Word: speeches
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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...
This article is adapted from Ratnesar's book Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech That Ended the Cold...
...have gangster government when the Federal Government has set up a new cartel," Bachmann announced on the floor of the House on June 9, referring to the government takeover of General Motors. A video of that speech attracted more than 2 million YouTube views. A few months later, from the same podium, she wondered if health reform would allow a 13-year-old girl to use a school "sex clinic" to get a referral for an abortion and "go home on the school bus that night." It wouldn't, but the terrifying suggestion buzzed around the Internet. The White House...