PLAN DOG IDENTIFIED GERMANY AS THE PRIMARY threat to America and to liberty (ours, everyone’s) in World War II—rightly. Nazism’s combination of science and superstition made that country the most powerful and most alluring of our enemies. Even though Japan had first attacked us, on our soil, our primary priority remained Germany’s destruction. In May 1945, overwhelmed by Soviet, American, and British armies, Germany finally surrendered. Berlin would become the symbol of the next, cold world war.
Franklin Roosevelt had died in April 1945, after being elected to a fourth term. Like Wilson before him, he hoped his war would lead to a peaceful world. A week after his arsenal of democracy fireside chat, he had described in a State of the Union address the worldwide order that he hoped would prevail once the dictators were defeated. He called for “a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.”1
His hope, like Wilson’s, was disappointed. Not all the aggressors had been on the same side. The Soviet Union—Hitler’s jackal, then his prey—found itself, after gigantic losses and immense efforts, the conqueror of half of Europe. Roosevelt had hoped to charm Stalin, as he had American voters and Winston Churchill. “You know,” he told one cabinet secretary, “I really think the Russians will go along with me about having no spheres of influence.”2 Churchill, more realistic or more desperate, offered Stalin a frank deal—a Soviet sphere of influence encompassing most of the Balkans, with Britain retaining the upper hand in Greece. Churchill himself called his proposal “rather cynical.”3 Since the arrangement tracked the prospective course of Soviet armies, Stalin accepted it.
Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese leaders had been bold, even to rashness. The Soviets showed a patient indefatigableness. They developed the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb shortly after America did. They sponsored foreign clients following, or at least espousing, Communist doctrine; the first fifteen postwar years saw Communist revolutions in China, Vietnam, and Cuba. In countries the Soviets could not control, they made use of spies and sympathizers; in the United States they managed to penetrate the atomic bomb program, the Roosevelt administration, and Hollywood.
The Cold War was cold only in comparison with the hecatombs of World Wars I and II; local wars and revolutions, pro- and anti-Communist pogroms, flared across the globe. In the midst of this strife, Berlin remained a static point: stable because opposing forces had met, balanced, and locked there.
Postwar Germany had been divided into four zones of occupation, each assigned to one of the victors—the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and America. The former capital was similarly split, although it was located in the heart of the Soviet zone, the future East Germany. Tension flickered over these divisions like lightning. In 1948 the Soviets blocked rail and truck traffic into West Berlin; America and its allies supplied the city from the air. In 1961 the Communist East German government—successor rulers of the former Soviet zone—stanched a steady drain of refugees to the west by sealing East Berlin with a wall—twenty-seven miles of concrete through the middle of the city, overseen by watchtowers and backed by a cleared death-strip in which any unauthorized person was shot. In 1963 President Kennedy gave a censorious speech on the wall’s western side: “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in.… Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was civis Romanus sum [I am a Roman citizen]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner [I am a Berliner].”4 The president’s German tag became famous. Yet the city’s divisions remained unchanged.
Berlin was simultaneously an ongoing experiment in comparative political systems and a frozen locker of Cold War policies. The free west flourished—pleasure boats dotted its small waterways—while the east was a gray barracks. In Spandau Prison, Rudolf Hess, the last high-ranking Nazi war criminal, lived out his life sentence under a rotating, four-power guard. The site of the former British embassy, on the Wilhelmstrasse, was now a vacant lot in East Berlin. The British disdained to rebuild, as a sign of their disapproval of East Germany, but, because embassies have extraterritorial status, the East Germans could not touch the site without provoking an international incident. So it sat.
Postwar agreements, still honored, allowed the occupying powers to send military personnel into each other’s zones. A passage through the wall on the Friedrichstrasse, known as Checkpoint Charlie (Charlie equals C in the military phonetic alphabet), was the scene of an ongoing Cold War ballet. When an American vehicle arrived at the checkpoint, it stopped, though it was not obliged to. East German soldiers paraded around it without boarding; members of the American military removed their name tags, since the East Germans had no right to know who they were. The inspection, which was unauthorized, was unacknowledged and frustrated by the inspected. Dance over, the vehicle moved on.5
As the Berlin Wall went up, Ronald Reagan was making the transition from entertainment to politics. Like William Jennings Bryan, he had been born in a small town in Illinois. A warm baritone voice, a winning personality, and good looks took him from college plays, to radio sportscasting, to Hollywood. In the mid-1950s, after his career as a star faded, he shifted to television and speaking, hosting a show sponsored by General Electric and acting as a corporate spokesman.
He had been interested in politics all along. He was a Roosevelt fan, doing an excellent impression of him. In Hollywood he first encountered Communists, who maneuvered to control actors’ civic groups. Olivia de Havilland, one of his fellow stars, recalled their tactics. If a Communist-backed motion at a meeting faltered, “Dalton Trumbo, a brilliant man, got up and spoke absolute nonsense to delay the vote, like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Once most of the people in attendance had drifted away, “the radicals untabled the motion and passed it, one-two-three.”6 Communists also sought to control the labor unions of those who worked on movie lots. Reagan, a leader in the Screen Actors Guild, opposed their efforts and received in return a phoned threat that his face would be fixed (i.e., with acid). His studio issued him a revolver and a personal guard.
Reagan read and was impressed by Witness, the best-selling memoir of Whitaker Chambers, journalist and former Soviet spy. One of the turning points of the book comes as Chambers watches his baby daughter in a high chair. “My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: ‘No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.’”7 Reagan could quote the passage years later, from memory.8
Away from the big screen he wrote his own material. As his most recent biographer put it, “Colleagues at every phase of his life would recall [him] immersed in his own private world with just a yellow tablet and fountain pen, undisturbed by his surroundings, writing umpteen drafts of speeches, radio broadcasts, and letters in longhand, even at times when others were hired to do his bidding.”9
His work as a corporate pitchman, speaking in plant after plant, reimmersed him in ordinary life. “We saturated him in Middle America” was how one of his handlers put it.10 When his anecdotes of Hollywood wore thin, he sensed and responded to the political concerns of his audiences.
In 1964 Reagan was recruited to give a televised fundraising appeal for the floundering presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater. Goldwater sank, but Reagan was a hit. He ran for office himself, in 1966 and 1970, winning two terms as governor of California.
The seventies saw the high-water mark of Soviet ambitions. America lost the Vietnam War—the longest we had fought from the American Revolution on; Cuban troops installed Communist regimes across Africa; the Soviet Union targeted western Europe with intermediate-range nuclear missiles and invaded Afghanistan. Republican and Democratic administrations alike seemed unable to stay the tide, much less reverse it.
Reagan sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, losing narrowly. Months later, he met with Richard Allen, a foreign policy expert eager to work for him on his second run for the job. “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic,” Reagan told him. “It is this: We win and they lose. What do you think of that?”11
Reagan’s victories in the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections gave him the chance to implement his policy. Far from being simple, it was a full-court press, as complex as Plan Dog. He called simultaneously for a defensive missile shield and disarmament talks. The first would outpace the technological capabilities of the Soviet Union; the second would give it a gracious line of retreat. He chipped away at recent Soviet gains by supporting anti-Communist insurgencies around the world and even undermined a very old acquisition by covertly supporting a free labor movement in Poland.
In early 1985 there was a jog, or a possible blink, in the Communist world. After a string of ailing gerontocrats, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union chose as its general secretary fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s watchwords, perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), described modifications he wished to make in the Soviet status quo. Did they represent actual reforms or cosmetic changes only? Reagan and Gorbachev met in Iceland in 1986 to try to work out a nuclear weapons deal; they failed, but talks continued.
