18 March 2014

George Bush and the Spring of 1989

March 14, 2014
Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted fromThe Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptation, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End of the Cold War, copyright 2014, Cornell University Press. Used by permission of the publisher, all rights reserved.

President George H. W. Bush detected winds of change in Eastern Europe as he took office. He had no way of knowing where the changes were headed or at what point they might cease. His priority was to make sure they did not lead to widespread violence.

As a politician and leader, Bush did not resemble Ronald Reagan. He pledged, drolly, to try to hold “his charisma in check” and professed to lack “the vision thing.”[1]

“If you give me a ten, I’m going to send it back and say, ‘Give me an eight,’” he told his speechwriters. “And you'll be lucky if I deliver like a six.”[2] At times he spoke directly. “We know what works: freedom works. We know what's right: freedom is right.” Other times, Bush sounded nothing like his predecessor. “We will always try to speak clearly,” he stated during his inaugural address, “for candor is a compliment; but subtlety, too, is good and has its place.”[3]

Bush brought to the White House a sterling résumé—congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, US. envoy to China, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and, for the previous eight years, vice president. His father, Prescott Bush, one of the “wise men” of the Eastern establish­ment who had surrounded FDR and Truman, a Republican in the mold of Henry Stimson, Robert Lovett, and John McCloy, had imbued in his son a sense that duty to country comes before politics. George Bush had been the youngest aviator in the navy during World War II; he was the last veteran of that conflict to serve as president.

“For the common man and the intellectual alike, the direction of change today is not leftward,” Bush proclaimed on the campaign trail. “The gloom of the West, the ‘malaise’ we heard so much about just a few years ago, is in retreat, replaced by a healthy confidence in our ability to cope, to change, and to grow.” It was an assessment not necessarily shared by American intel­lectuals as 1989 began. Yet Bush remained optimistic. “If we continue on this course,” he stated, “the revolutionary concept of freedom embodied in Western democracy will surely prevail.”[4] While Bush aspired to prevail, he also understood that 1989 in Eastern Europe was a time and place for caution and subtlety. Whether change occurred peacefully depended on how the Kremlin reacted. Bush knew that verbal pronouncements could not change reality. He was not the person who had employed the phrase “evil empire” in 1983 or spoke of “another time, another era” in 1988. He was not a bel­licose Cold Warrior, and he had not, in the course of the 1980s, become a naive optimist. “The Cold War isn’t over,” Bush told a reporter in the wake of Reagan’s visit to Red Square.[5]

While the Soviet Union was changing, he told a joint session of Con­gress on February 9, 1989 “prudence and common sense dictate that we try to understand the full meaning of the change going on there, review our policies, and then proceed with caution.”[6] Gorbachev’s reforms not­withstanding, the “fundamental facts remain that the Soviets retain a very powerful military machine in the service of objectives which are still too often in conflict with ours.” Moderation needed to be championed, illusions to be put aside. “So, let us take the new openness seriously, but let’s also be realistic.”[7]

The man Bush chose to be his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, saw plenty of Soviet objectives in conflict with American ones. “I think the Cold War is not over,” Scowcroft told aWashington Post reporter shortly after returning to the position he had held during the Ford administration.[8] The Red Army was still casting a pall over central Europe; Soviet military aid was still flowing to Cuba and Nicaragua; a vast Soviet nuclear arsenal was still threatening the free world. “I was suspicious of Gorbachev's motives and skeptical of his prospects,” Scowcroft later recalled. Were Gorbachev any­thing but a committed Marxist, he reasoned, Moscow’s inner circle would have chosen someone else to lead the Soviet Union.[9] Scowcroft “believed that Gorbachev’s goal was to restore dynamism to a socialist political and economic system and revitalize the Soviet Union domestically and inter­nationally to compete with the West.” This objective did not make him a friend of the United States. If anything, Gorbachev’s popularity in the West made him “potentially more dangerous than his predecessors, each of whom, through some aggressive move, had saved the West from the dangers of its own wishful thinking about the Soviet Union.”[10] The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, according to this thinking, revealed the truth to an American public accustomed to détente. Unlike Brezhnev, Gorbachev had done noth­ing to shock the American people in a negative way—yet.

