Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Today, a conversation hosted with

the Ronald Reagan Institute. In a moment, Jamie Fly will in Bowdoin and HR McMaster will

join me in discussing President Reagan's June 12, 1987 tear down this wall speech. But

since I was the speechwriter who wrote the speech, I've been asked actually General McMaster

has ordered me to tell the story of the speech. Right there, by the way, is the first page

of President Reagan's speaking copy and you can see my name as the speechwriter in the

upper left hand corner. First, some historical background. After the Second World War, West

Berlin, which is a portion of Berlin itself, remained under American, British, and French

control, even as East Berlin and all of surrounding East Germany came under the control of

a communist regime. And this is very important to grasp that West Berlin was completely surrounded

by the communist East. And in the map that's on the screen now, you can see West Berlin

is a little dot inside East Germany. Again, after the war, thousands of East Germans

flee the communist regime in East Germany to the Democratic West. How do they do this?

Very often they do it just by stepping across the street into West Berlin. And once they

were in West Berlin, they could get on a train, which had the rights to cross East German

territory to the West. So leaving was simple. And by 1961, fifth of the entire population

of East Germany had done just that, they'd fled. To stop this big, this enormous exodus,

the East Germans proposed a physical barrier and Moscow agreed. And in the middle of the

night of August 13, 1961, the East Germans strung barbed wire all the way around West

Berlin, cutting it off. There's a slide that shows this barbed wire. Eventually, the East

Germans would replace the barbed wire with cinder blocks. And after that, they would replace

the cinder blocks with slabs of concrete 13 feet high. More than a quarter of a century

...