Word: downes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Ronald Reagan did. "I didn't know when it would come, but I have to tell you, I'm an eternal optimist," the former President said in an interview with ABC's Sam Donaldson that night. "I believed in all my heart it was in the future." Two years earlier...
Reagan loathed the Berlin Wall. "It's a wall that never should have been built," he often said. As early as 1967, while still governor of California, he said the U.S. should have knocked down the barbed wire separating East and West Berlin the moment the communists put it up...
By the time Reagan went to Berlin in 1987, he and Gorbachev had developed enough trust to gamble on change. In the weeks leading up to the speech, several Administration officials lobbied to have the "tear down this Wall" line removed, arguing that it was unrealistic, unpresidential and potentially embarrassing...
Reagan was right. (In 1990, Gorbachev not only won the Nobel but was named TIME's Man of the Decade.) Neither Gorbachev nor Reagan was directly responsible for the fall of the Wall; rather, it collapsed from its own weight. But Reagan's speech presciently identified Berlin as the proving...
This article is adapted from Ratnesar's book Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech That Ended the Cold War