Who said gorbachev tear down this wall

The following week I produced an acceptable draft. It needed work—the section on arms reductions, for instance, still had to be fleshed out—but it set out the main elements of the address, including the challenge to tear down the wall. On Friday, May 15, the speeches for the President's trip to Rome, Venice, and Berlin, including my draft, were forwarded to the President, and on Monday, May 18, the speechwriters joined him in the Oval Office.

My speech was the last we discussed. Tom Griscom asked the President for his comments on my draft. The President replied simply that he liked it. President," I said, "I learned on the advance trip that your speech will be heard not only in West Berlin but throughout East Germany. The President cocked his head and thought. That wall has to come down. That's what I'd like to say to them. I spent a couple of days attempting to improve the speech.

I suppose I should admit that at one point I actually took "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" out, replacing it with the challenge, in German, to open the Brandenburg Gate, "Herr Gorbachev, machen Sie dieses Tor auf.

Gorbachev, tear down this wall" right back in. With three weeks to go before it was delivered, the speech was circulated to the State Department and the National Security Council. Both attempted to squelch it. The assistant secretary of state for Eastern European affairs challenged the speech by telephone. A senior member of the National Security Council staff protested the speech in memoranda. The ranking American diplomat in Berlin objected to the speech by cable. It would raise false hopes.

It was clumsy. It was needlessly provocative. State and the NSC submitted their own alternate drafts—my journal records that there were no fewer than seven—including one written by the diplomat in Berlin. In each, the call to tear down the wall was missing. Now in principle, State and the NSC had no objection to a call for the destruction of the wall. The draft the diplomat in Berlin submitted, for example, contained the line, "One day, this ugly wall will disappear. Then I looked at the diplomat's line once again.

That the wall would just get up and slink off of its own accord? The wall would disappear only when the Soviets knocked it down or let somebody else knock it down for them, but "this ugly wall will disappear" ignored the question of human agency altogether. What State and the NSC were saying, in effect, was that the President could go ahead and issue a call for the destruction of the wall—but only if he employed language so vague and euphemistic that everybody could see right away he didn't mean it.

When I reached Griscom's office on one occasion, I found Colin Powell, then deputy national security adviser, waiting for me. I was a year-old who had never held a full-time job outside speechwriting. Powell was a decorated general. After listening to Powell recite all the arguments against the speech in his accustomed forceful manner, however, I heard myself reciting all the arguments in favor of the speech in an equally forceful manner. I could scarcely believe my own tone of voice.

Powell looked a little taken aback himself. All Reagan said was that it was a good draft, Robinson recalled. Robinson then stepped in. He told the president that people in East Berlin would be able to hear him speak. Depending on weather conditions, he might even be picked up in Moscow by radio. Robinson asked if there was anything Reagan wanted to convey to the people listening from the other side. That wall has to come down. For the next three weeks, the National Security Council and the State Department went back and forth with the White House communications team to change the speech.

Robinson said seven alternative drafts were submitted, each version missing the call to tear down the wall. But I was convinced. Only Reagan could have said those words because it was what he truly believed, Robinson said.

He could imagine a post-Soviet world. He could see a world without the Berlin Wall. After 25 years of loyal service to the regime, according to Sarotte, Jager felt insulted and pushed to his limit. Jager was instructed by his superiors to let the biggest troublemakers through on a one-way ticket. But many of these so-called troublemakers were students and other young individuals who briefly entered West Berlin and then returned to the checkpoint for re-entry into East Berlin.

However, the GDR was serious in its warnings that this was a one-way ticket. Their angry parents began to plead with officials not to keep them separated from their children, and by that point Jager was unwilling to argue on behalf of his superiors. After Jager made an exception for the parents, others demanded the same treatment as well.

Having gone that far, it was simply too late. Thousands of people were demanding that the gates be opened. He was facing a momentous decision — open fire on the civilians, or let them through. At pm, Jager phoned his superior and reported his decision: he would open all the remaining gates and allow the crowds to stream across the border.

West Berliners greeted their counterparts with music and champagne. Some citizens began to chip away at the physical barrier with sledgehammers and chisels. By midnight, the checkpoints were completely overrun. Over that weekend, more than 2 million people from East Berlin visited West Berlin to participate in the mass celebration.

By the end of the day, estimates place the number of attendees at over a million, making it the largest In the end, 49 people were dead and dozens more injured, in what was, at the time, the deadliest mass shooting On June 12, Otto Warmbier, a year-old student who was taken prisoner in North Korea 17 months earlier, returned home to the United States in a comatose state.

His return marked a warming of relations between the U. Army and participated in the Normandy invasion. In , he By mid-August, Filipino rebels and U. Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India, is found guilty of electoral corruption in her successful campaign.