November 3, 2019 • 50 mins
On June 12, 1987, President Reagan gave his Berlin Wall speech at the Brandenburg Gate that would bring about the end of the Cold War. President Reagan's speechwriter, Peter M. Robinson, tells the story behind that speech on the 30th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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thirty first. On this episode of Newtsworld, the Berlin Wall
divided East and West Germany and was a visible reminder
(01:05):
of the Cold War from nineteen sixty one until November ninth,
nineteen eighty nine, when the East German government announced their
citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. The reunification
of Germany and the dissolution of the Soviet Union might
not have happened had it not been for the vision
of President Ronald Reagan. President Reagan was a staunch anti communist,
(01:29):
and he formed a partnership with two other leaders who
shared his beliefs, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Saint John
Paul the Second. Together, the three leaders all played key
roles in the fall of communism. On June twelfth, nineteen
eighty seven, President Reagan made a speech at the Brandenburg
Gate in which he demanded mister Gorbuchoff teared down this
(01:52):
wall on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the
Berlin Wall. The speech writer who wrote that famous speech
is herewith us today. I'm pleased to introduce my guest,
Peter M. Robinson Murdoch, Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and former special assistant and speech writer for President
(02:12):
Ronald Reagan. I am here today with one of my
dear friends, extraordinarily bright conservative. But the amazing thing was,
by the time he's twenty five, he's a speech writer
(02:34):
for one of the greatest speaking presidents of American history,
Ronald Reagan. So if you don't mind, Peter can you
take us back to the beginning in Vessel, New York,
and bring us up through your early years that grew
up in Vessel, New York, medium sized town and upstate
New York. You're a Georgian nuke. But Upstate to a
New Yorker is anything north of Yonkers. So in those days,
(02:56):
Upstate was Republican country, pretty conservad bit of Republican country.
I went to public high school. I went to Dartmouth College.
I graduated from Dartmouth and then spent a couple of
years studying at Oxford. I stayed on for a third
year at Oxford to write what was going to be
the finest novel ever written. And as that year drew
(03:17):
to a close, the novel was so bad that even
I couldn't stand to read it, and so I sent letters.
In those days, we used typewriters and type letters and
stuck them in envelopes and put post to John, and
you mail the letter and wait a couple of weeks
because it was England and it took a long time
to get something to the United States. I sent letters
to everyone I could think of who might be able
(03:39):
to give me a lead on a job, and about
the only person who wrote back was Bill Buckley, the
great late conservative journalist. Bill had been kind enough to
notice some of my student writing. I wrote as a
conservative for the student newspaper at Dartmouths, and Bill said,
you liked writing, and you like politics. You ought to
come to Washington. This is now nineteen eighty two and
try to be a speechwriter. And you get to Washington,
(04:01):
get in touch with my son, Christopher. Christopher Buckley was
then writing for Vice President George H. W. Bush. In
July of nineteen eighty two, I presented myself at Christopher's office.
Christopher announced that he was leaving the job in two weeks,
and he and our mutual friend Tony Dolan, who was
(04:21):
on President Reagan's staff. Christopher and Tony talked me up.
Crazy thing to do because I'd never written a speech
before in my life and I was only twenty five,
but I came with Bill Buckley's recommendation. They talked me
up inside the White House and I got hired on
the staff of George H. W. Bush when he was
Vice President. Worked for him for about fourteen months, and
then there were a couple of openings on the President's
(04:43):
staff and I moved downstairs in the old executive office
building as it was in those days. Vice president's office
was upstairs. I moved downstairs and joined the president's staff.
So that's how it happened. It was sheer dumb luck
combined with a generosity of not one but two Buckleys
and our friend Tony Dolan, who was then chief speech
writer to Ronald Reagan. Well, I remember occasionally hanging out
(05:06):
with you guys, and it was a sort of amazing
gang who understood that they were in fact helping shape history,
and that took it very starts. Then they had a
president who understood the power of language, and who himself
had been a pretty good writer over the years. It
was always fun to watch you guys work. But the
thing I want to talk about in particular is the
(05:27):
Berlin Wall and the famous Berlin Wall speech. And I remember,
because I am somewhat older than you, I remember the
Berlin Wall going up, and I remember the scale of
the crisis when the East Germans and the Soviets put
up the Berlin Wall to keep people trapped in East Germany.
And by the mid nineteen eighties, the Soviet system is
(05:48):
beginning to really break down. The Reagan strategy in the eighties.
I believe, working with Margaret Thatcher and with John Paul
the second is one of the most successful grand stre
ategies in history, and literally dismantling the Soviet Empire without
a major wards an astonishing achievement, and a big part
(06:08):
of that was the power of language. Reagan in sixty seven,
as governor, goes to Berlin and has a throwaway line.
He says, though Walsher is ugly, they ought to tear
it down. Now he's going back to Berlin and he
wants to make a big speech and could you describe
from the inside as a speech writer, what's that process like?
You know, you know the trip's coming up, you know
(06:31):
they want to do some interesting things, but how does
that actually technically work at any given time? On the
Reagan staff, there were five or six writers. In the
course of the eight years, there were fourteen different people
who held the job of speechwriter to the President. I
was there for six years. Our friend Tony Dolan was
there for all eight years. A friend, Dana Rohbacher was
there for all eight years. And there's a meeting. Tony
(06:52):
is now chief speech writer again. He stepped down for
a bit, and now he's running the shop again. There's
a meeting around a conference table in Tony's office and
we're reviewing the big speeches coming up, and Tony turns
to me and says, well, Peter, it's been a while
since you had a big one. Why don't you take
this speech in Berlin. Nobody could have predicted that this
was going to be a speech that you and I,
(07:14):
for example, would be talking about thirty years later. But
we all knew it would likely to be one of
the half dozen or so really significant speeches the President
delivered that year. It was unusual to go on a
big research trip, but for a major speech, you'd send
a speech research trip. I flew over there to Berlin
with the pre advanced team. You know what that term means,
(07:35):
of course, But for the listeners that would be the
press officials who would liaise with the West Berlin press,
and security people who would talk to the West Berlin
security teams and so forth. And then there was a
speech writer, Robinson. I spent a day in Berlin taking notes.
Many of our listeners have no idea how big the
difference was at that point between East and West Berlin,
(07:58):
and what it was like, so I think, if you
take a minute to sort of a scene setting, if
you will, let me tell you this. My first stop
in Berlin that day was that we Americans, we traveling party,
were taken that morning to the Berlin Wall, the site
where the President would speak. I have never before and
never since, been in a place where you just felt
(08:21):
the weight of history. The air almost seemed heavy with history.
Off to one side was the Reichstag, the German parliament.
Then it was just a museum. You could still see
shell damage from the Second World War. There's a memorial
to Soviet soldiers in West Berlin with two members of
the Red Army goose stepping back and forth as a
(08:42):
kind of honor guard. In West Berlin, you climb the platform,
take the stairs up to the observation platform and peer
over the wall into East Berlin. Now behind you in
the west is a completely modern city. People are well dressed,
there are lights, shops are full, people are driving recent
model cars. In fact, I was astounded at the number
(09:05):
of Mercedes Benzes. Behind me. There's hustle and bustle and
movement and dynamism. And then you look over the wall
down unterd and Lynden under the lime trees was the
name of the avenue, and it was effectively the Pennsylvania
Avenue of Berlin. In the old days, it was the
ceremonial center of Berlin. And you see soldiers and way
(09:25):
off in the distance, one or two people and one car.
It's almost motionless, and whereas behind you there's color so striking.
You look into the east and it's as though the
color has been leached out of the picture, gray brown, drab.
The buildings seem to be slumping, and indeed we now
(09:46):
know many of them were, so they didn't have the
funds to maintain buildings properly. It's almost between life and
a kind of half life. I remember John Kennedy's phrase
from his inaugural addressed the long Twilight struggle. East Lin
seemed to exist in a kind of twilight. And as
I say, the main presence when you look over that wall,
(10:08):
you look across no man's land, barbed wire and guard towers.
The main presence was military soldiers peering at us with
binoculars and marching back and forth in front of that
no man's land in their drab gray uniforms. So that
was one place we talked and wrote speeches about the
difference between freedom and communism, and right there you could
(10:32):
see it, you could feel it. What impact did that
have on you? And that this was your first close
experience of just how big the gap was. Honestly, I
was there for business reasons. I was trying to gather
material for a speech, and the first impact that had
on me was to scare the daylights out of me.