Scowcroft believed that enthusiasm on the part of Reagan and the men and women around him had outpaced sober calculations of U.S. national interest. The previous administration’s “willingness to declare an end to the Cold War, without taking into consideration what that would require,” troubled him. So did talk of eliminating nuclear weapons. However hor­rible, these weapons “were an indispensable element in the U.S. strategy of keeping the Soviets at bay, a compensation for their enormous superiority in conventional forces.”[11] Scowcroft thus seconded Bush’s inclination to be cautious about embracing Gorbachev. He ordered a comprehensive review of U.S.-Soviet relations. After a draft Soviet strategy review from the State Department, he entrusted Robert Blackwill, a highly regarded foreign service officer in charge of European and Soviet Affairs at the NSC, as well as a protégé of his own, Condoleezza Rice, to embark on a new study. Until its completion, Scowcroft ruled out an early summit, which he figured would only provide Gorbachev a propaganda victory.[12]

Scowcroft and Bush wanted to buy time. Not entirely sure how to pro­ceed, they allowed former secretary of state Henry Kissinger to reassert him­self at the highest levels. On January 17, 1989, Kissinger met Gorbachev in Moscow and spoke in terms of realpolitik. “I have said repeatedly that you do not change the seventy-year history of the Soviet Union, the four hundred year history of Russia, and the two hundred year history of the United States,” Kissinger told Gorbachev. “If there is a conflict between our two countries, we will lose, and others will benefit.” American foreign policy tended to be missionary in character, Kissinger went on to say; Soviet foreign policy, defensive. The two sides needed to move beyond these fundamental differ­ences and beyond the “details” of arms control. The new administration in Washington was not interested in challenging Soviet “security interests,” nor was Bush as allured by SDI as his predecessor.[13] Gorbachev “was prepared to send Dobrynin to the United States or receive Scowcroft in Moscow,” Kis­singer reported back to Washington. “Or an emissary could come if Scow­croft was unavailable. A note should be sent via the Soviet UN Ambassador, preferably from Scowcroft, although in order to preserve the privacy of the channel it would be best if the outside envelope were from me.”[14]

Kissinger’s ambitions probably foundered the moment that the new secre­tary of state, James Baker, underlined the words “would be best if the outside envelope were from me.”[15] Baker, who owed nothing to Kissinger, was not about to share power. Like his longtime tennis doubles partner, George Bush, Baker had spent eight years as a “moderate” in the Reagan administration, nearly every day of which conservatives had viewed him with suspicion. During his confirmation hearings, critics pounced on Baker for his lack of traditional foreign policy experience and his background as a maestro of political campaigns. Yet Baker was no less qualified than George Shultz. Both men had graduated from Princeton, joined the Navy, and served as secretary of the treasury. Both men understood the principle articulated by Dean Acheson that a critical role of any secretary of state was to marshal and sustain domestic political will for foreign policy objectives. They believed in negotiations backed by strength and in the possibility of reaching a deal. And both men forged a personal bond with Eduard Shevardnadze.

In his Princeton days, Baker wrote an undergraduate thesis about the provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky that briefly ruled Russia between the collapse of the Romanov dynasty and the Bolshevik Revolu­tion.[16] At the beginning of 1989, he joined Scowcroft in cautioning against wishful thinking. “Progress in arms control, human rights, [and] Afghani­stan” were “reasons to be hopeful,” read his notes for a January 23, 1989, cabinet meeting. “But, realism demands prudence”—despite the tremendous changes since 1981, when Baker served as chief of staff to President Rea­gan, the Soviet Union remained “a heavily-armed superpower hostile to American values and interests.”[17] Baker was tough yet open-minded. The Soviets “have to make hard choices,” he wrote Bush in February 1989. “We do Gorbachev no favors when we make it easier to avoid choices. ... He made a choice in arms control because there was a need for it.”[18] The Bush administration’s penchant for caution drew criticism, nearly from his first day in office, for being out of step, as changes in the Soviet Union seemed undeniable to so many observers. Reagan himself indicated in an interview that spring that he felt Bush was being too cautious in his dealings with Gorbachev.[19]

The patrician Bush would not say so, either publicly or privately, but Reagan had left behind a messy inheritance. The massive federal budget deficits that resulted from Reaganomics compelled the new president to do more with less.[20] Concern over the federal deficit reverberated throughout the 1988 presidential campaign. “Read my lips: no new taxes,” Bush asserted at the Republican Convention. Yet promotion of liberty in Eastern Europe surely bore a hefty price tag. “A political solution in Poland cannot endure without economic assistance from the West,” read a proposal by financier George Soros that wound up on the desk of Condoleezza Rice. “Indeed, both sides are entering into a social contract in the firm expectation of such assistance.”[21] Emotions were running high in Poland, Bush acknowledged to Helmut Kohl on June 23,1989, but it was “important to act carefully and to avoid pouring money down a rat-hole.”[22]

