It's My Party Read Free Page B

one man raised an arm and pointed.
     “My sister lives twenty miles in that direction. I haven’t seen her in more than two decades. Do you think I can get used
     to that?” Another man spoke. Each morning on his way to work, he explained, he walked past a guard tower. Each morning, the
     same soldier gazed down at him through binoculars. “The soldier speaks the same language. He shares the same history. But
     one of us is a zookeeper and the other is an animal, and I am never certain which is which.”
    Our hostess broke in. A gracious woman, she had suddenly grown angry. Her face was red. She made a fist with one hand and
     pounded it into the palm of the other. “If this man Gorbachev is serious with his talk of glasnost and
perestroika
, he can prove it. He can get rid of this wall.”
    Back at the White House I adapted my hostess’s comment, making it the central passage of the speech I drafted. A week later,
     the speechwriters met the president in the Oval Office. My speech was the last one we discussed. Tom Griscom, the director
     of communications, asked the president for his comments on my draft. The president simply replied that he liked it. Griscom
     nodded to me.
    “Mr. President,” I said, “I learned in Germany that your speech will be heard not only in West Berlin but throughout East
     Germany.” Depending on weather conditions, I explained, radios might be able to pick the speech up as far east as Moscow itself.
     “Is there anything you’d like to say to people on the
other
side of the Berlin Wall?”
    The president cocked his head and thought. “Well,” he replied, “there’s that passage about tearing down the wall. That wall
     has to come down. That’s what I’d like to say to them.”
    With three weeks to go before it was delivered, the speech was circulated to the State Department and the National Security
     Council. Both attempted to squelch it. Rozanne Ridge-way, the assistant secretary of state for Eastern European affairs, challenged
     the speech by telephone. Peter Rodman of the National Security Council protested the speech in memoranda. Weighing in from
     Berlin, John Kornblum objected to the speech by fax. The speech was naïve. It would raise false hopes. It was clumsy. It was
     needlessly provocative. State and the NSC submitted their own alternate drafts—as I recall, there were no fewer than seven,
     one written by Kornblum himself. In each, the call to tear down the wall was absent.
    The week before the president left for Europe, Tom Griscom began summoning me into his office each time State or the NSC came
     up with a new objection. Each time, Griscom had me tell him why I believed State and the NSC were wrong and the speech, as
     I had written it, was right. (Once I found Colin Powell, then national security adviser, in Griscom’s office waiting for me.
     I was a thirty-year-old who had never held a job outside speechwriting. Powell was a decorated general. We went at it nose-to-nose.)
     Griscom was evidently waiting for an objection he thought Ronald Reagan himself would find compelling. He never heard one.
    In Venice the day before the speech was to be given, the deputy chief of staff, Ken Duberstein, decided that the objections
     from State and the NSC had become so strident that he had to present them to the president himself. When he finished briefing
     the president, Duberstein tells me, an exchange along the following lines took place.
R EAGAN :
(A twinkle in his eye) I’m the president, aren’t I?
D UBERSTEIN :
Yes, sir, Mr. President. We’re clear about that.
R EAGAN :
So I get to decide whether the line about tearing down the wall stays in?
D UBERSTEIN :
That’s right, sir. It’s your decision.
R EAGAN :
Then it stays in.
    As
Air Force One
left Venice for Berlin the next morning, the fax machines on board began to whir. Making a final effort to squelch the speech,
     State and NSC were submitting yet another alternate draft. Tom Griscom never even took