I thought to myself, Oh, my goodness, what can I
(10:55):
possibly write for the President? What material can I possibly
give him that will be equal to the sense of history,
to the sense of moment. At this place, I was
pretty darn shaken, which leads me to the next place
I went in Berlin, which was to the office of
the Council General, the ranking American diplomat, a man called
(11:16):
John Cornbloom, who later, under Bill Clinton, became our ambassador
to have then reunited Germany. And John Cornbloom, this won't
surprise you, knude, I don't think. I sat there and
took notes, and he was full of ideas about what
Ronald Reagan should not say. No communist bashing please. West
Berlin is surrounded by East Germany, so people here are
(11:38):
very aware of the subtlety and nuance required in East
West relations. You've got several major universities here, and you
know that universities lean to the left. So please don't
have him come here and be an anti communist cowboy.
Oh and don't make a big deal out of the wall.
It's been there for a long time and they've gotten
used to it now. That was the advice from the
(12:00):
foreign policy expert. The next event, I was given a
ride in a US Army helicopter over the wall. Of course,
we stayed just inside West Berlin airspace, but we went
over the wall, and from inside West Berlin the wall
looked formidable enough. It was concrete slabs, as I recall,
they were just about thirteen feet tall. But from the
(12:22):
air you could see that no man's land, what it
was on the other side of the wall was essentially
a killing zone, and indeed dozens of people had been
killed trying to escape over that wall. That What I
remember being struck by especially was that there were large
areas of very carefully raked gravel. So I used the
headset to ask the pilot what was the gravel for,
(12:44):
and the pilot explained that that was there for the
young East German soldiers. If one of those kids got
it into his head to let a girlfriend escape in
the middle of the night or a member of his
family escape in the middle of the night, he knew
that he would have to explain the footprints in the
apple to his superior officer. I just thought they thought
of everything. Last event in Berlin for this young speechwriter
(13:09):
was that in the evening I got in a taxi,
I broke away from the American traveling party, left the
hotel and went out to a residential suburb of West Berlin,
where a couple of Berliners put on a dinner party
for me. We had never met, but Dieter and Ingeborg
else Deeter had had a career at the World Bank
(13:31):
in Washington and he had just retired back to Berlin.
So we had friends in common in Washington who got
in touch and said, can you introduce young Robinson here
to some Berliners? And that was all they were attempting
to do. There was a dinner party perhaps fifteen people,
a physician, a couple of students, people of different walks
of life, and fortunately, as they spoke English, because my
(13:54):
German is pretty hesitant. So we chatted for a moment
or two about the Berlin weather and German wine and so,
and then I blurted out. I felt I had to
ask them. I said, I've been told by the American
diplomat that you've all gotten used to the wall by now,
but I just flew over it. How can that be?
Is it so that you're used to the wall? And knute?
There was a silence. The conversation just stopped, and my
(14:17):
first thought, Oh, I've committed just the gaff or the
faux paw the diplomat wanted the President to avoid. And
then one man raised his arm and pointed one direction
and he said, my sister lives just a few kilometers
in that direction, but I haven't seen her in more
than twenty years. How do you think we feel about
the wall? And they went around the room and everybody
(14:41):
told a story about the wall. They had stopped talking
about it, but they hadn't gotten used to it. One
man described walking to his office. He walked to work
each morning, and each morning he took the same route
and passed the same guard tower, and he said, there's
a young man in that guard tower with a rifle
over his shoulder who peers down at me with binoculars.
We speak the same language, we share the same German history,
(15:05):
and yet one of us is a zookeeper and the
other is an animal. And I've never been able to
decide which was which. And then Ingeborg else, our hostess
at this event. She was wonderfully charming, kept the conversation
lighthearted until this moment and she became quite angry, and
she said, if this man Gorbchev is serious with this
glass notes, this parastroika, he can prove it by coming
(15:28):
here and getting rid of this wall. Well, that went
into my notebook, and I have to say, you knew
Ronald Reagan. I worked for Ronald Reagan. I knew immediately
that if the President had been there listening to that,
that comment would have made an impact on him. The simplicity,
the decency, the power of that comment, the in living memory,
(15:52):
this world existed in which Europe was divided in two.
And I feel frustrated that I don't know how to
convey to my own children what it was like to
be in this modern city West Berlin. I had about
an hour to myself and I went shopping to get
something for friends in the commercial district Kurfurst and Dome,
(16:16):
and it's so bright and bustling, and the stores were
filled with such beautiful goods and products. You could almost
feel you were in an ordinary city. And then you
turn a corner and look down at the end of
the street and there would be a wall, and you'd
forget about it, go into another store, and you turn
it too the wall again. And I don't know how
to describe how to make real to people who didn't
(16:40):
see it for themselves, just what that felt like to
feel that there was a truly malevolent I'll use the
term an evil empire, and that wall marks the border.
That's where it began. I don't know how to convey
with it, but that was the sense that right there
you were on the border between deeply flawed societies, of course,
(17:05):
but the border was between a fundamentally decent society and
a society that was really sick. How do we make
the kids understand now? I think they have to experience
it people who presently started getting it, because it's real
and reality overcomes fantasies. That was Reagan's great gamble, that
he could use language that was vivid and clear, like
(17:28):
evil Empire and people, after initially taking a half step back,
would say, well, yeah, I guess that's right. Next, Peter
Robinson explains the process of speech writing or President Reagan.
(17:50):
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newt Tillas Just for a second about the process of
(20:31):
generating his presidential speech. This varies from one White House
to another. I know, for example, than the George W.
Bush White House, the three principal writers, Matt Scully and
Mike Gerson and John McConnell all worked together. Those dollars
would be in a room together talking while one of
them sat at the keyboard, bouncing ideas off each other.
(20:51):
That was not the way we did it in the
Reagan White House. In fact, I can't even imagine doing
it that what. Clearly, different presidents have different styles and
different writers have differ styles. But in our white House,
the Reagan White House, once you were assigned a speech,
it was your speech, and it was up to you
to figure out what you believe the president ought to say.
(21:13):
The first draft was yours. Now, we were friends and
we would kick ideas around, but when it came to
writing the speech, each of us yours truly included. We'd
go back to his office and close the door and
sit in front of a word processor and write it.
Then the speech would go from the writer to the
chief speech writer, Tony. Tony would add his own comments editions,
(21:37):
discuss it with you. You'd talked Tony out of some
of the changes he wanted to make. Maybe, I say maybe,
because Tony's, as you know Tony. First of all, Tony's
a brilliant person, and in the second place, he's also
pretty insistent in his own positions. But you and Tony
would have a negotiation, you'd come up with a draft,
and then it would ordinarily this is important when we
(21:58):
get back to the Berlin Wall speech or narrowly, it
would go out to staffing. Next it would go to
senior White House staff and too relevant cabinet departments. Foreign
policy speech would go out to the State Department. Speech
touching on defense would go over to the Pentagon, where Cap.
Weinberger had a colonel who would review these speeches for him.
(22:19):
And then there's more negotiation. Quite often you'd get suggestions
on the draft from members of the staff or cabinet
secretaries that were conflicting with each other. You'd have to
negotiate those and work out what was most sensible. Finally,
when that was done, it would go to the President.
And Ronald Reagan took his speeches extremely seriously. He did
(22:40):
like making everything look easy, and he was an unusually
gifted giver of speeches. He was also a very fine
editor of speeches. Reviewing speeches is something he would do
in the upstairs and the residence in the evening. He
would leave the Oval office sometimes four or five in
the afternoon, and he'd have a sheaf of work with
him to do, and the residence the speeches were in
(23:01):
that sheaf of work. It was our job to get
drafts to him, usually forty eight hours before he gave
the speech. We'd send them into the president and they
would always, and I mean always, come back to us
the next morning, marked up by the President himself. Sometimes
those comments were minor. I can remember, for some reason,
(23:23):
it stays in my mind that there was a sixth
page set of remarks that I'd sent to him. I
get into the office in the morning, have a cup
of coffee, start to review this. No changes from the
President on the first page, none on the second, none
on the third, and I'm thinking, for once he decided
to watch TV instead of mark up the speeches, and
then on the last page he changed one word in
(23:45):
the next to last line, and in some ways that
made more impact on me than if he'd rewritten the speech. Extensively.
Ronald Reagan read and considered every word of every speech
before he delivered them. In the Westminster Address, which Tony drafted,
this is a very important June nineteen eighty two, the
(24:05):
President speaks before the Houses of Parliament and that is
where right at the beginning of the administration, he predicts
that the Soviet Union is already facing an economic crisis
that will ultimately bring it down. And if you go
to the Reagan Library today, you'll see that the President
worked on that. You see maybe a third of that
is rewritten in his own hand. So that varied, but
(24:27):
the President always took the reading and editing of speeches
very seriously. And when the President's changes came back, that
was that the speech was done. You've come back from Berlin,
and what happens. The first thing that happened was Tony
and I had a talk and I described to him
what I just abscribed to you. What I had seen
and felt and whether berliners had said. And Tony and
(24:50):
I then went immediately right across West Executive Avenue to
the West Wing and we sat down with Tommy Griscombe,
whom you also knew. Tommy Criskom was then director of Communications.
