Reagan: The Life (73 page)

The president was asked about this in a news conference, and he responded that America and Germany needed to move on. “
I feel very strongly that this time in commemorating the end of that great war, that instead of reawakening the memories and so forth and the passions of the time, that maybe we should observe this day as the day when, forty years ago, peace began, and friendship. Because we now find ourselves allies and friends of the countries that we once fought against. And that it be almost a celebration of the end of an era and the coming into what has now been some forty years of peace for us. And I felt that since the German people—and very few alive that remember even the war, and certainly none of them who were adults and participating in any way—and they have a feeling, and a guilt feeling that’s been imposed upon them, and I just think it’s unnecessary. I think they should be recognized for the democracy that they’ve created and the democratic principles they now espouse.”

Reagan’s words evoked a passionate response. “
President Reagan
apparently believes that all Germans alive today are under 60 years old,”
Menachem Rosensaft of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors wrote in the
New York Times
. “It would seem that a brief history lesson is in order. In 1943, when my parents arrived at
Auschwitz, they were in their early 30s. Most of the German guards and doctors who tortured them and sent their families to the gas chambers were their age or younger. Similarly, many of the killers of
Treblinka,
Bergen-Belsen,
Dachau and all the other death camps were in their 20s and 30s when they participated in the annihilation of six million European
Jews.” Few of these personnel, being guards and other noncombatants, died in battle, and only a small number were executed after the war for their crimes. “Thus, many of them are today in their 60s and 70s, still alive and well and living in Germany.” Rosensaft thought Reagan, of all presidents, should be aware of how long people lived.
Josef Mengele, the monstrous chief doctor at Auschwitz, was seventy-four years old, the same age as Reagan. “Somehow I think Mengele remembers the Third Reich,” Rosensaft said. The president had traveled to Normandy to honor the soldiers who died there; he regularly paid tribute to America’s war dead. But now he wouldn’t take time to remember the Holocaust. “He has made it clear that for him, the dead of Dachau, symbolic of the dead of all the Nazi concentration camps, are less worthy of respect than the fallen soldiers of Normandy or the G.I.s who lie buried in Arlington National Cemetery,” Rosensaft said. “In essence, he is telling the world that he cares more about German sensibilities than about the memory of Hitler’s victims. As a son of Holocaust survivors, I am angry. As an American, I am ashamed.”

Reagan’s problems multiplied when the White House announced that the president would be visiting the military cemetery at Bitburg. He would lay a wreath “
in a spirit of reconciliation, in a spirit of forty years of peace, in a spirit of economic and military compatibility,” Larry Speakes explained. The announcement provoked new outcry from Jewish groups and protests from American veterans. Hundreds of members of Congress petitioned the president to reconsider.

Reagan dug in his heels instead. “
All it would do is leave me looking as if I caved in in the face of some unfavorable attention,” he told a gathering of editors and broadcasters. “I think that there’s nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery, where those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into ser
vice to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”

The parallel Reagan seemed to be drawing between the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the Nazi troops struck many in America as bizarrely ahistorical. “
To equate the fate of members of the German army bent on world conquest with that of six million Jewish civilians, including one million innocent children, is a distortion of history, a perversion of language and a callous offense to the Jewish community,” Rabbi
Alexander Schindler of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations asserted. “The president has made a terrible statement that brings shame to the American people. It insults not only Jews and others who suffered and perished in the camps, but every American and Allied soldier who gave his life to liberate Europe from the Nazi death grip.”

By this time reporters had visited the Bitburg cemetery and discovered that the dead buried there included members of the Waffen SS, the military wing of Hitler’s elite guard. The discovery raised the controversy to a new level, for even forty years after the war the mere mention of the SS sent shudders through those who had suffered under Nazi rule. Further investigation linked the Bitburg dead to one of the worst single atrocities committed by an SS army division during the war: the massacre of more than six hundred civilian residents of a French village in 1944.

