Tear down this wall!

• 1. Introduction

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  At 2:00 p.m. on the 12th of June 1987, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, shielded from East Berlin by two panes of bulletproof glass, and issued a direct challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" The wall had divided the city since 1961. The line became one of the most quoted in Cold War history, yet it nearly never made it into the speech at all. How a single sentence survived determined opposition from inside the White House, and why the world barely noticed it at the time, is a story about political calculation, personal conviction, and the gap between a moment and its meaning.

• 2. A Long Running Theme

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  Reagan's challenge at Brandenburg Gate did not come out of nowhere. In June 1982, on an earlier trip to West Berlin, he asked a pointed question about the wall: "Why is the wall there?" Four years later, in 1986, the West German newspaper Bild-Zeitung asked him when the wall might come down. He replied that he was calling on those responsible to dismantle it that very day. By the time the 1987 speech was being drafted, Reagan had spent five years on record with the same demand. What changed in 1987 was the size of the stage, the presence of Gorbachev's glasnost rhetoric, and the fact that a gifted speechwriter named Peter Robinson chose to anchor the entire address to that demand.

• 3. The Line That Almost Died

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  Peter Robinson traveled to West Germany to scout venues and gauge the public mood before drafting the speech. A conversation with Ingeborg Elz of West Berlin planted the key phrase. Elz told Robinson that if Gorbachev was serious about glasnost and perestroika, he could prove it by getting rid of the wall. Robinson built the speech around that logic, yet the phrase drew fierce internal resistance. White House Chief of Staff Howard Baker called it "extreme" and "unpresidential". Deputy National Security Advisor Colin Powell agreed. Senior staffers warned that anything embarrassing to Gorbachev, with whom Reagan had developed a working relationship, should be cut. On Monday, the 18th of May 1987, Reagan reviewed the draft and called it "a good, solid draft", then said of the contentious line, "I think we'll leave it in."

• 4. Who Wrote the Line

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  Chief speechwriter Anthony Dolan disputes the Robinson account. In an article published in The Wall Street Journal in November 2009, Dolan argued that Reagan himself came up with the line during an Oval Office meeting that took place before Robinson had even written his draft. Dolan recorded his own reaction and Robinson's in real time. Robinson and Dolan exchanged letters about their conflicting accounts, and The Wall Street Journal published the correspondence. The dispute is unresolved, but both versions agree on one thing: the line's survival was Reagan's personal decision, not the product of a committee.

• 5. The Day of the Speech

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  The day before Reagan arrived, 50,000 people had demonstrated against his visit in West Berlin. The city deployed the largest police presence it had seen since World War II. Entire sections of Berlin were sealed off. The district of Kreuzberg was locked down so thoroughly that the U1 U-Bahn line was suspended. Reagan and his wife were brought to the Reichstag, where they viewed the wall from a balcony before he delivered the address at the Brandenburg Gate. West German president Richard von Weizsacker, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and West Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen were among the spectators. Reagan acknowledged the demonstrators at the close of the speech, wondering aloud whether they had considered that under the kind of government they apparently sought, no one would be able to protest at all.

• 6. A Slow-Burning Legacy

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  Time magazine noted, two decades later, that the speech received "relatively little coverage from the media" at the time. John Kornblum, the senior US diplomat in Berlin that day and later US Ambassador to Germany from 1997 to 2001, said the speech "wasn't really elevated to its current status until 1989, after the wall came down." East Germany's rulers dismissed it as "an absurd demonstration by a cold warrior", in the words of Politburo member Gunter Schabowski. The Soviet press agency TASS called it "an openly provocative, war-mongering speech." Helmut Kohl would later say Reagan had been "a stroke of luck for the world, especially for Europe." A September 2012 article in The Atlantic, by Liam Hoare, argued that American media tended to focus narrowly on this speech without weighing the broader complexity of events unfolding across East and West Germany and the Soviet Union.

• 7. What the Speech Actually Did

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  Author James Mann offered a more layered reading in a 2007 opinion piece in The New York Times. Mann placed the speech in the context of the Reykjavik summit of 1986, which had come close to an agreement to eliminate all American and Soviet nuclear weapons. He argued Reagan was not trying to land a knockout blow on the Soviet regime, nor was he performing for the cameras. He was doing something more calibrated: reassuring right-wing critics that he remained tough on communism, while extending a renewed invitation to Gorbachev to work together. Mann described it as helping to set the terms for the end of the Cold War. Reagan himself noted that East German police kept citizens away from the wall entirely, so the crowd could not actually hear the speech. In November 2019, a bronze statue of Reagan was unveiled at the US embassy near the site of the speech, after Berlin's authorities had refused to place one in the city itself.