That line did not appear by mere chance. While the phrasing was new, the sentiment had been there all along. Said Peter Robinson, the author of the speech: “Among us speechwriters, I don’t think there was any doubt at all about what the Gipper was up to: He intended to win. I’ll grant that I was surprised the wall came down when it did. But that Reagan wanted to defeat the Soviet Union—that he wanted us to win and them to lose—was clear enough in the speechwriting shop.”3 Robinson and Reagan on that day intended to call for the collapse of more than just the wall dividing Berlin.
Almost from the instant that he uttered those words, the Soviet press began to vilify Reagan’s remarks, subjecting a captive audience behind the Iron Curtain to a lengthy discussion by hardline Marxists who denounced Reagan’s declaration. Speaking on “Studio 9,” three of Russia’s top “political analysts”—Valentin Sorin, Georgi Arbatov, and Valentin Falin—explained that the speech was “plain blackmail, blackmail by an American cowboy… threatening and waving his hands and staging a show of strength near the Berlin Wall.” Arbatov informed Soviet citizens that Reagan’s “hypocritical” statement was merely an attempt to deflect Americans’ attention from the Iran-Contra scandal and the impending economic “crash” about to befall the capitalist United States.4
Likewise, Falin complained that, “Reagan came to this city [West Berlin] without a good knowledge of the fact that West Berlin is less suitable than many other places on the planet for demonstrations of force, threats, and the lowest and most—if I may say so—frantic demagoguery.” Reagan, said Falin, was yet again “increasing tension” and “increasing the temperature.” Continuing in this vein, Falin proceeded to justify the Berlin Wall’s 1961 construction and continued existence: “The measures our GDR [East Germany] friends were forced to take in 1961 were of strictly defensive character. Their Warsaw Pact allies also asked them to take these measures…. [T]hose measures at the border… steeply reduced possibilities of using West Berlin for subversive activities against the GDR and other socialist states.”
He plowed on: “Today the President turns to the vocabulary of the forties, fifties, and sixties and tries to plunge West Berlin back at least twenty years. He tries to plunge both West Berlin and central Europe back into the period when very acute crises arose from time to time in and around West Berlin. I would like to remind you that in 1961, precisely in West Berlin at the end of 1961—when the U.S. Administration was toying with the idea of bringing down this wall—the world found itself within 200 meters of World War III.”
As far as Falin and the group were concerned, Reagan was seeking to move the world backward, not forward, and the wall was a source of stability. In fact, Falin believed that a divided Germany was imperative, its presence providing an assurance that fascism could not once again take hold. Calling Berlin the “capital of bloody fascism,” he complained: “For Reagan the whole German question is the opening of the Brandenburg Gate. For all Europe and for us, however, it is the question of not allowing World War III to be unleashed again by German imperialism.”
Chomping at the bit, Arbatov jumped in: “What Reagan is saying is simply political vulgarity. Political vulgarity!”
Moderator Zorin invited the commentators to offer their objective assessments on Reagan’s request that Gorbachev “prove” he was serious about “openness” by coming to Berlin to open the Brandenburg Gate. Falin replied by bemoaning Reagan’s dirty pooclass="underline" “I think that Reagan is not only imposing political rules of the game on the other countries and the Soviet Union, but he also wants the political figures and leaders of the states to think precisely the same way as he does. But the Soviet leaders do not come into the house of someone else to either close or open gates. Soviet leaders know and respect international laws, know and respect sovereign interests of other countries….”
He was cut off by Zorin, “Unlike the U.S. President.” Yes, Falin shot back, “…unlike the U.S. President.”
To these Marxists-Leninists, who held the stage at the height of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost, it was clear that Reagan had acted rudely and without respect for Soviet sovereignty. For them, Reagan’s call to tear down the wall had nothing to do with liberating people; it was a form of blackmail that cruelly exploited contented East Germany. This discussion on “Studio 9” was indicative of the larger mood that permeated the Soviet press and leadership, and it was clear that East Berliners’ best friend in June 1987 sat in the Oval Office, rather than behind a camera in Moscow. When Reagan made this speech, there was no one in the USSR—including Mikhail Gorbachev—who was making similar calls for the wall’s dismantling, and despite all claims of the USSR’s Western-looking government, the Soviet leadership and media remained rooted in the past.
In fact, at the time, Gorbachev was on record favoring a divided Germany and the very wall that separated it. Indeed, his shockingly insensitive euphemism for the wall in his 1987 bestseller Perestroika is worth highlighting: West and East Germany, wrote Gorbachev, casually, “are divided by an international border passing, in particular, through Berlin.”5
It was certainly not Gorbachev’s intent to knock down the Berlin Wall, which is why Ronald Reagan issued that challenge in front of the Brandenburg Gate. In fact, a month after Reagan’s June 1987 challenge, Gorbachev visited with West German President Richard von Weizsacker. Weizsacker asked Gorbachev “just for the record” about his thoughts on the prospect of German unity. Gorbachev’s response was hardly a ringing endorsement: He said that “history would decide what would happen in a hundred years.”6 Even Archie Brown says that when Gorbachev later famously told East German dictator Erich Honecker that “life punishes those who wait,” he was speaking of and looking forward to the kind of liberalization of East German Communism that Gorbachev was pursuing in the USSR—he was not expecting an end to the regime in East Germany.7 Gorbachev had not been helpful in prodding Honecker and unfettering East Germany. Two months after Gorbachev had come to power, when he first met privately with Honecker, Gorbachev told the East German despot: “There is only one model, Marxist-Leninist socialism.”8
This was why Reagan challenged Gorbachev in Berlin in June 1987. The president was convinced that a challenge needed to be made, in spite of his advisers’ protests and insistence that he remove the “provocative” line from the speech.
Despite the massive coverage that his call received, the Brandenburg Gate speech was hardly the first time that Reagan had made a call for the razing of the wall. On the contrary, he had made similar calls many times over the course of his crusade, a few in just the last year. The wall’s removal had been a theme throughout much of his crusade, as the destruction of this symbol would mean the destruction of Communism. On three occasions prior to his presidency, May 1967, May 1968, and November 1978, Reagan called for the removal of the Berlin Wall. In each of these instances, the Crusader displayed his hatred of the symbol, seeking not only to end the division in Germany, but throughout the whole of the Eastern bloc. It was an idea that seemed far-fetched in 1967, and remained so twenty years later.
Equally striking was the fact that Reagan, as president, had called on Gorbachev to tear down the wall several times before his June 1987 speech. In August 1986 alone, he remarked on the destruction of the wall three times—on August 7, 12, and 13.9 Ten days before the Brandenburg Gate address, Reagan reiterated his call in a June 2 interview with a West German newspaper, saying: “In a word, we want the Berlin Wall to come down.” This time, Reagan added that he desired the “elimination of all barriers” between East and West Berlin as well as “the reintegration of all four sectors of the city into one unit again.”10 Significantly, this was an expressed desire for not merely the removal of the wall but for a unified Germany.