Word: berliner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...determined challenge, delivered Friday by Ronald Reagan with his back to the Berlin Wall, across from the Brandenburg Gate in Communist East Germany. But the necessity the President felt to remind West Berliners, of all people, that the Soviet leader still commands a totalitarian society underscored a melancholy aspect of Reagan's nine-day journey through Western Europe. For all his eloquence, the aging President was repeatedly upstaged by the youthful and suavely dynamic image of the man who was not there: Mikhail Gorbachev...
...Twenty years ago, on the morning of June 12, 1987, Reagan arrived in Berlin, on the occasion of the city's 750th birthday. He was scheduled to speak on the Western side of the Brandenburg Gate, for years the city's symbolic dividing line. His speechwriters had drafted an address intended as much for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom Reagan was forging a close relationship, as for the 20,000 people who gathered to hear him speak. In the speech, Reagan would call on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, but that language was opposed strongly by Reagan...
...decades later, what can we learn from the epochal events that followed - the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union? "People were afraid of the consequences of what Reagan would say," George Shultz, Reagan's long-serving Secretary of State, told me over lunch in Berlin last week. "But it turns out he was right." We were sitting in an elegant dining room overlooking the city, in a building that sits on the former border between east and west Berlin. "Saying something like, 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall' - that could...
...When Reagan climbed the dais, just before 2 p.m., two bulletproof panes of glass stood behind him, to protect against snipers who might target him from the East. Earlier in the day Reagan had looked across the wall into East Berlin from a balcony of the Reichstag. He later said that his forceful tone had been influenced by his learning that East German police had forced people away from the wall to prevent them from hearing his speech over the loudspeakers. As the crowd fell quiet, Reagan began his address with signature folksiness. The main speechwriter, Peter Robinson, wanted Reagan...
...Later that evening, Shultz would deliver a speech of his own at an event hosted by the American Academy in Berlin, marking the 20th anniversary of the Reagan address. As our plates were being cleared, I asked why "Tear Down this Wall" remains more resonant than any of the thousands of Presidential speeches delivered in the two decades since Reagan went to Berlin. Shultz sipped some green tea. "It's become famous, first of all, because what he called for happened. If you look back to the day after the speech, or the month after, I don't think...