In June 1987 Reagan stopped in Berlin on the way home from an economic summit meeting in Venice. He had been to Berlin once before, in 1982, a visit that brought out thousands of left-wing protesters. (The international Left at that time regularly did the Soviet Union’s bidding.) Berlin was marking its 750th anniversary in 1987; Reagan expected this occasion to be more peaceful and more productive.
He spoke before the Brandenburg Gate, a triumphal arch built by the Prussian monarchy at the end of the eighteenth century, which had served as a witness to the ups and downs of German history ever since. The charioteer at its summit was stolen by Napoleon and restored after his fall. The Nazis used the gate for parades and ceremonies. The Berlin Wall consigned it to the death-strip on the eastern side. Reagan stood on a podium, with his back to the gate and the barrier. He was seventy-six years old, the oldest man to serve in the White House; his voice had grown a bit husky, his body language a bit stiff. But he spoke with confidence, born of talent, practice, and conviction.
However much Reagan liked writing, the volume of a modern president’s words is too great even for a Balzac to generate. Reagan’s speechwriters were mostly young, conservative activists. The head of their team was Anthony Dolan, then thirty-eight; the Berlin speech itself was assigned to Peter Robinson, who had just turned thirty. But even as they churned out words for their boss, they channeled Reagan’s voice. “His policies were plain,” Robinson wrote, explaining the process. “He had been articulating them for decades—until he became President he wrote most of his material himself. [We] were never attempting to fabricate an image, just to produce work that measured up to the standard Reagan himself” had set. He had approved the draft of the Berlin speech in a meeting with his speechwriters in May.
The obvious model for any president speaking in Berlin was Kennedy’s 1963 speech. The most famous line in it had been his German-language statement of identification. Reagan now used several German phrases himself: a tribute to Berlin’s attractiveness lifted from a popular song, the local equivalent of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” Ich hab’ noch einen koffer in Berlin (I always have a suitcase in Berlin); and a backhanded tribute to the Berlin temperament, Berliner herz, Berliner humor, ja, und Berliner schnauze (Berlin heart, Berlin humor, yes, and Berlin snout, which equated to sass, rudeness, wiseass-ness). These Berlitz phrase-book bits were affectionate, corny, not stirring. Stirring would come later.
Reagan began with a discussion of Berlin as a symbol of the Cold War. “Behind me stands a wall… part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same—still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state. Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly.”
The Berlin Wall was not a countryside frontier like Hadrian’s Wall or the Great Wall of China. It was an antistreet in the heart of a city.
Its perverse closeness to ordinary urban life highlighted the deaths visited on those who tried to cross it. By the time Reagan spoke, 137 people had been shot, drowned, or otherwise killed making the attempt—from Ida Siekmann, a fifty-eight-year-old woman who had jumped over it to her death in August 1961, to Lutz Schmidt, a twenty-four-year-old man who had been shot helping a friend clamber across it in February 1987. This number of murders would have been a slow day’s work in the Cambodian killing fields or the Ukrainian Holodomor, to say nothing of the Nazi extermination camps. But compiling such a tally in a great city—not by criminals but by officers of the state; not against bandits, rioters, or arsonists but against ordinary people trying to move a few miles or a few blocks—made each death at the wall peculiarly conspicuous and revolting.
Reagan quoted Richard von Weizsacker, president of West Germany, on the German question—when, if ever, the split country would be reunited: “The German question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed.” Reagan went on: “As long… as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind.”
This was darkly stirring. But Reagan had always been best, whether as an actor or a politician, as the good guy: recalling, perhaps, his upbeat youthful idol Roosevelt; reflecting certainly his own optimistic nature. So he pivoted. “Yet I do not come here to lament. For I find in Berlin a message of hope… a message of triumph.”
Reagan surveyed the postwar world of western Europe and Japan. Its leaders, helped by America, “understood the practical importance of liberty—that just as truth can flourish only when the journalist is given freedom of speech, so prosperity can come about only when the farmer and the businessman enjoy economic freedom.” West Germany’s leaders “reduced tariffs, expanded free trade, lowered taxes. From 1950 to 1960 alone, the standard of living in West Germany and Berlin doubled.” This was the free marketeer’s version of Bryan’s and Roosevelt’s paeans to economic man: respect the farmer and the businessman as much as the magnate; respect them by giving them the opportunity to make their way.
