Excerpt of Tear Down This Wall by Romesh Ratnesar

INTRODUCTION

The morning of May 15, 1987, was a busy one for Ronald
Reagan. “Quite an agenda,” he recorded in the diary he
updated every day of his presidency. He reviewed names of
possible appointees to a commission on AIDS—the disease that
was claiming tens of thousands of lives but which Reagan had
only recently acknowledged. At a meeting of the National
Security Council, Reagan found his disputatious secretaries
of state and defense, George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger,
feuding over whether the United States should agree to a
major arms cut proposal made by the Soviet Union’s leader,
Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan was also informed that a U.S. Army
nurse had been kidnapped in Mozambique. “I want her rescued
if we have to blow up the whole d——m country,” he wrote
later. After lunch and a meeting with regional newspaper
journalists, the seventy-six-year-old president retired
“upstairs for the afternoon and evening,” with a stack of
material to read over the weekend. Among his papers were
drafts of the speeches he was to deliver on an upcoming trip
to Europe—including one he would be giving on June 12 in
West Germany, in the shadow of the Berlin Wall.

Even to some who knew him well, Reagan was a remote figure.
His basic kindness and decency were obvious to all he
encountered, but so were his emotional reserve and
imperviousness to events that might disrupt his simple,
sunny worldview. During his time in the White House, he
rarely budged from a daily routine that included a lunch of
soup and crackers, a light workout, and eight hours of
sleep. On the morning of Reagan’s first inauguration, the
man he had defeated, Jimmy Carter, received word that
fifty-two American hostages, held in Tehran for 444 days,
were to be released. When Carter phoned to give Reagan the
news, an aide to Reagan, Michael Deaver, told the outgoing
president that Reagan was sleeping and couldn’t be roused.
“You’re kidding,” Carter said. “No, I’m not,” Deaver
replied. By the final years of his second term, Reagan was
often disengaged from the daily business of the presidency.
His official biographer observed at the time that Reagan was
“showing signs of depression, failing to read even summaries
of important work papers, constantly watching TV and the
movies.” Reagan’s celebrated speechwriter, Peggy Noonan,
told an interviewer that when she met with Reagan before she
left the White House in 1986, she had been struck most by
his “frailty.” “He nods and encourages you,” she said, “but
you’re never quite sure he hears every word.”

But Reagan could still rise to the occasion. “He believed
that giving speeches was one of the president’s most
important duties,” says James Baker, who served under Reagan
as chief of staff and later as treasury secretary. “I’ve
never known a president who was better at utilizing the
bully pulpit, which is the most important thing that a
president has.” Reagan’s gift for public speaking had been
evident as far back as his days at Eureka College, when his
peers tapped him as their spokesman during a student strike
against the school president. That talent was honed by
thousands of commentaries, radio broadcasts, town hall
meetings, and fund-raising speeches Reagan gave before he
even mounted his first campaign for office in 1966. His
detractors confused Reagan’s eloquence with glibness,
dismissing his ability to connect with audiences as an old
actor’s trick. But those judgments now seem hollow; heard
today, Reagan’s best speeches—“Evil Empire,” the elegy for
the crew of the space shuttle Challenger, “The Boys of
Pointe du Hoc”—retain much of their rhetorical power. Reagan
approached speeches not merely as public performances but as
opportunities to present his views in clear and unmistakable
terms. Even his closest aides said they often learned about
Reagan’s position on a given issue only after he mentioned
it in a speech. Former President Gerald Ford once remarked
in wonder that Reagan “was one of the few political leaders
I have met whose public speeches revealed more than his
private conversations.”

The address delivered by Reagan in West Berlin on June 12,
1987, was the 1,279th of his presidency. He was entering the
twilight of his tenure. His long love affair with the
American people had soured over the Iran-contra scandal. His
approval rating had fallen twenty points in six months. On
the world stage too, Reagan appeared a diminished figure,
overshadowed by the dynamic Soviet leader, Gorbachev, whose
push to reform the communist system seemed to be driving the
course of history. In two dramatic summits to that point,
Reagan and Gorbachev had established a promising personal
connection, but their discussions had failed to yield
tangible progress toward ending their nations’ rivalry. At
their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, the two
leaders had come tantalizingly close to reaching an
agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons, before the deal fell
apart over Reagan’s refusal to abandon his plan to build a
space-based defense against nuclear missiles. Few experts in
either country believed the Cold War was about to end.

