20th Anniversary - Fall of the Berlin Wall

This semester I've been trying to maximize a bit more on my educational opportunities at BYU. I go to more lectures, and I'm wanting/trying to get more involved in some of the extracurricular activities here at the Y.

Today a former ambassador, Dr. Lynn Hansen, was invited to come and speak with respect to the fall of the Berlin wall. Actually, his lecture turned into a lot of old Cold War stories, which were still awesome, but had little to do with today's celebration.

20 years ago this day East Germany opened up the gates through the Berlin wall that allowed citizens of that country to freely move from one country to the other for the first time in about 20 years, give or take a few.

Peter Robinson, the speechwriter who crafted Reagan's Tear Down This Wall speech, gives some insight into the construction of that speech:

In April 1987, when I was assigned to write the Brandenburg Gate address, I spent a day in Berlin with the White House advance team, the logistical experts, Secret Service agents, and press officials who went to the site of every presidential visit to make arrangements. In the evening, I broke away from the advance team to join a dozen Berliners for dinner. Our hosts were Dieter and Ingeborg Elz, who, after Dieter completed his career at the World Bank in Washington, had retired to Berlin. Although we had never met, we had friends in common, and the Elzes had offered to put on this dinner party to give me a feel for their city. They had invited Berliners of different walks of life and political outlooks--businessmen, academics, students, homemakers.

We chatted for awhile. Then I explained that, earlier in the day, the ranking American diplomat in West Berlin had told me that over the years Berliners had made a kind of accommodation with the wall. "Is it true?" I asked. "Have you gotten used to it?"

The Elzes and their guests glanced at each other uneasily. Then one man raised an arm and pointed. "My sister lives twenty miles in that direction," he said. "I haven't seen her in more than two decades. Do you think I can get used to that?" Another man spoke. As he walked to work each morning, he explained, a soldier in a guard tower peered down at him through binoculars. "That soldier and I speak the same language. We share the same history. But one of us is a zookeeper and the other is an animal, and I am never certain which is which."

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 naive. 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.'"

The day the President arrived in Berlin, State and NSC submitted yet another alternate draft. Yet in the limousine on the way to the Berlin Wall, the President told Duberstein he was determined to deliver the controversial line. Reagan smiled. "The boys at State are going to kill me," he said, "but it's the right thing to do."

What's great about that excerpt above is how personal those accounts are, and how meaningful it must have been for the people of East and West Germany to hear the preeminent world leader speaking in there behalf, saying the words that they could not utter themselves. Whenever I watch that clip of Reagan saying those words, it sends chills through my bones.

Over in Germany they had a celebration to commemorate this day and guess who was conspicuously absent from the festivities? None other than our very own President Obama. The guy has no problem giving a campaign speech from the Brandenburg Gates, where both Kennedy and Reagan gave immortal speeches, but somehow he doesn't find it necessary to celebrate one of the most significant events in the last 50 years.

Make no mistake, Communism is an evil institution. This is a day worth celebrating, indeed.