"Tear Down This Wall" (page 2 of 3)

One Day?

Back in Washington, I told Tony Dolan, who oversaw Presidential speechwriting, that I wanted to make Ingeborg Elz's comment the central passage in Reagan's speech. I thought the passion and decency it conveyed sounded a lot like Reagan -- like that trumpet again. But when I sat down to write, the words didn't exactly flow.

In one draft I wrote, "Herr Gorbachev, bring down this wall," using "Herr" because I thought it would please the President's German audience, and "bring" because it was the only verb I could think of. I also swapped "bring" for "take," as if that were some sort of an improvement.

By week's end I'd produced nothing but a first draft that even I considered banal. I can still hear the clomp-clomp-clomp of Tony's cowboy boots as he walked down the hallway from his office to toss that draft onto my desk. "It's no good," he said.

"What's wrong with it?" I asked.

"I just told you. It's no good."

"Which paragraphs, Tony?"

"The whole thing is no good."

The next week I wrote another draft. This time I framed the challenge to the Soviet leader in stronger language, urging Gorbachev to "tear down the wall." On Friday, May 15, the speeches for the President's trip to Rome, Venice and Berlin were sent to him, and on Monday, May 18, the speechwriters joined him in the Oval Office. My speech was the last to be discussed. When Tom Griscom, the director of communications, asked Reagan for his comments, the President replied simply that he liked it.

"Mr. President," I said to him, "I learned that your speech will not only be heard in West Berlin but throughout East Germany." Radios might be able to pick up the speech as far east as Moscow. "Is there anything you'd like to say to people on the other side of the Berlin Wall?" I asked.

"Well, there's that passage about tearing down the wall," he replied. "That wall has to come down. That's what I'd like to say to them."

With three weeks to go, the speech was circulated to the State Department and the National Security Council. Both tried to squelch it. The draft was naive, they said. It was clumsy. It was provocative. State and the NSC submitted their own drafts -- no fewer than seven in all. In each, the call to "tear down the wall" was missing.

In principle, State and the NSC had no objection to a call for the wall's destruction. One draft, for example, contained the line, "One day, this ugly wall will disappear." I looked at that for a while. "One day"? One day the lion would lie down with the lamb, too, but you wouldn't want to hold your breath. "This ugly wall will disappear" was another line. What did that mean? The wall would disappear only when the Soviets knocked it down. What State and the NSC were saying was that Reagan could call for the wall's demise, but only if he used language so vague and euphemistic everyone could see he didn't mean it.

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“ Once a day, sit in a quiet, dim room, close your eyes, and focus on one word. This helps reduce stress and decreases your susceptibility to colds. ”

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