Reagan also bequeathed to Bush a vision of the world that the latter did not regard as secure. Bush believed—as did Scowcroft and every other adviser surrounding him in 1989—that nuclear weapons served as an indispensable deterrent and should not be abolished. So long as the Red Army loomed over Central and Western Europe, these weapons protected the peace. Bush did not oppose strategic arms reductions, but he wanted to proceed carefully. He did not wish to antagonize the Navy, which balked at proposed inspections of submarines as part of a START agreement. And he knew that conserva­tives would insist that any arms deal be accompanied by unrestricted research on SDI. Although he supported missile defense, Bush was skeptical. He did not see how it could replace the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, and he was not certain that the government had the resources to afford the technological research and development.

The president’s position on nuclear weapons accordingly drew criticism from the Kremlin. Gorbachev saw it as a reproach to the spirit of Reykjavik. Simply by stepping away from a vision of nuclear abolition, Bush was bound to disappoint the Soviet leader. Whatever else the president could have done in the first few months in office, it probably would not have changed Mos­cow's basic sense of aggravation at the loss of the understanding and momen­tum achieved with the Reagan administration.

A former head of the CIA, Bush appreciated that American intelligence services could not decide quite what to make of Gorbachev. “Some analysts see current policy changes as largely tactical, driven by the need for breath­ing space from the competition,” read a National Intelligence Estimate titled “Soviet Policy Toward the West: The Gorbachev Challenge.” Adherents to this view “believe the ideological imperatives of Marxism-Leninism and its hostility toward capitalist countries are enduring. They point to previous failures of reform and the transient nature of past ‘détentes.’ They judge that there is a serious risk of Moscow returning to traditionally combative behav­ior when the hoped for gains in economic performance are achieved.”[23] The same National Intelligence Estimate went on to say, “Other analysts believe Gorbachev’s policies reflect a fundamental rethinking of national interests and ideology as well as more tactical considerations. They argue that ideolog­ical tenets of Marxism-Leninism such as class conflict and capitalist-socialist enmity are being revised. They consider the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the shift toward tolerance of power sharing in Eastern Europe to be historic shifts in the Soviet definition of national interest. They judge that Gorbachev's changes are likely to have sufficient momentum to produce last­ing shifts in Soviet behavior.”[24]

For all the billions of dollars poured into U.S. intelligence services, in other words, their assessment of Soviet behavior provided no resolution for policy choices. Even the most optimistic assessment went only so far as “lasting shifts in Soviet behavior” as a prospective goal. The mixed messages reinforced Bush’s inclination to be cautious. Members of his administration did not consider radical nuclear arms reductions desirable, could not achieve consensus that Gorbachev meant the things he said, and could not guar­antee that a reformed and strengthened Soviet Union would not rekindle Cold War tensions. “As the Cold War was ending in 1989,” recalls Robert Zoellick, perhaps Secretary of State James Baker’s closest adviser during this period, “U.S. officials were at a great disadvantage compared to subsequent scholars: we could not be sure that the Cold War was in fact ending!”[25]

Nor did they sense that the administration was negotiating from a posi­tion of political strength. Unlike Reagan's first administration, Bush faced a Senate filled with Democrats and a House of Representatives shorn of many of the “boll weevil” Democrats who had supported Reagan’s arms buildup and tax cuts. Those who remained were particularly bitter over the nasty campaign Bush had conducted in the 1988 presidential election. It had been a far cry from “Morning in America” four years earlier, a contest in which candidate Bush had acted rather unlike Vice President Bush.[26]

The president’s team recognized political reality. “Protocol and prudence had dictated that I consult with members of my own party first,” Baker later wrote of his efforts to craft a new policy toward Nicaragua. “But as a practical matter, I understood that the support of the Democrats who were the majority was more critical.”[27] So did the seasoned observers of American politics who traveled to Moscow in the first months of the administration. They told Gorbachev's aides that the new president did not enjoy the same popularity as Reagan and did not possess an abundance of political capi­tal. “He has a delicate position with Congress,” West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl told Alexander Yakovlev in January.[28] The new president's “position is very difficult,” Senator Edward Kennedy’s aide Larry Horowitz told Vadim Zagladin later that year. “He would like to make progress in arms control,” but his own base was unhappy with his domestic legislation and his change in policy toward Central America. If anything, Horowitz went on to say, the Democrats in Congress were acting “as his real allies.”[29]

