It was, however, during his second term as president that Reagan forged a diplomatic relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, chairman of the Soviet Union. This was the context in which Reagan gave the following speech at the Berlin Wall, on the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin, in which he challenged Gorbachev to tear down the wall. The West German government requested that the president’s schedule be adjusted to allow him to visit Berlin on his way back from an economic summit in Venice. Reagan’s visit brought a protest to the Berlin streets. By some accounts, the 50,000 who gathered the day before Reagan spoke to protest about American foreign policy outnumbered the 45,000 Berliners who attended the speech. By way of comparison, 450,000 people had witnessed John F. Kennedy’s ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech in 1963.
Reagan spoke at the Brandenburg Gate behind two panes of bulletproof glass. West Berlin was all but an armed fortress. The Tiergarten was coiled with barbed wire. Anyone who wanted to see the leader of the free world had to pass through four barriers manned by armed guards and policemen in plain sight and in plain clothes. Reagan knew the value of what he was defending. As he said on another occasion: ‘democracy is worth dying for because it is the most deeply honourable form of government ever devised by men’.
Chancellor Kohl, Governing Mayor Diepgen, ladies and gentlemen: Twenty-four years ago, President John F. Kennedy visited Berlin, speaking to the people of this city and the world at the City Hall. Well, since then two other presidents have come, each in his turn, to Berlin. And today I, myself, make my second visit to your city. We come to Berlin, we American presidents, because it’s our duty to speak, in this place, of freedom. But I must confess, we’re drawn here by other things as well: by the feeling of history in this city, more than 500 years older than our own nation; by the beauty of the Grunewald and the Tiergarten; most of all, by your courage and determination. Perhaps the composer Paul Lincke understood something about American presidents. You see, like so many presidents before me, I come here today because wherever I go, whatever I do: Ich hab noch einen Koffer in Berlin. [I still have a suitcase in Berlin.] Our gathering today is being broadcast throughout Western Europe and North America. I understand that it is being seen and heard as well in the East. To those listening throughout Eastern Europe, a special word: Although I cannot be with you, I address my remarks to you just as surely as to those standing here before me. For I join you, as I join your fellow countrymen in the West, in this firm, this unalterable belief: Es gibt nur ein Berlin. [There is only one Berlin.]
Berlin is the crucible of European history in the twentieth century. American presidents were drawn to it because it was where the world turned. On 26 June 1963 John F. Kennedy had famously declared himself a citizen of Berlin. The two other presidents to whom Reagan refers are Nixon and Carter. All the Berlin speeches were essentially the same; until Reagan they are all variations on a theme by Kennedy. In February 1969, Nixon said that ‘all the people of the world are truly Berliners’. In July 1978 Carter described Berlin, in John Winthrop’s biblical phrase, as a city on a hill. After the wall came down, Clinton in 1994 and Bush in 2002 came to congratulate Berliners on their freedom, and Obama reminded them that the Soviet Union had tried ‘to extinguish the last flame of freedom in Berlin’.
As all the presidents said, the wall divided ideas as well as people. Reagan states this case up-front and concludes his opening by prefiguring the dramatic purpose that brings him to Berlin. Echoing Kennedy’s famous German sentence, Reagan gets the songwriter wrong. The composer of ‘I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin’, later recorded by Marlene Dietrich, was in fact Ralph Maria Siegel. The sentence in German has become a presidential tradition. Kennedy started it. Carter and Reagan did it and then Obama, in July 2008, told Berlin, in German, that everyone in the world was, in a sense, a citizen of Berlin. In this speech Reagan also slips into German too often, but his central claim is clear, no matter what language it is in: Es gibt nur ein Berlin. There is only one Berlin.
Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same – still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state. Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly; here, cutting across your city, where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world. Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.
The wall itself was a physical demarcation between two worlds. The distinction Reagan draws conceptually here is the philosophical division between progress and backwardness, embodied in Berlin in stone. The wall had been erected in 1961 to stop East Germans fleeing to the West. Reagan describes the apparatus of the totalitarian state to show that it was not the wall that prevented free access through the city. The wall symbolised the lack of free access that the military police enforced at the point of a gun.
The Berlin Wall stood 12 feet tall and created a barrier between two ways of life. On the Western side there was a riot of colours. Crowds thronged the streets and the windows displayed the goods of consumer capitalism that, on the Eastern side, were absent. The grey buildings of the East still bore the marks of shelling and the streets were thinly populated with shuddering cars and badly dressed pedestrians. East Berlin was heavily guarded, complete with dog runs and rows of barbed wire. The wall split the city in two, split families in two, it split the modern world in two. It is less controversial to say now than it was then, that Reagan was, literally and philosophically, on the right side of the divide.
