11.10.09
Here we go again
You may have heard about the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall recently. Of course, along with any talk of the end of the USSR comes an exaggerated account of St. Regan’s role. Take it away Time Magazine via Yahoo!
…few people imagined the Berlin Wall would disappear anytime soon. (See pictures of the Berlin Wall.) Ronald Reagan did. “I didn’t know when it would come, but I have to tell you, I’m an eternal optimist,” the former President said in an interview with ABC’s Sam Donaldson that night. “I believed in all my heart it was in the future.”
Well you also “believed in all your heart” that your administration wasn’t trading arms for hostages, and we know how that turned out.
Two years earlier, Reagan had addressed a crowd of some 20,000 near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Wall. At the time, even his closest advisers dismissed the notion as far-fetched. “It’s a great speech line,” Reagan’s National Security Adviser, Frank Carlucci, remembers thinking. “But it will never happen.” When the Wall came down, however, Reagan’s speech entered American lore. “You look for one line you remember a President by,” says Ken Duberstein, a former White House chief of staff who accompanied Reagan on the day of his Berlin speech. “FDR is easy. Bill Clinton is easy: ‘I did not have sex with that woman.’ What is Ronald Reagan going to be remembered by? One line: ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall.’”
The idea of Reagan’s applause line causing the end of the Berlin Wall (and by extension, the USSR) is wrong in so many ways it’s the superstring of stupidity. To call anything Reagan did during that time “diplomacy” is an insult to the reader’s intelligence. Carter had a policy of detente in place. Not because he was a pussy, but because the US had strong intelligence indicating the USSR as an empire in economic decline. From day one, Reagan’s “hard-line” evil empire bullshit served only to piss everyone off and ruin lots of lives in South American countries which had nothing to do with the USSR.
That 20 years later we’re still having to listen to this bullshit about cowboy Ronnie destroying communism is maddening. Actual grown-up adults still believe this.
Thankfully, Andrea Merkel and the AP got it right.
