The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, May 26, 2025

Notably:  On June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan delivered one of his most memorable speeches when he stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, next to the Berlin Wall as well, and challenged Mikhail Gorbachev: “If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The speech took its place among the great addresses in American history. Reagan penned not a word of it. By then he was a tired, old, forgetful, entirely disengaged (as opposed to mostly disengaged, as he had been for his entire presidency and governorship) president, ravaged by the Iran-Contra scandal that should’ve cost him his job (he ably lied and convinced every investigation that he had no idea, no idea, as Captain Renault would say, that the profits from trading missiles for hostages with Iran were being diverted to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, in violation of the Boland Amendment that forbade American support: thank you, Oliver North, whom Reagan loved to the end) and soon to be re-ravaged by the Senate’s 58-42 rejection of the bigoted and contemptuous Robert Bork as a Supreme Court justice. The Berlin speech was the work of Peter Robinson, a standard-issue right-winger who likes to think he’s not a standard-issue ideologue who’s since been working at the Hoover Institution, one of the standard-issue pillars of sanitized Birchers that gave rise to Reagan and the rest of them, culminating in the current vomitory for a White House. At any rate: good speech. Except that what has never been part of the Reagan story, that story so richly mythical, is that Reagan walked back those words. In a White House meeting on September 23, 1988, he told Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s foreign affairs minister, that “it had perhaps been unrealistic to have suggested then that the Berlin wall be torn down in its entirety,” according to Max Boot in his Reagan, published last year, and that he would be satisfied if the two sides of Berlin would “work together.” Fourteen months later, the Berlin Wall came down–not because Reagan called for it, but because the Soviet Union was led by man who, well before the Brandenburg speech, had realized the absurdity and finiteness of Lenin’s ash heap. 

—P.T.