The Wall Fell

I didn't get a chance to post this earlier, but it needs to be posted, because we're too willing to forget certain key facts:

1. Communism failed.

2. The West won the Cold War.

3. Freedom can only be earned and preserved when good men stand up for it.


When I was a kid, the Berlin wall was an accepted part of the world. It had only been there since 1961, yet people treated it as if it were a permanent fixture. And the Cold War was a similar part of our world -- we weren't going to defeat the Soviet Union, so we had to learn to live with them and the scourge of Communism. Millions upon millions of people lived behind walls and fortified borders in Eastern Europe, starving for freedom (and food) under an inhuman system of oppression.

That's no longer true. In fact, it's part of the ashbin of history. And it is so because of brave men and women, in both the West and the East, who stood up against the totalitarian regimes and dared to believe the world could change so much that we now have college students who literally weren't born before the Berlin Wall fell. That says something about how we should not dare to dream what some view as impossible. Remember, even some among Reagan's inner circle didn't want him to say those four words...

Ronald Reagan would embarrass himself and the country by asking Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, which was going to be there for decades. So the National Security Council (NSC) staff and State Department had argued for many weeks to get Reagan's now famous line removed from his June 12, 1987, Berlin speech.

...Well before a draft was circulated, I called the writer who had the assignment, Peter Robinson, and told him I was going to an Oval Office meeting.

Shortly before we walked to the West Wing, Peter told me what he wanted in the draft: "Tear down the wall." I pushed back in my chair from my desk and let loose "fantastic, wonderful, great, perfect" and other inadequate exclamations. The Oval Office meeting agenda went quickly, with little chance to pop the question. But the discussion ceased for a moment toward the end, and I crowded in: "Mr. President, it's still very early but we were just wondering if you had any thoughts at all yet on the Berlin speech?"

Pausing for only a moment, Reagan slipped into his imitation of impressionist Rich Little doing his imitation of Ronald Reagan—he made the well-known nod of the head, said the equally familiar "well," and then added in his soft but resonant intonation while lifting his hand and letting it fall: "Tear down the wall."

I had refused to talk to Peter until I was back in my office, such was my excitement. Slamming the door I shouted: "Can you believe it? He said just what you were thinking. He said it himself."

So it was "the president's line" now. And that made it easier, though not dispositively so, for the speechwriting department to fight off objections. But this is where the Berlin address was about more than the killer sentence.

...Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has suggested that the Reagan years show that "containment" worked. In fact, Reagan explicitly and repeatedly rejected containment as too accommodationist, saying "containment is not enough."

As part of this strategy, Reagan established offensive-minded, victory-conscious rubrics like "forward strategy for freedom," "not just world peace but world freedom," and "expanding the frontiers of freedom."

Part of this was Reagan's attempt to codify while in office a Cold War narrative developed by the anti-communist conservative movement that formed him over three decades even as he helped form it. That narrative saw liberal notions about how to handle communist regimes as provoking aggression or causing catastrophe: Franklin Roosevelt's Stalin diplomacy, Harry Truman's Marshall mission to China, John Kennedy's offer of a "status quo" to Khrushchev in Vienna, Jimmy Carter's statement that we have an "inordinate fear of communism."

Reagan had the carefully arrived at view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that they saw acts of conciliation as weakness, and that rather than making nice in return they felt an inner compulsion to exploit this perceived weakness by engaging in more acts of aggression. All this confirmed the criminal mind's abiding conviction in its own omniscience and sovereignty, and its right to rule and victimize others.

Accordingly, Reagan spoke formally and repeatedly of deploying against criminal regimes the one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity, their ontological weakness. This was the sort of moral confrontation, as countless dissidents and resisters have noted, that makes these regimes conciliatory, precisely because it heartens those whom they fear most—their own oppressed people. Reagan's understanding that rhetorical confrontation causes geopolitical conciliation led in no small part to the wall's collapse 20 years ago today.

When people talk about speaking "truth to power" Reagan was a true example of what it means.

One other thing -- it says something about our current President that he can manage to appear via video at the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall, and never mention the truly evil forces that helped build and keep the wall -- the Soviet Union, Kruschev, or Communism -- nor mention agents of true change who helped bring down the world through their words and action -- Ronald Reagan, Margeret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II. But hey, he managed to mention himself.