knew that Reagan, as the nation’s most popular conservative, had more latitude to make deals with the Kremlin than he himself would have once he came into office. Therefore he quietly urged Shevardnadze to finish as much business as possible with the outgoing administration. Terrified that a leak of his relatively conciliatory remarks might be used against him in the campaign, he asked Shultz to give him the interpreter’s notes of the session and to make no copies.
During the fall campaign, Bush said that he wished to keep the “pressure on Moscow to change.” He opposed cuts in the defense budget or the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan’s pet project for a space-based antimissile shield. In his first debate with the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, Bush insisted that “the jury is still out on the Soviet experiment.”
Viewing the campaign from the Kremlin, Gorbachev wondered whether Bush was backing away from the assurances he had offered in the limousine. His advisers reminded him that Bush had to placate his right wing; the vice president had to show some “muscles.” Once he was elected, they said, Bush would probably resume Reagan’s policies.
In December 1988, after the election, Reagan met Gorbachev for the final time as president over luncheon at the U.S. Coast Guard station at Governors Island in New York Harbor. Bush had agreed to attend, but only in a supporting role.
That morning, Gorbachev had given a fateful speech at the UN. He declared that the “use or threat of force” could no longer be an “instrument of foreign policy.” He pledged to shift the USSR’s military doctrine to a purely defensive stance and to cut half a million Soviet troops as well as many tanks, artillery pieces, and war planes in Eastern Europe.
Before the luncheon, when reporters asked for comment on Gorbachev’s initiative, Reagan said, “I heartily approve.” Bush took the same line he had taken for eight years, this time with a hint of smug irony: “I support what the president said.” Eager to ingratiate himself with the president-elect, a beaming Gorbachev said, “That’s one of the best answers of the year!”
Bush’s advisers had warned him to assume a remote air of toughness and skepticism with the Soviet leader; he must not prejudice the negotiations that would begin once he was president. Once the doors were closed, Reagan’s spokesman Marlin Fitzwater was shocked to notice that Gorbachev treated Reagan almost like a piece of furniture. The only American that Gorbachev seemed to be interested in was Bush, who kept trying to dodge his questions and turn the attention back to his chief.
When Reagan noted that a recent poll showed that 85 percent of Americans supported the new relationship with Moscow, Gorbachev aimed his reply at Bush: “I’m pleased to hear that. The name of the game is continuity.” After more chatter, the vice president finally burst out: “What assurance can you give me that I can pass on to American businessmen who want to invest in the Soviet Union that perestroika and glasnost will succeed?” Gorbachev glared at him and snapped, “Not even Jesus Christ knows the answer to that question!”
He went on to lecture Bush: “I know what people are telling you now—that you’ve won the election, you’ve got to go slow, you’ve got to be careful, you’ve got to review, that you can’t trust us, that we’re doing all this for show. You’ll see soon enough that I’m not doing this for show, and I’m not doing this to undermine you or surprise you or take advantage of you.
“I’m engaged in real politics. I’m doing this because I need to. I’m doing this because there’s a revolution taking place in my country. I started it. And they all applauded me when I started it in 1986, and now they don’t like it so much. But it’s going to be a revolution nonetheless.… Don’t misread me, Mr. Vice President.”
That day an earthquake had devastated Soviet Armenia, killing twenty-five thousand Armenians and leaving almost a half million homeless. The next morning, Gorbachev canceled visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other New York landmarks to fly back to the Soviet Union. Soon after, at Christmas, Bush sent his son Jeb and his twelve-year-old grandson George to Armenia to inspect the damage and assess how the United States might help.
Bush had not achieved his life’s ambition by taking large chances or questioning conventional wisdom, particularly on the Soviet Union. Thus, at the end of 1988, his natural instinct was to apply the brakes to the Soviet-American relationship, pull over to the side of the road, and study the map for a while.
