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As President Ronald Reagan prepared to give a speech to West Berlin in 1987, Peter Robinson got to work.
Trying to figure out what Reagan should talk about, Robinson visited the German capital. The speechwriter spoke with an American diplomat, who advised him not to include any controversial statements regarding the Berlin Wall. The diplomat even told Robinson that West Berliners actually were accustomed to the wall, which first separated the city in 1961.
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Robinson couldn’t believe that. When he mentioned that claim at a dinner party that included some of the city’s residents, they gave him an earful. One mentioned he hadn’t seen his sister in two decades because of the Berlin Wall. Another mentioned he walked past a guard at the wall nearly every day.
“That soldier and I speak the same language,” the man informed Robinson. “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.”
Then the hostess chimed in. Slamming a fist into her palm for emphasis, she angrily said that if Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev were serious about open discussion, he must do one thing.
Get rid of the Berlin Wall.
Reagan Initially Wasn’t Going to Berlin
President Ronald Reagan speaks before the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on June 12, 1987. (White House)
Robinson now knew the focus of his speech.
He detailed the backstory behind Reagan’s famous “Tear Down This Wall” speech—which the president delivered in front of the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987—in a first-person article in 2007.
At first, Germany wasn’t even a planned stop on Reagan’s trip to Europe four decades ago. Reagan, who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, initially intended to stop in Rome and the Vatican (to visit Pope John Paul II) before attending the G7 Economic Summit in Venice. That was supposed to be it, then it was back to Washington, D.C.
But in 1987, Berlin was celebrating its 750th birthday. Its government requested that Reagan speak, and his administration accepted the invitation.
Before he began writing, Robinson received approval from the White House communications team to include a challenge to Gorbachev to bring down the wall. The speechwriter struggled with the phrasing in initial drafts, he recalled. After finally settling on “tear down this wall,” Robinson’s draft made its way to the president on May 15, 1987—a month before Reagan’s scheduled address in West Berlin.
A few days later, a meeting that included Robinson commenced in the Oval Office. Robinson asked Reagan about the message he wanted to convey to East Germans, where his speech would be broadcast.
“Well, there’s that passage about tearing down the wall,” Reagan replied, according to Robinson’s account. “The wall has to come down. That’s what I’d like to say to them.”
The Backlash to “Tear Down This Wall”
U.S. President Ronald W. Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev chat outside Hofdi House during a summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986. (Dirck Halstead/Getty Images)
While Reagan liked the line, others in government thought it was unnecessarily confrontational.
The State Department, including Secretary of State George Shultz, tried to get it taken out. So did the National Security Council. Robinson recounted an exchange with Colin Powell, then deputy national security adviser, in which the general tried to persuade Robinson to delete the “tear down this wall” reference. To his credit—and somewhat to his surprise—Robinson held firm.
Robinson remembered at least seven other drafts of the speech, and none of them included that phrase. The pushback was real.
At least in Shultz’s case, the secretary of state wasn’t done trying to plead his case. He did so again after the American delegation reached Italy. As their appearance in Germany neared, Robinson wrote, deputy chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein outlined the various objections to Reagan.
Duberstein then gave Reagan a copy of the speech. When the president asked for Duberstein’s opinion, he replied that he was fine with “tear down this wall,” but only one man had the power to make that call.
“Let’s leave it in,” Reagan said.
“It’s the Right Thing to Do”
President Ronald Reagan’s Speech at the Berlin Wall, June 12, 1987
That still wasn’t the end of it.
Mere hours before Reagan was to speak, the State Department and National Security Council made a last-ditch attempt to remove “tear down this wall,” Robinson recalled. As Reagan was en route to the Berlin Wall, though, his mind was made up.
“The boys at State are going to kill me, but it’s the right thing to do,” Reagan said.
Reagan spoke for approximately 26 minutes before an estimated 20,000 people. As the speech approached its midway point, Reagan implored: “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate!”
The large crowd, some waving American and German flags, responded with about 20 seconds of applause. Reagan stopped as they cheered before he resumed speaking.
“Mr. Gorbachev… Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Fifteen more seconds of loud cheers followed.
When the Wall Came Down
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, displays a fragment of the Berlin Wall. (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library)
The impact of Reagan’s speech didn’t resonate right away.
“[We] really were not impressed,” Gorbachev later recalled. “We know that Mr. Reagan’s original profession was actor.”
It took nearly 2½ years before the Berlin Wall (and all it stood for) began to come down on November 9, 1989. It was about time. The wall, as high as 15 feet in some places, not only separated East and West Berlin. It also surrounded West Berlin.
Guards stood watch in 302 towers, per research from CNN, seeking to stop East Germans from seeking the freedom that the West offered. Communists also placed 55,000 land mines along the wall to dissuade any thoughts of escape. Barbed wire, spikes, and bunkers provided further deterrents.
All that went away once the Berlin Wall came down.
At least 140 people died in escape attempts during the wall’s nearly three decades of existence, CNN reported. Those lives were not lost in vain. The wall finally fell, not necessarily because of Reagan’s speech but because of the forces of change that were at play. Berliners will never forget November 9, 1989.
“It was like heaven on earth,” said Klaus Scharioth, a former German ambassador to the U.S. “For many people in Germany, especially, of course, for those with family and friends in the other part, this was one of the best days in their lives.”
Less than a year after the Berlin Wall started to crumble, East and West Germany reunited on October 3, 1990.
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Stephen won a first-place writing award from the Louisiana Sports Writers Association while in college at Louisiana State University. While at the Sentinel, he was part of a sports staff whose daily section was ranked in the top 10th nationally multiple times by The Associated Press. He also was part of an award-winning news operation at Military.com.