Tear Down This Wall Read Closely as the Speech Diplomats Tried to Soften

Some advice from the people paid to give advice: do not say it. It will anger the Soviets. It will embarrass the Germans. It will look naive, and it will make the President seem like a cowboy.

That, in substance, was the counsel Ronald Reagan received about one sentence of a speech he was to give in West Berlin on June 12, 1987. He said it anyway. The line is quoted so often that its context has nearly vanished, and the speech around it is a better piece of political argument than the sentence people remember. Let us read it carefully, the way one reads a text rather than a slogan.

Terms and Premises

A document read closely needs a method, so here is mine, stated in advance.

1. The speech is an argument, not a mood. It makes a claim about why free societies prosper and unfree ones do not, and then draws a demand from the claim.
2. The demand is specific. It asks a named person to take a named action at a named place.
3. The advice against it was serious, and deserves an answer. The objections came from people who understood diplomacy, and they should be stated at their strongest.
4. The speech's meaning was settled by events. Whatever the diplomats feared, the outcome two and a half years later is evidence about who judged the moment better.

Keep those four in mind. Now the text.

The Setting

Reagan was in Berlin for the city's 750th anniversary celebrations, and he spoke at the Brandenburg Gate, where the Wall ran directly behind the platform. The gate stood in East Berlin's side of the line, so a President of the United States addressed a city's crowd with the symbol of its division at his back. It was June 12, 1987, and the Cold War still had two and a half years to run. At the time almost nobody expected that.

The Opening: To Those Who Cannot Be Here

The speech begins by addressing two audiences at once, a technique worth noticing.

To those listening in East Berlin, a special word: Although I cannot be with you, I address my remarks to you just as surely as to those standing here before me. For I join you, as I join your fellow countrymen in the West, in this firm, this unshakable belief: Es gibt nur ein Berlin.

"There is only one Berlin." Think about how bold that is. The line denies the legitimacy of the division in the language of the people it divides. It is also a claim about the nature of a city: a city is the people who live in it, and the barrier is an imposition on them. A diplomat would call it an interference. A conservative would call it a defense of the natural order of a community against an artificial state.

A few lines later, Reagan describes what the wall is:

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe.

And he adds a line that carries the moral point without raising his voice:

Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.

The word "scar" is exact. A wall is a wound that a body has been prevented from healing. The sentence also does something skilled speechwriters do: it makes the listener, wherever he is from, a party to the story.

The Core Argument: Freedom Leads to Prosperity

The middle of the speech is where the argument lives. Reagan quotes the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's boast of the 1950s, "We will bury you," and answers it with a ledger:

But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind—too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.

Let us treat that as a syllogism, which is how it works.

• Premise one: societies that protect individual liberty and property produce more wealth than societies that plan from the center.
• Premise two: the divided Germany and the divided Europe are the experiment, with the same people, the same culture and the same language on either side.
• Conclusion: the wall is evidence of what each system believes about its own citizens. A system that is confident of its record does not have to prevent departures.

The experiment is as clean as social science gets, and its results were never in doubt. For the fuller comparison, see Two Germanys and two Koreas, the natural experiments that socialism lost, and for the economic reasoning behind it, Friedman Argued That Economic Freedom Comes Before Political Freedom. Reagan's paragraph is the whole case in eight sentences.

The Demand

Then comes the sentence the speech was built to deliver. Reagan has been walking the audience from a diagnosis to a demand, and the demand is addressed to one man:

There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, 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!

Three features deserve attention.

1. It is conditional. "If you seek peace... if you seek prosperity... if you seek liberalization." Reagan was taking Mikhail Gorbachev's own words about reform, openness and restructuring and asking him to prove them. A President who says "you say you want change; here is how to show it" is practicing diplomacy, not abandoning it.
2. It is concrete. A hundred speeches have asked for "peace" and "openness." This one asked for a gate to open. It gave the world a test it could watch.
3. It is personal. Naming the Soviet leader, in the second person, at the spot, is what made the sentence travel.

The speech closes on a prophecy: the wall will fall, "for it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom." That is an assertion of the same moral premise that the Declaration of Independence rests on, that human beings hold unalienable rights, and that no structure of concrete can finally outlast them.

The Drafting and the Objections

The speech was drafted by Peter Robinson, a White House speechwriter, who traveled to Berlin in advance and wrote that Berliners he spoke with told him how they felt about the wall and about the Soviet leader's claims of reform. The call to open the wall grew out of that trip, according to the National Archives' account.