The administration tried to mitigate the damage by inviting Holocaust survivor
Elie Wiesel to the White House, where he received a medal for his work on behalf of human rights. Wiesel thanked the president and America for defeating the Nazis and liberating the death camps. “
But, Mr. President,” he continued, “I wouldn’t be the person I am, and you wouldn’t respect me for what I am, if I were not to tell you also of the sadness that is in my heart for what happened during the last week. And I am sure that you, too, are sad for the same reasons. What can I do? I belong to a traumatized generation. And to us, as to you, symbols are important.” The symbolism of the president’s visit to Bitburg was tragically misguided. Wiesel credited Reagan’s claim that he hadn’t known about the SS graves when he accepted Kohl’s invitation to visit the cemetery. “Of course, you didn’t know. But now we all are aware. May I, Mr. President, if it’s possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find a way, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

T
HE
W
ASHINGTON MEDIA
corps was willing to blame Don Regan for the public relations disaster the Bitburg affair had become. Pundit after opiner whispered or shouted that Jim Baker would never have allowed such a debacle had he still been chief of staff. Regan resented the charges. “
The commitment in question was already on the president’s calendar when I arrived at the White House,” he recalled. Regan blamed Mike Deaver for not keeping on top of the planning and especially for not checking the roster of the Bitburg dead more carefully. “How the hell did
that
happen?” he demanded of Deaver when the story of the SS graves broke. Washington insiders knew Deaver had a drinking problem, which he admitted after he left the White House and was charged with perjury in an investigation of lobbying activities. Deaver’s alcoholism didn’t prevent the jury from convicting him (though it might have helped mitigate his sentence), but it lent retrospective credence to the rumors at the time of the Bitburg affair that his resort to the bottle had impaired his performance as deputy chief of staff. Regan reiterated the rumors in pointing the finger at Deaver for the SS oversight. “It was said that he was drinking a quart of Scotch whisky a day and masking his breath with mints while he went about his duties in the White House,” Regan wrote. Regan added that he himself hadn’t been able to recognize Deaver’s impairment because Deaver had disguised it so well. “I never saw the slightest sign in Deaver’s behavior that he was drinking to excess; in fact I was then under the impression that he was a teetotaler.”

Some in Washington blamed
Helmut Kohl for snookering the president. Kohl’s constituents included World War II veterans who resented the abasement forced upon Germany by international opinion as a result of the Holocaust. By no means did all of them long for the days of the Third Reich, but more than a few felt that their entire generation was wrongly blamed for the war crimes of the worst among them. A visit by Reagan to a military cemetery, arranged by Kohl, would reassure these voters that the chancellor sympathized with them.

However Bitburg landed on Reagan’s schedule, the decision to go ahead with the visit in the face of the public criticism was the president’s alone. Reagan characteristically blamed the media for making too much of missteps by his administration. “
The press had a field day assailing me because I’d accepted Helmut Kohl’s invitation,” he wrote in his diary as the controversy was just beginning. “Helmut had in mind observing
the end-of-WWII anniversary as the end of hatred and the beginning of friendship and peace that has lasted forty years.” The media had inflamed the understandable sensitivities of well-meaning people. “I have repeatedly said we must never forget the Holocaust and remember it so it will never happen again. But some of our Jewish friends are now on the warpath.” Yet they wouldn’t change his mind. “There is no way I’ll back down and run for cover.” It would send a very bad signal to the world, besides being unjustified. “Yes, the German soldiers were the enemy and part of the whole Nazi hate era,” Reagan wrote. “But we won and we killed those soldiers. What is wrong with saying ‘let’s never be enemies again’? Would Helmut be wrong if he visited Arlington Cemetery on one of his U.S. visits?”

Reagan’s determination didn’t prevent him from trying to soften the impact of his cemetery visit. Kohl repeated his invitation to Reagan to visit a concentration camp; Reagan this time accepted. “
Helmut may very well have solved our problem,” he noted. He sent Deaver to Germany to finalize the plans, with special instructions to make sure no new problems arose.

