Power Game (67 page)

The White House inability to control the political fallout cost Reagan heavily. What began as an effort to bury past enmity and to
emphasize modern Allied solidarity unintentionally raked up coals of anguish over Nazi atrocities because of the belated American discovery that there were graves of Waffen SS troops at the Bitburg cemetery.

Amidst the uproar over the president’s including the hated SS, Hitler’s storm troopers, in his tribute to the German war dead, Reagan and his aides kept up a brave front. Publicly, they stuck to Reagan’s commitment to go to Bitburg, out of respect for West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. But privately, everyone around the president—especially Nancy Reagan—urged him to back out. Michael Deaver tried to persuade the German government to alter the itinerary.

Just two days before leaving for Europe, the president himself, unknown to all but a handful, made a strong personal appeal to Kohl to drop the Bitburg visit. White House advance men had found a substitute, the memorial to the German war dead at Festung Ehrenbreitstein, a fortress on the Rhine. It had no graves and no links to the SS. In a long phone call, Reagan proposed Ehrenbreitstein in place of Bitburg, but Kohl stiffly refused.

The whole incredible episode came to have high stakes for both leaders: Kohl feeling his government was at stake and Reagan feeling his reputation and the glow of his reelection were at risk. The Bitburg controversy became impossible to unravel because the two leaders had struck a personal bargain from which their aides could not extricate them. Bitburg was a burning demonstration that even a skillful staff cannot protect a president’s agenda or spare him from political damage if that president acts on impulse—even well-meant—and will not change until it is too late. Bitburg was Reagan’s self-inflicted wound.

The Bitburg story was especially ironic because if Reagan, at seventy-three, should have had one advantage, it should have been his personal recollections of the Holocaust and the horrors kindled by the Nazi era. It would have been more understandable for a younger president not fully to have sensed the painful symbolism of an American leader visiting a German cemetery and including the Waffen SS. As the late Arthur Burns, then ambassador to Bonn, commented, “The original decision to go to Bitburg was ill conceived.”
⁴⁵
From that, the plot flowed with tragic ineluctability.

It began with a compact forged by Kohl and Reagan. Kohl personally was the architect and manager of Reagan’s visit to Germany around the fortieth anniversary of the allied victory in Europe on May 8, 1985. The trip to Bitburg was Kohl’s dream. It was to be the American analogue to Kohl’s visit of reconciliation with French President Francois Mitterand to the graves of the French and German World War I
dead at Verdun. Photographers had framed the moving symbolism of Kohl and Mitterand holding hands at the Verdun battlefield, with fields of white crosses as their backdrop. Kohl had also been deeply hurt by his exclusion from the Allied celebration of the fortieth anniversary of D day at Normandy on June 6, 1984. On November 30, soon after Reagan’s reelection, Kohl pleaded in tears, top officials told me, for Reagan to agree to some gesture of German-American reconciliation to heal the wound of Normandy and to nourish the balm of Verdun.

“Anything you want,” Reagan responded, not consulting the aides who sat by the two leaders in the Oval Office. According to American officials, Kohl proposed three things: a commemoration at Cologne Cathedral on V-E Day, a visit to a concentration camp, and a joint visit to a military cemetery. Evidently both he and Reagan were unaware that the gesture of Verdun could not be repeated because no American soldiers were buried in German cemeteries. Thus, in agreeing, Reagan committed himself to honor the German war dead alone.

The first hints of controversy came not over Bitburg, but over a story in the German magazine
Der Spiegel
on January 19, 1985, that Reagan was considering a visit to the Dachau concentration camp. Seeing the idea in print, Reagan recoiled. Mrs. Reagan found such a visit distasteful, one of her confidants told me. She was squeamish about visiting the death scenes and being shown the ovens and photographic displays of bodies being bulldozed into mass graves. Privately, she told aides, “I’ve talked to Ronnie, and that’s not what we want to do.”
Der Spiegel
implied that the Bonn government also did not want Reagan to visit Dachau. Within days, Reagan publicly indicated his desire not to go there, saying he wanted to stress “reconciliation” not “the hatred that went on at the time.”

