President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 call to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall is considered a defining moment of his presidency. But according to Reagan’s speechwriter, Hoover Institution fellow Peter Robinson, those powerful words came close to being left unsaid.
On the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ronald Reagan’s former speechwriter and current Hoover Institution fellow Peter M. Robinson shares what inspired those now famous words – “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” – and how they were almost cut from the speech.
The passage – which includes the legendary line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” – was almost cut after State Department and National Security Council advisers found them outlandish and provocative, Robinson said. In one case, a White House official thought it was even un-presidential, he recalled.
But after the Berlin Wall toppled – 30 years ago, on Nov. 9, 1989 – Reagan’s words, delivered not two years earlier on June 12, 1987, came to define a turning point in U.S.-Soviet relations. What was once deemed audacious had become auspicious.
“The speech became retroactively prophetic, if that makes sense,” said Robinson, who is the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at Hoover. “Once the wall fell, the speech seemed to have summed up and even predicted the final phase of the Cold War.”
