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Reagan’s Address at the Brandenburg Gate—A Retrospective Look 20 Years Later

From time to time, American Presidents utter a line that captures the very essence of their presidency. John F. Kennedy called a generation of Americans to service in his 1961 inaugural when he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you…” George H.W. Bush's post-Gulf War fall from grace was summed up in six words uttered at the 1988 Republican National Convention: "Read my lips, no new taxes!" For Ronald Reagan, his defining moment came at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate in West Germany where he challenged the very symbol of communist oppression, a struggle that consumed a large part of his presidency.

June 12 marks the 20th anniversary of Reagan's call to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall and reunite East and West Germany. The source of this line has been a topic of debate among both scholars and former officials in the Reagan administration. Some have said Reagan was simply repeating the line written by speechwriter Peter Robinson, who was charged with drafting the speech. Others have said the line was Reagan's own, derived from an idea held long before his presidency. The line was removed in several drafts, but Reagan surprised everyone when he reinserted the line while on stage. We explored this issue in several of our interviews for the Ronald Reagan Oral History Project. Below are some of the responses we received.

President Reagan at the Berlin Wall, Brandenburg Gate, Federal Republic of Germany, June 12, 1987.

Richard V. Allen, national security advisor: (in 1978) We went on to Berlin and got the consulate to provide us a little van and we went out to the Wall. The ladies got out, my wife Pat, Irene Hannaford, Nancy got out, the Governor, Peter, and I got out and we stand there and we’re looking at the Wall. Of course, I'd lived in Berlin before the Wall, I'd been there many times since the Wall, and he just looked at it and after what seemed a long, long time he turned to me and said, "You know, Dick, we've got to find a way to knock this thing down." Then nine years later he would stand in front of the Wall and say, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Really important because the notion that some speechwriter, a good one, Peter Robinson, put that into his head is wrong, entirely. It was his idea. Like most of the ideas that he had, they were his. They weren’t put to him by some pointy-headed guy or a speechwriter.

A.B. Culvahouse, White House Counsel: I remember that that one line was a matter of some internal debate until President Reagan decided it—there was a staff concern that there would be people in the future who would look back and say, "There goes Reagan again, making a statement that's just totally unrealistic."
Stephen Knott: "Tear down this wall."
Jeff Chidester: A lot of people didn’t know about it until he gave it, isn't that right? I think I heard a story that it kept going back and forth, they kept taking it out—
A.B. Culvahouse: Oh yes, that's true. It was a matter of some debate within the White House. But the President decided it. At the end of the day, he wanted to say it.

Joanne Drake, Chief of Staff, post-presidency: The Berlin Wall speech is quite symbolic of that. He wanted it left in and he was advised, even at the Secretary of State level, to please take it out, that that would not be a good piece of diplomacy to leave it in there. He left it in there.

Frederick Ryan, Chief of Staff, post-presidency: When he was going to Berlin he said, "I want to say 'take down that wall.'" He met immense resistance from the State Department and the NSC [National Security Council]. It’s funny; there are probably a hundred people out there who have told me that they're the ones who wrote, "Tear down this wall." There were a handful of people on both sides of this, and the State Department was resisting it.

The only person I know who will admit that he was against it being in there was Howard Baker. Howard Baker said he was a practical politician, and you don't ask for something that can't happen. He didn’t want it in there, and he was overruled, and he humbly admits that he was wrong on that.

But the "tear down the wall"—there was an awful lot of back and forth. Finally the President said, "I'm doing it." There are different versions the speechwriters gave him, but I saw the process unfold. I know that just before the speech—President Reagan would tell this story often—they took him to the Reichstag, where you could see over the wall, and they gave him a pair of big binoculars. He was looking over the wall and he could see East German police pushing the crowds back. Word had gotten out that Ronald Reagan was going to be speaking at the wall, and they really couldn’t see it. They wanted to be within hearing range of it. And the East German police were pushing them back.

It made him mad. Maybe it was part of his days as an actor, that his audience was being driven away. It was partly the fact that he had an important message and these Communist police were stopping them from hearing it. It made him mad, and that's how he delivers the speech. He really punched that line about "Tear down this wall" because he was angry and he wasn't hesitant about showing that. He admitted afterwards that when he saw those people pushing them back, that really got him.