Bush’s old Houston friend and two-time campaign manager, James Baker, whom he had promptly named as his secretary of state, shared and reinforced his instinctive caution. In several private conversations, Baker and Bush reviewed the experience of previous administrations with an eye to the near future.
They concluded that those presidents who had encountered trouble in Soviet-American relations had often moved too quickly. The principal examples of this were John Kennedy, who had let himself be rushed into an early, bruising summit with Nikita Khrushchev, and Jimmy Carter, who had proposed an ill-considered “comprehensive” arms-control plan to the Kremlin after only two months in office.
Baker now told the president-elect, “Part of the challenge is to avoid rashness.” He added that the biggest mistakes, particularly at the beginning of an administration, were “frequently those of commission, not omission.”
Bush’s new national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, was, if anything, even more cautious. The quiet, modest, steady son of a Utah wholesale grocer had gone to West Point and flown for the air force during World War II. In 1948, during a training exercise, Scowcroft’s P-51B Mustang crashed in a New Hampshire forest. His back broken, he was hospitalized for two years.
Scowcroft had served as air attaché in the U.S. embassy in Belgrade in the late 1950s and then, after teaching stints and further air force service, had risen on Richard Nixon’s National Security Council staff to become Henry Kissinger’s deputy. When Gerald Ford stripped Kissinger of his NSC portfolio in November 1975, Scowcroft succeeded him as national security adviser.* Bush liked to joke that during those years, as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he had “worked for” Scowcroft.
In the 1980s, Scowcroft was a senior officer of Kissinger’s consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, and was a member of the presidential panel appointed by Ronald Reagan to investigate the Iran-contra scandal. After the 1988 election, Bush asked him to return to the White House.
Since the death of the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger détente in the mid-1970s, Scowcroft had worried about vacillations in both U.S. policy and public opinion toward the Soviet Union. Détente, as even some of its own proponents acknowledged, had been oversold. Despite the improved atmosphere of relations between Washington and Moscow and a series of agreements on arms control and other issues, the Soviets continued to persecute dissidents, build new weapons, and throw their considerable weight around internationally.
As a result, many Americans became disillusioned; they felt their own government had been taken in. Now that Scowcroft was back in office, he worried that the United States and its allies faced, in Gorbachev, a new, more effective version of what Scowcroft called the “clever bear syndrome”—the old Brezhnev practice of pursuing expansionist goals while lulling the West into lowering its defenses. The West could keep up its guard, Scowcroft believed, “only when we’ve been scared to death”; Gorbachev was all the more formidable an opponent precisely because he was so unfrightening and reassuring.
A wise leader, said Scowcroft, must pay attention to his adversary’s capabilities, not his intentions. Unless and until the Soviet war-making capability changed, Americans must still be suspicious of Gorbachev.
On Sunday, December 18, 1988, Henry Kissinger slipped into Bush’s small West Wing vice presidential office for a quiet meeting with the president-elect, Baker, and Scowcroft. He told Bush that he was about to become “the first president with a real opportunity to end the Cold War.”
Why not discreetly negotiate a deal? Kissinger suggested. Gorbachev would promise not to use violent force to suppress reform and liberalization in Eastern Europe; in exchange, the West would promise not to exploit any economic or political changes that occurred there at the expense of “legitimate” Soviet security interests.
For example, said Kissinger, the West might pledge not to use Eastern Europe as a base from which to run covert intelligence operations against the Soviet Union. It might forswear any effort to lure Eastern European countries out of the Warsaw Pact. Shorn of his military option, meanwhile, Gorbachev would be more likely to let Eastern Europe have the political breathing room it needed to reintegrate itself with the West.