And Tony said, Peter tell Tommy. I then went through
it with him, and I said, I'd like to build
a speech around a call to tears on the wall.
And Tony and Tommy both sensed what I sensed, which
(25:11):
was if John corn Bloom probably wouldn't like that sort
of thing, we were going to have trouble with the
foreign policy bureaucracy. The first thing that did that happened
was that Tony cleared my schedule and gave speeches to
the other writers and left me alone for a week.
I produced a draft. I sent it in and thought
I'm done. Tony came down the hall, threw this draft
(25:32):
on my desk and said it's no good. And I said, Tony,
which passage, which paragraph? What needs work? And he said
the whole thing, it's no good. Go home, get some sleep,
start again next week. I did. Then Tony and I
went back and forth on a draft. There was one moment,
one point, when I put this is how you know, youth,
(25:52):
I thought to myself, his audience is going to be German,
so I'll put the main line in German. Harry Gorbachoff
mocking zd so taw auf and Tony looked at that
and said, Peter, when your client, as the President of
the United States, give him his big lines in English? Now,
I said that, ordinarily I have to tell you, Well,
(26:13):
it's been thirty some years, so I guess I can.
I guess I should feel free to tell you the
real story. Tony Dolan engineered a fast one. We waited
until what the draft is done. He asked other speech
writers to hurry up with their work. The President was
going to be going to an economic summit in Italy
before going to Berlin, so there were perhaps half a
dozen other speeches that were involved with the trip to
(26:36):
Italy before he got to Berlin and gave the Berlin Address.
So he asked the other speechwriters to hurry and produced drafts,
and then on a Friday afternoon, this is in May
of nineteen eighty seven, he waited until he heard the
helicopter landing on the south lawn and then he took
all these speeches and hurried over to the west wing
and said to the staff secretary, Look, the President has
(26:56):
a lot of speeches coming up. You'd better give him
these to review it Camp David to give him a
headstart on them. And the staff secretary, who was relatively
new to that position, said yes, I will, And so
instead of going out to staffing first, the Berlin Wall
speech went directly to the President, who reviewed it that
(27:16):
weekend at Camp David. Thank you, Tony Dolan for pulling
that one off. And on the following Monday, we had
a meeting with the President in the Oval Office and
we talked about each of these speeches, and then we
got to my speech and the President said, well, that
was a good draft, that's a fine speech, and that
was all. He said. We always wanted more of Ronald Reagan.
(27:38):
You'd go in with a question prepared that you could
ask that you would hope would elicit more from him.
And so I explained to him, mister President, I learned
in Berlin that they'll be able to hear your remarks
on the other side of the wall, the communist side,
throughout East Berlin, certainly, and if the weather conditions are
just right, they'll be able to pick it up by
(27:58):
radio all the way to Moscow. Is there anything in
particular you'd like to say to people on the communist
side of the wall? And Ronald Reagan's thought for a moment,
and he gave his head that little shake, and he said, well,
I'd like to tell them that that wall has to
come down. That's what I'd like to say to them.
That wall has to come down. He always knew what
(28:21):
he was doing coming up the famous line tear down
this wall was provocative, and many around Reagan recommended its
removal from the speech that story. Next, I want to
(28:43):
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(29:05):
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sign up at blinks dot com slash newt. What happened next.
(30:40):
There were about three weeks from that meeting in the
Oval Office until the President delivered the speech. And now
the speech went out to staffing, and the State Department
and the National Security Council spent all three weeks trying
to squelch it. That line was too provocative, mister Corbett,
you have teared down this wall. It would raise false expectations.
(31:02):
It was aimed at Gorvichef personally, it would put him
in a difficult spot in the polit bureau. And on
and on this went. They submitted one alternative draft after another,
each one omitting the call to tear down the wall.
I was not then part of the traveling party that
went to Europe, but Tony told me afterwards what happened
and the state departments. The day they left it to
(31:25):
deliver the speech in Berlin, the State Department sent another
alternative draft to the fax machine on Air Force one,
and Ken Duberstein told me what happened. They got to Berlin,
and Ken Duberstein was the deputy chief of staff. Howard
Baker was chief of staff, but he didn't make the
trip because his wife was very ill at that point,
and Ken said in the limousine on the way to
(31:46):
the wall, the President explained that he was going to
deliver the speech as written, and then he leaned across
and flapped Ken on the knee and said, the boys
at State are going to kill me for this, but
it's the right thing to do. And twenty minutes later,
Ronald Reagan delivered the speech General Secretary Gorbachev, if you
(32:06):
seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union
in Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to
this gate, mister Garbatschev, open this gate, mister Garbatchov. Mister
(32:47):
Gorbachev teared down this wall. Now, am I correct that
it went back and forth I think seven times, But
the State, with Reagan insisting a stay in, they submitted
(33:10):
seven alternative drafts, but from every single draft the call
to tear down the wall was absent. I should also
say in Italy, Ken Duberstein sat the president down. You know,
of course, the way Washington works, and it's a terrible
staff failure if you have to ask your principle to
make the same decision twice. The President had already said,
(33:32):
and this is why it was very important. There were
various people, as you know, who had the right to
go to the President himself, Howard Baker, chief of staff,
who years later, by the way, very sweetly, he opposed
the speech, and years later he told me, I've never
been so happy to be wrong about anything in my
life as I was about that speech. He didn't take
(33:53):
it to the President himself. Nobody at the State Department
took it to the President himself. Why was that because
they knew the President had already said he especially wanted
to deliver that passage. So what they tried to do
was put pressure on Tommy Griscomb to persuade him to
change his mind. The director of communications, or Tony Dolan,
(34:15):
or me, the speech writer, if the people involved in
drafting the speech, if I had written a memorandum to
the President saying, mister President, on second thought, I believe
this passage may have been ill judged, the President would
very likely have deferred to the guy who wrote the speech,
because I'd been in Berlin, and I'd done the research,
but I just refused to do that, and Tony backed
(34:36):
me up, and Tom Griscomb backed me up. We just
held our ground. Why because I've been to Berlin and
seen it and talked to ordinary people there, and because
all three of us knew Ronald Reagan. You could not
ask that man to go to one of the most
(34:57):
dramatic borders between us and them, between freedom and democracy
that existed, and asked him to deliver some pabulum speech
written by the State Department or the National Security Council.
It just couldn't do it. And so we held firm
and Ken Duberstein, as I said, took the decision back
(35:17):
to the President in Italy. And Ken told me he
sat the President down in some Italian garden and reviewed
the arguments against the speech, and he had the speech
with him, and he asked the President to take a
moment and read that passage one more time. And then
Ken said he and the President talked about it for
a moment or two, and then Ronald Reagan got that
(35:38):
twinkle in his eye and he said, now, Ken, I'm
the President, aren't I. Duberstein said, yes, sir, we're clear
about that much. So can I get to decide whether
this line stays in? Yes, sir, it is your decision. Well,
then it stays in. And that was Ronald Reagan. You know,
George Schultz told me that sector State. He actually got
(36:02):
a call from Reagan along the same lines as they
kept sending back these drafts. And then Reagan called and said, George,
would you explain to your people that I'm the president
and they're not? If you think for a moment about
other people who might have been president instead of Ronald
(36:22):
Reagan at that moment, we know Jimmy Carter wouldn't have
given that speech. Jimmy Carter gave a speech at Notre
Dame talking about the inordinate fear of communism. He had
the same view of the State Department. We needed to
manage this relationship, not challenge them, not bring moral pressure
to bear on them, recognize them as a legitimate regime,
and work with them. That's really what Reagan was up to.
(36:44):
And you, of course, this is it's so good to
talk to you because we were young men together during
the eighties. We saw all the stuff together, different perspective.
You were on the hill, I was in the White House,
but you could see Ronald Reagan's large project. Of course,
he was standing up to the Soviets, and of course
he had to bring Western European allies with him. That's
where Missus thatature was so important. But he also had
(37:07):
to convince not just the American people. He won big
the first time and in a landslide in his reelection bid,
he had to bring along official Washington. He had to
bring along the instruments of foreign policy, and of course,
as you know, the State Department. These were highly intelligent people,
(37:28):
They were patriotic people, They were overwhelmingly good and dedicated people.
