Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [118]
There were thousands of press people in Bonn, all there to cover a major non-event conducted by the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, the United States, Canada, and Japan. At the end of the summit, the leaders posed for pictures and issued a joint statement saying they were going to stay the course (they didn’t say which course was getting the “stay” treatment). They also said that they all opposed inflation. OK.
But the big news of the economic summit—other than the revelation that Reagan was staying in a castle owned by a guy whose godfather was Adolf Hitler—was Reagan’s first act when he got off the plane in Bonn. Unlike the rest of us who rush to file missing baggage claims, Reagan issued an Executive Order banning all trade with Nicaragua. The other world leaders were perplexed by this move—it had nothing to do with their economic summit—and they quickly tried to put as much distance between themselves and Reagan as possible. Not one of the leaders—not even his fellow righties, Margaret Thatcher of the U.K. or Brian Mulroney of Canada—endorsed Reagan’s embargo of what he called a “communist regime.”
We went to the summit’s press office and were told by the White House press officer that we should speak to “Herr Peters at the U.S. Press Center near the Bundestag” about press credentials.
“I’m sorry, but I believe you’re a little late,” Peters told us when we finally found him. “There are no more press credentials to be issued.”
We insisted that we were assured of credentials and that he was supposed to take care of us.
“I’m afraid all you can do at this point,” he said, “is to take it up with Frau Schmidt.”
Oh, great. The old “Frau Schmidt” handoff.
We found Frau Schmidt. She was packing up to go home when we got to her desk.
“I’m sorry, you’re not on the list,” she said as she leafed through a file of index cards.
“But we must be on the list,” I replied. “I spoke to the White House last week and we were guaranteed press credentials: ‘Just check with Frau Schmidt when you get to Bonn,’ I was told. So now we’ve flown all the way here, at great expense to our newspaper, and because of some foul-up, there are no credentials here for us!”
The possibility that there may have been a “foul-up,” a mistake made through carelessness, perhaps laziness, was a revolting thought to an older German, and highly insulting. She walked away—and within ten minutes she returned, handing us our official PRESIDENT REAGAN STATE VISIT press passes with complimentary lanyard embroidered with the colors of the flag of the Federal Republic of Germany.
We didn’t have much use for the passes in Bonn, except they got us our first real meal in thirty hours. The German government had opened up their parliament building to feed the press with all the free food and drinks they could consume. The spread of food was easily two blocks long.
“You know what they say,” Gary remarked with a smile as he wolfed down his fifth caviar pâté. “A well-fed press always tells the truth.”
We took off for Bitburg in the morning. Located about one hundred miles south of Bonn, Bitburg was a town of 24,000 inhabitants—12,000 Germans and 12,000 American servicemen and -women and their dependents from the nearby air force base. Leveled by the United States in an air attack on Christmas Eve, 1944 (Bitburg was a staging area and supply depot for the Nazi troops in the Battle of the Bulge), it was now a quaint little city nestled in the hills of the Rhineland.
We weren’t off the bus five minutes when we were approached by the local Welcome Wagon that had been set up for the visiting press. No running from office to office begging for press credentials here in Bitburg—these people had the red carpet rolled out for anyone with a camera, notepad, or sharpened pencil. Bernd Quirin, a financial officer with the city and head of the local German Army Reserves, recognized us as Americans and offered to give us a personal tour of Bitburg, including the cemetery.
We took him up on it, and he chauffeured us around in his Audi for the next two hours. We heard