“The fact is that when I was sitting there in Berlin, I was more worried about the air initiative than I was about this sentence” to tear down the wall, acknowledged Kornblum in an interview two decades later. “The air initiative was the key part [of Reagan’s speech], from an operational point of view.”6 Reagan’s conservative speechwriters had often been at odds with his more moderate domestic and political advisers. But in 1987, Reagan’s new White House team, headed by Chief of Staff Howard Baker, was nervous about a dramatic erosion of support from the right. (One conservative leader, Richard Viguerie, had written that “the symbolic end of the Reagan revolution came with the installment of Howard Baker as White House chief of staff.”7) The result was that for a change, the White House staff was inclined to support the speechwriters.
Reagan’s new White House team was also especially eager to show that he was still an active and engaged president, despite Iran-Contra. Thomas Griscom, the longtime Baker aide installed as the White House communications director, liked Robinson’s speech from the moment he saw it. “There were real questions at that point about whether this presidency was over,” Griscom later reflected. The passage about the Berlin Wall would attract attention, he felt. It would be a line people would remember.8
Griscom was inclined to endorse the fiery rhetoric of the speechwriting team in a way that such predecessors as Richard Darman and David Gergen had not been. Inside the White House, Griscom became a leading advocate of Robinson’s speech, along with Dolan, the chief speechwriter. Griscom decided to make sure, early on, that the president liked the idea. He wanted to know that Reagan saw the speech, understood its implications, and was comfortable with it.9
The White House speechwriters conspired to get Robinson’s Berlin Wall speech into Reagan’s hands early, before the State Department or National Security Council had time to marshal their opposition.10 Other speechwriters, assigned to compose what Reagan might say during other appearances on his European trip, hurried to finish their own drafts so that the entire package could be sent to Reagan quickly.
On the morning of Monday, May 18, 1987, Griscom and the White House speechwriters went to the Oval Office for a session with Reagan to plan his visit to Europe. The aides outlined the main points in their speeches. One, Josh Gilder, gave an overview of what he was writing for the president’s meeting with Pope John Paul II. Eventually, it was time for the Berlin Wall speech. Robinson asked Reagan what he thought of the draft. Reagan simply said he liked it. Disappointed, the thirty-year-old speechwriter asked whether the president had any further ideas. It was possible, Robinson pointed out, that this speech might be heard over the radio throughout East Germany, or even all the way to Moscow. Was there anything in particular the president wanted to say to people in Eastern Europe? “Well, there’s that passage about tearing down the wall,” Reagan replied. “That wall has to come down.”11
Reagan’s seemingly casual approval was hardly surprising, at least not when phrased in that way. As recently as the previous summer, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its construction, he had himself called for the wall to come down. He had, however, never before called upon Gorbachev to tear it down; the new wording differed from what Reagan had said before. If the president noticed this distinction, he didn’t discuss it during his session with the speechwriters. But the meeting had served its purpose. Griscom left the Oval Office satisfied that Reagan not only knew about the passage on tearing down the wall, but liked it.
During the following week, State Department officials, led by Ridgway, mounted an intensive campaign against the “tear down this wall” speech. They wanted Robinson’s draft to be abandoned. Instead, they argued, Reagan should deliver some version of the draft that Kornblum had sent to the State Department from Berlin.
Ridgway took her complaints to the National Security Council. It was up to officials there to try to represent the interests of American foreign policy within the Reagan administration. The NSC was responsible for reconciling intramural disputes like this one.
Reagan’s new national security adviser, Frank Carlucci, who had been brought to the White House after the Iran-Contra scandal broke, quickly discovered that he hated dealing with the White House speechwriters. He turned over the task of clearing Reagan’s foreign-policy speeches to his deputy, Colin Powell.12 In the spring of 1987, Powell was also new to his job. He had previously worked as the military aide to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and he wanted to return to his career in the army. He had been commanding an army corps in West Germany when Carlucci persuaded him to come to the NSC. In Powell’s very first day there, he had clashed with the speechwriters. He had questioned whether a draft speech for Reagan to deliver about the defense budget was too shrill. Tony Dolan, the chief White House speechwriter, had launched into a “tirade,” Powell later recalled in his memoir. “This was going to be an even tougher neighborhood than the Pentagon front office,” Powell concluded.13
When the dispute erupted over plans for the Berlin Wall speech, Powell represented the interests of the State Department, passing along its objections to Griscom. In one memo, Powell’s team offered instructions for how to completely rewrite the speech. The call for Gorbachev to tear down the wall was replaced with a more anodyne “It’s time for the Wall to come down.”14 On May 26, Powell and the National Security Council lost the first skirmish. The issue was whether to proceed with Robinson’s draft, calling upon Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, or to throw it out. Somebody—probably Griscom or his boss, Howard Baker—decided that Robinson’s draft would survive.
That day, Powell sent a note to Ridgway at the State Department. Written in Powell’s script on White House stationery, it said:
Roz—
Here’s the working draft from the speechwriters. We are working to reinsert elements of the Kornblum version as well as our own comments.
At this point, we need to work from this draft, as opposed to a brand-new draft.
Powell’s final sentence was crucial. Officials at the State Department and National Security Council would not be able to kill Robinson’s draft, emphasizing the Berlin Wall as a symbol of the enduring differences between Western and Eastern Europe, between freedom and communism. They could seek to revise or edit what the speechwriters had written, but it would serve as the foundation for what Reagan was going to say.
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WARSAW PACT
While White House aides were still debating exactly what Ronald Reagan would say to Mikhail Gorbachev about the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev himself was by coincidence visiting Berlin. On May 27, 1987, the Soviet leader, joined by his wife, Raisa, flew to East Berlin to meet with the general secretaries of the other Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. The occasion was a regular meeting of the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance organized under Soviet leadership as a counterpart to NATO.
Gorbachev was joined in Berlin by a group of aging leaders, each of them holding absolute power within his own domain. The group photos taken by an East German newspaper show their stiffness, formality, and utter lack of humor or flexibility—men lost in a time that was passing them by more quickly than they knew or could even fear.1 Erich Honecker from East Germany served as the host. Besides Gorbachev, the visitors included General Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland, Todor Zhivkov of Bulgaria, János Kádár of Hungary, Gustáv Husák of Czechoslovakia, and Nicolae Ceauṣescu of Romania. By day, they talked in a conference hall. One night, they attended a concert in the ornate Schauspielhaus in honor of the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin.