James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Reagan himself stayed aloof from these battles. Dolan and other speechwriters sought to put forward what they saw as Reagan’s conservative values, using slogans such as “Let Reagan be Reagan.” The president often supported them, but he did so from a distance. “He had worked under the Hollywood system, where there are directors and writers,” reflected Dolan many years later. “In Hollywood, you can’t befriend the writers too much, or else they’ll get too full of their own importance.”

On Ronald Reagan’s previous presidential trip to West Berlin in 1982, he had delivered his speech in front of the Charlottenburg Palace in a pleasant, mostly residential area a couple of miles from the heart of the city and the dividing line with East Berlin. Security had been one important factor. The planners had to worry about the huge antinuclear demonstrations against Reagan, which indeed turned out to be raucous and occasionally violent.

As soon as Reagan agreed to go to West Berlin again in 1987, U.S. officials there began trying to decide where he should speak. They were looking for a location that would attract attention. John Kornblum, the U.S. minister in West Berlin, began thinking about a site that would make a bold statement, one with deep resonance in German history. The president could appear directly in front of the Brandenburg Gate. 1The gate is Berlin’s most famous landmark, the very symbol of the city itself. It was constructed in 1791 as a symbol of peace, then played a symbolic role in Germany’s turbulent history, from Napoléon’s conquest through the rise of Hitler.

The Brandenburg Gate was located in East Berlin in the Soviet sector about fifty yards behind the Berlin Wall. The gate had been closed to the West ever since the wall was built. For Kornblum and other American officials, that was precisely the point. An American leader couldn’t go directly up to the Brandenburg Gate (at least not without fear of being shot by East German border guards). But if the speaking podium was placed correctly, Reagan could appear on television with the mammoth gate framed directly behind him, and with the wall between himself and the gate. No image could better dramatize the continuing division of Berlin, of Germany, and of Europe.

Kornblum broached with West Berlin officials the idea of Reagan’s speaking before the Brandenburg Gate. They told him it was impossible; the security problems would be too great. Kornblum, who was never reluctant to assert U.S. or Allied power and sovereignty in West Berlin, reminded officials there that the Americans, British, and French were still in charge of security in the city. Despite the West German anxieties, he recommended to Washington that Reagan give his speech with the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall as the backdrop.

Early on, Ronald Reagan’s White House aides had little idea of what he might say in Berlin. The new White House communications adviser, Thomas Griscom, had started his job in early March along with his own boss, White House chief of staff Howard Baker. Griscom oversaw the speechwriters. Their principal goals were to help Reagan recover from the Iran-Contra scandal and to demonstrate that he was not a lame-duck president.

Griscom knew what he did not want: this should not be simply a speech about Germany or American policy toward Germany, he believed. Griscom’s initial instructions for the speech were that Reagan should not try to imitate John Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech of 1963. He did not want “to have Ronald Reagan up there speaking German and trying to bond with the German people,” Griscom subsequently explained. “That wasn’t the president’s style, and it had already been done very well by Kennedy.” Reagan’s speech should, instead, be cast in the larger context of America’s changing relations with the Soviet Union. 2

In early April, Reagan’s chief speechwriter, Tony Dolan, assigned to a thirty-year-old assistant, Peter Robinson, the job of drafting Reagan’s speech. Robinson, like Dolan, owed his job to William F. Buckley. Robinson was a political conservative; his favorite college professor, Jeff Hart, had worked with Buckley at National Review . After graduating from Dartmouth, Robinson had studied at Oxford and tried unsuccessfully to write a novel. In 1982, three years out of college and jobless, he wrote to Buckley for advice or help. It turned out that Buckley’s own son, Christopher, was just leaving a speechwriting job with Vice President George Bush. Robinson went to work for the vice president and became a Reagan speechwriter a couple of years later. 3

In late April 1987, as preparation for writing Reagan’s speech, Robinson went to Europe as part of a White House and Secret Service advance team arranging the presidential trip. In West Berlin, his first stop was a discussion with Kornblum to discuss what Reagan should say. 4

It was a frosty conversation. Kornblum was a professional diplomat who spent his days dealing with West German officials and the State Department back home. He was engaged above all in a fight to maintain American and Allied sovereignty over West Berlin and to prevent the growing rapprochement between West and East Germany from going too far. The declassified State Department cables from this period show that Kornblum was endeavoring to make sure that Eberhard Diepgen, the mayor of West Berlin, did not attempt to go to ceremonies in East Berlin and did not invite East Germany’s Erich Honecker to ceremonies in West Berlin. 5

Kornblum was not a humble man. He tended to be respectful toward those with whom he did business from day to day, but also aloof and dismissive to those he considered less knowledgeable. He was not inclined toward patience with a young conservative speechwriter from Washington, even one who worked at the White House. In fact, Kornblum believed he had already drafted Reagan’s speech anyway, making the speechwriter’s trip superfluous. For his own part, Robinson wasn’t disposed to pay homage to a State Department bureaucrat. He had been assigned by the White House the task of drafting the president’s speech, and he expected it to embody Reagan’s traditional anti-Communist values, which of course meant concentrating on the Soviet Union. He didn’t want to get bogged down in the details of intra-German diplomacy.

The entire meeting lasted only about fifteen minutes. By Robinson’s subsequent account, Kornblum told him the president should stay away from the subject of the Berlin Wall. It would be unwise for Reagan to stir up public feelings about the divided city. Robinson said Kornblum informed him that the residents of West Berlin “had long ago gotten used to the structure that encircled them.” 6

Robinson’s description is puzzling, because in fact Kornblum’s own draft speech for Reagan, sent to Washington the previous month, had attacked the wall and called for it to be destroyed. (“Barriers to contact must be torn down. We should begin with the ugly wall which divides this great city.”) 7It had, moreover, contained a denunciation of “communist dictatorship.” However, Kornblum had also included a series of modest policy proposals (such as holding conferences jointly in West and East Berlin) intended to make Reagan’s speech sound positive and future oriented. The goal was to convey a sense of change and thus to defuse public sentiment in West Berlin for a new, more harmonious relationship with the East.

It seems likely that in his meeting with the visiting White House speechwriter, Kornblum emphasized the specific policy measures he had suggested. He may well have cautioned Robinson against focusing too much on the Berlin Wall and argued that many West Berliners had become accustomed to the reality of a divided city. It seems plausible that Robinson may have taken what Kornblum said as a warning that Reagan should not criticize the presence of the Berlin Wall. At this juncture, Robinson had no idea Kornblum had himself written a speech that called for the wall to be dismantled. He had not seen Kornblum’s earlier draft and realized, correctly, that Reagan was not going to deliver a speech drafted by the State Department. Robinson left the meeting angry, deciding that in gathering ideas for Reagan’s speech, a diplomat like Kornblum was going to be of no help.