In the Reichstag a few moments ago, I saw a display commemorating this fortieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan. I was struck by the sign on a burnt-out, gutted structure that was being rebuilt. I understand that Berliners of my own generation can remember seeing signs like it dotted throughout the western sectors of the city. The sign read simply: ‘The Marshall Plan is helping here to strengthen the free world.’ A strong, free world in the West, that dream became real. Japan rose from ruin to become an economic giant. Italy, France, Belgium – virtually every nation in Western Europe saw political and economic rebirth; the European Community was founded. In West Germany and here in Berlin, there took place an economic miracle, the Wirtschaftswunder. Adenauer, Erhard, Reuter, and other leaders understood the practical importance of liberty – that just as truth can flourish only when the journalist is given freedom of speech, so prosperity can come about only when the farmer and businessman enjoy economic freedom. The German leaders reduced tariffs, expanded free trade, lowered taxes. From 1950 to 1960 alone, the standard of living in West Germany and Berlin doubled. Where four decades ago there was rubble, today in West Berlin there is the greatest industrial output of any city in Germany – busy office blocks, fine homes and apartments, proud avenues, and the spreading lawns of parkland. Where a city’s culture seemed to have been destroyed, today there are two great universities, orchestras and an opera, countless theaters, and museums. Where there was want, today there’s abundance – food, clothing, automobiles – the wonderful goods of the Ku’damm … In the 1950s, Khrushchev predicted: ‘We will bury you.’ But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind – too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Fr
eedom is the victor.
This is the measure of the freedom that really counted in the end. Reagan is smart enough, perhaps he is American enough, to know that the way freedom really bit was commercially. This section could easily have been, after the example of Cicero or Jefferson, a paean to the democratic virtues or the beautiful state of liberty. It could have been a long exposition of the value of a free press, of freedom of association and speech. All of these questions were present in a Berlin which had passed from Hitler to Stalin, a unique journey through unfreedom.
Yet Reagan makes a less conventional argument which is, for that reason, more profound still. He poses the question economically. He makes the explicit link between democracy and capitalism, each of which helps the other. Growth and prosperity, the fruits of freedom, are made permissible by liberty and measure out its true worth. This is no vulgarisation. The difference in both the quality and the supply of goods available in West Berlin compared with the East was a major component in the destruction not just of the wall but of the system that built and maintained it. It is a vital link in the argument precisely because it was not widely accepted. The Left in most nations upheld liberty in theory but regarded capitalism as part of the system of oppression, not the liberator. Reagan’s defence of capitalism is full-throated, important and right. It is the pivot of the speech; the pivot of the historical change.
And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control. Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
The chief writer of this speech, Peter Robinson, struggled to formulate the best line. His first draft read: ‘Herr Gorbachev, bring down this wall.’ In the second draft he wrote ‘take down’ instead. Then he tried it in German: ‘Herr Gorbachev, machen Sie dieses Tor auf.’ Eventually, at a Berlin dinner party Robinson heard a lady called Ingeborg Elz almost supply the right phrase: take down that wall.
That was when the trouble really started. Reagan had to contend with the opinions of so many advisers, not a problem Pericles ever had. Officials from the State Department and the National Security Council, including the deputy security adviser Colin Powell, were adamant it should not be included. Reagan had in fact made similar speeches before in Berlin. In 1982 he had asked: ‘Why is that wall there?’ In 1986, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the wall, he had declared: ‘I would like to see the wall come down today, and I call upon those responsible to dismantle it.’
That did not impress the officials, all of whom thought it too provocative to preach to Mr Gorbachev in the midst of his campaign for perestroika (restructuring), glasnost (opening) and, the forgotten part of the trinity, uskorenie (acceleration). The assistant secretary of state for Eastern European affairs called Reagan to object. The National Security Council (NSC) sent a stiff memorandum and the American ambassador in Berlin suggested the president should say: ‘One day this ugly wall will disappear’ as if it were set to walk away by itself. The State Department and the NSC submitted their own drafts, which said nothing about tearing the wall down. Secretary of State George Shultz tried to delete the line. At the crucial drafting meeting the president himself smiled and concluded: ‘Let’s leave it in.’ On the day of the speech itself, the State Department and the NSC tried again. In the limousine on the way to the Berlin Wall, the president said: ‘The boys at State are going to kill me but it is the right thing to do.’
