Tearing down that wall
ROBINSON, PETER
Tearing Down That Wall by Peter Robinson LAST MONTH, A TELEVISION PRODUCER wanted to interview me for a piece on the tenth anniversary of President Reagan's address at the Berlin Wall, a speech I...
...But one of us is an animal, and the other is a zookeeper, and I am never quite certain which is which...
...They claimed that it was unduly provocative...
...If that passage had to come out, it would be Griscom's job to explain to Reagan why...
...On the very morning Air Force One left Venice for Berlin, the State Department and the National Security Council made a last effort to block the speech, forwarding yet another alternative draft...
...No such luck...
...I held my ground as best I could...
...In Europe, recent articles have attributed it to John Kornblum, a career foreign-service officer, now ambassador-designate to Germany, who actually fought it tooth and nail...
...Because we, his speechwriters, were not creating Reagan...
...He never heard it...
...On one of these occasions, Colin Powell, then national security adviser, was waiting in Griscom's office for me...
...The president especially liked the passage about tearing down the Berlin Wall, the very part of the speech to which the foreign-policy experts were most vehemently opposed...
...The same soldier peered down at him through binoculars each morning...
...President," I said, "I learned in Germany that your speech will be heard by radio throughout East Germany...
...The week before the president's departure, the battle reached a pitch...
...Kornblum, a stocky man with thick glasses, appeared impatient...
...we were stealing from him...
...Be sophisticated...
...The work I did on the speech was the most notable of my professional life...
...The president fixes his jaw...
...He enunciates his words deliberately, so that the last four words, each a monosyllable, sound like hammer blows: "Mr...
...Griscom chose not to take it to the forward cabin...
...On the one hand, he had objections to the speech from virtually the entire foreign-policy apparatus of the U.S...
...All I had been told back in Washington was that the president would deliver the speech in front of the Wall and that he would be expected to speak for about 30 minutes...
...That Wall has to come down...
...The key phrase came from a woman I met at a dinner party, and the phrase remained in the speech solely because of Ronald Reagan...
...In Berlin for a day and a half with the White House advance team, I needed material, and I had my notebook ready when I met Kornblum, the ranking American diplomat in the city...
...Another man spoke...
...State and the NSC submitted their own, alternative drafts—as best I recall, there were seven— one of them composed by Kornblum...
...Reagan's policies were straightforward—he had been articulating them for two decades...
...He can get rid of this Wall...
...In the library's small amphitheater, an older couple sat alone among the rows of benches, seeing a short film: President Reagan appears on a blue platform...
...It never got shipped from the White House to the archives," a member of the library staff said...
...Talk about American support for West Berlin's bid to host the Olympics...
...Have you gotten used to the Wall...
...They had not stolen, as I had, from Frau Elz—and from Ronald Reagan...
...Do you think I can get used to that...
...Mention American efforts to persuade the East Germans to permit more air routes into West Berlin...
...I was looking forward to seeing the papers after a decade: my two drafts and the dozens of revisions and alternative drafts that circulated when the State Department and the National Security Council responded with such contempt and vehemence to what I had written...
...She was a gracious, pleasant woman, probably in her mid-50s, but she was angry...
...Tearing Down That Wall by Peter Robinson LAST MONTH, A TELEVISION PRODUCER wanted to interview me for a piece on the tenth anniversary of President Reagan's address at the Berlin Wall, a speech I drafted...
...Don't mention the Wall...
...The president said simply that he liked it...
...The president liked the speech...
...Griscom had heard him say so...
...He speaks the same language I speak...
...My sister lives 20 miles in that direction," he said, pointing with an outstretched arm, "but I haven't seen her in more than two decades...
...That was the purpose of presidential libraries, after all, to keep intact the history of small but important aspects of the administrations whose papers they house...
...Back in the office, I adapted Frau Elz's comment about Gorbachev, making it the central passage of the speech...
...He kept looking up, as though searching the room for a more important member of the advance party with whom to speak...
...Then one man spoke...
...When the president departed for the Venice summit, he took with him the speech I had written...
...He spoke rapidly...
...Depending on weather conditions, it might even be heard as far east as Moscow...
...Hours later, President Reagan delivered his speech...
...But my own file—the file with my notes, my first draft, and my comments on each of the subsequent drafts— was missing...
