Word: reagan
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...drama, the speech received relatively little media coverage. Compared to the younger, more vigorous Gorbachev, Reagan seemed to be a diminished figure on the world stage, a lame-duck President hobbled by the Iran-Contra scandal at home. But in hindsight, the "Tear Down this Wall" speech helps explain how the Cold War ended. Unlike many conservatives, Reagan believed that the U.S.-Soviet arms race was not immutable, and that the rivalry between East and West that had defined the Cold War could be defused through diplomacy and persuasion. In Gorbachev, he found a partner with whom he could...
...Toward the end of our lunch, I asked Shultz, now 86, what lessons the world can draw from the Reagan speech at a time when the U.S. and its allies are struggling to contain the new threat of militant Islam. "President Reagan had the idea that change could happen," Shultz says. "That put him at odds with establishment thinking, which had embraced détente and assumed change would not happen. To them, you had two systems that would go on forever; peaceful coexistence was the objective. Reagan assumed change was possible and I thought so too. Your mindset makes...
...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...
...time, the Soviet news agency TASS called Reagan's visit to the Wall "openly provocative, war-mongering." But listen closely to a recording of it today: the speech sounds as much like an invitation as it does a challenge. "There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace," Reagan says. As he goes on, you hear scattered claps and hollers. "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...