But they had come of age during de Todd. They
had come of age when to be a skillful foreign
policy professional meant believing in real politique, in managing the relationship,
because it was essentially permanent. And Ronald Reagan showed up
(37:50):
and said, you know what I intend to bring to
bear here not just real politique, but a certain moral
sense of imagination. As Reagan famously told Dick Gallant, his
first national security advisor, my view of the Cold War
as simple, we win and they lose. And that, as
you know, Knut was hotterly foreign to the way of
(38:13):
thinking and the way of doing business at the State
Department and the National Security Council, and in this case
he simply overruled them. Now, the day that speech was given,
Secretary Schultz was representing to the White House the objections
of the State Department. Tommy Griscom was on the platform,
(38:35):
and Tommy told me that as soon as the speech
was delivered to the President, with shaking hands, there's applause.
George Schultz looks over at Tommy and starts walking toward him,
and Tommy thought, oh my goodness, he's about to give
me a dressing down. He thinks this was a mistake.
And George Schultz got right up to him and looked
at Tommy and said three words. You were right. As
(38:57):
soon as Raygan delivered that speech, everybody recognized the fittingness
of it. Coming up next, we'll revisit the day thirty
years ago on November ninth, nineteen eighty nine, when Germany
was reunified. Hi, this is new Gingwich. After I served
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(41:11):
do you think, as a practical matter, was the halt
of an impact? If I remember corrected, The CIA, for example,
had said, you're going to be embarrassed because it's going
to be there for thirty or forty more years. The
State Department had said, oh, you know, you're going to
embarrass Korbatchoff and make it harder to work with him.
I mean, there were all of these fears of anything
(41:31):
which would shake the process, and yet two short years later,
the Berlin Wall comes down. Where were you when it
came down? Oh? I was in business school at that point.
I have to say I never expected it to come
down as quickly as it did. A day or two
after the President delivered the speech, I remember going into
(41:52):
the White House mess and sitting down at the staff table,
and the next person to come in and sit down
at the staff table was Peter Rodman of the NSC staff.
Peter was central in the effort to squelch that speech,
and so I tensed a little bit. I didn't know
what I was going to say to him, and Peter
turned to me and he said, well, Peter, it looks
(42:12):
as though our speech was a big success. All right,
so now it's everybody's speech. But then Peter told me
something very interesting. He said, our intelligence services have picked
up cable traffic between Moscow and East Berlin in which
Moscow is instructing East Berlin to expand border crossings in
the wall. Clearly this had an effect on their thinking.
(42:34):
They recognize what a public relations disaster. That's the way
Peter put it, what a public relations disaster the Berlin
Wall is. In all the years, that's the only direct
effect on anyone I am aware of the speech except that,
And again, I've been thinking about this for years. We
all know that important speeches matter, but it would be
(42:56):
hard to say exactly did the Gettysburg address change the
course of any battle, what practical effect. I'm not saying
that the Reagan speech rises to anything like this level,
but we know it mattered, but it's hard to pin
down cause and effect when it comes to words. I
have spoken now over the years to a number of
people who were in East Germany when the President delivered
(43:18):
that speech, and what they have told me was that
it was a shocking moment that he said something that
was so outside the realm of what could be thought
that it was difficult even to make sense of it.
Get rid of the wall. The President of the United
(43:39):
States saying, we could live in a world without that wall.
How can that be? And I have come to the
conclusion that along with other people, Pope John Paul the
Second who says to the people in Eastern Europe being
not afraid that, along with Margaret Thatcher, who says capitalism democracy,
this is simply a terior system, and she is on
(44:02):
the offensive. Ideologically from the get go Votslav Hovel in
Czechoslovaki elec Vience in Poland. Ronald Reagan adds to this
effort to think new kinds of thoughts. What was unthinkable
the day before he gave that speech became thinkable the
day afterwards. Before he gave that speech, people in East
(44:25):
Berlin assumed, as did people in our own state department,
that that wall would be there for who knew essentially
forever it was essentially permanent. And the day after he
gave that speech, the President of the United States stands
in front of the wall and challenges the leader of
(44:46):
this empire, Mikail Gorbachev, to tear it down. It begins
to become possible to think new kinds of thoughts. I
believe Reagan helps to create a new space for thought
and feeling and protest, which, as we know, is what happens.
That year and a half later, a protest movement begins
(45:06):
in churches, begins in Leipz League and sweeps across East
Germany and culminates with a hundred thousand people marching down
Unta den Linden, that avenue that was empty when I
was there in nineteen eighty seven. In nineteen eighty nine
there are one hundred thousand East Germans protesting, and as
you know, of course, a couple of Pollitt Bureau. First
(45:28):
they forced Eric Connaker, the long time dictator of East Germany,
they force him to resign. They go into emergency session
the Pollitt Bureau in East Germany, and then the middle
of the night on November ninth, they issue a number
of dictats and a member of the Politt Bureau who's
also the press officer, he's bleary eyed, he's tired, and
(45:48):
he misinterprets a decision of the polit Bureau and says
that all the checkpoints are now open effective. His questions
that mean now effective, immediate at Lian and this man
Gunterushevasky says yes effective immediately, and the press conference was
being carried live in East Berlin. Immediately people begin streaming
(46:11):
to the checkpoints in the wall on foot, by bicycle,
by cars. The soldiers have not received any orders. This
takes everyone by surprise, and there's a standoff that lasts sometime.
And finally, of course, the soldiers have a choice. They
can open fire, but they're receiving no direction, and one
of them decides to act like a human being and
(46:31):
he opens the gate. And then all the checkpoints are open,
and the Berlin Wall has ceased to function. From the
Berlin Walls specifically, take a look at them. They've been
there since last night. They are here in the thousands,
they are here in the tens of thousands. Occasionally they
shout d mahamusvek, the wall must go. Thousands and thousands
of West Germans come to make the point that the
(46:53):
wall has suddenly become irrelevant something as you can see,
almost a party on how do you measure You're such
an astonished moment in history. The East German government said
tonight they were going to make more openings in the
wall at least a dozen more put bulldozers right through
the wall so that more people could cross to the west.
The East German communist leadershef Tonight said there'd be a
(47:15):
new election law guaranteeing secret elections which the rest of
the world could monitor. And only twenty four hours after
East Germans were told they could go anywhere anytime, the
Soviet Union said that was a sensible move. I never
taught the President about this afterwards, but I did ask
missus Reagan what his impression, What did he feel when
(47:37):
the wall came down, and she said that he was
especially struck that it wasn't Corvichev who brought the wall down,
it was ordinary German people themselves. That that meant a
great deal to him. I remember the night the wall
came down, Oh yes. The next night, Sam Donaldson had
flown out to sit with Reagan and he said to Reagan,
are you surprisinglys And Reagan said, will you know I
(48:00):
always thought they were Germans on both sides of the wall,
you know, just that simple. The other is to go
back to your point, because both of us are creatures
of words and of the importance of ideas. I think
one of the characteristics that Thatcher, Saint John Paulo Second
and Reagan had. It was really important that we often
(48:20):
forget today, is they established moral superiority. They assert it
in a way which absolutely shattered the Soviet mythology that
in fact Reagan, I'm told, I don't this may be apocryphal,
but I know the handful of times I flew an
Air Force one, Reagan would always come back, and he
would always tell anti Soviet jokes. And I am told
(48:43):
that at the very first meeting with Gorbachev he began
with an anti Soviet joke, those very mild ones, but
in essence it was a man says to the reporters, Look,
I have as much freedom in Russia as I do
in America, And the reporters is how that be? He says, Well,
in America, I can stand up in front of the
(49:04):
White House and I can say Ronald Reagan is a
terrible president, and nothing will be done. He said, Anne,
I can stand up in front of the Kremlin and
I can say Ronald Reagan is a terrible president and
nothing will be done. So we have equal freedom. As
a member of New Center Circle, you can listen to
(49:24):
our podcast extra Peter Robinson's story behind his book, How
Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. If you're not a member
of new Center Circle, please consider joining today at Newt
Center Circle dot com. Thank you to my guest Peter M. Robinson.
(49:46):
You can learn more about President Reagan's Berlin Wall speech,
the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall
on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is
produced by Westwood One. Our executive producer is Debbie Myers
and our producer is Garnsey Slow. Our editor is Robert Borowski,
and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. Our guest booker is
(50:10):
Grace Davis. The artwork for the show was created by
Steve Penley. The music was composed by Joey Salvio. Special
thanks to the team of Ingwish three sixty and Westwood
One's John Wardock and Robert Mathers. Please email me with
your comments at newt at newtsworld dot com. If you've
been enjoining Newtsworld, I hope you will go to Apple
(50:31):
Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give
us a review so others can learn what it's all about.
