James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Berliners on the East side of that wall have little to celebrate. They are being forced to endure a glorification of communist dictatorship… Your courage and your unity will ensure that—one day—this ugly wall will disappear….

Europe must be reunited. Barriers to contact must be torn down. We should begin with the ugly wall which divides this great city. We should continue by helping people in East Germany and Eastern Europe to enjoy full self-determination and democratic rights. 6

Although the Kornblum draft reviled the wall and urged its destruction, it did not include what would later become the most bitterly debated and eventually the most celebrated element in Reagan’s speech. His text did not call upon Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the wall.

The Soviet leader, in his first two years on the job, had engaged in a flurry of diplomacy that had attracted considerable excitement, particularly in Western Europe. He had proposed the elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2000; he had also started to establish good working relationships with Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand. The perception had taken hold that Gorbachev was innovative, while the United States was clinging to the status quo. The idea behind this early draft of the speech was that Reagan needed to respond to Gorbachev, not to challenge him. A cover letter explained that the speech “will help counter the impression that Gorbachev has seized the initiative.” In particular, Kornblum proposed that Reagan make a series of specific policy suggestions. The United States, he said, should propose an improvement in air links to Berlin. It should call for international conferences to be held concurrently in West and East Berlin. Perhaps the 1992 Olympics could be held in both parts of the city.

These ideas were designed to convey the idea that American policy toward Europe was open to change—even as the United States was quietly rebuffing the idea of upgraded ties between the two Germanys. The cover letter that accompanied Kornblum’s draft said Reagan should emphasize that “we are not sitting on a static line in Europe—we are going somewhere.” Reagan’s address in West Berlin should also demonstrate to Soviet officials that while the United States was ready to deal with Gorbachev, “we will not abandon positions of principle to do so.” 7

Many years later, after the end of the Cold War, Kornblum would become embroiled in an acrimonious dispute with Reagan’s speechwriters over his role in the Berlin Wall speech. Kornblum sometimes claimed credit for having been the inspiration for the key line in the speech. Two decades later, he wrote that Reagan “needed, in our view, to issue a direct call to Gorbachev to open the Berlin Wall.” 8However, the idea of an exhortation addressed specifically to Gorbachev is not contained in the speech Kornblum sent to Washington, nor does it appear in other records. Kornblum’s speech would have had the president inveigh against the wall, but in a more impersonal way; there would have been no appeal to the leader of the Soviet Union to remove it.

Reagan’s former speechwriters, on the other hand, claimed that Kornblum wanted Reagan to avoid the subject of the Berlin Wall entirely. One of them, Peter Robinson, attributed to Kornblum the view that the president’s speech should contain “no chest-thumping. No Soviet-bashing. And no inflammatory statements about the Berlin Wall.” 9The record demonstrates, however, that this accusation is incorrect. The speech Kornblum sent to the White House in early March repeatedly denounced the Berlin Wall and urged that it be torn down.

Kornblum’s draft was merely the first step in deciding what Reagan should say and do while in West Berlin. State Department officials and U.S. diplomats overseas could make suggestions for what Reagan could say. They could even put their ideas into the form of a draft speech. No matter what they did, the work of crafting prose for Ronald Reagan would always go to the White House speechwriters.

Reagan’s political career was based in no small part on his ability to give a speech. He had first attracted national prominence in 1964 with his televised address on behalf of Barry Goldwater’s losing presidential campaign—a speech that reflected the ideas he had been refining in front of audiences for more than a decade. 1Twelve years later, with his concession speech to Gerald Ford at the Republican National Convention in 1976, he had put himself in position to take over the Republican Party.

When Reagan handled policy issues or the daily workings of government, he was frequently passive and aloof. But when it came to speeches, he was attentive to detail. He sometimes delivered a speech with a contact lens designed for reading in one eye but not the other, so that he could glance down and read the speech text if he needed to do so. Secretary of State George Shultz once heard Reagan advise Margaret Thatcher about how to use a TelePrompTer. Be sure the pages of the speech are numbered on the TelePrompTer and keep turning the pages of your written text, Reagan said, so that if the machine suddenly breaks down, you know where you are in the printed copy. Be sure to have a few quotes in the speech; it’s appropriate to pull up the printed page and read those words—so that, by contrast, it will not seem to the audience as if you are reading the other parts of the speech . 2

Reagan worked up the final text of a speech with markings every few lines, at each point he wanted to pause and take a breath, so that his delivery would flow evenly. 3It was Reagan (no doubt thinking of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats) who came up with the idea of a five-minute live presidential radio speech each Saturday. When he rehearsed these radio broadcasts, he did it with a watch, noting down where he should be in the text after one, two, three, and four minutes. Once Reagan was on the air, an aide would gesture to him when each minute had passed. Reagan would either slightly speed up or slow down his delivery as necessary so that the speech would end in exactly five minutes—just what the broadcasters needed. 4

Alone with his aides, Reagan sometimes indulged in the sort of bathroom humor or profanity that the public never saw. During his prepresidential trip to West Germany, he had laughed when he discovered that the German words for entrance and exit are Einfahrt and Ausfahrt; from then on, he and Richard Allen, the foreign-policy adviser who had accompanied him on the trip, used to swap fahrt jokes. 5When Soviet leader Yuri Andropov died in 1984 and aides suggested that the president go to Moscow to attend the funeral, Reagan countered, “I don’t want to honor that prick.” 6

In public, however, and particularly in his speeches, Reagan succeeded in conveying a world of innocence and goodness, a throwback to the era of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town . No one could better elicit emotions of nostalgia, childhood, and a romance for the America of small towns—the parts of the nation whose past was more glorious than their future. Richard Nixon used to try to appeal to the same small-town nostalgia by recalling how, as a boy, he used to hear the train whistle as it passed in the night. Yet Nixon managed to convey, instead, only the resentment of hard life in small towns. It was Reagan who could make the train whistle.

Reagan’s speeches often told stories of ordinary people, of heroes who had not received the recognition they deserved. He spoke of Roy Benavidez, a Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam, or Lenny Skutnik, a federal worker who jumped into the icy waters of the Potomac River to rescue a woman after a plane crash. It was Reagan who introduced the custom of inviting one or more such heroes to attend his annual State of the Union address to Congress, so that he could point them out to a surefire burst of applause.