The furor persisted, however. “
The press has the bit in their teeth and are stirring up as much trouble as they can,” Reagan wrote. He took pains to publicize that he would visit a concentration camp as well as the military cemetery. “By nightfall the TV press was distorting that statement,” he muttered.

Deaver arrived back from Germany and explained that the visit to a camp was firmly on the schedule. But
Bergen-Belsen suited Kohl better than
Dachau, and he had seen no reason to insist on the latter. Kohl himself called Reagan to confirm the new schedule and to thank the president for his steadfastness. The chancellor was “
quite emotional,” Don Regan wrote in his notes of the call. Reagan appreciated the message and the emotion. “
He told me my remarks about the dead soldiers being the victims of Nazism as the
Jews in the Holocaust were had been well received in Germany,” Reagan commented to himself. “He was emphatic that to cancel the cemetery now would be a disaster in his country and an insult to the German people. I told him I would not cancel.”

Reagan received encouragement from closer to home as well. “
I was very
proud
of your stand,” George Bush wrote to him. “If I can help absorb some heat, send me into battle. It’s not easy, but you are
right
!!”

Reagan valued the support, but the criticism was no less important in making him hold his ground. “
The uproar about my trip to Germany and
the Bitburg cemetery was cover stuff in
Newsweek
and
Time
,” he wrote derisively. “They just won’t stop. Well, I’m not going to cancel anything no matter how much the bastards scream.” Forty-eight hours later he wrote, “
Every day seems to begin with the latest press muckraking over whether I should or shouldn’t go to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany. Well, d--n their hides. I think it’s morally right and I’m going.”

T
HE PRESIDENT JOINED
the other G7 leaders in Bonn in early May. Discussions centered on trade and finance. Japan’s
Yasuhiro Nakasone proposed a new round of the trade talks that had been going on recurrently since World War II; he sought to head off protectionism, particularly against exports of Japanese automobiles. France’s Mitterrand pushed for monetary talks to adjust exchange rates, which had hurt the French economy of late. Britain’s Thatcher cemented her mutual admiration pact with the president.

Helmut Kohl spoke with Reagan privately for nearly an hour. Reagan assured him he wasn’t upset by the furor in the media. Kohl was pleased. “
He said I had won the heart of Germany by standing firm on this,” Reagan recorded. The German people confirmed Kohl’s assertion. “
In all our motoring the streets are lined with people clapping, waving, cheering—all I’m sure to let me know they don’t agree with the continuing press sniping about the upcoming visit to Bitburg,” Reagan wrote.

On the morning of May 5, Reagan visited the grave site of
Konrad Adenauer, the founding father of West Germany, in the hills above the Rhine. Nancy Reagan and Mrs. Kohl laid flowers on the grave. The Reagans and the Kohls then boarded Air Force One for a flight to Hanover. A German helicopter carried them to
Bergen-Belsen.

Reagan wasn’t used to speaking to hostile audiences. As California governor he had occasionally encountered hecklers, but as president he was insulated from voiced dissent. On this day, however, the dissenters were fully in evidence. They came from Germany, the United States, Britain, France, Israel, and other countries. They were Christians and Jews, civilians and military veterans, the politically active and the heretofore silent. Guards, and reverence for the dead, kept them out of the camp itself, but they shouted in protest from the borders of the memorial. Obviously referring to Bitburg, they chanted, “
You don’t belong there … We don’t want you to go in there.”

Reagan saw and heard them. He affected unconcern. Asked what he
thought of the protests, he shrugged. “It’s a free country,” he said. But he understood he had one chance to make the situation right, or at least better. A light rain fell from a gray sky as Reagan and Nancy walked beside the mounds of heather that marked the mass graves of those killed at the camp. He stood with bowed head before the obelisk commemorating the victims. He placed a wreath of green ferns at the base of the stone pillar; a ribbon on the wreath read, “The People of the United States of America.”