Cold War Pivots on 'Tear Down This War'
Good morning, it’s June 12. Today is the 89th birthday of George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the United States and the father of the 43rd president.
Twenty-six years ago today, the man who elevated George Bush to national office gave one of the most celebrated speeches in his own presidency. The setting was the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the very symbol of Europe’s Cold War division between western democracies and Soviet-controlled “satellite” states.
When President Reagan’s arrived in Berlin on June 12, 1987, relations between Washington and Moscow were at a historic pivot point.
Although he got little credit for it either in the United States or abroad, Reagan had been fixated on reducing the world’s nuclear arsenals for many years. The hang-up had long been the Kremlin’s aversion to allowing inspectors inside the Soviet Union to verify implementation of arms reduction treaties. This reluctance convinced many Americans, Reagan included, that the Russians were not to be trusted.
In 1986, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev altered this calculation. After the foreign ministers of NATO allies called for elimination of intermediate and short-range nuclear missiles on a “global and effectively verifiable basis,” Gorbachev publicly embraced the concept, known as “double global zero.” He announced that his government would destroy all such missiles, if the U.S. would do the same.
In so doing, the Soviet leader threw the verification issue back onto the Americans’ laps. Gorbachev’s gambit achieved its purpose. Although U.S. intelligence services warned the White House that mutual verification might actually work to the Soviets’ advantage, Reagan didn’t care. This was the opening he’d been looking for, and he instructed Secretary of State George Shultz to begin negotiating a pact.
But the arms race – and the insane doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” -- was only half the problem as far as Ronald Reagan was concerned. The other half was the Soviet Union’s virtual enslavement of its own people and those of Eastern Europe.
And so, on his visit to Germany 26 years ago today, it was Reagan’s turn to see if Gorbachev was bluffing. At the Brandenburg Gate ceremony, before a huge crowd, the American president praised the sounds of “reform and openness” emanating from Moscow, but said the open question was whether they signaled “profound changes” or were “token gestures.”
“There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace,” Reagan said. “Secretary General 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. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
It was a dramatic gesture, which the aging thespian well knew.
“Then it was on to the Brandenburg Gate where I addressed…tens of thousands of people – stretching as far as the eye could see,” Reagan wrote in his diary. “I got a tremendous reception – interrupted 28 times by cheers.”
Later, Reagan would tell his best biographer that he could hear the anger in his own voice as he spoke the famous lines in his speech; Reagan was miffed because he had learned just before delivering his words that East German police had forced thousands of people on the other side of the wall away from loudspeakers so they couldn’t hear the president's remarks.
It wouldn’t matter. Reagan’s words echoed from Berlin all the way to Moscow. And instead of falling on deaf ears, they resonated in the heart of a Soviet leader who was ready for change. The immediate future portended an invitation by Reagan to his Russian counterpart to visit Washington, where he would receive a reaction so unexpected it resulted in the incongruous phrase: “Gorby Fever.”
Out of such personalized responses can come the breaking of gridlock, and human progress.
