It's My Party (2 page)

A Republican sweep. The thought takes some getting used to, like Einstein’s negative curvature of the universe.

The last time the GOP held all three branches of the federal government was some seven decades ago. (In the elections of 1930,
the GOP majority in the House of Representatives was reduced to just two seats and Republican deaths soon gave the chamber
to the Democrats. Then, in the elections of 1932, the GOP lost to the Democrats in a landslide, seeing the Democrats capture
majorities in the House and Senate alike while the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt tossed the Republican Herbert Hoover out of
the White House.) The population of the United States seven decades ago was only 120 million, our navy was no more powerful
than that of Great Britain, and we were in a Great Depression that would throw one laborer in four out of work. Today the
population of the United States is 274 million, our military might is greater than that of all other nations combined, and
we are creating a new information economy that is transforming the globe. If the GOP wins in 2000, it will take command of
the most formidable nation in history.

Yet this represents a moment of unusual uncertainty for the GOP. It no longer has a leader of the stature of Ronald Reagan.
It finds itself divided between social conservatives, who place morality at the center of their politics, and economic conservatives,
who favor low taxes and limited government but take a laissez-faire view of social issues. Although in the 1998 elections
the GOP did well in most of the country, in California, home to one American in ten, the GOP suffered an enormous blow, watching
its senatorial candidate lose by eleven points, its gubernatorial candidate by twenty. Who will lead the GOP? How will it
unify its wings? Can it recapture California? If it wins power in 2000, what will it do with it?

This seemed an opportune moment, in short, to pose a question about my fellow Republicans: Who
are
these people?

* * *

To complete this book in time for the 2000 elections, I had to hurry. I read a dozen reference works, made a couple of hundred
telephone calls, then began jumping on airplanes to crisscross the country. As I did so I kept a journal, recording what I
saw and heard. The result is neither a work of political science nor of history. Strictly speaking it isn’t even a work of
journalism—I know plenty of journalists who have interviewed far more Republican activists and officeholders than I did. Or
than I cared to. My ideal reader is somebody like me, with a family to raise and mortgage payments to make. He has no desire
to master the minutiae of the Republican Party, just a sense that he’d like to look into it a little. I wanted to offer him
a slender volume, not a tome.

This is instead a travel book, one tourist’s notes as he journeyed across the territory of the Republican Party. I interviewed
Republicans north, south, east, and west. I examined Republican history and ideology. Throughout my journey I modeled myself
on the amateur explorers of the nineteenth century, those avid gentlemen who tried to discover the source of the Nile or locate
the tombs of the pharaohs. Like them, I gathered as many facts as I could while keeping an eye out for local color. Like them,
I did nothing dozens of others couldn’t have done just as well. It’s just that I was eccentric enough to do it.

I
n
AD
578, the monk John Moschos left the desert monastery of St. Theodosius, set upon a hill or low mount near Bethlehem, to travel
the Byzantine world. Inside the monastery, every aspect of existence seemed straightforward for John Moschos, his beliefs
enshrined in the teachings of the church, his life ordered by the monastic disciplines of work and prayer. The moment he left
the monastery, he stepped into confusion. The Byzantine empire through which he journeyed was under assault, from the west
by Slavs, Goths, and Lombards, from the east by Persians. The cities he toured proved raucous, gaudy, decadent. Even when
he visited monasteries he often encountered evidence of strife, on occasion reaching an abbey where he intended to spend the
night only to find that it had been burned, its inhabitants marched off to slave markets. In his writings, John Moschos records
the teachings of the desert fathers, his intention when he set out. But he also presents long passages in which, amazed and
perplexed, he describes his travels, as if unable to believe his eyes unless he set it all down.

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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