The proposal was classically Kissingerian: the use of secret high-level diplomacy to reach a bargain based on the balance of power. He made it clear that he would not object to acting as emissary to Gorbachev, which would thrust him back into the center of the American-Soviet relationship—especially with Scowcroft, his old friend and protégé from the Nixon and Ford administrations, at the National Security Council, and with the foreign-policy neophyte Baker at State.*
Bush was intrigued by Kissinger’s idea, so much so that he authorized him to take a letter over his signature to Gorbachev in Moscow. The former secretary of state was delighted. In January, a week before the inauguration, Kissinger flew to the Soviet capital.
Events in Eastern Europe were already beginning to confirm Kissinger’s concern about a coming confrontation between newly stirring democratic forces and the diehard regimes. On Monday, January 16, 1989, demonstrators in Prague were arrested for observing the twentieth anniversary of the suicide of Jan Palach, the young student who had set himself on fire to protest the 1968 Soviet invasion.
Eight hundred people were arrested. Among them, and sentenced to nine months in prison, was a dissident playwright charged with “inciting disorder.” This was Vaclav Havel.
That same day, in Moscow, Kissinger saw Gorbachev’s close aide Alexander Yakovlev at the Kremlin. Yakovlev was one of the key members of Gorbachev’s brain trust, a principal advocate and theoretician of glasnost, the policy of openness and official honesty. Having been an exchange student at Columbia University in the late 1950s and ambassador to Canada in the early 1980s, he spoke excellent English.
Yakovlev told Kissinger that Gorbachev was anxious about the Bush administration’s seeming reluctance to pick up quickly where the Reagan administration had left off. He and Gorbachev could understand that the new leaders in Washington might wish to take some time to assess their options, he said, but a failure to reaffirm their improved relations might arouse concern around the world.
Yakovlev warned Kissinger that certain Communist party hard-liners were unhappy with Gorbachev’s policies. In closed-door meetings, they lacerated him for abandoning socialism and selling out to the West. Yakovlev implied that Gorbachev and his fellow reformers needed Western recognition and encouragement as well as reciprocal concessions to maintain support for their program at home. If the Bush administration retreated from the progress made under Reagan, Gorbachev’s conservative opponents would benefit.
Kissinger replied that improvements in U.S.-Soviet relations under Reagan had been largely cosmetic. It was time to introduce more substance. He said he was well acquainted with Bush and had recently met with the president-elect and his key advisers. He further said that he had a proposition to make, which should be considered semiofficial in that it had Bush’s personal blessing.
The situation in Europe, Kissinger said, was dangerously fluid. The political evolution there could well turn into a revolution that could eventually provoke an international confrontation. He conjured up a twofold specter that he knew would frighten any Soviet: Eastern Europeans straining against the ties binding them to the Soviet Union, coupled with a resurgence of German nationalism that was likely to make the Federal Republic all the more eager to exploit tensions between East Germany and the Kremlin.
Kissinger suggested that if faced with the prospect of “losing” Eastern Europe—especially East Germany—the Soviet Union might feel compelled to use force to reassert itself in the region. This would provoke some kind of powerful reaction from the United States. Kissinger recalled that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Great Powers had had no intention of starting World War I yet still had set off a chain reaction of crises because no one knew what the limits were.
To avert such a danger now, Kissinger proposed a high-level U.S.Soviet negotiation to reach a cluster of understandings—some formal, some informal. They would set limits on what the Soviet Union could do to defend its interests in Eastern Europe, in exchange for a Western pledge to do nothing that would accelerate the changes in the East, particularly if such action might threaten the Kremlin’s sense of its own security.
Kissinger said that the superpowers could not stop history, but they could prevent events from blowing up. He repeated that he had discussed his idea with people in the incoming administration. They were ready for a dialogue in good faith. What answer should he take back to Washington?
Yakovlev replied that the Kremlin was ready to undertake detailed discussions with the Bush administration aimed at managing the process of change in Europe and minimizing the disruptive effect of that change on East-West relations. He noted that one of the standard themes in Kissinger’s writings was the need to preserve a balance of power. Sometimes this meant maintaining the status quo in international relations.
