James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Robinson had a single night free in West Berlin. He had arranged to have dinner with a few West Germans. A friend had given him the name of Dieter Elz, a former World Bank employee who had lived in Washington for many years and then retired at age sixty to West Berlin. Elz and his wife, Ingeborg, had only recently moved back from the United States and didn’t know many people in the city. When Robinson asked the Elzes to invite a few West Berliners over to their home, Dieter Elz had trouble finding anyone. He finally enlisted a couple of members of the local Rotary Club and their wives. 8

Over dinner, Robinson asked the Germans around the table about their lives in West Berlin. What did they think an American president should say during a speech in the city? Midway through the dinner, Ingeborg Elz began to talk about the Berlin Wall. Every time the Elzes sought merely to visit family in East Germany or to drive through East Germany to summer vacations in Austria, they were required to deal with the wall and its many manifestations: frightening border checkpoints, threatening East German police, car searches, transit visas that required months of advance paperwork. To be sure, in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev was talking about change, using words like glasnost and perestroika, but in West Berlin those slogans didn’t carry much practical significance.

As Ingeborg Elz spoke, Robinson was taking notes. At one point, the White House speechwriter scrawled down these words into his notebook: “If the Russians are willing to open up, then the wall must go. Open the Brandenburg Gate.” 9

Those two sentences made the crucial connection, the one that became the core element of Reagan’s speech several weeks later: the linkage between Gorbachev’s reforms and the Berlin Wall. To be sure, in the past, Reagan and other American officials had called for the destruction of the wall, but this idea went one step further: it turned the wall into the litmus test for whether the Soviet Union was really changing or not.

Gorbachev’s continuing talk of far-reaching change had made the concept of tearing down the wall no longer unimaginable. What Ingeborg Elz told Robinson was an idea that was already in the air. Indeed, only a few weeks earlier, the Washington Post had published a commentary by Dimitri K. Simes, a specialist on Soviet affairs, which carried the headline: TEARING DOWN THE BERLIN WALL: GORBACHEV HAS A CHANCE TO HIT A PUBLIC RELATIONS HOME RUN. If Gorbachev were to do this, Simes wrote, then “the image of the evil empire so damaging to Soviet international effectiveness would disappear overnight.” 10

It was ironic that this dinner conversation at the Elzes’ home had such a lasting impact. Robinson was talking not to a cross section of the citizenry of West Berlin, but merely to six English-speaking dinner guests hastily and randomly put together by a couple who had just moved home from the United States. The Elzes had few connections to West Berlin’s political or intellectual elites; they were middle-class people, conservative but not involved, prosperous but not powerful. Still, what they told Robinson reflected the attitude of many other West Berliners: that the wall was not merely a diplomatic issue, but a continuing outrage and hardship to daily life of the city.

In attending this casual dinner, Robinson was behaving less like a speechwriter than a journalist or novelist; he was gathering material. In retrospect, the results were startling. His handwritten notes of the conversation that night show that in addition to the idea of opening up the Brandenburg Gate, the dinner guests offered several other details that would eventually emerge in Reagan’s speech. One of the guests suggested that the president might quote the title of a Marlene Dietrich song: “Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin” (“I still have a suitcase in Berlin”). Another offered him the phrase “Berliner Schnauze,” a slang phrase for the blunt, cheeky personality that other Germans associated with Berlin. Robinson wrote down these phrases and put them into the president’s speech.

The following day, U.S. and West Berlin officials gave the White House speechwriter a tour of the city, including the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag building. When the group stopped at the Berlin Wall, they noticed some graffiti, including a slogan that a West German official translated for Robinson. “This wall will fall,” it said. “Beliefs become reality.” 11Robinson dutifully wrote the words in his notebook. They, too, became Reagan’s.

Robinson did not talk to Kornblum again. The senior U.S. diplomat in West Berlin was paying far greater attention to the head of the White House delegation: Bill Henkel, who was in charge of advance preparations for Reagan’s trip. West Berlin officials, up to and including Mayor Eberhard Diepgen, were still objecting to the idea of having an American president give a speech at the Brandenburg Gate.

“We discussed what would be the best place, and that was not very simple,” explained Diepgen many years later. “In that time, we had in Berlin a very special situation. On the one hand, most of the people were thankful to the Americans, friends to Americans. And on the other hand, Berlin was a concentration point for the very fundamentalistic position of people from West Germany, because all of those who didn’t want to go into the army, they came to [West] Berlin.” Diepgen was alluding to the West German policy of encouraging young Germans to move to West Berlin by exempting them from military service. As a result, West Berlin became the center of the political left, and its political demonstrations were particularly prone to violence, as Reagan had discovered on his previous visit to Berlin five years earlier. “It was a question of security,” said Diepgen of his opposition to a speech at the Brandenburg Gate. 12

Kornblum realized that the West Berlin mayor would not agree to the Brandenburg Gate site, but he didn’t care. “We can listen to the mayor, but we’re in charge here,” he told Henkel. They attended a meeting with West Berlin officials, who suggested four other venues, including a convention hall and a factory. Kornblum thought they were boring. He took Henkel to visit the other sites, and then to the one in front of the Brandenburg Gate. “Look, here’s how it’s going to look on TV,” Kornblum said. 13Henkel was convinced. Before leaving for Washington, he chose the Brandenburg Gate site.

Back in Washington to write Reagan’s Berlin speech, Peter Robinson was determined to concentrate on the Berlin Wall and the differences between totalitarianism and freedom. He tried to set down on paper what he had heard over dinner in Berlin: that the standard for judging Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (political openness) in the Soviet Union was whether he would open the Berlin Wall. In an early draft of the speech, Robinson wrote: “If you truly believe in glasnost, Herr Gorbachev, bring down this wall.” Tony Dolan, who as Reagan’s chief speechwriter was Robinson’s boss, liked that idea but found the speech in general to be too prosaic. He sent it back to Robinson for a rewrite, saying he could do better. 1In the second draft, Robinson included the words “If you are sincere about glasnost, Herr Gorbachev, take down this wall.”

On May 20, 1987, Robinson completed a draft that Dolan approved. “Behind me stands a wall that divides the entire continent of Europe,” the speech said. The armed guards and the checkpoints along Europe’s divide served as “an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state.” Robinson’s new draft continued:

We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of openness and liberalization—to use the Russian term, “glasnost.” Some political prisoners have been released. BBC broadcasts are no longer jammed….