Tear Down This Wall (Brandenburg Gate Address)

Summary

On 12 June 1987 President Ronald Reagan spoke in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, with the Berlin Wall and the closed gate directly behind his platform. The city was marking its 750th anniversary, and Reagan, on his second visit, addressed Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Governing Mayor Eberhard Diepgen, and a large crowd, while also speaking by broadcast to listeners in East Berlin and Eastern Europe. The speech, drafted by the White House speechwriter Peter Robinson, runs to about 2,700 words. It opens with Kennedy's 1963 visit and a line from a Berlin song, declares in German that there is only one Berlin, and describes the wall as a gash of barbed wire and concrete and a scar across the city. Reagan then recounts the Marshall Plan and West Germany's economic miracle, setting West Berlin's rebuilt prosperity against Khrushchev's boast that communism would bury the West, and concludes that freedom is the victor. Turning to Mikhail Gorbachev's new talk of reform and openness, he asks whether it marks real change or token gestures, and proposes one unmistakable sign: Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate, tear down this wall. The second half defends the Western alliance's firmness on missiles, which had brought the Soviets back to arms talks, and offers practical proposals for Berlin: air links, international conferences, youth exchanges, and Olympic Games held in both halves of the city. The close turns inward. Reagan says that what keeps Berliners in their besieged city is love, describes the sunlight forming a cross on the East Berlin television tower, and reads graffiti on the wall predicting its fall. State Department and National Security Council officials had urged that the challenge to Gorbachev be softened or cut; Reagan kept it. The speech drew modest notice at first, but after the wall was opened on 9 November 1989 its central line became one of the most quoted sentences of the Cold War.

Top Lessons

• Naming the test of sincerity

  Reagan does not dismiss Gorbachev's reforms or simply praise them. He lists what has changed, asks whether the changes are real or cosmetic, and then names a single public act that would settle the question. The method teaches that claims of reform are best judged by a concrete deed that cannot be faked.

• A wall as an argument

  The speech uses the wall standing behind the speaker as its chief piece of evidence. A government that must fence its own citizens in has already answered the question of which system people prefer, and Reagan lets the concrete, the guard towers, and the closed gate make that case before he draws the conclusion that freedom is the victor.

• What keeps a people going

  Near the end Reagan asks why West Berliners stay in a city surrounded by a hostile state and answers that it is not stubbornness or sentiment but love. He then links that love to worship, pointing to the cross the sun makes on the atheist state's television tower. The speech locates the strength of a free people in their affections and their faith, not only in their economy or their arms.

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