In My Time - Dick Cheney [95]
Every day that I’m in office as Secretary of Defense, my admiration increases for the men and women who have chosen to serve this nation. This thought is brought home to me each time I walk out of my door into the halls of the Pentagon. In the stairwell facing my office is a saying from the prophet Isaiah. It is a fitting reminder of what you mean to America.
Isaiah said, “I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And Isaiah said, “Here I am. Send me.”
In the face of an unknown peril and in a dangerous world, each of you has answered, “Send me.” I am proud to be with you all today.
THOSE OF US ON the National Security Council had come to our jobs with a lot of experience. I had been White House chief of staff and a member of Congress, in the leadership; Jim Baker had been chief of staff and Treasury secretary; Brent Scowcroft had been NSC advisor to President Ford, and Colin Powell likewise to President Reagan. But even with all that background, we had made mistakes when we first started working together. The lesson here is that while experience matters, it’s not just each individual’s experience that’s important, but experience working together as a team. We learned a lot from our missteps during the failed coup as well as from our success with Just Cause. And I believe it was because we’d had real experience managing crises together that we were able to respond as well as we did eight months later when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
THE MOST MOMENTOUS EVENT of 1989 happened in Berlin. In October I had been there, and I was feeling greater optimism than I had earlier about the sincerity of Mikhail Gorbachev and the historic nature of the changes we were seeing. But even as thousands of East Germans were finding ways to flee to the West that fall, the Berlin Wall was still standing. The East German government was still trying to force people to live under a system and society they would not freely choose. “The biggest symbol of the inadequacy of the government in East Germany is the continued presence of the Wall,” I said in West Berlin, and I noted that “the sooner it comes down, the better off it will be for everyone.”
It is hard now to describe the elation when the Wall did come down in November 1989. I remember the nightly coverage of people who had been trapped for years in the communist bloc suddenly able to stream across the border. I remember Leonard Bernstein at Christmas conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in both East and West Berlin. The words of “Ode to Joy” were changed so that it became “Ode to Freedom.”
As I watched the celebrations on TV, I kept looking for a glimpse of my good friend Dave Nicholas. He’d been best man at my wedding, chairman of my first campaign for Congress, and was now my representative to NATO, and I knew that he and his family were in the middle of those happy crowds somewhere. Dedicated to the idea of freedom in Eastern Europe, Dave would later become an ambassador from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to Ukraine, where he helped in the movement for democratic reform. Before he died unexpectedly in Kiev in 2005, he would see the triumph of the Orange Revolution and thrill to it, as did we all.
After forty years, we were seeing the Iron Curtain lift and the Soviet threat diminish, and it was happening in a peaceful and promising way. I had no doubt that the United States military was the most effective single reason for the transformation we were witnessing. The victory of the West in the Cold War still stands as a preeminent historic example of peace achieved through strength.
But there was another dimension as well. Ronald Reagan’s determination that people should live in freedom was part of it. His clear call in 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”—deservedly lives in history, as do the words of Pope John Paul II: “Be not afraid.” When the pope visited his native Poland in 1979 he took that biblical message behind the Iron Curtain, where it inspired freedom-seekers such