I'm newt Gangwish. This is Newtsworld, the Westwood one podcast network,
Hi, this is newt twenty twenty is going to be
one of the most extraordinary election years of our lifetime.
I want to invite you to join my Inner Circle
as we discuss each twist and turn in the Race
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(00:21):
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free book at checkout. Sign up today at newts Inner
Circle dot com Code free Book. This offer ends January
thirty first. On this episode of Newtsworld, the Berlin Wall
divided East and West Germany and was a visible reminder
(01:05):
of the Cold War from nineteen sixty one until November ninth,
nineteen eighty nine, when the East German government announced their
citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. The reunification
of Germany and the dissolution of the Soviet Union might
not have happened had it not been for the vision
of President Ronald Reagan. President Reagan was a staunch anti communist,
(01:29):
and he formed a partnership with two other leaders who
shared his beliefs, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Saint John
Paul the Second. Together, the three leaders all played key
roles in the fall of communism. On June twelfth, nineteen
eighty seven, President Reagan made a speech at the Brandenburg
Gate in which he demanded mister Gorbuchoff teared down this
(01:52):
wall on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the
Berlin Wall. The speech writer who wrote that famous speech
is herewith us today. I'm pleased to introduce my guest,
Peter M. Robinson Murdoch, Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and former special assistant and speech writer for President
(02:12):
Ronald Reagan. I am here today with one of my
dear friends, extraordinarily bright conservative. But the amazing thing was,
by the time he's twenty five, he's a speech writer
(02:34):
for one of the greatest speaking presidents of American history,
Ronald Reagan. So if you don't mind, Peter can you
take us back to the beginning in Vessel, New York,
and bring us up through your early years that grew
up in Vessel, New York, medium sized town and upstate
New York. You're a Georgian nuke. But Upstate to a
New Yorker is anything north of Yonkers. So in those days,
(02:56):
Upstate was Republican country, pretty conservad bit of Republican country.
I went to public high school. I went to Dartmouth College.
I graduated from Dartmouth and then spent a couple of
years studying at Oxford. I stayed on for a third
year at Oxford to write what was going to be
the finest novel ever written. And as that year drew
(03:17):
to a close, the novel was so bad that even
I couldn't stand to read it, and so I sent letters.
In those days, we used typewriters and type letters and
stuck them in envelopes and put post to John, and
you mail the letter and wait a couple of weeks
because it was England and it took a long time
to get something to the United States. I sent letters
to everyone I could think of who might be able
(03:39):
to give me a lead on a job, and about
the only person who wrote back was Bill Buckley, the
great late conservative journalist. Bill had been kind enough to
notice some of my student writing. I wrote as a
conservative for the student newspaper at Dartmouths, and Bill said,
you liked writing, and you like politics. You ought to
come to Washington. This is now nineteen eighty two and
try to be a speechwriter. And you get to Washington,
(04:01):
get in touch with my son, Christopher. Christopher Buckley was
then writing for Vice President George H. W. Bush. In
July of nineteen eighty two, I presented myself at Christopher's office.
Christopher announced that he was leaving the job in two weeks,
and he and our mutual friend Tony Dolan, who was
(04:21):
on President Reagan's staff. Christopher and Tony talked me up.
Crazy thing to do because I'd never written a speech
before in my life and I was only twenty five,
but I came with Bill Buckley's recommendation. They talked me
up inside the White House and I got hired on
the staff of George H. W. Bush when he was
Vice President. Worked for him for about fourteen months, and
then there were a couple of openings on the President's
(04:43):
staff and I moved downstairs in the old executive office
building as it was in those days. Vice president's office
was upstairs. I moved downstairs and joined the president's staff.
So that's how it happened. It was sheer dumb luck
combined with a generosity of not one but two Buckleys
and our friend Tony Dolan, who was then chief speech
writer to Ronald Reagan. Well, I remember occasionally hanging out
(05:06):
with you guys, and it was a sort of amazing
gang who understood that they were in fact helping shape history,
and that took it very starts. Then they had a
president who understood the power of language, and who himself
had been a pretty good writer over the years. It
was always fun to watch you guys work. But the
thing I want to talk about in particular is the
(05:27):
Berlin Wall and the famous Berlin Wall speech. And I remember,
because I am somewhat older than you, I remember the
Berlin Wall going up, and I remember the scale of
the crisis when the East Germans and the Soviets put
up the Berlin Wall to keep people trapped in East Germany.
And by the mid nineteen eighties, the Soviet system is
(05:48):
beginning to really break down. The Reagan strategy in the eighties.
I believe, working with Margaret Thatcher and with John Paul
the second is one of the most successful grand stre
ategies in history, and literally dismantling the Soviet Empire without
a major wards an astonishing achievement, and a big part
(06:08):
of that was the power of language. Reagan in sixty seven,
as governor, goes to Berlin and has a throwaway line.
He says, though Walsher is ugly, they ought to tear
it down. Now he's going back to Berlin and he
wants to make a big speech and could you describe
from the inside as a speech writer, what's that process like?
You know, you know the trip's coming up, you know
(06:31):
they want to do some interesting things, but how does
that actually technically work at any given time? On the
Reagan staff, there were five or six writers. In the
course of the eight years, there were fourteen different people
who held the job of speechwriter to the President. I
was there for six years. Our friend Tony Dolan was
there for all eight years. A friend, Dana Rohbacher was
there for all eight years. And there's a meeting. Tony
(06:52):
is now chief speech writer again. He stepped down for
a bit, and now he's running the shop again. There's
a meeting around a conference table in Tony's office and
we're reviewing the big speeches coming up, and Tony turns
to me and says, well, Peter, it's been a while
since you had a big one. Why don't you take
this speech in Berlin. Nobody could have predicted that this
was going to be a speech that you and I,
(07:14):
for example, would be talking about thirty years later. But
we all knew it would likely to be one of
the half dozen or so really significant speeches the President
delivered that year. It was unusual to go on a
big research trip, but for a major speech, you'd send
a speech research trip. I flew over there to Berlin
with the pre advanced team. You know what that term means,
(07:35):
of course, But for the listeners that would be the
press officials who would liaise with the West Berlin press,
and security people who would talk to the West Berlin
security teams and so forth. And then there was a
speech writer, Robinson. I spent a day in Berlin taking notes.
Many of our listeners have no idea how big the
difference was at that point between East and West Berlin,
(07:58):
and what it was like, so I think, if you
take a minute to sort of a scene setting, if
you will, let me tell you this. My first stop
in Berlin that day was that we Americans, we traveling party,
were taken that morning to the Berlin Wall, the site
where the President would speak. I have never before and
never since, been in a place where you just felt
(08:21):
the weight of history. The air almost seemed heavy with history.
Off to one side was the Reichstag, the German parliament.
Then it was just a museum. You could still see
shell damage from the Second World War. There's a memorial
to Soviet soldiers in West Berlin with two members of
the Red Army goose stepping back and forth as a
(08:42):
kind of honor guard. In West Berlin, you climb the platform,
take the stairs up to the observation platform and peer
over the wall into East Berlin. Now behind you in
the west is a completely modern city. People are well dressed,
there are lights, shops are full, people are driving recent
model cars. In fact, I was astounded at the number
(09:05):
of Mercedes Benzes. Behind me. There's hustle and bustle and
movement and dynamism. And then you look over the wall
down unterd and Lynden under the lime trees was the
name of the avenue, and it was effectively the Pennsylvania
Avenue of Berlin. In the old days, it was the
ceremonial center of Berlin. And you see soldiers and way
(09:25):
off in the distance, one or two people and one car.
It's almost motionless, and whereas behind you there's color so striking.
You look into the east and it's as though the
color has been leached out of the picture, gray brown, drab.
The buildings seem to be slumping, and indeed we now
(09:46):
know many of them were, so they didn't have the
funds to maintain buildings properly. It's almost between life and
a kind of half life. I remember John Kennedy's phrase
from his inaugural addressed the long Twilight struggle. East Lin
seemed to exist in a kind of twilight. And as
I say, the main presence when you look over that wall,
(10:08):
you look across no man's land, barbed wire and guard towers.
The main presence was military soldiers peering at us with
binoculars and marching back and forth in front of that
no man's land in their drab gray uniforms. So that
was one place we talked and wrote speeches about the
difference between freedom and communism, and right there you could
(10:32):
see it, you could feel it. What impact did that
have on you? And that this was your first close
experience of just how big the gap was. Honestly, I
was there for business reasons. I was trying to gather
material for a speech, and the first impact that had
on me was to scare the daylights out of me.
