Who said “Tear down this wall”?

The speech at the gate

Ronald Reagan came to West Berlin on June 12, 1987, the year the city celebrated its 750th anniversary. He spoke at 2:20 p.m. in front of the Brandenburg Gate, with the Wall behind him and panes of bulletproof glass in front, and he told the crowd he understood the speech was being heard in the East as well. He was not the first American president to make the Wall his stage: Kennedy had come 24 years earlier, with four words of German. Reagan opened with German of his own, a line from a well-known song about the city, Ich hab noch einen Koffer in Berlin, I still have a suitcase in Berlin, and a phrase for both halves of the city, Es gibt nur ein Berlin, there is only one Berlin.

Midway through, he turned to the Soviet leader:

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 line his staff wanted cut

The words were drafted that spring by a young speechwriter, Peter Robinson. As the drafts went around, officials at the State Department and the National Security Council objected: they found the line provocative, worried it would embarrass Gorbachev just as relations were improving, and pressed for it to be softened or dropped. Reagan kept it.

Near the end he read out graffiti he had just seen on the Wall from the Reichstag: “This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.” At the time, the speech drew less attention than it does now. It became famous after 1989, when the Wall did fall.

What Gorbachev said

Gorbachev did not tear the Wall down, but he changed the rules around it. In a speech to the United Nations on December 7, 1988, he said every nation had the right to choose its own path. At a press conference in Bonn on June 15, 1989, he was asked about the Wall. It had come out of a particular moment in history, he said, and “The Wall could disappear when the preconditions, which brought it about, cease to exist.” Then he added: “I do not see a big problem here.”

That autumn he kept Soviet tanks in their barracks while East Germany came apart. On November 9 the gates opened, not on any order from Moscow but through a fumbled announcement and a decision at one checkpoint.

Did the speech bring down the Wall?

Admirers of Reagan see the line as part of a wider pressure, with the arms buildup, the blunt rhetoric and the hard bargaining with Moscow, that convinced Soviet leaders their bloc could not hold. Many historians give more weight to Gorbachev’s refusal to use force, to Hungary opening its border, and to the crowds who marched in Leipzig and East Berlin in 1989.

The record allows a few plain statements. Reagan asked for the Wall to come down, in public and in front of it. Gorbachev never ordered it down, but he refused to save it by force. And the people who finally opened it were East Germans: a spokesman who had not been briefed, a crowd at a bridge, and an officer who opened a gate. Six months after the speech, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty, scrapping a whole class of nuclear missiles. Reagan died in 2004, Gorbachev in 2022.