“The president was not hot to go to a camp,” one official told Bernard Weinraub of
The New York Times
. “You know, he’s a cheerful politician. He does not like to grovel in a grisly scene like Dachau. He was reluctant to go. I’m not saying opposed, but there was a coolness. And nobody pushed him on it.”
⁴⁶

When Mike Deaver went to Germany in late February to develop the president’s itinerary, Kohl had fixed on a visit to Bitburg. Deaver wanted a big European swing with stops in Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal, plus something unusual to add political spice: Hungary. The Budapest government was agreeable, but the White House backed off when Janoś Kádár, the Hungarian leader, wanted assurances that Reagan would not embarrass Kádár by baiting Moscow publicly on his European trip. Also, rather than celebrate V-E Day in Cologne, the
White House substituted an address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. But Deaver was attracted to the Bitburg cemetery because it was conveniently located near an American Air Force base where Reagan could give a rousing speech to the troops.

It was a cold day, crystal clear, when Deaver and William Henkel, chief White House advance man, were driven out to the Kolmeshohe Military Cemetery at Bitburg by Werner von der Schulenberg, German chief of protocol, and William Woessner, deputy chief of the American Embassy in Bonn. The cemetery was a peaceful glen in a cloister of woods, with a large tower monument at the far end of a small field of gravestones.

“It was very picturesque,” Deaver recalled. “A beautiful little spot. The graves were all covered with snow. I remember saying to our embassy people, ‘I want them [the graves] checked out. Be sure there’s nothing embarrassing here.’ ”
⁴⁷

Woessner remembered asking Schulenberg for assurances there were no war criminals and “that would have certainly included Waffen SS, as far as I was concerned.” Schulenberg sent back assurance there was no problem.
⁴⁸

But there
was
a problem—a huge gulf between two nations, two memories, two attitudes. The American officials operated on the premise that Kohl’s government, as a close ally, would not knowingly trip up the American president—specifically, that if the German government said there were no horrible embarrassments for Reagan, they could trust the Germans. They assumed that what would be embarrassing to Americans would be embarrassing to Germans. But as Jim Markham, bureau chief of
The New York Times
in Bonn, explained to me, Germans regard the Waffen SS troops as similar to regular military units, some of them press-ganged into service at early ages and not morally culpable, as the SS were, for the Holocaust atrocities. That is a distinction not made by Americans. Moreover, Markham said, the Germans felt that the reconciliation Kohl wanted from Reagan implied some pardon of the past and accepting the reality of the Waffen SS buried among other Germans. American officials felt bitterly misled.

Kohl’s proposed itinerary included a stop at Munich, not far from Dachau. But the Americans got the distinct impression that Kohl really did not want Reagan going to a concentration camp. In their desire to move Reagan on to Spain, Portugal, and France, a stop in Munich seemed too cumbersome. So Deaver and Henkel scratched that stop—also dropping the concentration camp visit. It was a fatal error because they were setting up Reagan to pay homage to the German war dead,
but not to bear witness to millions of victims of Nazism. “When we dropped Munich, none of us at that time thought about the fact that we still had the cemetery hanging out there and we did not have a compensating event,” Henkel confessed. “That was a fatal fault.”
⁴⁹
Other American officials had qualms, and Jewish leaders were angry about dropping Dachau. Nonetheless, the itinerary was approved by Don Regan, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, and Secretary of State Shultz in early March; Reagan also accepted it.

By then, the Bitburg stop was fixed. A former American embassy official, Hans Tuck, was asked to draft remarks for Reagan to make at Bitburg cemetery. Tuck refused. “No,” he said, “the president should not say a word.”
⁵⁰
When an American advance team went in late March 1985 to refine the travel plans, worry about Bitburg gnawed Henkel. Snow still covered the gravestones. Despite German assurances, Henkel asked embassy officials again to be sure there were no embarrassments lying beneath the snow. In frustration, a senior American diplomat burst out: “What do you think—Joseph Mengele [the hunted Nazi concentration camp doctor] is buried there?”

