Tear Down This Wall! - Response and Legacy

Response and Legacy

Although it has been called "The four most famous words of Ronald Reagan's Presidency", the speech received "relatively little coverage from the media", Time magazine reported 20 years later. Communists were critical of the speech, and the Soviet press agency Tass accused Reagan as giving an "openly provocative, war-mongering speech."

Twenty-nine months later, on November 9, 1989, after increasing public unrest, East Germany finally opened the Berlin Wall. By the end of the year, official operations to dismantle the wall began. With the collapse of the Communist governments of Eastern Europe and, eventually, the Soviet Union itself, the tearing down of the wall epitomized the collapse for history. In September 1990, Reagan, no longer President, returned to Berlin, where he personally took a few symbolic hammer swings at a remnant of the Berlin Wall.

Former West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said he would never forget standing near Reagan when he challenged Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. "He was a stroke of luck for the world, especially for Europe." Although there is considerable disagreement over how much influence Reagan's words had on the destruction of the wall, the speech is remembered as an important moment in Cold War history.

Peter Robinson, the White House wordsmith who drafted the address, said its most famous line was inspired by a conversation with Ingeborg Elz of West Berlin who had remarked in a conversation with him, "If this man Gorbachev is serious with his talk of Glasnost and perestroika he can prove it by getting rid of this wall."