Reagan was right. The effect, when he delivered it, was electrifying, and it is worth considering why this should be so. If Kennedy had said it a quarter of a century earlier it would have been no more than an expression of an unlikely hope. It would have been a statement about American virtue: we think your wall is a prison wall. By the time Reagan comes to Berlin the prospect of change in Russia is real. This is why his set-up is important. He does not build to the famous injunction to tear down the wall with an attack on Russia. On the contrary, he is emollient and cajoling. He takes seriously the reports that Mr Gorbachev may be in the process of starting down a new path. The demand to tear down the wall then becomes the necessary conclusion to an argument begun in Russia rather than merely yet another statement of American and Russian Cold War hostility.
But we must remember a crucial fact: East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other. And our differences are not about weapons but about liberty … We in the West stand ready to cooperate with the East to promote true openness, to break down barriers that separate people, to create a safe, freer world. And surely there is no better place than Berlin, the meeting place of East and West, to make a start. Free people of Berlin: Today, as in the past, the United States stands for the strict observance and full implementation of all parts of the Four Power Agreement of 1971. Let us use this occasion, the 750th anniversary of this city, to usher in a new era, to seek a still fuller, richer life for the Berlin of the future. Together, let us maintain and develop the ties between the Federal Republic and the Western sectors of Berlin, which is permitted by the 1971 agreement. And I invite Mr. Gorbachev: Let us work to bring the Eastern and Western parts of the city closer together, so that all the inhabitants of all Berlin can enjoy the benefits that come with life in one of the great cities of the world.
Like his hero Roosevelt, delivering a fireside chat to the nation on the wireless, Reagan is masterfully conversational even in his solemn moments. The first president to come alive on camera, Reagan filled the screen and had a comforting speaking voice. As befits a former actor, Reagan knew how to hit the stresses in a line, but the fact that his words were so good means some credit is due to his writers. There has rarely been a clearer divide between speaker and writer than there was with Reagan. Henry Kissinger has noted that the only part of the job that Reagan sweated over was the preparation of speeches. Notoriously indolent, Reagan once said: ‘It’s true that hard work never killed anybody, but I figured why take the chance?’ He employed, instead, writers like Peggy Noonan, the finest of modern speechwriters, author of Reagan’s superb speech at Pointe du Hoc in Normandy on the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day landings.
This raises the perennial question of to whom the great lines are due – the writer or the speaker? The answer is that the fiction must be maintained. There was only one man behind the bulletproof glass partition at the Brandenburg Gate. It was Reagan who had the final say on whether to deliver the immortal line. He did and so it is his. So is the argument he makes here, which is a universal case for the trinity of liberty, capitalism and democracy. Reagan believed that everyone would draw the same conclusion he had, if given the opportunity. Reagan takes the conflict between East and West of the wall into the world. This is the world made safe by democracy, the extension of the argument begun seven decades before by Woodrow Wilson.
One final proposal, one close to my heart: Sport represents a source of enjoyment and ennoblement … And what better way to demonstrate to the world the openness of this city than to offer in some future year to hold the Olympic Games here in Berlin, East and West? In these four decades, as I have said, you Berliners have built a great city. You’ve done so in spite of threats – the Soviet att
empts to impose the East-mark, the blockade. Today the city thrives in spite of the challenges implicit in the very presence of this wall. What keeps you here? … Something that speaks with a powerful voice of affirmation, that says yes to this city, yes to the future, yes to freedom. In a word, I would submit that what keeps you in Berlin is love – love both profound and abiding. Perhaps this gets to the root of the matter, to the most fundamental distinction of all between East and West. The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship … As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‘This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality’. Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom. And I would like, before I close, to say one word. I have read, and I have been questioned since I’ve been here about certain demonstrations against my coming. And I would like to say just one thing, and to those who demonstrate so. I wonder if they have ever asked themselves that if they should have the kind of government they apparently seek, no one would ever be able to do what they’re doing again. Thank you and God bless you all.
A slight whimper to end a speech so powerful which reminds me of the annual last-minute scramble, at the Labour Party conference, for a policy announcement to crowbar uneasily into the text. How can we make the news?, I can hear Reagan’s writers say. Let’s call for Berlin to have the Olympic Games. The judgement looks faulty in retrospect but the immediate reaction to the speech was underwhelming. The German weekly Die Zeit did not even quote the request to Gorbachev. The 1987 speech really only came to prominence after the wall came down in 1989. By then it had begun to sound like the words of a prophet. This invites us to wonder about how much a speech like this changes the course of history. Condoleezza Rice co-wrote a book about the end of the Cold War in which she gave the speech only a walk-on part. Former Secretary of State George P. Schultz does not mention it at all in 1,184 pages of his memoirs. The political theatre certainly seems to have helped Mr Gorbachev with uskorenie, with acceleration.
When They Go Low, We Go High Page 16