When Reagan’s itinerary was announced on Thursday, April 11, Bitburg was finally mentioned in public. White House spokesman Larry Speakes was raked over the coals by reporters demanding whether American soldiers were buried at Bitburg and why the President was visiting a German military cemetery but not a concentration camp. That night, Regan and Speakes watched the television news, astonished that only CBS gave extensive coverage to Reagan’s German trip. Regan felt they could ride out the situation. But Stuart Spencer warned Deaver, “Mike, you’re going to see a firestorm on this one like you’ve never seen before.”
⁵¹

When the newspaper stories hit Friday morning, the blaze was lit. Jewish groups erupted in fury, their leaders demanding that Reagan not go to Bitburg. Editorials savaged the White House. Ed Rollins got angry calls from Republicans. “Paula Hawkins just raised all kinds of hell,” he said. “Bob Dole left a message in my office about how outrageous this was, and how the veterans and everybody else would be outraged by it.”
⁵²
On that weekend came the first news of SS graves at Bitburg cemetery.

In just three days, the uproar was so strong that the White House decided it had to add a concentration camp—as damage control. The fiction was that Kohl had invited Reagan to a camp, but in fact, as one top American official said, “We told the Germans, ‘We’re coming.’ ”
Deaver and Henkel flew to Germany on Monday, where they were dogged by TV cameras as they went to survey Dachau. They snuck away to look at Bergen-Belsen, which was less grisly, more solemnly mournful, with its mounds of mass graves. But already Elie Wiesel, a fifty-six-year-old camp survivor, world-reknowned writer, and chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, was declaring there could be no trade-off of a camp for Bitburg cemetery.

“This particular cemetery is to us unacceptable,” Wiesel decreed. “This is not just a cemetery of soldiers. This is tombstones of the SS, which is beyond what we can imagine. These are and were criminals.”

Privately, Deaver was trying to cut Reagan’s political losses. In Germany, he asked Horst Teltschik, Kohl’s national security adviser, to find a substitute for Bitburg, but Kohl did not budge. By now, the American Embassy had learned that
all
German military cemeteries included Waffen SS graves. Ambassador Burns cabled Washington that it would be a disaster for German-American relations if Bitburg were dropped. He argued that it would weaken Kohl by making him look like an American lackey.

At home, the White House was adding to its problems. Don Regan and Ed Rollins had hastily called a meeting with some Jewish Republican leaders—Max Fisher of Detroit, Gordon Zacks of Columbus, and Richard Fox of Philadelphia—ostensibly to get their advice. But before hearing them out, Regan caused offense by arriving late at the meeting and summarily announcing that the president had already decided to visit a concentration camp.

Reagan himself fueled the emotional reactions two days later by equating the Nazi soldiers buried at Bitburg with Holocaust victims. Of the soldiers, he said, “They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” A few days later, Reagan got a letter from an American who said his life had been saved at Dachau no less than four times by Waffen SS troops. “So you see,” Reagan told a large meeting of cabinet and staff aides, “as horrible as those places were, there were impulses of compassion.” Deaver groaned a loud warning: “Oh, Christ, don’t let this get out. I can see the headlines now:
REAGAN SAYS CONCENTRATION CAMPS ARE HOTBEDS OF HUMANITY
!”

By now, Bitburg was consuming the administration, pushing aside the rest of the agenda. Reagan was caught in a vise. Fifty-three senators wrote urging him to drop the cemetery visit. On April 19, Kohl telephoned, insisting on Bitburg, and wrung from Reagan a renewed pledge to stick to the itinerary that now included Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen.
The very same day, Elie Wiesel, invited to the White House long before to receive the Congressional Gold Medal for his writing on the Holocaust, implored Reagan at a nationally televised ceremony to cancel the cemetery visit. Reagan watched, pain etched across his face as Wiesel cried out: “That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

The protests reached a crescendo in the second half of April. The president’s popularity dropped several points. Deaver was trying to cushion the shock: shortening Reagan’s time at Bitburg, arranging for retired Army General Matthew B. Ridgway to lay the wreath instead of Reagan, preparing a moving speech at Bergen-Belsen to ease the anger of Jews. Still, almost everyone in the White House, including Mrs. Reagan, was badgering the president to call off the Bitburg stop. “Nancy felt very, very strongly—extremely strongly,” one Reagan confidant told me. “She felt Kohl really bruised the president badly in the way Bitburg was handled.” But Reagan resisted all entreaties, feeling he had no alternative. That is, until the morning of April 29, two days before his scheduled departure.