Word: speech
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...future." Two years earlier, Reagan had addressed a crowd of some 20,000 near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Wall. At the time, even his closest advisers dismissed the notion as far-fetched. "It's a great speech line," Reagan's National Security Adviser, Frank Carlucci, remembers thinking. "But it will never happen." When the Wall came down, however, Reagan's speech entered American lore. "You look for one line you remember a President by," says Ken Duberstein, a former White House chief of staff who accompanied Reagan...
...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 to Gorbachev. But Reagan and his speechwriters insisted on keeping it in. To the President, the line was an invitation as much as a challenge: calling on Gorbachev to tear down the Wall might actually inspire him to do it. "If he took down the Wall," Reagan told an aide after returning...
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 ground of Gorbachev's intentions to open up the communist bloc. If Gorbachev truly sought peace and liberalization, Reagan said in Berlin, then he should let the Wall come down. In the end, Gorbachev did, and the rest of the Iron Curtain followed. Allowing democracy to spread through Eastern Europe...
...state's increasingly fragile water system that was built by former Governor Pat Brown in the 1960s when the state's population was 11 million. Today, the Golden State has nearly 38 million residents and the population is expected to grow to 50 million. In a recent speech, Pat Brown's son, state Attorney General Jerry Brown, the former governor who leads in polls to succeed Schwarzenegger, recounted the perils of water politics in California. In 1981, Brown signed a bill to build a periphery canal, which would have transported Sacramento River water around the ecologically fragile Delta and directly...
...artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality,” John F. Kennedy ’40 said of Robert Frost in a speech following the poet’s death, “becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.” Horacio Castellanos Moya emerges as another writer who recognizes the discrepancies between his ideal and the reality and uses his talents to critically assess the forces responsible for the latter. In “The She-Devil in the Mirror...