I thought to myself, Oh, my goodness, what can I
(10:55):
possibly write for the President? What material can I possibly
give him that will be equal to the sense of history,
to the sense of moment. At this place, I was
pretty darn shaken, which leads me to the next place
I went in Berlin, which was to the office of
the Council General, the ranking American diplomat, a man called
(11:16):
John Cornbloom, who later, under Bill Clinton, became our ambassador
to have then reunited Germany. And John Cornbloom, this won't
surprise you, knude, I don't think. I sat there and
took notes, and he was full of ideas about what
Ronald Reagan should not say. No communist bashing please. West
Berlin is surrounded by East Germany, so people here are
(11:38):
very aware of the subtlety and nuance required in East
West relations. You've got several major universities here, and you
know that universities lean to the left. So please don't
have him come here and be an anti communist cowboy.
Oh and don't make a big deal out of the wall.
It's been there for a long time and they've gotten
used to it now. That was the advice from the
(12:00):
foreign policy expert. The next event, I was given a
ride in a US Army helicopter over the wall. Of course,
we stayed just inside West Berlin airspace, but we went
over the wall, and from inside West Berlin the wall
looked formidable enough. It was concrete slabs, as I recall,
they were just about thirteen feet tall. But from the
(12:22):
air you could see that no man's land, what it
was on the other side of the wall was essentially
a killing zone, and indeed dozens of people had been
killed trying to escape over that wall. That What I
remember being struck by especially was that there were large
areas of very carefully raked gravel. So I used the
headset to ask the pilot what was the gravel for,
(12:44):
and the pilot explained that that was there for the
young East German soldiers. If one of those kids got
it into his head to let a girlfriend escape in
the middle of the night or a member of his
family escape in the middle of the night, he knew
that he would have to explain the footprints in the
apple to his superior officer. I just thought they thought
of everything. Last event in Berlin for this young speechwriter
(13:09):
was that in the evening I got in a taxi,
I broke away from the American traveling party, left the
hotel and went out to a residential suburb of West Berlin,
where a couple of Berliners put on a dinner party
for me. We had never met, but Dieter and Ingeborg
else Deeter had had a career at the World Bank
(13:31):
in Washington and he had just retired back to Berlin.
So we had friends in common in Washington who got
in touch and said, can you introduce young Robinson here
to some Berliners? And that was all they were attempting
to do. There was a dinner party perhaps fifteen people,
a physician, a couple of students, people of different walks
of life, and fortunately, as they spoke English, because my
(13:54):
German is pretty hesitant. So we chatted for a moment
or two about the Berlin weather and German wine and so,
and then I blurted out. I felt I had to
ask them. I said, I've been told by the American
diplomat that you've all gotten used to the wall by now,
but I just flew over it. How can that be?
Is it so that you're used to the wall? And knute?
There was a silence. The conversation just stopped, and my
(14:17):
first thought, Oh, I've committed just the gaff or the
faux paw the diplomat wanted the President to avoid. And
then one man raised his arm and pointed one direction
and he said, my sister lives just a few kilometers
in that direction, but I haven't seen her in more
than twenty years. How do you think we feel about
the wall? And they went around the room and everybody
(14:41):
told a story about the wall. They had stopped talking
about it, but they hadn't gotten used to it. One
man described walking to his office. He walked to work
each morning, and each morning he took the same route
and passed the same guard tower, and he said, there's
a young man in that guard tower with a rifle
over his shoulder who peers down at me with binoculars.
We speak the same language, we share the same German history,
(15:05):
and yet one of us is a zookeeper and the
other is an animal. And I've never been able to
decide which was which. And then Ingeborg else, our hostess
at this event. She was wonderfully charming, kept the conversation
lighthearted until this moment and she became quite angry, and
she said, if this man Gorbchev is serious with this
glass notes, this parastroika, he can prove it by coming
(15:28):
here and getting rid of this wall. Well, that went
into my notebook, and I have to say, you knew
Ronald Reagan. I worked for Ronald Reagan. I knew immediately
that if the President had been there listening to that,
that comment would have made an impact on him. The simplicity,
the decency, the power of that comment, the in living memory,
(15:52):
this world existed in which Europe was divided in two.
And I feel frustrated that I don't know how to
convey to my own children what it was like to
be in this modern city West Berlin. I had about
an hour to myself and I went shopping to get
something for friends in the commercial district Kurfurst and Dome,
(16:16):
and it's so bright and bustling, and the stores were
filled with such beautiful goods and products. You could almost
feel you were in an ordinary city. And then you
turn a corner and look down at the end of
the street and there would be a wall, and you'd
forget about it, go into another store, and you turn
it too the wall again. And I don't know how
to describe how to make real to people who didn't
(16:40):
see it for themselves, just what that felt like to
feel that there was a truly malevolent I'll use the
term an evil empire, and that wall marks the border.
That's where it began. I don't know how to convey
with it, but that was the sense that right there
you were on the border between deeply flawed societies, of course,
(17:05):
but the border was between a fundamentally decent society and
a society that was really sick. How do we make
the kids understand now? I think they have to experience
it people who presently started getting it, because it's real
and reality overcomes fantasies. That was Reagan's great gamble, that
he could use language that was vivid and clear, like
(17:28):
evil Empire and people, after initially taking a half step back,
would say, well, yeah, I guess that's right. Next, Peter
Robinson explains the process of speech writing or President Reagan.
(17:50):
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newt Tillas Just for a second about the process of
(20:31):
generating his presidential speech. This varies from one White House
to another. I know, for example, than the George W.
Bush White House, the three principal writers, Matt Scully and
Mike Gerson and John McConnell all worked together. Those dollars
would be in a room together talking while one of
them sat at the keyboard, bouncing ideas off each other.
(20:51):
That was not the way we did it in the
Reagan White House. In fact, I can't even imagine doing
it that what. Clearly, different presidents have different styles and
different writers have differ styles. But in our white House,
the Reagan White House, once you were assigned a speech,
it was your speech, and it was up to you
to figure out what you believe the president ought to say.
(21:13):
The first draft was yours. Now, we were friends and
we would kick ideas around, but when it came to
writing the speech, each of us yours truly included. We'd
go back to his office and close the door and
sit in front of a word processor and write it.
Then the speech would go from the writer to the
chief speech writer, Tony. Tony would add his own comments editions,
(21:37):
discuss it with you. You'd talked Tony out of some
of the changes he wanted to make. Maybe, I say maybe,
because Tony's, as you know Tony. First of all, Tony's
a brilliant person, and in the second place, he's also
pretty insistent in his own positions. But you and Tony
would have a negotiation, you'd come up with a draft,
and then it would ordinarily this is important when we
(21:58):
get back to the Berlin Wall speech or narrowly, it
would go out to staffing. Next it would go to
senior White House staff and too relevant cabinet departments. Foreign
policy speech would go out to the State Department. Speech
touching on defense would go over to the Pentagon, where Cap.
Weinberger had a colonel who would review these speeches for him.
(22:19):
And then there's more negotiation. Quite often you'd get suggestions
on the draft from members of the staff or cabinet
secretaries that were conflicting with each other. You'd have to
negotiate those and work out what was most sensible. Finally,
when that was done, it would go to the President.
And Ronald Reagan took his speeches extremely seriously. He did
(22:40):
like making everything look easy, and he was an unusually
gifted giver of speeches. He was also a very fine
editor of speeches. Reviewing speeches is something he would do
in the upstairs and the residence in the evening. He
would leave the Oval office sometimes four or five in
the afternoon, and he'd have a sheaf of work with
him to do, and the residence the speeches were in
(23:01):
that sheaf of work. It was our job to get
drafts to him, usually forty eight hours before he gave
the speech. We'd send them into the president and they
would always, and I mean always, come back to us
the next morning, marked up by the President himself. Sometimes
those comments were minor. I can remember, for some reason,
(23:23):
it stays in my mind that there was a sixth
page set of remarks that I'd sent to him. I
get into the office in the morning, have a cup
of coffee, start to review this. No changes from the
President on the first page, none on the second, none
on the third, and I'm thinking, for once he decided
to watch TV instead of mark up the speeches, and
then on the last page he changed one word in
(23:45):
the next to last line, and in some ways that
made more impact on me than if he'd rewritten the speech. Extensively.
Ronald Reagan read and considered every word of every speech
before he delivered them. In the Westminster Address, which Tony drafted,
this is a very important June nineteen eighty two, the
(24:05):
President speaks before the Houses of Parliament and that is
where right at the beginning of the administration, he predicts
that the Soviet Union is already facing an economic crisis
that will ultimately bring it down. And if you go
to the Reagan Library today, you'll see that the President
worked on that. You see maybe a third of that
is rewritten in his own hand. So that varied, but
(24:27):
the President always took the reading and editing of speeches
very seriously. And when the President's changes came back, that
was that the speech was done. You've come back from Berlin,
and what happens. The first thing that happened was Tony
and I had a talk and I described to him
what I just abscribed to you. What I had seen
and felt and whether berliners had said. And Tony and
(24:50):
I then went immediately right across West Executive Avenue to
the West Wing and we sat down with Tommy Griscombe,
whom you also knew. Tommy Criskom was then director of Communications.
