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Tear Down This Wall: The Speech That Almost Wasn’t
To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this Sunday, my friend over at the Intercollegiate Review, Jed Donahue, asked me to write a word or two about President Reagan’s “tear down this wall” address.
To tell you the truth, I resisted, putting Jed off by noting that I’d written the story of the speech–and done so at some length–in my memoir of the Reagan White House, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. Jed’s counterargument: “Today’s college students were still in junior high when that book came out. The story may not be new to you, but it will be to them.”
Jed prevailed and I wrote:
Yet if you’d like proof that history isn’t predetermined—that history contains within itself a multitude of alternative realities, of near misses and might-have-beens—consider the address that President Ronald Reagan delivered at the Brandenburg Gate twenty-nine months before the Berlin Wall came down. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Those words were very nearly dropped from the president’s text.
How do I know? I wrote the address.
And now that I see the item in print — or, rather, online — I have the feeling he was right.
Published in General
Jed was right! Those words went right to the point and said it all. The younger generation needs to hear them.
My goodness, what a moving video! I had never heard it before.
Peter, I have an assignment for you. In two years we need a speech to be delivered at the GOP convention that refers to the “walls” put up by Obama and the left that prevent entrepreneurs from creating jobs, Congress from doing its job, Americans from living without fear of the IRS, and so on. The speech would end with, “My fellow Americans, we must tear down those walls.”
Thanks for posting this. Very moving, indeed. The last line in the video is equally important: “Because we remained strong, the Soviets came back to the table.” Depressing — heartbreaking, really — to think how far we have retreated from this idea.
Thanks–and the next time Jed comes up with a suggestion, I’ll just save time by agreeing right away.
The magnitude of the line hit me again when my daughter was taking history in high school and was studying the end of the Cold War. I smile and looked at her and said the line. She was stunned that I knew this. And I explained to her that although it was history to be learned and studied to her, I lived it. But that I also knew as soon as I heard it, I was witnessing an historical moment.
A wonderful story, Steve, and one that means a lot to me. I’m constantly worried about the problem of making our children see what we saw and understand what we understood. The adequate teaching history–the transmission of the American legacy to the next generation–strikes me as a hard, hard problem.
So Peter’s book, not being recently published and promoted, is relegated to a history that will no longer be taught? We at Ricochet cannot allow that to happen. I have a copy of “How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life,” and though I will refrain from a review here, I will proclaim it as magnificent. It is a “coming of age” story like no other. What’s more, the book is available as an audiobook from Audible.com. Our podcast hosts, to my knowledge, have never mentioned this. And to top it off, the narrator is the humble author himself. Magnificent words, read magnificently.
A few years ago Peter was in Austin to interview Gov. Perry for an episode of Uncommon Knowledge. It was held in the ballroom at the Stephen F. Austin and Ricochet had Our very own table (great seats, by the way). With this interview was a presentation by Peter on the anniversary of The Speech. I was sitting next to, if I heard correctly, Blue Yeti’s Mom. When Peter’s presentation of The Speech concluded (with plenty of video to boot) We applauded, and I turned Her way, both of Us with tears, and She exclaimed,”Isn’t this just thrilling?!”
Thrilling, indeed.
I’ll never forget it.
In May, my husband and I found ourselves sharing a beautiful B&B in the south of Spain with a lovely British couple in their sixties. We chatted pleasantly in the sun-splashed garden over gin and tonics, and learned that he had been an intelligence officer during the Cold War, based in Washington, DC, in the 80s.
I was all ears—eager first person accounts of Reagan and the front lines. Instead he shocked me by dismissing the whole thing as a giant charade. The wall came down and no one got hurt, did they? “The Soviet Union was obviously never a real threat, was it?” he said, all smiles and English charm. The whole thing was down to the insidious propaganda of the Carlisle Group, “the most evil people in the world,” whose sole aim was to foment war to drive up the production and sale of weapons.
I said, “What about the gulag? Was not Communism an evil ideology with real victims in their millions?” At that point, a sort of psychic abyss opened between us, and we all knew that, despite the perfect setting the mutual friendly-feelings, there would be no real meeting of minds.
That fresh experience makes me all the more alert to your basic point about the precariousness of good outcomes, Peter. There was nothing inevitable about the triumph of freedom over tyranny. It came down to the vision and commitment and courage and willingness-to-suffer of a few in the face of intense opposition. So it always has been and so it always will be with moral goodness in the world.
Thank you again for the part you played in that crucial moment, which, no doubt will serve before God to “cover a multitude of sins”. :)
God help us all be on the side of right, when our own challenge comes!
poetic. and frustrating.
Dear Capt. Spaulding,
a) You’re my new best friend for life
b) I intend to print your comment and show it to my kids. They’ll be astonished.
Thanks–many, many thanks,
Peter
“There are times,” wrote the Cambridge historian Geoffrey Elton, “when I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of Winston Churchill–whether they can see that, no matter how much better the details, often damaging, of man and career become known, he still remains, quite simply, a great man.”
I’d say something similar about the Cold War: Either you see that everything–everything–was at stake; either you recognize that, despite their many flaws, Truman, Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II were genuinely great human beings; either you see that, or you see…nothing.
Thanks for the kind words, Katievs. I hope the speech cuts some ice with St. Peter when the moment comes, but what I’m really counting on to get into heaven is being able to say that I was married to Mrs. Robinson. Any woman who put up with me, I will correctly note, had to have been a saint.
I have exactly the same idea. Whenever I picture myself in front of the Judgment Seat, all red in the face and deeply ashamed, I see myself making bold to say, “Even so! Jules chose me and I gave the world 5 of his children,” and feel sure, somehow, that that will be enough.
Five children–that’s the clincher! (We have five ourselves.)
Funny, isn’t it, how little it takes to say literally all that can be said? “Evidence-based,” indeed. Anyone who handwaves away the Soviet Union post-fall and particularly post-Venona decrypts is evil. Not mistaken; not naïve; not misinformed. Evil. Because it’s not possible to be any of the other descriptions except on purpose.
Excellent article on that historic speech, Peter. May one inquire as to how your book is going?
Peter’s article:
President Obama in Prague, April 5, 2009:
When has an English speaker ever referred to a war as having “disappeared”? As if it’s gone missing and nobody knows what happened to it. It’s almost like they say it that way on purpose.
Now here’s the paragraph directly preceding the Obama line I quoted above:
Note the extensive use of the passive voice and lack of any mention of human agency. Just helpless rubes, victims of whatever the Cold War, with all its nukes, decided to do, until it “disappeared” and left all its nukes behind.
One may.
The answer is: slowly, but well. And thanks for asking.
Peter, here is another comment aimed at putting a smile on your face.
As you may know, a whole collection of Reagan speeches are available on iTunes. But you probably don’t know that when I go for long training runs, I usually have my iPhone on shuffle. Most of what I’m listening to is music, of course, but on several occasions I have listed to the complete Tear Down this Wall speech while running over the Ben Franklin Bridge or along Kelly drive in Philadelphia. It adds a whole different dimension to the words- I humbly tip my hat to your fine work.