By Rebecca Miller '04
Assistant Director of Communications

Seated in an armchair, wearing borrowed shoes – he had left his at home – Peter Robinson, the speechwriter who penned President Ronald’s Reagan’s historic call to “tear down this wall,” well remembers another time when he had to put himself in someone else’s shoes on a daily basis. Only then, it was perhaps the world’s most powerful pair.

Throughout his time working for Reagan, Robinson wrote hundreds of speeches, and in each, he considered just what Reagan would think, what he would do. It was his job to give Reagan a platform to be himself. And the president never failed to deliver the words Robinson wrote – even beyond his expectations.

There were moments that stood out during Reagan’s presidency, but none so much as June 12, 1987, standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, his voice ringing strong and clear.

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Those words, Robinson believes, could never have been uttered by any other politician. And with them, Reagan hammered a chisel into the crack already beginning to spread throughout the Soviet Union.

Just two years later, the Berlin Wall fell.

That possibility wasn’t something the State Department considered, and as a young Robinson toured West Berlin in preparation for Reagan’s visit in 1987, he felt the diplomatic pressure.

The wall is just an afterthought now, he was told. Berliners are a sophisticated lot who have moved on. Don’t mention the wall.

But the 13-foot high gash through the heart of the city was hard to ignore. A helicopter ride showed the devastation on the eastern side – the barbed wire and the armed soldiers.

At a gathering later, Robinson asked Berliners if it was true that the wall wasn’t a big deal anymore.

His question was met with a long silence. Then, one by one, they began sharing stories of families separated, countrymen pitted against countrymen. Decades later, their silence spoke of weariness, not of apathy.

If they could hear the president say one thing, it would be this: tear down the wall. Robinson knew, looking at the situation through Reagan’s eyes, that it was just what needed to be said. He knew too, that it was just what Reagan would want to say.

Despite weeks of maneuvering and strident objections from political forces on all sides, that sentence stayed in the speech, bolstered by Reagan’s support.

“He wanted to win, but he wanted to win peacefully,” Robinson said.

And win he did, with the help of six words that shook the world.

(Peter Robinson spoke at the fourth annual Reagan Lecture, sponsored by The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College, on Feb. 3. Dr. Paul Kengor, Reagan biographer and the Center’s executive director, moderated the presentation.)