Yakovlev said that he endorsed that idea; the United States and Soviet Union had common interests in preserving the status quo in Europe during the period immediately ahead. Kissinger agreed, though he added that it was difficult to put the matter that way in the United States: American public opinion would never allow the U.S. government to explicitly accept the need for Eastern Europe to remain under Soviet domination.
Two days later, on Wednesday, January 18, Gorbachev called Kissinger to his grand office in the Kremlin. The only other Soviets present were an interpreter and Anatoli Dobrynin, the twenty-three-year ambassador to the United States, who had worked closely with Kissinger during their years in power together in Washington. He was now an adviser to Gorbachev.
Kissinger handed Gorbachev the letter from Bush, which pledged to continue the progress begun under Reagan—though not immediately. The president-elect had written that he hoped Gorbachev would understand if the new administration took some time to assess the relationship and consider its options.
Kissinger explained his proposal for an understanding on Eastern Europe. Might there be any Soviet interest in such an agreement? Gorbachev leaned forward, arched an eyebrow, and gave a half-smile. “I detect that there’s another question behind that question,” he said. He suspected that Bush, using Kissinger as a go-between, was trying to trick him into revealing how willing he was to abandon Soviet control over Eastern Europe.
Kissinger responded that he had “no hidden agenda”; the idea was very much his own, though the president-elect had expressed interest and authorized him to seek Gorbachev’s reaction. Reassured, Gorbachev told him that the notion might be worth pursuing; if there should be a back-channel negotiation on the matter, Kissinger should deal with his old friend Dobrynin. Kissinger was encouraged enough to think that his plan might have some chance.
After Kissinger’s departure, Gorbachev reread Bush’s letter. He was joined by his chief foreign policy aide, Anatoli Chernyayev, a veteran of the party apparatus, primarily the international department, whom he had known since the 1950s. Chernyayev was the kind of bureaucrat who preferred keeping his head down. He had never distinguished himself as an advocate of reform, though people who had known him during the Khrushchev period remembered him as having privately expressed relatively liberal views and having maintained some friendships with political dissidents.
Chernyayev said that Bush’s letter contained “a certain contradiction”: Bush promised continuity yet suggested that he might change American policy. Gorbachev chose to be encouraged that Bush had wasted no time in communicating with him: what other newly elected U.S. president had written to a Soviet leader even before he could use White House stationery? He wrote out a reply urging Bush to work together with him for “world peace.”
Gorbachev’s personal aide for Eastern Europe, Georgi Shakhnazarov, advised him to support the Kissinger plan. He felt that if the Bush administration was interested in consultations and understandings that could keep problems in Eastern Europe from spilling over into other areas of Soviet foreign policy, so much the better.
On Thursday, January 19, Bush called Meredith Price, editor of his prep school’s alumni magazine, the Andover Bulletin, in response to Price’s request for an interview. Asked what he hoped historians would say about his presidency, Bush said, “Left things a little better than when I found them. Kept America strong and kept the inexorable move toward democracy going forward.
“And I say ‘inexorable’ because when you look around the country, I don’t think any serious student of world politics thinks that socialism or communism is on the rise. I think most people see that incentives and ownership and the freedoms that we think of when we think of democracy are on the move, and I’d like to keep those trends going with the United States at the forefront. And so I guess in the end, I’d hope they would say, ‘He made a difference. He did his best.’”
In his inaugural address, delivered the next day, Bush used a word picture to convey his values and his sense of the world mood: “The day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.… We know what works: freedom works. We know what’s right: freedom is right. We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on earth—through free markets, free speech, free elections, and the exercise of free will unhampered by the state.”
On Sunday, January 22, Brent Scowcroft quickly made it clear that he and his boss were under no illusions about Gorbachev. Appearing on ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley,” he said that Gorbachev seemed “interested in making trouble within the Western alliance. And I think he believes that the best way to do it is a peace offensive, rather than to bluster, the way some of his predecessors have.”