Democrats were not Bush's allies, however. As if to flex their political mus­cles, Senate Democrats voted down Bush's nominee for secretary of defense, John Tower, notwithstanding his four terms in that same body. Bush’s second choice, Richard Cheney, surmised of Gorbachev on NBC’s Meet the Press: “If I had to guess today, I would guess he ultimately would fail. That is to say, he will not be able to reform the Soviet economy to turn it into an efficient modern society.”[30] The administration swiftly distanced itself from Cheney. But the original comments and subsequent denials fueled suspicions that the Bush administration wanted Gorbachev to “stew in his own juices.” From Moscow, Ambassador Jack Matlock again attempted to nudge a president toward negotiating with the Soviets. “The four-part agenda which we have successfully pursued over the past six years... has been successful in the sense that it has finally produced significant Soviet positive movement” in bilateral relations, regional problems, arms reductions, and human rights, he wrote in one of three cables that February. “It has not yet exhausted its full potential, however, since much remains to be done in all four areas.”[31]

Matlock tailored his message to the so-called realists in the new adminis­tration. “We of course have many specific interests which we must pursue,” he went on to say, “but no long-term goals are more important than the transformation of the Soviet political system into one with effective struc­tural constraints on the use of military force outside Soviet borders, along with the evolution of the Soviet military machine into one suitable primar­ily for defensive purposes.” Many doubted whether, absent a “total collapse of the system,” this would ever occur. Perhaps collapse might happen some­day in the future, Matlock acknowledged; in the near term, “for the first time in at least sixty years,” political reformation and military restraint were “consistent with avowed Soviet aspirations.” The administration “would be remiss if we did not reinforce incentives for Soviet movement in this direction.”[32]

Bush’s advisers detected in Matlock's cable the language of Reaganism. They wanted more specificity. As Bush and Scowcroft waited for the results of the strategic review, they pondered alternatives to the ambitious dream of a world without nuclear weapons. In March, Scowcroft considered a public declaration to call on both the Soviets and the United States to withdraw all conventional forces from Europe.[33] Blackwill talked his boss out of this proposal, which he feared might undercut America's commitment to its European allies. Blackwill wanted to focus on Germany instead. “Today, the top priority for American foreign policy in Europe should be the fate of the Federal Republic of Germany,” began a memo he and Philip Zelikow crafted for Scowcroft on March 20, 1989.[34] Within a year, Kohl faced reelection—a contest many expected him to lose. The prospect of the SPD's return to power jeopardized U.S. plans to modernize its Lance short-range tactical nuclear missile and, more broadly, the cohesion of NATO amidst Gorbymania on the streets of Western Europe. Scowcroft contrib­uted to Blackwill and Zelikow’s memo by linking Kohl's reelection to a “vision of Europe's future” that included “an approach to the ‘German question.’” He advised the president to “send a clear signal to the Germans that we are ready to do more if the political climate allows.” These ideas intrigued the president, who apparently wrote back to Scowcroft that he had read it “with interest!”[35]

Bush decided that spring to shift the focus of U.S.-Soviet diplomacy from nuclear disarmament to the long-term future of Europe with the fate of Germany potentially on the table. Western Europe appeared on a path toward economic and political integration, yet there was tremendous anxiety. What of the huge Soviet army that remained the largest force on the conti­nent? Would a unified Western Europe be responsible for its own defense? These were the types of questions the Bush team thought that the Rea­gan administration, in its exuberance to reduce nuclear weapons and take Gorbachev at his word, had neglected. Indeed, Gorbachev had pledged to withdraw half a million troops from central and eastern Europe. “Even with these reductions,” Bush wrote in a February 16, 1989, response to a Japanese newspaper, “the Warsaw Pact has far to go to correct the conventional forces imbalance in Europe.”[36]

On May 15, 1989, Baker’s deputy, Robert Zoellick, sent his boss a memo in advance of the upcoming NATO summit urging him to enunciate the “common values of the West”—democratization, market systems, individual rights, and free associations—in the context of drawing “Eastern Europe and the USSR into the ‘community of nations.’” The goal should be to end “the division of Europe on our terms,” to contrast “common values of the West” with “Gorbachev’s more narrow, territorial concept of the Common European House.”[37]

