Speechwriter who helped Reagan ‘tear down that wall’

STANFORD, California — Today, June 12, marks the 30th anniversary of the most subversive speech of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, a speech delivered in a divided German capital that became a point of passionate communion between the United States and Europe. The anniversary has a pungent flavor, coming at a time when the White House sows so much anguish and tension in European capitals — especially Berlin.

In 1987, it was all very different. The U.S. was the unquestioned guarantor of European security. Its leadership of what was then unselfconsciously called the “Free World” relieved Europeans governments of the need to spend heavily on their own defense. It was a deal that conferred grandeur on the U.S. and ensured peace in Western Europe on very sweet terms.

On the day of the speech, Reagan stood on a podium near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and called on Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet Union, to end the political division between East and West Germany — to end, in effect, the Cold War.

“General Secretary Gorbachev,” Reagan said, “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!”

Those words were written by a 30-year-old graduate of Dartmouth and Oxford, Peter Robinson, then a junior member of Reagan’s speechwriting team. I visited Robinson, now 60 and a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, to talk about the speech, and about Reagan — a man for whom he wrote, by his own estimation, “more than 300 speeches.”

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The Cold War is the forgotten war. As a personal experiment, Robinson tells me, he interrogated his daughter when she was a high-school senior. He asked her to explain the American Revolutionary War. “No problem. We won our independence from the British.” The Civil War? “Lincoln freed the slaves and reunited the country.” World War I? “A little complicated. Archduke, assassination, but the Americans went over and the democracies won.” World War II? “Easy, we beat Hitler and Imperial Japan.”

Fireworks illuminate the Brandenburg Gate during celebrations on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 2014 in Berlin | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

And the Cold War…? “She was very uncertain, very vague. They’re not taught about the Cold War in American high schools. They don’t know how Vietnam fit into it, or Korea. They don’t even know who Gorbachev was.”

Most Americans have also forgotten Reagan’s Berlin speech, Robinson says. He is genial and unfailingly articulate — exactly what you’d expect from a man who once made his living putting words into an American president’s mouth.

Very few Stanford University students “have any more than the vaguest idea” of the speech’s political context and the Cold War, he says, sitting in an office teeming with memorabilia from his days in Washington, including a baseball signed by Gorbachev and several autographed photos of Reagan.

What about across the pond, I ask. The Germans, surely, have a better sense of history — after all, the end of the Cold War resulted in the reunification of their country and made Germany a colossus again. “It’s politically vexing for Germans,” he answers. “The Cold War was hard for them because their fate was decided every morning in Washington and Moscow, not in Berlin. They could not defend themselves. It’s a complicated memory.”

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 helped Germany recover its self-respect, Robinson says. “I never was able to talk to Reagan about the speech after the Wall came down, but Mrs. Reagan told me that he was always pleased that it wasn’t Gorbachev who tore down the Wall but the Germans themselves.”

The piquant truth, of course, is that America has gone — in the opinion of many — from a golden age in which it helped to tear down a wall, to an era in which its president talks gratingly of building one on the country’s southern border. How does Robinson — the Wall Man — feel about that?

“Oh dear, I’m the Wall Whisperer, am I?” he asks.

“There’s a basic distinction between a wall to keep people in, which is what they had in Germany, and a wall to defend a border that keeps people from entering illegally,” he says.

People tell him all the time that “Reagan would have hated this Trump wall — that Reagan hated walls.” And Robinson is sure that Reagan would have felt “very uncomfortable with any animus toward immigrants and certainly toward Hispanic culture.” When Reagan was running for president in 1980, he called for Puerto Rican statehood, Robinson reminds me. “There was zero anti-Hispanic feeling in him, just zero.”

Still, “after three decades in which American administrations of both parties failed to enforce the immigration law, I just think he would have said, ‘Wait a moment. The writ of law extends to the border. Let’s fix that.’”

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Writing speeches for Reagan, Robinson says, wasn’t especially difficult. Reagan had penned most of his own speeches before becoming president, and he’d employed conversational language, the diction of ordinary Americans.

“When you wrote, you could hear those wonderful pipes of his, and you knew whether something was right for him or not — on top of the fact that by the time he got to office, you had two decades of Reagan’s writings and recordings on every conceivable issue. You knew where he stood.”

People tell him all the time that “Reagan would have hated this Trump wall — that Reagan hated walls.”

But the Berlin Wall speech was unprecedented; a departure from the cautious diplomacy the State Department preferred in its dealings with Moscow.

What instructions was he given? None, Robinson says. He was simply thrown in at the deep end. “My guidance from senior staff on the speech was, ‘Audience of about 10,000. Length: 20 to 25 minutes. Subject: foreign policy. Period.’ It was up to me to figure out what Reagan ought to say beyond that.”

Robinson, 30 at the time, had graduated from Oxford not that long ago with a second B.A. in “PPE” — Politics, Philosophy and Economics — the portmanteau degree of the aspirational gentleman.

The callow speechwriter “flew to Berlin to do research and got nowhere with the ranking American diplomat, who was full of things Reagan shouldn’t say.” The embassy was clear it didn’t want any “commie-bashing.”

Inspiration struck one evening at a dinner party among Berliners, where a woman told him, with a passion he can still recall: “If this man Gorbachev is serious about glasnost and perestroika, he can prove it by coming here and getting rid of this wall.”

“Boom. I put that in my notebook. I knew immediately that I had something. Because I knew Reagan would have responded to that woman’s message. I had Reagan in my head. He would have loved that. Simple, dignified, but very powerful.”

Tunku Varadarajan is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.