Ronald Reagan's Berlin Speech in 1987 Research Paper

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Reagan at the Berlin Wall

In Ronald Reagan’s 1987 speech at the Berlin Wall, two years before the Wall fell, Reagan made a direct challenge to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall!” It was a stunning challenge before the whole world at one of the most iconic places in the world—the Berlin Wall which for more than two decades had stood as a monument to the Cold War, to the tensions between the Communist capital in Moscow and the Capitalist U.S. Two-and-a-half decades prior, another U.S. President had come to the same wall to lament the callousness of Communism: John F. Kennedy. In many ways, Reagan’s speech was inspired by Kennedy’s speech at the Berlin Wall in 1961. This paper will show how.

Kennedy used the Berlin Wall as a political tool to show that he was both united with the common men and women of the world and hard on Communism. He identified as a Berliner in his speech, saying in German, “Ich eine Berliner!” (Kennedy, 1961). Reagan used this same term, “Berliner,” and the same idea in his speech when he stated, “Every man is a Berliner” (Reagan, 1987). Reagan was implying like Kennedy, that the people of Berlin represented the common man, torn between two cultures and opposing ideologies: on the one hand, Communism, on the other hand, liberty and democracy.

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Reagan was channeling Kennedy in his remarks, leading up to his firm stance against Communism when he challenged Gorbachev to tear down the wall.

Reagan’s speech was powerful in that it baited Gorbachev to do as he said he wanted to do in the crumbling Soviet Union—open up Russia to more liberalizing attitudes and ways. Reagan and the West viewed Gorbachev as a man who knew that the Soviet Union’s days were numbered, that its ideology had ultimately failed it; that its command and control economy had not worked. Reagan and the West seized on the opportunity to push Gorbachev in front of the whole world to take the next step and declare Communism dead. Reagan and the West did this by going to the Berlin Wall and making another tough political speech in front of the very symbol of Communism itself. Reagan used that symbol to essentially say that the Soviet Union was old and worn out and useless just like this wall and that it was high….....

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