Today is the twentieth anniversary of President Reagan’s speech in Berlin where he issued his famous challenge, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

The story has often been told how Reagan’s speechwriter, Peter Robinson, was advised by senior State Department officials that the Berlin Wall was no longer a big issue with the people of West Berlin, so the President should devote his speech to other matters.

Robinson was skeptical, and his own conversations with people he met in West Berlin during the preparations for the President’s visit convinced him to include the line in the speech. Reagan concurred, and the line stayed in.

As the President neared the platform at the Brandenburg Gate, Robinson tells us that he turned to his aide Ken Duberstein and said, “The boys at State are going to kill me, but it’s the right thing to do.”

History concurred. Less than three years after Reagan uttered the famous line, the wall came tumbling down.

Another chronicler of the Reagan years, Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweitzer, says that there is both a prologue and an epilogue to this story. He recounts both in his book, Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism.

The prologue was in two scenes. The first scene was twenty years earlier, when then-Governor Ronald Reagan debated Senator Robert Kennedy on CBS. When the subject of the Cold War came up, Reagan suggested that the Soviets could demonstrate their peaceful intentions by tearing down the Berlin Wall.

The second scene took place eleven years later, in 1978. While preparing to run for President, Reagan made a tour of Europe with his foreign policy advisor Richard Allen. Their itinerary included Berlin, so Reagan could see the wall first-hand. Reagan and Allen actually entered East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie, and had a look around. While they were there, they witnessed a scene that Reagan never forgot. A passing shopper was forced to drop his bags by the East German police, who spent next few minutes probing him and the contents of his bags with the muzzles of their guns. It was a grim reminder of the realities of life under Communism.

The epilogue occurred in 1990, when Reagan made his last visit to Berlin. The wall was down by then, and he was greeted with shouts of, “Thank you, Mr. President.” There was even a song written to commemorate the occasion called, “The Man Who Made Those Pussyfooters and Weaklings Feel Ashamed.”

To me, the prologue is more interesting than the epilogue. It shows that Reagan’s embrace of Peter Robinson’s line was no whim of the moment. Twenty years before, and doubtless long before that, he knew it was the right thing to do.