Reagan zoomed in on Berlin. “Where four decades ago there was rubble, today in West Berlin there is the greatest industrial output of any city in Germany—busy office blocks, fine homes and apartments, proud avenues.… Where a city’s culture seemed to have been destroyed”—first by Nazism, then by bombs—“today there are two great universities, orchestras and an opera, countless theaters, and museums. Where there was want, today there’s abundance.”
Though he continued to face ahead, his text turned behind him, to the east, beyond the wall. “In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind—too little food.”
He addressed his opposite number, Mikhail Gorbachev. “And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness.… Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet States? Or are they token gestures, intended… to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it?”
Reagan proposed a test. “There is one sign the Soviets can make that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.”
His speech was only half done, but now came the intended climax, the rhetorical shot meant to be heard round the world’s newscasts. Peter Robinson had first heard the prototype of the coming lines back in April, when he visited Berlin with the presidential advance team, sent ahead to scout out venues. (Poor Lincoln, training into Gettysburg, cold). Robinson had dinner with Berliners, who talked about the wall, the looming presence in their lives. “My sister lives twenty miles in that direction,” said one. “I haven’t seen her in more than two decades.” Another described a guard tower he passed every morning on his way to work, and its attendant soldier. “That soldier and I speak the same language.… But one of us is a zookeeper and the other is an animal.” The hostess was most vehement. “If this man Gorbachev is serious with his talk of glasnost and perestroika he can prove it. He can get rid of this wall.”12
Robinson wrung the line through many versions: “bring down this wall,” “take down this wall.” Once he went full Kennedy: “Herr Gorbachev, Machen Sie dieses Tor auf.” “What did you do that for?” Dolan, the supervisor of all his drafts, asked. Robinson explained that since the crowd would be German, Reagan should give his big line in German. “When you’re writing for the president of the United States,” Dolan replied, “give him his big line in English.”13
At the speechwriters’ May meeting with Reagan, the president had singled out “that passage about tearing down the wall. That wall has to come down. That’s what I’d like to say” to any East Germans who might be able to pick up his words via radio.14
The State Department and the National Security Council lobbied against the line as too confrontational, too insulting to Gorbachev, with whom there were hopes of progress on arms control, and submitted their own, more anodyne versions. Their objections went all the way to Reagan at least twice, the last time on the very morning of the day he was to speak, and he rebuffed them every time. In his limousine on the way to the Brandenburg Gate, Reagan told a senior aide he would deliver the line as written. “The boys at State are going to kill me, but it’s the right thing to do.”15
“General Secretary Gorbachev,” Reagan said in his speech, “if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Reagan was not the first American to hope that the wall would fall. Kennedy in 1963 had looked forward “to that day when this city will be joined as one… in a peaceful and hopeful globe.”16 The advisors Reagan referred to as “the boys at State” had written in one of their alternative drafts, “One day, this ugly wall will disappear.”17 But these hopes were idealized, their timelines unspecific. Reagan took Gorbachev’s own catchwords and challenged him to live up to them. Walls do not fall on their own (parts of Hadrian’s are still standing after nineteen hundred years). What men build, men must dismantle. Reagan was inviting Gorbachev to do the job.
He went on to survey the ongoing arms control talks. “But,” he said, “we must remember a crucial fact: East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other. And our differences are not about weapons but about liberty.” Tyrants yearn to suppress it; free men will fight to defend it, if necessary.
