The American Mind

Twenty years ago today, Ronald Reagan asked Mikhail Gorbachev:

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Two years later, the wall fell:

UPDATE: Via Power Line we have Peter Robinson, the writer of the speech, describing how it survived the Reagan administration bureaucracy:

Our hostess broke in. A gracious woman, Ingeborg Elz had suddenly grown angry. Her face was red. She made a fist with one hand and pounded it into the palm of the other. “If this man Gorbachev is serious with his talk of glasnost and perestroika,” she said, “he can prove it. He can get rid of this wall.”

* * * * *

Back at the White House I adapted her comment, making “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” the central line in my draft. On Friday, May 15, the speeches for the President’s trip—he would be traveling to Rome and Venice before reaching Berlin—were forwarded to the President, and on Monday, May 18, the speechwriters joined him in the Oval Office. My speech was the last we discussed. “Mr. President,” I said, “I learned on the advance trip that this speech will be heard not only in West Berlin but throughout East Germany. Is there anything you’d like to say to people on the other side of the Berlin Wall?”

The President cocked his head and thought. “Well,” he replied, “there’s that passage about tearing down the wall. That wall has to come down. That’s what I’d like to say to them.”

* * * * *

With three weeks to go before it was delivered, the speech was circulated to the State Department and the National Security Council. Both attempted to suppress it. The draft was naïve. It would raise false hopes. It was clumsy. It was needlessly provocative. State and the NSC submitted their own alternate drafts—my journal records that there were no fewer than seven. In each, the call to tear down the wall was missing.

When in early June the President and his party reached Italy (I remained in Washington), Ken Duberstein, the deputy chief of staff, sat the President down in the garden of the palazzo in which he was staying, then briefed him on the objections to my draft. Reagan asked Duberstein’s advice. Duberstein replied that he thought the line about tearing down the wall sounded good. “But I told him, ‘You’re President, so you get to decide.’ And then,” Duberstein recalls, “he got that wonderful, knowing smile on his face, and he said, ‘Let’s leave it in.’”

Robinson will be talking about the speech at the Reagan Ranch today. [via Hot Air]

When Reagan uttered his famous words few understood their historic significance:

Curiously, international media reaction was subdued, even dismissive, with the press choosing “either to ignore it or to criticize it,” Kornblum said.

Then on November 9, 1989, the brutal 29-year history of the Berlin Wall finally ended.

“It (Reagan’s speech) wasn’t really elevated to its current status until 1989, after the wall came down,” said Kornblum.

It’s fitting that today will be the dedication of Victims of Communism memorial.