And Tony said, Peter tell Tommy. I then went through
it with him, and I said, I'd like to build
a speech around a call to tears on the wall.
And Tony and Tommy both sensed what I sensed, which
(25:11):
was if John corn Bloom probably wouldn't like that sort
of thing, we were going to have trouble with the
foreign policy bureaucracy. The first thing that did that happened
was that Tony cleared my schedule and gave speeches to
the other writers and left me alone for a week.
I produced a draft. I sent it in and thought
I'm done. Tony came down the hall, threw this draft
(25:32):
on my desk and said it's no good. And I said, Tony,
which passage, which paragraph? What needs work? And he said
the whole thing, it's no good. Go home, get some sleep,
start again next week. I did. Then Tony and I
went back and forth on a draft. There was one moment,
one point, when I put this is how you know, youth,
(25:52):
I thought to myself, his audience is going to be German,
so I'll put the main line in German. Harry Gorbachoff
mocking zd so taw auf and Tony looked at that
and said, Peter, when your client, as the President of
the United States, give him his big lines in English? Now,
I said that, ordinarily I have to tell you, Well,
(26:13):
it's been thirty some years, so I guess I can.
I guess I should feel free to tell you the
real story. Tony Dolan engineered a fast one. We waited
until what the draft is done. He asked other speech
writers to hurry up with their work. The President was
going to be going to an economic summit in Italy
before going to Berlin, so there were perhaps half a
dozen other speeches that were involved with the trip to
(26:36):
Italy before he got to Berlin and gave the Berlin Address.
So he asked the other speechwriters to hurry and produced drafts,
and then on a Friday afternoon, this is in May
of nineteen eighty seven, he waited until he heard the
helicopter landing on the south lawn and then he took
all these speeches and hurried over to the west wing
and said to the staff secretary, Look, the President has
(26:56):
a lot of speeches coming up. You'd better give him
these to review it Camp David to give him a
headstart on them. And the staff secretary, who was relatively
new to that position, said yes, I will, And so
instead of going out to staffing first, the Berlin Wall
speech went directly to the President, who reviewed it that
(27:16):
weekend at Camp David. Thank you, Tony Dolan for pulling
that one off. And on the following Monday, we had
a meeting with the President in the Oval Office and
we talked about each of these speeches, and then we
got to my speech and the President said, well, that
was a good draft, that's a fine speech, and that
was all. He said. We always wanted more of Ronald Reagan.
(27:38):
You'd go in with a question prepared that you could
ask that you would hope would elicit more from him.
And so I explained to him, mister President, I learned
in Berlin that they'll be able to hear your remarks
on the other side of the wall, the communist side,
throughout East Berlin, certainly, and if the weather conditions are
just right, they'll be able to pick it up by
(27:58):
radio all the way to Moscow. Is there anything in
particular you'd like to say to people on the communist
side of the wall? And Ronald Reagan's thought for a moment,
and he gave his head that little shake, and he said, well,
I'd like to tell them that that wall has to
come down. That's what I'd like to say to them.
That wall has to come down. He always knew what
(28:21):
he was doing coming up the famous line tear down
this wall was provocative, and many around Reagan recommended its
removal from the speech that story. Next, I want to
(28:43):
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(29:05):
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(30:40):
There were about three weeks from that meeting in the
Oval Office until the President delivered the speech. And now
the speech went out to staffing, and the State Department
and the National Security Council spent all three weeks trying
to squelch it. That line was too provocative, mister Corbett,
you have teared down this wall. It would raise false expectations.
(31:02):
It was aimed at Gorvichef personally, it would put him
in a difficult spot in the polit bureau. And on
and on this went. They submitted one alternative draft after another,
each one omitting the call to tear down the wall.
I was not then part of the traveling party that
went to Europe, but Tony told me afterwards what happened
and the state departments. The day they left it to
(31:25):
deliver the speech in Berlin, the State Department sent another
alternative draft to the fax machine on Air Force one,
and Ken Duberstein told me what happened. They got to Berlin,
and Ken Duberstein was the deputy chief of staff. Howard
Baker was chief of staff, but he didn't make the
trip because his wife was very ill at that point,
and Ken said in the limousine on the way to
(31:46):
the wall, the President explained that he was going to
deliver the speech as written, and then he leaned across
and flapped Ken on the knee and said, the boys
at State are going to kill me for this, but
it's the right thing to do. And twenty minutes later,
Ronald Reagan delivered the speech General Secretary Gorbachev, if you
(32:06):
seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union
in Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to
this gate, mister Garbatschev, open this gate, mister Garbatchov. Mister
(32:47):
Gorbachev teared down this wall. Now, am I correct that
it went back and forth I think seven times, But
the State, with Reagan insisting a stay in, they submitted
(33:10):
seven alternative drafts, but from every single draft the call
to tear down the wall was absent. I should also
say in Italy, Ken Duberstein sat the president down. You know,
of course, the way Washington works, and it's a terrible
staff failure if you have to ask your principle to
make the same decision twice. The President had already said,
(33:32):
and this is why it was very important. There were
various people, as you know, who had the right to
go to the President himself, Howard Baker, chief of staff,
who years later, by the way, very sweetly, he opposed
the speech, and years later he told me, I've never
been so happy to be wrong about anything in my
life as I was about that speech. He didn't take
(33:53):
it to the President himself. Nobody at the State Department
took it to the President himself. Why was that because
they knew the President had already said he especially wanted
to deliver that passage. So what they tried to do
was put pressure on Tommy Griscomb to persuade him to
change his mind. The director of communications, or Tony Dolan,
(34:15):
or me, the speech writer, if the people involved in
drafting the speech, if I had written a memorandum to
the President saying, mister President, on second thought, I believe
this passage may have been ill judged, the President would
very likely have deferred to the guy who wrote the speech,
because I'd been in Berlin, and I'd done the research,
but I just refused to do that, and Tony backed
(34:36):
me up, and Tom Griscomb backed me up. We just
held our ground. Why because I've been to Berlin and
seen it and talked to ordinary people there, and because
all three of us knew Ronald Reagan. You could not
ask that man to go to one of the most
(34:57):
dramatic borders between us and them, between freedom and democracy
that existed, and asked him to deliver some pabulum speech
written by the State Department or the National Security Council.
It just couldn't do it. And so we held firm
and Ken Duberstein, as I said, took the decision back
(35:17):
to the President in Italy. And Ken told me he
sat the President down in some Italian garden and reviewed
the arguments against the speech, and he had the speech
with him, and he asked the President to take a
moment and read that passage one more time. And then
Ken said he and the President talked about it for
a moment or two, and then Ronald Reagan got that
(35:38):
twinkle in his eye and he said, now, Ken, I'm
the President, aren't I. Duberstein said, yes, sir, we're clear
about that much. So can I get to decide whether
this line stays in? Yes, sir, it is your decision. Well,
then it stays in. And that was Ronald Reagan. You know,
George Schultz told me that sector State. He actually got
(36:02):
a call from Reagan along the same lines as they
kept sending back these drafts. And then Reagan called and said, George,
would you explain to your people that I'm the president
and they're not? If you think for a moment about
other people who might have been president instead of Ronald
(36:22):
Reagan at that moment, we know Jimmy Carter wouldn't have
given that speech. Jimmy Carter gave a speech at Notre
Dame talking about the inordinate fear of communism. He had
the same view of the State Department. We needed to
manage this relationship, not challenge them, not bring moral pressure
to bear on them, recognize them as a legitimate regime,
and work with them. That's really what Reagan was up to.
(36:44):
And you, of course, this is it's so good to
talk to you because we were young men together during
the eighties. We saw all the stuff together, different perspective.
You were on the hill, I was in the White House,
but you could see Ronald Reagan's large project. Of course,
he was standing up to the Soviets, and of course
he had to bring Western European allies with him. That's
where Missus thatature was so important. But he also had
(37:07):
to convince not just the American people. He won big
the first time and in a landslide in his reelection bid,
he had to bring along official Washington. He had to
bring along the instruments of foreign policy, and of course,
as you know, the State Department. These were highly intelligent people,
(37:28):
They were patriotic people, They were overwhelmingly good and dedicated people.
