Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate, 1987

Date: June 12, 1987 Place: West Berlin, near the Brandenburg Gate People: Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl, Eberhard Diepgen, and others Themes: The Berlin Wall, the Cold War, German division, freedom, and reform

At 2:20 in the afternoon on June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan of the United States began speaking near the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin.

Behind him stood the Berlin Wall.

It had already been there for almost twenty-six years.

On August 13, 1961, the East German authorities began sealing the border between East and West Berlin. Over time, barbed wire, concrete barriers, watchtowers, patrol roads and other installations developed into an elaborate border system. The Berlin Wall system stretched for roughly 155 kilometers around West Berlin. According to research by the Berlin Wall Foundation, at least 140 people died between 1961 and 1989 in connection with the Wall and the East German border regime.

So when Reagan came to the Brandenburg Gate, he was confronting more than a structure made of concrete.

On one side was West Berlin. On the other was East Berlin.

Sometimes only a few dozen meters separated two political systems—and separated families and friends for decades.

Twenty-four years earlier, in June 1963, President John F. Kennedy had visited West Berlin and delivered his famous address at Schöneberg City Hall. By 1987, Berlin still presented the division of the Cold War in unusually visible form. Reagan referred to Kennedy at the beginning of his speech and made clear that he was addressing not only the people standing before him but also listeners in East Berlin and across Eastern Europe.

Then he expressed his position in German:

“Es gibt nur ein Berlin.” — “There is only one Berlin.”

But the world of 1987 was no longer the world Kennedy had encountered in 1963.

Mikhail Gorbachev had become the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985 and had begun promoting policies associated with perestroika, or restructuring, and glasnost, or openness. The United States and Soviet Union remained strategic rivals, divided by nuclear weapons, security disputes and ideology, but negotiations had created new possibilities.

That change gave the Berlin Wall a new political meaning.

For years the Wall had appeared to be a permanent feature of the Cold War. Now a question became increasingly difficult to avoid: if reform in the Soviet bloc was genuine, why should a wall dividing one European city remain necessary?

Reagan chose to ask that question publicly.

The sentence that would make the speech famous, however, nearly disappeared from the text.

Peter Robinson, the young White House speechwriter assigned to draft the address, later described visiting Berlin with the presidential advance team in April 1987. At a dinner with West Berlin residents, he asked whether they had simply become accustomed to living with the Wall. Their response convinced him otherwise. One woman argued that if Gorbachev was serious about reform and openness, removing the Wall would be a way to prove it.

Robinson decided to build that idea into the speech.

The proposal then became the subject of disagreement inside the Reagan administration.

According to Robinson’s later account, published by the U.S. National Archives, officials in the State Department and National Security Council worried that a direct challenge to Gorbachev might be unnecessarily provocative and could complicate improving U.S.-Soviet relations. Robinson recalled that several alternative drafts were proposed and that the direct demand to remove the Wall disappeared from them.

Reagan ultimately kept the line.

Because the details of these drafting disputes come substantially from Robinson’s retrospective account, they are best treated as the testimony of a participant rather than as the only possible interpretation of the internal debate.

Then came June 12.

Reagan stood before the Wall and spoke about Berlin’s destruction after World War II, the Marshall Plan and West Berlin’s reconstruction. He also addressed the reforms emerging in the Soviet Union.

Were they signs of profound change, he asked, or only limited measures intended to strengthen the existing system?

There was, Reagan said, one unmistakable test.

He addressed the Soviet leader directly:

“Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Those final words became one of the most recognizable phrases of Reagan’s presidency.

Yet the full speech was more complicated than the famous excerpt suggests.

Immediately after the challenge, Reagan spoke about Europeans’ fear of war and about arms reduction. He argued for maintaining Western defenses while also pursuing negotiations to reduce weapons on both sides. Later in the speech he proposed more contact between East and West Berlin, youth exchanges, international conferences and other forms of cooperation.

The demand to remove the Wall therefore belonged to a broader argument.

It was both a challenge and an invitation.

If reform was real, greater freedom of movement through Berlin could demonstrate it.

When Reagan finished speaking, however, the Wall remained standing.

It did not fall the next day.

It did not fall the next month.

It was still standing a year later.

History was far more complicated than the television clip that later came to symbolize it.

By 1989, several developments were converging across Eastern Europe: Gorbachev’s reforms and changing Soviet policy toward its allies, political transformation in Poland and Hungary, worsening economic and political problems inside East Germany, growing numbers of East Germans seeking routes to the West, and increasingly large public demonstrations in East German cities.

By the autumn of 1989, the East German government’s ability to preserve the old political and border system was rapidly deteriorating.

Then, on the evening of November 9, events crossed a threshold.

At a press conference, East German official Günter Schabowski announced new travel regulations. His response to a question about when they would take effect helped create the impression that the changes were immediate.

Television carried the news.

Large numbers of East Berliners headed toward the border crossings. Confronted with growing crowds and without clear instructions capable of controlling the situation, border personnel eventually allowed people through.

Berliners crossed the border.

People from the two halves of the city embraced. Some climbed onto the Wall. Others began striking the concrete with hammers and tools.

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall effectively ceased functioning as a closed border.

Less than a year later, on October 3, 1990, Germany was reunified.

Only then did Reagan’s words acquire the historical resonance they have today.

“Tear down this wall” became one of the best-known verbal symbols of the end of the Cold War. But it would be misleading to conclude that Reagan uttered one sentence in 1987 and thereby caused the Wall to fall two years later.

The collapse of the border system had deeper causes: the crisis of the Soviet bloc, political changes across Eastern Europe, Gorbachev’s reforms, the actions of East German citizens who demonstrated or tried to leave, and the accelerating loss of control by the East German government. The U.S. State Department’s historical account of the events of 1989 likewise places the opening of the Berlin Wall within this larger sequence of developments.

The significance of Reagan’s speech lies somewhere else.

Politics often teaches people to accept what appears permanent. Language can occasionally do the opposite. It can describe the apparently permanent as something that could change.

On June 12, 1987, the Berlin Wall still had guards, checkpoints and an elaborate border system. No one standing there could know that two years and five months later the barrier would lose its function.

Peter Robinson later recalled that even he had not expected the Wall to come down so quickly. Only afterward, he said, did the speech seem to acquire an almost retrospective prophetic quality.

That is one of the peculiar features of history.

Before an event happens, people see a wall.

Afterward, they search backward for moments that seem to have predicted its disappearance.

And so the afternoon of June 12, 1987, became one of those moments preserved in historical memory.

An American president stood on one side of a wall.

On the other side remained another state, another political system and, in many ways, another world.

He said:

“Tear down this wall.”

In 1987, it was a demand.

Two years later, it sounded like a prophecy.

But walls in history are rarely brought down by a sentence alone. They fall through the accumulated choices of individuals, changes within institutions, transformations in international politics—and the moment when an age that once appeared permanent finally begins to change.