During the spring of 1987, American conservatives were becoming disenchanted with Ronald Reagan’s increasingly conciliatory approach to Mikhail Gorbachev. Inside the White House, Reagan’s aides began to bicker over a speech the president was planning to give on a trip overseas. That June, the president would travel to Venice for the annual summit meeting of the seven industrialised nations. From there, plans called for him to stop briefly in Berlin, which was still divided between East and West. The question was what he should say while there.
The speech Reagan delivered 20 years ago this week is now remembered as one of the highlights of his presidency. The video images of that speech have been played and replayed. On June 12, 1987, Reagan, standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall, issued his famous exhortation to Mikhail Gorbachev: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall”.
For many American conservatives, the Berlin Wall speech has taken on iconic status. This was Reagan’s ultimate challenge to the Soviet Union — and, so they believe, Gorbachev simply capitulated when, in November 1989, he failed to respond with force as Germans suddenly began tearing down the wall.
Among Reagan’s most devoted followers, an entire mythology has developed. Theirs is what might be called the triumphal school of interpretation: the president spoke, the Soviets quaked, the wall came down.
Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican and former Reagan speechwriter, told me that American intelligence had reported that the day after the Berlin Wall speech, Gorbachev confided in his aides that Reagan wasn’t going to give up.
The opposing perspective on the Reagan speech is that it was nothing but a stunt. The adherents of this interpretation include not just Democrats or liberals but many veterans of the George H W Bush administration.
In a 1995 book about the end of the Cold War, Germany United and Europe Transformed, two former officials of the first Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice and Philip Zelikow, minimised the significance of the Berlin Wall address and its role in the events leading up to the end of the Cold War. They argued that after the speech was given there was no serious, practical follow-up.
Even some of Reagan’s own senior foreign-policy officials seem to think the speech was not particularly noteworthy. But those who dismiss the speech as insignificant miss the point, too. They fail to see its role in helping the president line up public support for his foreign policy. In the months leading up to his speech, Reagan had been under attack in the United States for having been beguiled by Gorbachev. Hawks in the national-security establishment were upset that at the Reykjavik summit meeting, Reagan had talked about the possibility of abolishing nuclear weapons.
By the spring of 1987, Reagan was well into quiet negotiations for two more summit meetings with the Soviet leader in Washington and Moscow. His administration was moving toward a landmark arms-control agreement with the Soviet Union — a treaty on intermediate-range nuclear forces, which would have to be ratified by the Senate. The idea of such a treaty was beginning to attract considerable opposition in Washington.
The Berlin Wall speech, then, offered cover for Reagan’s diplomacy. It was an anti-Communist speech that helped preserve support for a conservative president seeking to upgrade American relations with the Soviet Union. In political terms, it was the prerequisite for the president’s subsequent negotiations. These efforts, in turn, created the vastly more relaxed climate in which the Soviets sat on their hands when the wall came down.
Those who minimise the speech also ignore the message it sent the Soviets. It served notice that the US was willing to reach accommodations with Gorbachev, but not at the expense of accepting the permanent division of Berlin (or of Europe).

NYT