Authors: Hedrick Smith
The American Embassy in Bonn, secretly scouring Germany for an alternative that did not include Waffen SS graves, had finally found the shrine to the five million German war dead from both world wars at Festung Ehrenbreitstein. It is an old fortress, with four-foot-thick stone walls, and located high on a bluff near Koblenz, overlooking the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle rivers. It has no graves (and hence no SS) and it had been used for memorial wreath layings in the past. After seeing it, White House advance man Frederick Ahearn excitedly telephoned Bill Henkel at the White House. “Bill, this is it!” He described its one twelve-foot granite casket with a German soldier lying prone, face up, shovel helmet down over his ears, and read memorial inscriptions with vows to peace.
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The Americans saw it as a fitting equivalent to our tomb of the unknown soldier. It was, as Henkel later said, “the classic out.”
Over breakfast in the White House mess on April 29, Henkel eagerly briefed Deaver, Regan, and McFarlane on Ehrenbreitstein. Deaver and Henkel made ready to fly to Germany at once to arrange for Reagan to go there. Hopefully, they took the plan to the president. About nine
A.M
., Reagan met with Bush, Shultz, Regan, McFarlane, Deaver, Henkel, and Assistant Secretary of State Rick Burt in the Oval Office. For the first time, the president was prepared to push Chancellor Kohl. Wearing his glasses and with some notes in hand, Reagan telephoned Kohl.
It was an unusually long call for two leaders—nineteen minutes. To others in the room, it felt like a test of wills.
“My people have told me that we can achieve the same purposes,” Reagan said, mindful of Kohl’s need for a symbol of reconciliation. “It’s a memorial to your soldiers. It honors your four or five million war dead.”
Kohl objected. He made impassioned pleas on personal terms, as if to say, one American said, “You can’t do this to me.”
“But, Helmut,” Reagan countered, “you and I will be there together.” Soothingly, Reagan tried to reassure Kohl that he was still committed to their joint objective of reconciliation. He read passages from the Ehrenbreitstein memorial with themes of “never again” and pointed out how fitting those themes were.
Kohl still objected. He had committed his prestige to Bitburg. He had faced down critics in the Bundestag. And always, there was the reminder, spoken or unspoken, that Kohl in 1983 had braved massive opposition to accept deployment of American Pershing II and cruise missiles, as Reagan had wanted. Kohl had stood by his friend, and now he needed Reagan to stand by him.
No, Kohl insisted, any change now could cause his government to fall. The Americans doubted that, but Reagan could hardly contest Kohl.
They talked on, Kohl fearful of the political backlash in his own country, and Reagan mindful of his own political firestorm and trying to persuade Kohl that Ehrenbreitstein had the symbolism without the political downside of Bitburg. But Kohl would not give ground, and Reagan would not force him.
Finally, Reagan put down the phone and told the others, “We have to do this. Helmut says his government would fall.”
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Reagan, having failed, decided wisely that boldness now would make the ordeal pass faster. Crestfallen, Deaver and Henkel left for Germany on an overnight flight, Reagan emphasizing he would go through with the Bitburg visit.
“Don’t you change anything!” he ordered Deaver. “What we’re doing is right. History will prove it’s right, and we’re not going to back down.”
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The day before Reagan himself left for Bonn, 390 members of the House urged him not to visit Bitburg. Mrs. Reagan, still deeply unhappy, was hesitant. Later she told one friend that the president knew how she dreaded the trip.
“Are you going with me?” he coaxed, a bit uncertain.
“I’ve been in this thing for thirty years,” she replied, “and I’m not backing out now.”
The actual visit was less of a trauma than the prolonged painful overture. Reagan’s visit to Bergen-Belsen made some amends to angered Jews, though Reagan was personally wounded by the refusal of German-Jewish rabbis to join him there. Over American and international television, Reagan paid a quiet, eloquent tribute to the thousands who came to Bergen-Belsen: “Never to hope. Never to pray. Never to love. Never to heal. Never to laugh. Never to cry.”
