The Year that Changed the World (37 page)

Krenz recalled his increasingly desperate efforts to keep his government together in an interview with
Newsweek
in the spring of 1990, likening the experience to “riding a whirlwind.”
Wir sind das Volk
documents how quickly and inexorably popular pressure built across the country during the interval between Honecker's ouster and the fall of the Wall on November 9. The conversation between Bush and Kohl is drawn from a declassified White House transcript dated October 23, 1989, 9:02–9:26 a.m. EST.
Concerning Krenz, the chancellor remarked, “I am not sure how courageous he is.”

CHAPTER 12

The climax of the Fall is based almost entirely on firsthand reporting from East Berlin the night of November 9 and afterward. The reconstruction of the press conference, as noted in
chapter 1
, is based on interviews with Schabowski and Krenz, as well as the official GDR government transcript and original video clips of the event. The drama of that bitter, internecine summit of the Central Committee, presided over by Krenz and dominated by Gerhard Schurer's hair-raising portrayal of the country's economic crisis, is recorded in rich and authoritative detail in Maier's
Dissolution.
The dilemma of those who made the fateful decision to open the Wall—the commanders of the border crossings at Checkpoint Charlie and Bornholmerstrasse—is perfectly captured in the BBC–Spiegel TV documentary by the head of the East German visa office. He, too, had futilely been telephoning for instructions as the crowds built at the Wall. At the moment of the country's existential crisis, he said, “I couldn't find anyone to talk to.”

The Wall is long gone. But for a reminder of how it all happened, and who ultimately deserves credit, I suggest a visit to the new Reichstag, refurbished and reopened in Berlin on April 19, 1999. Tucked away on the northeast corner of the building, oddly far from public view, is an unobtrusive bronze plaque, missed by almost all who visit:

To the Hungarian people from the German people,

To whom we owe thanks for a united Germany,

A democratic Hungary, and a free Europe.

In Hungary, revolution came with little trace of popular upheaval. It would be too easy to suggest that knowledge of the people's unhappiness forced the country's reformers to act. It did not. They chose their own path, knowing that it did not necessarily bode well for themselves. “They are of historic importance,” Horst Teltschik would tell me, speaking of Nemeth and those around him. “If you look at the history of mankind, there are very few examples where the leadership of a dictatorship became a leading force for democracy, knowing that in elections they would lose.”

Years later, in a conversation with Teltschik, Hungary's Prime Minister Jozsef Antall referred disparagingly to those “old communists.”

“Without those guys,” Teltschik tartly responded, “you would never have come to power.”

CHAPTERS 13 AND 14

The conversation between Bush and Kohl comes from a White House transcript dated November 10, 1989, 3:29–3:47 p.m. My guides to the Velvet Revolution were Vaclav Havel, Jan Urban, Ivan Gabal and his wife, Zdenka Gabalova. I will always be indebted to them for opening the door to one of the most moving experiences of my life.

My thanks to Hanns Schumacher, then an aide to Hans-Dietrich Genscher at the German foreign ministry, for getting me on that military transport to Bucharest. Videos of the Ceausescus' execution can be found on the Internet.
Videograms of a Revolution,
directed by Harun Farocki, captures the scene on Palace Square on December 21 and 22, 1989. The transcript of Ceausescu's “trial” makes far more compelling reading than might be captured in these brief excerpts. The transcript of his dressing down his generals over Timisoara, setting the stage for the massive killings in the city, is if anything even more telling about the man and his nature. Miklos Nemeth is the source of the reference to Hungarian intelligence helping Ceausescu's pursuers catch the fleeing dictator.

I am indebted to Richard Andrew Hall for his exceptionally researched reconstruction of the revolution-turned-coup in his Ph.D. thesis for the University of Michigan, “Rewriting the Revolution: Authoritarian Regime-State Relations and the Triumph of Securitate Revisionism in Post-Ceausescu Romania,” 1997. One of the most exhaustive studies of the period is
The Romanian Revolution of December 1989,
2005, by Peter Siani-Davies. Also useful was Edward Behr's
Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite,
1991, and
Modern Romania
by Tom Gallagher, 2005. Among the best compilations of academic writing on Romania and the events in Eastern Europe is
The Revolutions of 1989: Rewriting Histories,
edited by Vladimir Tismaneanu, 1999.

The closing remarks by Havel, Nemeth and Schabowski in the chapter entitled “Denouement” are all drawn from first-hand interviews.

EPILOGUE

The casualty figures come from
World War II: Combatants and Casualties, 1937–1945.
The Soviet Union lost 23 million soldiers and civilians; the toll for the United States was 418,000—a very considerable number, to be sure, but not commensurate with Soviet losses.

Charles Krauthammer's article “The Unipolar Moment” appeared in the Winter 1990–91 issue of
Foreign Affairs.
In 1993, Samuel P. Huntington published an essay in
Foreign Affairs
entitled “The Clash of Civilizations?”
He expanded it, eliding the question mark, in his book of 1996:
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
See also Ronald Steel,
Temptations of a Superpower,
1996, and Robert W. Tucker,
The Imperial Temptation,
1992, coauthored with David C. Hendrickson.

Robert Kagan's admirable essay in the Spring 2008 issue of
World Affairs,
“Neocon Nation,” traces the bipartisan history of American idealism from 1776 to the present. Notably, it concludes (with a nod to David Halberstam) that U.S. foreign policy historically trends to excess—and trouble—when its leaders “fail to examine the assumptions of the era.” The more absolutist the assumptions, the greater the ensuing troubles. This is very much the story of America's post–Cold War interlude, all the more so as time went on.