Zoellick saw Germany as “the real opportunity to get ahead of the curve and to exceed expectations.” Official NATO documents dating back to the 1950s stated German reunification as a long-term goal. “And there’s no doubt the topic is coming back,” he wrote. “The real question is whether Gorbachev will grab it first.” Or the Germans might grab it themselves— “especially after Honecker passes from the scene.” Zoellick advocated an ini­tiative built upon the “tear down the Wall” rhetoric, one that would include “freer and more open links between the two Germanies, in the areas of com­munications, flow of information, movement of people, aviation (building on our Berlin Air proposal so as to include German participation), and the environment.” Why not call for a Berlin Olympics in 2000, he asked, where athletes from “the two Germanies” could compete on one team?[38]

Bush was already speaking out more forcefully. Three days before Zoellick’s memo, the president delivered a speech in College Station at Texas A&M University. “Wise men—Truman and Eisenhower, Vandenberg and Rayburn, Marshall, Acheson, and Kennan—crafted the strategy of contain­ment,” he told the graduating Aggies. “They believed that the Soviet Union, denied the easy course of expansion, would turn inward and address the contradictions of its inefficient, repressive, and inhumane system. And they were right—the Soviet Union is now publicly facing this hard reality. Con­tainment worked.”[39] Opportunity beckoned the United States to go further. “Our goal is bold,” Bush stated, “more ambitious than any of my predeces­sors could have thought possible. Our review indicates that 40 years of per­severance have brought us a precious opportunity, and now it is time to move beyond containment to a new policy for the 1990s—one that recognizes the full scope of change taking place around the world and in the Soviet Union itself.” Bush raised the stakes from containing Soviet expansionism to some­thing new: “We seek the integration of the Soviet Union into the commu­nity of nations.” This could be achieved, Bush went on to say, if the Soviets reduced arms, tore down the Iron Curtain, gave up meddling in the Third World once and for all, expanded human rights and pluralism, and joined the international fight against the drug trade and environmental degradation.[40]

Two weeks later, Bush took this message to Europe. He now incorpo­rated some of Zoellick’s suggestions. The administration’s “policy is to move beyond containment,” he declared on May 31, 1989, in Mainz, Germany. “For 40 years, the seeds of democracy in Eastern Europe lay dormant, buried under the frozen tundra of the Cold War. And for 40 years, the world has waited for the Cold War to end. And decade after decade, time after time, the flowering human spirit withered from the chill of conflict and oppression; and again, the world waited. But the passion for freedom cannot be denied forever. The world has waited long enough. The time is right. Let Europe be whole and free.”[41]

Tentatively, Bush was laying out the concrete terms on which the Cold War might end: when Europe was whole and freedom triumphed. And “the momentum for freedom does not just come from the printed word or the transistor or the television screen,” he proclaimed in Mainz, “it comes from a single powerful idea: democracy.” In other words, the Cold War could end when the Soviets withdrew from the GDR and Eastern Europe, when those countries became democracies. Bush hoped this process could occur peacefully, yet history gave no assurance that this was possible. Pressures had welled up against communist regimes in 1953, 1956, 1968, and 1981 only to be met by force. American presidents had tripped over themselves extolling the superiority of democratic capitalism. And yet, for forty years, the Cold War had persisted.

The bottom line was that only the Kremlin could ensure that the end of the Cold War happened peacefully. “OK, so long as the programs do not smack of fomenting revolution,” Scowcroft wrote on a USIA proposal for a “democratic dialogue” with Eastern Europe in June.[42] At the same time, the Bush administration had no desire to broker a deal that conceded continued Soviet domination of Eastern Europe for peaceful liberalization. Facing a hostile congress and distrusting conservatives, Bush could not afford to be seen as concocting “Yalta II.” His priorities were to insure that reforms in Eastern Europe continued peacefully; to broach the German question delicately; to seek conventional arms reductions; and to respond intelligently, imaginatively, and swiftly to events that no one could predict.

James Graham Wilson is a Historian at the Department of State. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of State or the U.S. Government.

[1] George H. W Bush, “Acceptance Speech at the Republican National Convention,” August 18, 1988, available at http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/5526

[2] Robert Schlesinger, White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters: From FDR to George W. Bush, 1st ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), 363.

[3] George H. W Bush, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1989, available athttp://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=1&year=1989&month=01

[4] Excerpts of Remarks for Vice President George Bush, National Press Club, Washington, D.C., January 5, 1988, on file at George H. W. Bush Presidential Library.