But they had come of age during de Todd. They
had come of age when to be a skillful foreign
policy professional meant believing in real politique, in managing the relationship,
because it was essentially permanent. And Ronald Reagan showed up
(37:50):
and said, you know what I intend to bring to
bear here not just real politique, but a certain moral
sense of imagination. As Reagan famously told Dick Gallant, his
first national security advisor, my view of the Cold War
as simple, we win and they lose. And that, as
you know, Knut was hotterly foreign to the way of
(38:13):
thinking and the way of doing business at the State
Department and the National Security Council, and in this case
he simply overruled them. Now, the day that speech was given,
Secretary Schultz was representing to the White House the objections
of the State Department. Tommy Griscom was on the platform,
(38:35):
and Tommy told me that as soon as the speech
was delivered to the President, with shaking hands, there's applause.
George Schultz looks over at Tommy and starts walking toward him,
and Tommy thought, oh my goodness, he's about to give
me a dressing down. He thinks this was a mistake.
And George Schultz got right up to him and looked
at Tommy and said three words. You were right. As
(38:57):
soon as Raygan delivered that speech, everybody recognized the fittingness
of it. Coming up next, we'll revisit the day thirty
years ago on November ninth, nineteen eighty nine, when Germany
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(39:22):
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(41:11):
do you think, as a practical matter, was the halt
of an impact? If I remember corrected, The CIA, for example,
had said, you're going to be embarrassed because it's going
to be there for thirty or forty more years. The
State Department had said, oh, you know, you're going to
embarrass Korbatchoff and make it harder to work with him.
I mean, there were all of these fears of anything
(41:31):
which would shake the process, and yet two short years later,
the Berlin Wall comes down. Where were you when it
came down? Oh? I was in business school at that point.
I have to say I never expected it to come
down as quickly as it did. A day or two
after the President delivered the speech, I remember going into
(41:52):
the White House mess and sitting down at the staff table,
and the next person to come in and sit down
at the staff table was Peter Rodman of the NSC staff.
Peter was central in the effort to squelch that speech,
and so I tensed a little bit. I didn't know
what I was going to say to him, and Peter
turned to me and he said, well, Peter, it looks
(42:12):
as though our speech was a big success. All right,
so now it's everybody's speech. But then Peter told me
something very interesting. He said, our intelligence services have picked
up cable traffic between Moscow and East Berlin in which
Moscow is instructing East Berlin to expand border crossings in
the wall. Clearly this had an effect on their thinking.
(42:34):
They recognize what a public relations disaster. That's the way
Peter put it, what a public relations disaster the Berlin
Wall is. In all the years, that's the only direct
effect on anyone I am aware of the speech except that,
And again, I've been thinking about this for years. We
all know that important speeches matter, but it would be
(42:56):
hard to say exactly did the Gettysburg address change the
course of any battle, what practical effect. I'm not saying
that the Reagan speech rises to anything like this level,
but we know it mattered, but it's hard to pin
down cause and effect when it comes to words. I
have spoken now over the years to a number of
people who were in East Germany when the President delivered
(43:18):
that speech, and what they have told me was that
it was a shocking moment that he said something that
was so outside the realm of what could be thought
that it was difficult even to make sense of it.
Get rid of the wall. The President of the United
(43:39):
States saying, we could live in a world without that wall.
How can that be? And I have come to the
conclusion that along with other people, Pope John Paul the
Second who says to the people in Eastern Europe being
not afraid that, along with Margaret Thatcher, who says capitalism democracy,
this is simply a terior system, and she is on
(44:02):
the offensive. Ideologically from the get go Votslav Hovel in
Czechoslovaki elec Vience in Poland. Ronald Reagan adds to this
effort to think new kinds of thoughts. What was unthinkable
the day before he gave that speech became thinkable the
day afterwards. Before he gave that speech, people in East
(44:25):
Berlin assumed, as did people in our own state department,
that that wall would be there for who knew essentially
forever it was essentially permanent. And the day after he
gave that speech, the President of the United States stands
in front of the wall and challenges the leader of
(44:46):
this empire, Mikail Gorbachev, to tear it down. It begins
to become possible to think new kinds of thoughts. I
believe Reagan helps to create a new space for thought
and feeling and protest, which, as we know, is what happens.
That year and a half later, a protest movement begins
(45:06):
in churches, begins in Leipz League and sweeps across East
Germany and culminates with a hundred thousand people marching down
Unta den Linden, that avenue that was empty when I
was there in nineteen eighty seven. In nineteen eighty nine
there are one hundred thousand East Germans protesting, and as
you know, of course, a couple of Pollitt Bureau. First
(45:28):
they forced Eric Connaker, the long time dictator of East Germany,
they force him to resign. They go into emergency session
the Pollitt Bureau in East Germany, and then the middle
of the night on November ninth, they issue a number
of dictats and a member of the Politt Bureau who's
also the press officer, he's bleary eyed, he's tired, and
(45:48):
he misinterprets a decision of the polit Bureau and says
that all the checkpoints are now open effective. His questions
that mean now effective, immediate at Lian and this man
Gunterushevasky says yes effective immediately, and the press conference was
being carried live in East Berlin. Immediately people begin streaming
(46:11):
to the checkpoints in the wall on foot, by bicycle,
by cars. The soldiers have not received any orders. This
takes everyone by surprise, and there's a standoff that lasts sometime.
And finally, of course, the soldiers have a choice. They
can open fire, but they're receiving no direction, and one
of them decides to act like a human being and
(46:31):
he opens the gate. And then all the checkpoints are open,
and the Berlin Wall has ceased to function. From the
Berlin Walls specifically, take a look at them. They've been
there since last night. They are here in the thousands,
they are here in the tens of thousands. Occasionally they
shout d mahamusvek, the wall must go. Thousands and thousands
of West Germans come to make the point that the
(46:53):
wall has suddenly become irrelevant something as you can see,
almost a party on how do you measure You're such
an astonished moment in history. The East German government said
tonight they were going to make more openings in the
wall at least a dozen more put bulldozers right through
the wall so that more people could cross to the west.
The East German communist leadershef Tonight said there'd be a
(47:15):
new election law guaranteeing secret elections which the rest of
the world could monitor. And only twenty four hours after
East Germans were told they could go anywhere anytime, the
Soviet Union said that was a sensible move. I never
taught the President about this afterwards, but I did ask
missus Reagan what his impression, What did he feel when
(47:37):
the wall came down, and she said that he was
especially struck that it wasn't Corvichev who brought the wall down,
it was ordinary German people themselves. That that meant a
great deal to him. I remember the night the wall
came down, Oh yes. The next night, Sam Donaldson had
flown out to sit with Reagan and he said to Reagan,
are you surprisinglys And Reagan said, will you know I
(48:00):
always thought they were Germans on both sides of the wall,
you know, just that simple. The other is to go
back to your point, because both of us are creatures
of words and of the importance of ideas. I think
one of the characteristics that Thatcher, Saint John Paulo Second
and Reagan had. It was really important that we often
(48:20):
forget today, is they established moral superiority. They assert it
in a way which absolutely shattered the Soviet mythology that
in fact Reagan, I'm told, I don't this may be apocryphal,
but I know the handful of times I flew an
Air Force one, Reagan would always come back, and he
would always tell anti Soviet jokes. And I am told
(48:43):
that at the very first meeting with Gorbachev he began
with an anti Soviet joke, those very mild ones, but
in essence it was a man says to the reporters, Look,
I have as much freedom in Russia as I do
in America, And the reporters is how that be? He says, Well,
in America, I can stand up in front of the
(49:04):
White House and I can say Ronald Reagan is a
terrible president, and nothing will be done. He said, Anne,
I can stand up in front of the Kremlin and
I can say Ronald Reagan is a terrible president and
nothing will be done. So we have equal freedom. As
a member of New Center Circle, you can listen to
(49:24):
our podcast extra Peter Robinson's story behind his book, How
Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. If you're not a member
of new Center Circle, please consider joining today at Newt
Center Circle dot com. Thank you to my guest Peter M. Robinson.
(49:46):
You can learn more about President Reagan's Berlin Wall speech,
the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall
on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is
produced by Westwood One. Our executive producer is Debbie Myers
and our producer is Garnsey Slow. Our editor is Robert Borowski,
and our researcher is Rachel Peterson. Our guest booker is
(50:10):
Grace Davis. The artwork for the show was created by
Steve Penley. The music was composed by Joey Salvio. Special
thanks to the team of Ingwish three sixty and Westwood
One's John Wardock and Robert Mathers. Please email me with
your comments at newt at newtsworld dot com. If you've
been enjoining Newtsworld, I hope you will go to Apple
(50:31):
Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give
us a review so others can learn what it's all about.
I'm newt Gangwish. This is Newtsworld, the Westwood one podcast network,
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