But the world was changing. In Eastern Europe, small-scale
rebellions against communist rule had begun to stir. On the
eve of Reagan’s visit, hundreds of East German youths
revolted near the Berlin Wall when police tried to prevent
them from listening to a rock concert in West Berlin.
Whether the American president sensed the ground moving, or
merely allowed himself to imagine it, is difficult to know.
As Reagan climbed the dais in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg
Gate just after 2 p.m. on June 12, 1987, it is unlikely that
he anticipated that by the end of the year he and Gorbachev
would sign the first U.S-Soviet treaty to reduce nuclear
weapons; that he would leave office in January 1989
declaring that “the Cold War is over”; and that just nine
months would pass after that before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And even the man known as the Great Communicator might not
have believed, on that gray Berlin afternoon, that his words
would become the most memorable delivered by any American
president in the last quarter-century. Along with the
assassination attempt against him in 1981, Reagan’s
appearance at the Brandenburg Gate remains the iconic image
of his presidency. During the 2008 presidential campaign,
Time named “Remarks on East-West Relations at the
Brandenburg Gate” one of the ten best political speeches in
history. USA Today rated “Tear down this Wall” the second
most memorable quote of the last twenty-five years.* “You
look for one line you remember a president by,” says Ken
Duberstein, a former White House chief of staff who
accompanied Reagan on that day in Berlin. “FDR is easy. Bill
Clinton is easy: ‘I did not have sex with that woman.’ What
is Ronald Reagan going to be remembered by? One line: Tear
down this Wall.”

Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is
sometimes difficult for Americans to recall the antagonism,
bitterness, and depredation that characterized the Cold War.
For more than four decades, the United States and Soviet
Union remained locked in a struggle, in President George H.
W. Bush’s words, “for the soul of mankind.” It was a
conflict that distorted national priorities and led both
countries into disastrous misadventures; hundreds of
thousands died in the proxy conflicts waged by the
superpowers around the globe. Wars against communist foes in
Korea and Vietnam claimed the lives of more than 100,000
American troops. For millions living under communism in
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the price of the
Cold War was paid in the form of dismal health standards,
diminished life expectancy, an absence of political freedom,
and the crushing of individual will. And due to the
U.S.-Soviet arms race, for half a century the world lived
with the specter of nuclear war, a hair’s-trigger away from
Armageddon.

In this contest of wills, Berlin was the most visible
staging ground. Divided into four sectors by the conquering
Allies after World War II, the city came to embody the
contrast between two competing ideologies: the vibrant,
market-oriented democracy of the West versus the gray,
statist socialism of the East. The Berlin Wall, built by the
communists in 1961, was the Cold War’s defining symbol.
Stretching over 100 miles, reinforced with concrete, barbed
wire, and dog runs, the Wall literally separated brother
from brother, neighbor from neighbor, and block from block.
During the thirty-eight-year existence of the Berlin Wall,
at least two hundred East Germans were killed and another
five thousand captured while trying to cross it.
Symbolically, the Wall stood for the mistrust that plagued
East-West relations during the postwar period.

Reagan loathed the Wall. On a trip to West Berlin in 1978,
he was taken to an eighth-floor office overlooking it and
told the story of Peter Fechter, the youth who had been
gunned down by East German police in 1962 as he tried to
crawl over. The authorities left Fechter unattended for
nearly an hour, while he bled to death. “Reagan just gritted
his teeth when he heard all of this,” says Peter Hannaford,
a longtime aide who was with Reagan that day. “You could
tell from the set of his jaw and his look and some of the
things he said that … he was very, very determined that this
was something that had to go.”

Reagan’s speechwriters knew this. From the start of the
administration, they viewed themselves as the keepers of the
flame of the Reagan revolution. The presidential trip to
West Berlin in June 1987, which came on the occasion of the
city’s 750th birthday, presented an opportunity to create
one last signature moment ...