June 12 marks the 35th anniversary of President Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate speech — memorable for the six words still stuck in our consciousness today, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” It didn’t get much publicity at the time, and the real effects of it, as of any speech, are always an open question. Only later would we get a sense of its real import. After 25 years of a bifurcated Berlin, the speech became a harbinger of what was to come.
I remember well the cool evening in Munich, Germany — the evening of August 12th, 1961. Some college friends and I were celebrating my 20th birthday in one of Munich’s legendary Bierhallen. For the next day we had made arrangements to drive the Autobahn up to Berlin, but at the very instant our spirits were going up, the gull-gray edifice of the Berlin Wall was too.
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