Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’
‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’
Mar 17, 2025 8:36 AM

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Acton adjunct scholar and sometime PowerBlog contributor Eric Schansberg links to a bit of background to Ronald Reagan’s remarks at the Brandenburg Gate provided by Anthony Dolan, Reagan’s head speechwriter, in today’s WSJ.

Peter Robinson is credited with the famous utterance, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” In his remarks at this year’s Acton Institute Annual Dinner, Rev. Robert A. Sirico recalled that President Reagan’s challenge was derided by the world’s media at the time. As Dolan writes, in this speech it was thought that Reagan “would embarrass himself and the country by asking Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, which was going to be there for decades.” It wasn’t until the Wall fell a mere two years later that the prescience of Reagan’s challenge was validated.

For more on presidential speechwriters, check out the Podium Pundits blog, which “brings together former presidential speechwriters, from both Democratic and Republican administrations, to analyze ment on major speeches, messaging strategy, and the business munications.” Also be sure to check out Ray Nothstine’s reflections on this same anniversary from two years ago, in which he relates the views of another Acton Annual Dinner speaker, former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Death of a Dictator
Otto Reich at NRO claims that Cuban tyrant Fidel Castro is dead, or soon will be. That has been suspected for some time, but Reich says that funeral arrangements are now definitely in the works. Cuban authorities are evidently modeling the funeral on that of Pope John Paul II, parison that Reich teases out in the rest of the article. One is inclined to say that the ing grandiose tributes to Castro are risible, but it is hard to laugh...
Follow-Up on Climate Change at the Economist
About a month ago I posted some responses to the editorial position taken at the Economist. One of their claims was with regard to the Kyoto Protocol and that “European Union countries and Japan will probably hit their targets, even if Canada does not.” At the time I registered skepticism with respect to these estimates. Turns out my skepticism was well-founded. From Wired News: Between 1990 and 2004, emissions of all industrialized countries decreased by 3.3 percent, mostly because of...
An Economist’s Report on Climate Change
In a missioned by the UK government, Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, argues that the cost of waiting to take action to curb CO2 emissions will outpace other economic arguments against action on climate change. The BBC reports (HT: Slashdot) that Stern found “that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20%,” but that this opportunity cost for not taking action immediately could be offset by moving now: “Taking action now would cost...
Plug-In Hybrids Are Not So Green
The blog Autopia passes along this NYT story outlining some of the fundamental challenges facing plug-in hybrid electric cars. The basic formula for the appeal of such hybrids is as follows: “The electric system runs mostly on coal, natural gas and uranium, all relatively plentiful. Cars run mostly on oil, oil and oil, which lately has been expensive. Wouldn’t it be nice to connect the two?” And as attractive an option as this might be, the NYT story writes that...
Love of God and the Free Market
The Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy will be holding a theological conference on the subject of “Economy: Love of God, Production, and the Free Market.” Taking place tomorrow (Tuesday), you can either follow it live or read the proceedings later at the dicastery’s web site. ...
‘Truth is the Great Issue’
We’ve just posted the audio from Chuck Colson’s remarks at the Acton annual dinner in Grand Rapids on October 26. This link will take you there. “We are the people of the truth,” Colson told the more than 500 people assembled at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel. “We believe there is ultimate reality and we believe it is knowable. And that puts us up against our culture.” One of the nation’s most prominent evangelical Christians, Colson is founder of Prison...
CNN Poll: Broken Government
Data from a new CNN poll: “Queried about their views on the role of government, 54 percent of the 1,013 adults polled said they thought it was trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Only 37 percent said they thought the government should do more to solve the country’s problems.” These results follow a period in which the GOP has dominated both the executive and legislative branches at the federal level. During this...
What is Truth!
Hugh Hewitt interviewed Andrew Sullivan on the radio last week about Sullivan’s book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back. Discussing the value of various figures throughout history as moral heroes, Sullivan speaks of “the great question that Pilate asked, what is truth? The truth is not quite as easy and as simple as we sometimes think it is. And the truth about everything, the meaning of the whole universe, is something that is, by...
The New Evangelical Role in the Public Square, Part 1
The role of evangelicals in the public square has been a major development in American life over the past twenty-five or thirty years. A recent spate of popular books has looked at this phenomenon very critically. The number of books from the political and religious left, arguing against the rise of the newer evangelical right, makes for a full shelf of books by now. Most of these popular and poorly written books sound like dire warnings about ing religious takeover...
Patterns of Philanthropy
“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (Luke 12:48 NIV). When Bank of America Philanthropic Management noticed that “the wealthiest 3% of American households responsible for nearly two-thirds of charitable giving,” it decided to study philanthropic giving. (The top 5% paid 54.4% of taxes in 2003.) Passed on by Don’t Tell the Donor, “Bank of America today released the initial results...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved