Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho,
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho
and the walls came tumbling down.

Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho,
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho
and the walls came tumbling down.

(“Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho.” Traditional Spiritual)

Note: This video of Nat King Cole introducing Mahalia Jackson singing the above song is a keeper.

Theodore H. White believed there were several elements that went into making a great speech. First, there must be “the occasion” – a suitable reason to give the speech in the first place. Secondly, the words themselves must reach out and not just stimulate the mind of the audience but touch the heart as well. And finally, the venue in which the speech is given must act as an amplifier to give the speech an importance beyond the occasion or the actual words spoken.

Reagan had it all 20 years ago today as he stood before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The man, the moment, the venue – all came together so that his thundering challenge to the mighty Soviet state to “Tear down this wall” hit the occupied countries of Europe like a bolt of lightening. It discomfited Gorbachev (and not coincidentally, the western left), gave heart to our allies, and electrified conservatives at home. It is one of the three great political speeches of my lifetime, easily the equal of Kennedy’s speech inaugurating the 1960’s and coming close to Dr. King’s challenge to America at the Lincoln Memorial to turn his dream of a peaceful, multi-racial society into reality.

As bracing as President Reagan’s speech at Brandenburg was, perhaps only the Gipper himself could have foreseen how prescient his words would be when a scant 2 years and 5 months later, joyful East Berliners took matters into their own hands and hammered the wall into dust. If there has been a more shocking, surprising, uplifting example of the power of the spoken word to affect the course of world events, I cannot think of one.

Of course, Gorbachev got the credit. But stop and think what the Communist leader actually was credited with doing – or more accurately, not doing. Mikhail Gorbachev was lionized for not sending in the tanks, for not slaughtering people as most of his predecessors certainly would have done. It speaks volumes of the desperation of the western left at that time that no credit whatsoever should fall to President Reagan and his open challenge to the moral authority of the Soviet Union that they would praise Gorbachev for simply acting like a human being and not a Communist thug.

But that was a symptom of the times and I’m sure Reagan could have cared less. He was not a vain man. His purpose at Brandenburg was to tweak the Soviet State by allowing them to hear the footsteps of freedom as the March of History approached the crumbling, rotten core of Communist tyranny all over Eastern Europe. New technologies had revealed the truth about the west to the captive peoples behind the Iron Curtain; the simple truth that they could see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears on pirated TV signals, cassette tapes, and newspapers smuggled across ever more porous borders – that the people of the west lived happier, freer, more enriching lives than they did. Rather than tamp down the restlessness as Gorbachev hoped, his mild, hesitant reforms opened the floodgates and a full blown revolution was underway.

I like the idea of Reagan as Joshua, sounding the ram’s horn of freedom which spurred a mighty shout from the host of oppressed peoples, bringing the whole rotten edifice of Communist tyranny crashing down. Of course, it was much more complicated than that. More than a 40 years of spadework had been done under both Democratic and Republican Presidents that gradually ate away at Soviet authority and the myths that kept the tyrants in power.

And let’s not forget the contributions of that smiling, brilliant, hard as nails holy man from Rome whose political savvy was matched by an iron will and an absolute total belief in his own moral authority. There was also an equally savvy, tough as boot leather Brit whose special relationship with the American President helped forge the most successful transatlantic partnership since World War II.

Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Maggie Thatcher – Freedom’s Triumvirate – never formally coordinated strategy to challenge the idea of the permanence of the Soviet State. But if there is a guiding hand of God, surely they were touched by it. The idea that those three came to power at basically the same time is either one of the happiest accidents of history or proof that there is an Almighty God, depending on your personal beliefs.

But it was Reagan at the Gate who put the finishing touches to the beginning of the end of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. The groundwork had already been laid in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary. All that remained was for Reagan to utter the words:

We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

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! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate!

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

The story of the ruckus those last 4 words caused in our own government is one of high drama and low comedy. Everyone in the permanent bureaucracy was aghast at the thought of an American president directly challenging a Soviet leader. Even some of Reagan’s closest aides were against the idea of including the words. Peter Robinson, who is credited with authoring the speech, tells the story here:

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 suppress it. The draft was naïve. 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. In each, the call to tear down the wall was missing.

When in early June the President and his party reached Italy (I remained in Washington), Ken Duberstein, the deputy chief of staff, sat the President down in the garden of the palazzo in which he was staying, then briefed him on the objections to my draft. Reagan asked Duberstein’s advice. Duberstein replied that he thought the line about tearing down the wall sounded good. “But I told him, ‘You’re President, so you get to decide.’ And then,” Duberstein recalls, “he got that wonderful, knowing smile on his face, and he said, ‘Let’s leave it in.’”

The day the President arrived in Berlin, State and NSC submitted yet another alternate draft. Yet in the limousine on the way to the Berlin Wall, the President told Duberstein he was determined to deliver the controversial line. Reagan smiled. “The boys at State are going to kill me,” he said, “but it’s the right thing to do.”

I find it amusing that up to the day of the speech, the bureaucrats were scrambling to get Reagan to change his mind and drop those 4 little words. But in the end, Reagan’s unerring sense of the moment and flair for the dramatic won out in his own mind. He guessed the impact those words would have. And he was proved right in the end.

Has it really been 20 years? Reagan himself is fading into myth and legend, an iconic part of our national story. The Soviet state is a rising authoritarian power, gradually moving away from the west and edging closer to outright opposition to American interests in Europe and especially elsewhere. But the countries Reagan helped free in Eastern Europe are doing very nicely, thank you. And the only way Russian hegemony could be re-established over their old dominion at this point would be through a ruinous war. The former captive nations are now full blown members of the democracy club. And there’s is nothing Putin and his former KGB friends can do about it.

Let that be the story, then. Reagan spoke. The wall fell. And tens of millions of souls live and breathe free because an American President stood alone in front of what was thought to be a permanent symbol of division only to blow his horn and have it come crashing down, uniting people in the ageless quest for human liberty.

I’m glad I was alive to see it.

UPDATE:

Some others marking this day as well:

Hugh Hewitt:

Reagan had to lose the presidential race in order to win it, and had to leave office after eight often difficult years before the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet empire collapsed. Reagan never stopped believing in freedom or in the rightness of his cause, leaving a record of persistence that ought to inspire his successors in government as well as those captive and oppressed peoples around the globe who would, like the men and women of Eastern Europe in the long years of Soviet cruelty, prefer freedom to tyranny.

Sister Toldjah remembers with pictures and video.

Jim Hoft points out that today is the day they dedicate a memorial to the victims of communism – all 100 million of them:

The Goddess of Democracy” was carved by students from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China and erected in Tiananmen Square during the democracy protest in 1989.

Today the Victims of Communism Organization is dedicating a memorial to the millions and millions of vicitms of communism by unveiling the “Goddess of Democracy” statue in Washington, DC. The monument to victims of communism stands at the intersection of Massachusetts and New Jersey avenues, two blocks from Union Station.