At Bitburg, I watched him silently tread the pathway around the graves, pause before the tall monument with Kohl at his side, but never touch the wreath, and then just as silently leave. Soon, at Bitburg Air Force Base, Reagan apologized. “Some old wounds have been reopened, and this I regret very much, because this should be a time of healing,” he said. To the Germans, he offered reconciliation, and to Americans “worried that reconciliation means forgetting” he said, “I promise you, we will never forget.”
The chorus of protest crested, and then it faded. Polling showed Americans equally divided over whether or not Reagan should have gone to Bitburg. But his dignified handling of that traumatic day lifted his popularity to pre-Bitburg levels, and even a bit above. It was fortunate because otherwise Kohl’s intransigence could have severely damaged his personal relations with Reagan as well as German relations with this country. “Kohl was so absolutely unyielding that he was viewed as unreasonable” by many top American officials, Richard Wirthlin told me. “If Bitburg had not had that happy last chapter, I think that could have strained relations permanently.”
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A Star-Crossed Game Plan
With Bitburg finally behind him, Reagan could proclaim his top agenda priority: tax reform. It was terribly late in coming—on May 28, nearly seven months after Reagan’s election. The president unfurled it in a nationally televised address. His populist pitch not only promised lower tax rates for most Americans, but it tapped public bitterness toward the existing system, which he damned as “complicated, unfair, cluttered with gobbledygook and loopholes designed for those with the power and influence to hire high-priced legal and tax advisers.”
The Reagan formula—to broaden the tax base by closing loopholes and to tax business more heavily to finance rate cuts for individuals—
borrowed heavily from the Democratic plan originated three years earlier by Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Congressman Dick Gephardt of Missouri. In fact, Democrats were more receptive to it than were most House Republicans.
Once again, Reagan’s 1985 game plan seemed star-crossed. Before he could build public support for his tax plan, he was distracted by the seizure of a TWA plane by Arab terrorists, then by his own cancer surgery, and
then
by the hijacking of the
Achille Lauro
passenger ship by Palestinian terrorists. From each diversion, Reagan got a political lift: The TWA passenger-hostages were freed, he came out of his surgery healthy, and the
Achille Lauro
hijackers were captured and tried in Italy.
In the fall, when Reagan had recovered enough personally to mount an offensive for his tax-reform bill, he lost control of the agenda again—this time on political issues that the White House should have deflected: sanctions on South Africa and the rising tide of protectionism in Congress. As in the spring, Democrats in Congress were riding high. These were their issues, their agenda—not Reagan’s. The administration managed to shunt the trade controversy aside with Reagan’s veto of a bill to protect the textile industry, with the promise of administrative action against unfair trade by other countries, and with Treasury Secretary Jim Baker’s campaign to drive down the value of the dollar and check the skyrocketing trade deficit.
On South Africa, Reagan added to public outrage caused by weeks of racial violence after Pretoria imposed martial law. The president threw fat on the fire by defending the “reformist administration” of President Pieter Botha in a radio interview with WSB in Atlanta in August. “They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country,” Reagan declared, ignoring the apartheid pass laws, strict influx control, denial of citizenship and the right to vote. He had done the interview on vacation at his California ranch. His display of ignorance fired up the opposition and demonstrated that his second-term handlers had still not learned how to protect Reagan from himself.
“They should have protected him on South Africa,” Michael Deaver commented, knowing Reagan’s foibles intimately. “No one should have let him get on the phone to do that interview with the Atlanta radio station from his ranch. You never let Ronald Reagan do an interview from his ranch. He’s so much the product of his environment. He’s all alone out at his ranch, nobody with him. He’s probably dreaming about riding his horse. Maybe the horse even went by at that moment. And he’s on the phone, talking to one person and not thinking
that hundreds of thousands will eventually be in the audience. He’s relaxed.
“That’s the wrong situation for him to be making policy pronouncements about South Africa. If he’s going to be making policy pronouncements, it should be very carefully worked out in advance, and he should deliver it in a more formal setting. He should be standing up. You know, it’s funny about Reagan. The way he thinks changes when he sits down. They had him sitting down for a press conference in the Oval Office the other day. I would never let him be sitting down. He’s too relaxed when he’s sitting. He’s not careful. He’s conversational, not presidential.”
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The interview gaffe gave ammunition to Reagan’s congressional critics and dealt another setback to his game plan. Reagan had vowed not to impose economic sanctions against Africa, but his position became politically untenable. Both houses passed legislation for limited sanctions, and if Reagan vetoed it, both houses had the votes to override his veto. Reagan had been deserted by House and Senate Republicans in overwhelming numbers. To avoid political humiliation, Reagan bowed to the inevitable and announced on September 9 that he was adopting some sanctions against South Africa. His own policy was in shambles.
On the budget, yet another congressional initiative intervened, this one to Reagan’s liking: a six-year scheme to bring the $200 billion deficits down to zero. It was devised by Republican senators Phil Gramm and Warren Rudman and cosponsored by South Carolina Democrat Fritz Hollings. For Reagan it was a windfall. It saved him from naked exposure at an ignominious moment: the need to raise the national debt ceiling above $2 trillion,
more than double
what it was when he entered office.
While the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings scheme did not originate with the president, it gave new impetus to his long-term agenda of cutting government. The Reagan deficits had become so horrendous that there was wide consensus that Congress and the administration needed the discipline of an automatic cutting mechanism. Some politicians, such as New York Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, contended that big deficits were deliberate on Reagan’s part—that he had cut tax rates deeply in 1981 knowing that this action would create massive deficits, which would force Congress to cut government programs for years to come. Indeed, Reagan’s pet analogy was that of a daddy cutting his boy’s allowance to stop his foolish spending. “Well, you know, we can lecture our children about extravagance until we run
out of voice and breath,” Reagan had said in February 1981. “Or we can cure their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance.”
But Gramm-Rudman-Hollings cut against Reagan’s agenda, for if Reagan intended to cut Congress’s allowance, Congress was cutting his allowance, too. The new scheme envisioned a terrible bite on Reagan’s prized defense buildup. Senate Republicans as well as House Democrats wanted to force him to raise taxes to pay for the defense program. But Reagan would not raise taxes; he preferred letting defense spending level off. Gramm-Rudman passed, with Reagan’s support, and in 1985 the Pentagon budget was actually reduced for the first time in six years.
Literally at year’s end, Reagan got to tax reform, a few weeks after his summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. Just as bad luck with terrorist incidents had hurt Reagan earlier, now good luck—Gorbachev’s drive for a summit—helped him late in the year. Because of Reagan’s slow start in 1985, there was not time for the tax-reform bill to pass both houses that year, as Reagan had wanted. But the bill finally came to the fore, promoted by Jim Baker and Richard Darman, the Treasury Department’s master strategists, as well as by House Democratic leaders: Speaker O’Neill and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski. O’Neill and Rostenkowski favored the tax bill because it hit business and lowered rates for most middle-income taxpayers; their agenda protected Reagan’s.
In most respects, 1985 had been a badly broken field for the president. He and his team were largely to blame. They had not played the agenda game well. Nonetheless, through it all, Reagan had personally pursued two priorities, both embraced belatedly: the summit with Gorbachev and the tax-reform bill. And in the end, he got to them both. The summit is less surprising because presidents can manage their agenda with foreigners better than with Congress, and Reagan had softened his conditions for a summit—dropping earlier demands for advance promise of agreements. But the tax bill’s survival was testimony not only to the support of Democratic leaders but also to Reagan’s tenacity. Reagan stubbornly clings to pet goals long after other politicians give up—a personal quality often underestimated by his critics, but essential to presidential success in the agenda game.
Fallacies of the Rosy Scenario
Reagan’s 1985 game plan was bedeviled not only by misplayed political tactics and second-term overconfidence. Reagan’s problems were also a matter of substance. His policies had generally lost credibility inside
the beltway. In the 1984 campaign, the country bought Reagan’s pitch for “more of the same,” but the Washington political community was disbelieving. In 1981, other politicians, grasping for something new, had been willing to gamble on big Reagan tax cuts and a defense buildup; but by 1985 the political community had largely lost faith in Reaganomics. Big deficits had become an obsession. Senate Republicans, Reagan’s most important allies, were frustrated with what they derided as Reagan’s stand-pat, head-in-the-sand opposition to reducing deficits with a sizable tax increase, as well as his unwillingness to take the political risk of initiating changes in Social Security COLAs—even with his popularity at a peak and his last election behind him.