...Air Force One landed...
...Don't let Reagan bash the Soviets...
...Every time State or the NSC registered a new objection to the speech, Griscom summoned me to his office, where he had me tell him, one more time, why I was convinced State and the NSC were wrong, and the speech, as I had written it, was right...
...He shares the same history...
...Well, there's that passage about tearing down the Wall," Reagan said...
...His comments ran roughly as follows: Berlin is the most left-leaning of all West German cities...
...In May 1987, when I was assigned the task of drafting the speech, Queen Elizabeth had already visited Berlin on the occasion of its 750th anniversary, and Gorbachev was due in a matter of days...
...Is there anything you want to say to people on the other side of the Berlin Wall...
...That's what I'd like to say...
...Above him tower the pillars of the Brandenburg Gate...
...Peter Robinson is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior director of the White House Writers Group...
...Ever since the Wall came down, people in and around the government in those days have sought credit in part or full for the speech...
...The Berlin Wall address is merely one of half a dozen or more Reagan speeches that even now remain impor-tant—the Westminster address, the "evil empire" speech, the address at Moscow State University...
...It proved a monumental struggle to get to the point at which President Reagan could speak those words that seemed fanciful even at the time I wrote them—words that would come gloriously true two and a half years later (even if it wasn't Mikhail Gorbachev doing the tearing down...
...Griscom was evidently waiting for an objection that he believed Ronald Reagan himself would find compelling...
...And, in some very important ways, I didn't write it either...
...There was a silence...
...behind him, through a big plexiglass window, you can see the Berlin Wall...
...If this man Gorbachev is serious with his talk of glas-nost and perestroika, he can prove it...
...In each, the call for Gorbachev to tear down the Wall was missing...
...When the State Department and the National Security Council began attempting to block my draft by submitting alternative drafts, they weakened their own case...
...They asserted that the passage about the Wall amounted to a cruel gimmick, one that would unfairly raise Berlin-ers' hopes...
...This presented Tom Griscom with a problem...
...On his way to work, he explained, he passed a guard tower...
...Their drafts lacked boldness...
...For three weeks, State and the NSC fought the speech...
...There were telephone calls, memoranda, and meetings...
...Tom Griscom, the director of communications, asked the president for his comments on the Berlin speech...
...Why wasn't one of them the Great Communicator...
...Two weeks later, after two drafts, the speechwriters joined President Reagan in the Oval Office...
...Griscom nodded to me...
...Mr...
...That evening I had dinner with a dozen or so West Berliners at the home of Dieter Elz, a retired World Bank official...
...We met at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., so the crew could film the interview in front of the actual documents...
...They argued that it was crude...
...Jimmy Carter, Walter Mon-dale, George Bush, and Bob Dole all had clever writers...
...government...
...The speech was circulated to the State Department and the National Security Council three weeks before it was to be delivered...
...There is a school of thought that Ronald Reagan managed to look good only because he had clever writers putting words into his mouth...
...Kornblum didn't write it...
...I was the only American present, and I related what Kornblum had told me...
...Perhaps the leading exponent is my former colleague Peggy Noonan, who while a Reagan speechwriter appeared in a magazine article under a caption that said just that: "The woman who puts the words in the president's mouth...
...But historians will have difficulty getting the story of the Berlin Wall address right, and not only because documents have disappeared...
...Gorbachev, tear down this Wall...
...Here in Berlin, where the conflict between the Communist world and the West was at its most visible, Kornblum was saying President Reagan should talk only about a grab-bag of minor diplomatic initiatives...
...Is that true...
...Two thick files were present, each containing dozens of pages, but they were the files assembled by the researcher who worked with me on the speech...
...They showed a great deal of what had taken place—I had forgotten that one NSC staffer had so objected to several pages that he had meticulously lined out every word...
...She made a fist of one hand and slapped it into the palm of the other...
...He speaks with controlled but genuine anger—he had learned shortly before delivering the speech that in East Berlin, on the other side of the Wall, a crowd had assembled to hear him, only to be dispersed by the police...
...Berliners have gotten used to it...
...The West Berliners looked at one another, as if deciding who would go first...
...There is a basic problem with this view...
...They conveyed no sense of conviction...
...Our hostess, Frau Elz, broke in...
...On the other, he had Ronald Reagan...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 40
