In remembrance of the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, Power Line posted an article about Peter Robinson, the man who wrote the speech President Reagan delivered in Berlin on June 12, 1987.
Mr. Robinson was inspired to write the line "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" by a dinner conversation with a dozen or so Berliners (the dinner was hosted by Dieter and Ingeborg Elz). Mr. Robinson asked his hosts if they had gotten used to living with the Berlin wall; the article reports what followed:
"The Elzes and their guests glanced at each other uneasily. Then one man raised an arm and pointed. "My sister lives twenty miles in that direction," he said. "I haven't seen her in more than two decades. Do you think I can get used to that?" Another man spoke. As he walked to work each morning, he explained, a soldier in a guard tower peered down at him through binoculars. "That soldier and I speak the same language. We share the same history. But one of us is a zookeeper and the other is an animal, and I am never certain which is which."
"Our hostess broke in. A gracious woman, Ingeborg Elz had suddenly grown angry. Her face was red. She made a fist with one hand and pounded it into the palm of the other. "If this man Gorbachev is serious with his talk of glasnost and perestroika," she said, "he can prove it. He can get rid of this wall.""
The US State Department and the National Security Council were not happy with that line in the speech. They submitted alternative drafts of the speech on more than one occasion, but President Reagan insisted on leaving that line in the speech. Thank God that we were blessed with a President with the courage to face important issues head on.
On a personal note, I was attending a church conference when the wall fell. I turned on the TV at one point and watched what was happening in Berlin. I couldn't believe it. The wall had been there since I was a young teenager. In the early days of the wall, there were stories in the media all the time about courageous attempts to escape from East Berlin. I never thought the wall would come down. It seemed to part of a permanent iron curtain. I still remember the images on television of people streaming through the wall to greet friends and relatives they had been separated from for more than twenty years. It was an amazing sight.
Leave a comment