[5] Alessandra Stanley, “More Worldly Than Wise,” Time, August 15, 1988, avail­able at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,968127,00.html

[6] “Address on Administration Goals Before a Joint Session of Congress," February 9, 1989, available at http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=51%20&year=%201989&month=2

[7] Ibid.

[8] Quoted in David Hoffman, “Gorbachev Seen as Trying to Buy Time for Reform,” Washington Post, January 23, 1989, Al.

[9] George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 13.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., 12

[12] Ibid., 46.

[13] “Zapis' besedy M. S. Gorbacheva s H. Kissingerom, Yanvarya 17, 1989 goda,” Fond 1, Opis 1, Archive of the Gorbachev Foundation.


[14] “Kissinger’s Report on Meeting with Gorbachev”; January 17, 1989; James A. Baker Papers, box 108, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey.


[15] Ibid.


[16] “Proposed Agenda for Meeting with the President”; July 13,1990; James A. Baker Papers, box 115, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey.


[17] “Talking Points for Jan. 23 1989 Cabinet Meeting,” James A. Baker Papers, box 108, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey.


[18] “Baker’s notes on U.S.-Soviet relations,” February 1989, James A. Baker Papers, box 108, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Col­lections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey.


[19] Lou Cannon, “Reagan Is Concerned about Bush's Indecision,” Washington Post, May 6,1989, A21.


[20] As Giovanni Arrighi puts it: “The mobilization of the world's finan­cial resources to rescue the U.S. economy from the deep recession of the early 1980s, and simultaneously to escalate the armaments race with the USSR, transformed the United States into the greatest debtor nation in world history, increasingly dependent on cheap East Asian credit, labor, and commodities for the reproduction of its wealth and power.” Giovanni Arrighi, “The World Economy and the Cold War,” in Cambridge History of the Cold War, eds. Leffler and Westad, 3:41.


[21] George Soros, “International Economic Assistance for Poland,” March 24, 1989, in Condoleezza Rice Files, Aid to Poland and Hungary, George H. W. Bush Presidential Library.


[22] “Memorandum of Conversation: Telephone Call from the President to Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany,” June 23, 1989, available atwww.margaretthatcher.org/document/B1E15262B42B47749865ACF3306DE0AB.pdf


[23] National Intelligence Estimate, “Soviet Policy toward the West: The Gor­bachev Challenge,” April 1989, available athttp://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB261/us11.pdf


[24] Ibid.


[25] Robert B. Zoellick, “An Architecture of U.S. Strategy after the Cold War,” in In Uncertain Times: American Foreign Policy after the Berlin Wall and 9/11, Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey Legro (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 28.


[26] For a vivid description of this campaign, see Sidney Blumenthal, Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War (New York: Harper, 1991).


[27] Baker with DeFrank, Politics of Diplomacy, 55.


[28] Zapis' Besedy A.N Jakovleva S federal'nym kantslerom FRG G. Kolem, January 9, 1989, in Aleksandr Yakovlev, Perestrojka: 1985-1991. Neizdannoe, maloiz- vestnoe, zabytoe (Moscow: MGD, 2008), 302.


[29] Zagladin to Gorbachev, June 22, 1989, Fond 5, Document 7223, Archive of the Gorbachev Foundation.


[30] Quoted in Ann Devroy, “Bush and Baker Disclaim Cheney’s Gorbachev View,” Washington Post, May 1,1989, A15.


[31] Cable from Jack Matlock to State Department, "U.S.-Soviet Relations: Policy Opportunities," February 22,1989, in Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton, and Vladislav Zubok (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010), 401.


[32] Ibid.


[33] Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Trans­formed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 27.


[34] Ibid., 28


[35] Ibid.


[36] “Written Responses to Questions Submitted by the Kyodo News Service of Japan,” February 16, 1989, available at http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=65&year=1989&month=2


[37] Zoellick to Baker, “NATO Summit—Possible Initiatives (Zoellick draft for Baker)”; May 15, 1989; James A. Baker Papers, box 108, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey.


[38] Ibid.


[39] George H. W Bush, “Remarks at the Texas A&M University Commencement Ceremony in College Station,” May 12, 1989, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=413&year=%201989&month=5


[40] Ibid.


[41] George H. W Bush, “Remarks to the Citizens in Mainz, Federal Republic of Germany,” May 31, 1989, available at http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=413&year=1989&month=5


[42] Memo, Nancy Bearg Dyke to Brent Scowcroft, June 27, 1989, 1, OA/ID 91124-009, Brent Scowcroft Collection, George Bush Presidential Library.

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