Scowcroft warned that Gorbachev’s foreign policy might be secretly intended to throw the West off its guard and give the Soviet Union time to restore its economy and build new military power before a new world Communist offensive.* “Until we have better evidence to the contrary,” he said, “we ought to operate on that expectation.… I think the Cold War is not over. There may be, in the saying, light at the end of the tunnel. But I think it depends partly on whether the light is the sun or an oncoming locomotive.”
Having allowed Scowcroft to play bad cop, Bush once again played good cop. On Monday morning, January 23, he asked Scowcroft to arrange a telephone call to Gorbachev in the Kremlin. Bush said that he wanted to “establish contact, just check in with the guy.”
For a president to telephone a Soviet leader was unusual, but the call was characteristic of Bush. When he looked at the globe, he thought of the ultimate Rolodex. For him, the splotches of color meant not just countries but presidents, kings, and prime ministers, many of whom he knew well and referred to by their first names. When a crisis erupted, his first instinct was to reach for the telephone.
When his call was put through to Moscow, Bush reassured Gorbachev that while he intended to make a broad reassessment of American relations with the Soviet Union, he would not allow any “foot-dragging.” He thanked the Soviet leader for the warm reception given his son and grandson in Armenia.
Hearing what he wanted to hear, Gorbachev later told aides that he was encouraged by the call. For years he had been eager to have an American interlocutor with whom he could argue and bargain freely.
Although he had been affected by Reagan’s warmth and goodwill, Gorbachev was tired of the lack of spontaneity, the anti-Soviet jokes, the Hollywood stories, the incessant recitation—always as if for the first time—of the Russian proverb Doveryai, no proveryai (Trust, but verify), which Gorbachev took as an insult.* Gorbachev told several aides after Bush’s call that the new American president seemed ready to deal with historical forces and world issues not in the abstract, but directly, “as one human being to another.”
* Kissinger remained as secretary of state for the rest of Ford’s term.
* During the 1988 campaign, Kissinger had wondered aloud with intimates whether Bush might appoint Baker chief of staff for his first year as president (in order to get the White House in shape) and put Kissinger at State—just for a year. However, he glumly noted that in Bush’s slender campaign autobiography, Looking Forward (1987), he was the only person “criticized by name.” In fact, Bush’s comments about him in the book were very mild.
* Adherents of this theory sometimes used the Russian word peredyshka (breathing space).
* In his address at the signing of the treaty eliminating intermediate-range nuclear missiles at the White House in December 1987, Reagan delivered the hackneyed line again. As if he could stand it no longer, Gorbachev came close to the edge of public rudeness, piping up, “You repeat that at every meeting.” The Soviet laughter in the East Room was not entirely without malice. Reagan defused the moment by retorting good-naturedly, “I like it!”
CHAPTER 2
“I Don’t Want to Do Anything Dumb”
On Friday, January 27, 1989, Bush held his first news conference as president. Watching in his office at the State Department, Baker playfully addressed the image on the television screen: “Pull your tie up, George.”
A reporter asked the president about Scowcroft’s pessimism about the Soviet Union. Bush replied that the administration’s position was “Let’s take our time now.” He said that he did not like using the term “Cold War”: “That doesn’t properly give credit to the advances that have taken place in this relationship.… Do we still have problems, are there still uncertainties, are we still unsure in our predictions on Soviet intentions? I’d have to say, ‘Yeah, we should be cautious.’”
The next day, Kissinger arrived at the White House and reported to Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft on his talk with Gorbachev in Moscow. Afterward Baker asked the assistant secretary of state for Europe, Rozanne Ridgway, and her deputy for the Soviet bloc, Thomas Simons, for a confidential assessment of Kissinger’s idea for a superpower negotiation on Eastern Europe.
Both career foreign-service officers who had spent eight years as part of the Reagan administration, they hated the Kissinger plan. Simons