For an early and somewhat unnerving example of the White House's Manichaean vision, consider a speech by President Bush at Iowa Western Community College on January 21, 2000: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who ‘they' were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who ‘them' was. Today we are not so sure who the ‘they' are, but we know they're there.” The conversation on faith-based foreign policy was reported by Ron Suskind in the
New York Times Magazine,
October 17, 2004, and amplified in his 2007 book,
One Percent Solution.
See also Mark Danner's “Iraq: The War of Imagination” in the December 21, 2006, issue of the
New York Review of Books.
The quote from Cheney is cited by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in his book with Ron Suskind,
The Price of Loyalty
(2004). The full citation reads: “You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter.” O'Neill reports that the remark left him “speechless.”

I've stressed the military aspect of the Reaganite myth of Cold War confrontation, mainly for brevity's sake, but there is also a strong economic component. The argument can be summed up fairly simply: by dramatically boosting American military spending in the 1980s, including the Star Wars missile defense, Reagan forced Moscow into an arms race it could not afford. The consequent economic pressures contributed to the collapse of the Soviet system. Intuitively, the case has a certain logic, for the Soviet Union did slide into economic crisis during the Reagan years. But while military expenditures were undoubtedly absorbing an ever-larger share of Soviet resources (again, chiefly because of falling oil revenues), it cannot be said this had much to do with the United States. If the Reagan administration substantially increased U.S. defense spending, the Soviet Union did not. Indeed, its defense budget was essentially unchanged through the 1980s, as Peter Scoblic notes in a thoroughly researched book,
Us vs. Them,
2008. Mikhail Gorbachev, among others, long before he came to power and Reagan's military buildup had gotten under way, recognized that Moscow should
reduce
its military spending. Scoblic's conclusion, like
that of other analysts: “The Soviet Union suffered no economic stress as a result of the Reagan buildup. Conservatives [who argue otherwise] are therefore retrofitting the Reagan administration—and themselves—with a degree of agency and optimism that they simply did not possess.”

Blinded by the light of its triumphal march through the post–Cold War years, the United States failed to fully come to terms with the enormous changes in the world around it. Fareed Zakaria brilliantly sketches out the perils—and opportunities—of this new global landscape in
The Post-American World,
2008. See also Leslie H. Gelb,
Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy,
HarperCollins (2009). The quantitative backstopping for my brief discussion of this theme came partly from an article in the
Financial Times,
June 27, 2008, by Robert Hormats and Jim O'Neill at Goldman Sachs, “A New World for America's Next President.” The caveat is this: The administration of George W. Bush did not create the myth of American triumphalism, even if his White House elevated it to cult status. Americans bear a collective responsibility, and no fresh start or clean slate is possible under a new president without that recognition. This is the point of Tony Judt's important essay, “What Have We Learned, If Anything?” in the May 1, 2008,
New York Review of Books.
Building on the theme in his book
Reappraisals,
2008, he argues that the United States is locked in an “age of forgetting,” such that it no longer knows where it came from, or what it stands for, with “calamitous” results and the prospect of worse to come.

Abraham Lincoln,
USS,
2
,
222

Abrams, John,
76
–77

Adamec, Ladislav,
181
–184,
188
–189

Afghanistan,
39
,
210

Albright, Madeleine,
214

Allensbach,
24

Allensbach Institute,
75
,
223

Alliance for Free Democrats,
32

Allies

Normandy invasion during World War II,
28
,
69

role in construction of Berlin Wall,
17

Al Qaeda,
219

Altenburschla,
19

Alt-Herren Riege
(team of old men),
26

American Conservative Union,
2

American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War
(Hutchings),
227
,
231
,
232

American Society of Newspaper Editors,
224

Andropov, Yuri,
11
–12

Angolan civil war, impact of,
23

Antall, Jozsef,
235

Arafat, Yasir,
182
–183

Archive of the Gorbachev Foundation,
233
–234

Arnot, Alexander,
231
–232

Arsenals of Folly
(Rhodes),
225

Ash, David,
228

Ash, Timothy Garton,
48
,
143
,
225
,
230

At Cold War's End
(Fischer, ed.),
227

Atlantic Charter,
229

At the Highest Levels
(Beschloss and Talbott),
222

Auchincloss, Kenneth,
232
–233

Audience
(Havel),
136
–137

Ausländer
(foreigners),
24

Austria

Pan-European Picnic (1989) and,
97
–104,
106
,
116
,
124
,
144
,
231
–232

refugees from GDR and,
97
–104,
113
–126

Austro-Hungarian Empire,
9
–10

Autopsy of an Empire
(Gorbachev),
227

Axis of Evil,
217

Back to the Future
(film),
60
–61

Bad Sooden,
19

Baez, Joan,
177
–178

Bahrman, Hannes,
234

Bailey, Anthony,
223

Baker, James A., III

German unification proposal and,
125
–126

nuclear arms and,
74
–75

U.S.-Soviet relations and,
40
,
60
–61,
225
,
227
,
231

Balcerowicz, Leszek,
130

Balkan war,
213
–214

Behr, Edward,
236

Berecz, Janos,
38

Berlin

attitudes toward German reunification,
23
–28

Berlin Wall in,
15
–16.
See also
Berlin Wall

refugees from GDR and,
113
–114,
116
,
120
–121
See also
East Berlin; West Germany

Berliner
Luft,
25

Berlin Wall

Berlin airlift and,
4

border guards,
3
,
5
–10,
15
–17,
27
,
97
–105

Brandenburg Gate,
3
,
15
,
170
,
204

Checkpoint Charlie,
5
–6,
9
,
10
,
16
,
24
–25,
88
–89,
167
–170,
175
,
204
,
223
,
235