He told an anecdote about eastern (Communist) tyranny. “The totalitarian world finds even symbols of love and worship an affront.” In the sixties the East Germans built a sky-high television tower (Fernsehturm) in their half of Berlin—a twelve-hundred-foot-tall needle with a metallic spherical visitors’ platform halfway up. “Ever since,” Reagan said, “the authorities have been working to correct what they view as the tower’s one major flaw, treating the glass sphere… with paints and chemicals.” The flaw? “When the Sun strikes that sphere… the light makes the sign of the cross.” Berliner schnauze called the effect “Pope’s revenge.”18
Reagan’s churchgoing was genial and undogmatic. In this paragraph, there is not a Bible verse to be found; what would William Jennings Bryan or the Flushing remonstrators have thought? But like Roosevelt before him, Reagan was careful to keep God in his sights. Even in Berlin, he concluded, “symbols of worship cannot be suppressed.”
His speech ended with a prediction. “Across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.” This was almost true. Walls cannot withstand free men, if they are resolved to remove them.
When Reagan left the White House at the end of his second term in January 1989, the wall still stood; three more people were yet to die trying to cross it—Ingolf Diederichs jumping from a train, Chris Gueffroy shot, Winfried Freudenberg killed in a balloon crash. Mr. Gorbachev never came to tear it down. But in the summer of 1989, he signaled that he would allow it to be destroyed.
Three times the people of Eastern Europe had risen against their Soviet-imposed governments—in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968—only to be suppressed by Soviet troops. In 1981 the Polish army itself had repressed Poland’s Free Labor Movement (which was why the Reagan administration had needed to help the movement covertly). In July 1989, six months after Reagan left office, in a speech in France, Gorbachev renounced that option: “Any interference in domestic affairs and any attempts to restrict the sovereignty of states—friends, allies or any others—are inadmissible.”19
But the Communist order in Eastern Europe was already crumbling. The Polish government had agreed in April to hold free elections. In May Hungary dismantled its border fence with Austria, and thousands of East Germans and Czechs streamed through the gap. In October Erich Honecker, who had built the Berlin Wall in the first place, was deposed as general secretary of the East German Communist Party; the following month, Berliners from both sides of the wall tore it down with chisels and hammers, as guards, suddenly without orders, stood by. In September 1990 former president Reagan returned to Berlin, where he did a photo-op, whacking with a hammer at a still-standing segment.
What effect had Reagan’s words had on its destruction? None, according to his otherwise perceptive biographer: “[The wall] had ‘fallen’ in November 1989, not as a result of Reagan’s plea, as some believe.… It was the German people themselves who took up sledgehammers and pickaxes to demolish the ugly scar.”20 This is blinkered. Reagan had envisioned victory over the Soviet Union for a decade. He pursued it with weapons, negotiations, little wars, secret ops, and words. His words at the Brandenburg Gate had told the subject peoples of Eastern Europe that their masters were hesitating and that America was on their side. Superpower negotiations would not distract us from the most important thing, which was liberty, including theirs. On Reagan’s 1990 trip to Berlin, Sabine Bergmann-Pohl, the last head of the East German government, told him, “Mr. President, we have much to thank you for.”21 Sometimes eyewitnesses know what they have seen.
Reagan’s peroration in 1987 had spoken only of “this wall… across Europe”—a prudent specification. As Eastern European tyrannies trembled in 1989, the government of Communist China seemed threatened by massive student demonstrations in Beijing. It responded by calling in the army and massacring the demonstrators—fewer than three hundred of them, according to Chinese officials; twenty-seven hundred, according to the Chinese Red Cross; ten thousand, according to a secret cable by the British ambassador.22 No walls fell there.
Reagan did what he could, which was what he had planned to do. Roosevelt had extended the zone of our liberty to embattled Britain, aiding it as an arsenal, then as an ally. Reagan extended it to Eastern Europe, enough to undermine its Soviet masters.
In November 1990, when the two Germanys were reunited, I went to celebrate at a party at the German consulate (there were no geographical prefixes now) in New York City. All the guests were given souvenir chips of the wall, embedded in Lucite cubes, with a silhouette of the Brandenburg Gate on one face. My cube is on my desk as I write this.