The part that interests the historian is what happened to the draft. Documents from the Reagan Library and the accounts of participants show that State Department officials and National Security Council staff objected to the line, in written comments and in meetings, and recommended taking it out or softening it. Their reasons were not frivolous. The Soviet leader was then pursuing arms control talks, and they worried that a public challenge would be seen as naive and provocative, would raise false hopes and could damage the progress being made. Some also argued that the line promised something the United States could not deliver, since the President could not tear down a wall himself, and that a demand which went unmet would make him look weak. Alternate drafts that left it out were prepared. Reagan, after hearing the arguments, decided to keep it.

The Steelman

Let me state the diplomats' case as its defenders would. They would say: diplomacy is the art of making it easy for the other side to do what you want. A public ultimatum makes it hard, because a leader who gives in looks as though he has yielded to a foreign President. A speech at the Brandenburg Gate is theater, they would add, and theater is cheap. The real work is done in rooms, by people who know each other's habits. Besides, Gorbachev was a reformer by Soviet standards, and a good reformer deserves help, not a dare.

That is a serious position, and it has produced real successes. Quiet diplomacy and public statements are not opposites. Reagan did both, and the same period includes the arms control agreement he and Gorbachev signed in December 1987.

The Rebuttal

Here is the answer, point by point.

1. The line did not replace diplomacy. The INF Treaty on intermediate-range missiles was signed in Washington on December 8, 1987, six months after the speech. The public demand and the private negotiation ran together.
2. Public moral clarity is a form of leverage. A dictatorship that depends on silence is threatened by a clear statement of the obvious. Reagan said aloud what every Berliner already knew, and he did it where it could be heard in the East.
3. The "unrealistic" objection mistakes the audience. The line was not primarily addressed to Gorbachev's staff. It was addressed to the peoples of the East, who were being told by their own governments that the wall was a protection. A leader of the free world who says plainly that it is not tells them they are right to doubt.
4. The line cost little and risked little. If Gorbachev had ignored it, nothing would have been lost. The wall was there already. If he had been embarrassed, the embarrassment would have been the wall's.
5. The outcome favors the speaker. On November 9, 1989, the gate that Reagan had named was opened, and the wall came down. Historians still argue about how much credit the speech deserves, and the answer is: far less than the pressure of the East German people and the Soviet leader's own restraint, and far more than nothing. A President's words are not an army. They shape what is thinkable.

It matters to be honest about the limit. Reagan did not tear down the wall. East Germans did, with a crucial assist from circumstances, which are told in The Night the Berlin Wall Fell and the Press Conference Slip That Opened It. The speech's contribution was to set the terms of the contest in language no one could mistake.

The Reaction at the Time

At the time, the speech was received as a notable but not epochal address. Later retrospectives say it received relatively little attention or praise at the time, and the famous line did not command the headlines that later memory assigns it. The line became famous in retrospect, after the wall fell and the sentence looked like a prophecy.

That delay is useful to remember. The moral clarity that seems obvious in hindsight is rarely popular in the moment. People who say the plain thing early are often told they are being unhelpful. The test of a statement is whether it is true, not whether it is welcome.

How It Read After November 1989

On the night of November 9, 1989, the speech became something else. Within months the people who had called it provocative had to account for the fact that the Soviet leader did not use force, and that the gate opened. The line moved from a risky choice to a rallying cry and then, after the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, to a symbol of the free world's confidence.

There is a lesson in that for the rest of us. We are often tempted to trim a true statement to avoid a fight. Reagan's staff gave him good reasons to do so, and he weighed them and decided the truth was worth the risk. Not every such decision turns out as well. The habit of saying the true thing plainly, at the proper time and place, is still the right habit. For its background in his earlier speeches see Reagan at Westminster in 1982 Predicted the Soviet Collapse Out Loud, and for the kind of patriotism behind it, loving your country is not idolatry, a believer's case for patriotism. The wider postwar story of the divided city is in The Berlin Airlift Fed a City by Air for Eleven Months Without Firing a Shot.

The case in brief

1. The Brandenburg Gate speech of June 12, 1987 is an argument that freedom produces prosperity and peace and that the Berlin Wall is the confession of a system afraid of its own people.
2. Its famous demand is conditional, concrete and personal: if Gorbachev sought peace and reform, he could show it by opening the gate.
3. State Department and National Security Council staff objected to the line on diplomatic grounds, and their case, that public challenges can damage private negotiations, deserves respect.
4. The answer is that the speech and the diplomacy ran together, as the December 1987 INF Treaty shows, and that moral clarity addressed to the people of the East cost little and helped define the terms of the contest.
5. The wall fell because East Germans acted and circumstances allowed it, and the speech's contribution was to say aloud what it meant.

What you can do: read the full text of the speech from the Reagan Library, then pick one true thing in your own community that people are advised not to say, and decide how to say it plainly and courteously.