IS IT TRUE? May 18, 2011 Evening Bonus Edition

1. It is sometimes difficult to remember, when one is daily apprised of the the acts of moral turpitude by our so called leaders, those people who took the argument to a higher level.

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   Tear Down This Wall
   (President Reagan’s most famous line was almost deleted)
   by Peter Robinson

   In April 1987, when I was assigned to write the Brandenburg Gate address, I spent a day in Berlin with the White House advance team, the logistical experts, Secret Service agents, and press officials who went to the site of every presidential visit to make arrangements. In the evening, I broke away from the advance team to join a dozen Berliners for dinner. Our hosts were Dieter and Ingeborg Elz, who, after Dieter completed his career at the World Bank in Washington, had retired to Berlin. Although we had never met, we had friends in common, and the Elzes had offered to put on this dinner party to give me a feel for their city. They had invited Berliners of different walks of life and political outlooks–businessmen, academics, students, homemakers.

   We chatted for awhile. Then I explained that, earlier in the day, the ranking American diplomat in West Berlin had told me that over the years Berliners had made a kind of accommodation with the wall. “Is it true?” I asked. “Have you gotten used to it?”

   The Elzes and their guests glanced at each other uneasily. Then one man raised an arm and pointed. “My sister lives twenty miles in that direction,” he said. “I haven’t seen her in more than two decades. Do you think I can get used to that?” Another man spoke. As he walked to work each morning, he explained, a soldier in a guard tower peered down at him through binoculars. “That soldier and I speak the same language. We share 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, Ingeborg Elz 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,” she said, “he can prove it. He can get rid of this wall.”

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   Back at the White House I adapted her comment, making “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” the central line in my draft. On Friday, May 15, the speeches for the President’s trip–he would be traveling to Rome and Venice before reaching Berlin–were forwarded to the President, and on Monday, May 18, the speechwriters joined him in the Oval Office. My speech was the last we discussed. “Mr. President,” I said, “I learned on the advance trip that this speech will be heard not only in West Berlin but throughout East Germany. 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.”

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   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 suppress it. The draft was naive. It would raise false hopes. It was clumsy. It was needlessly provocative. State and the NSC submitted their own alternate drafts–my journal records that there were no fewer than seven. In each, the call to tear down the wall was missing.

   When in early June the President and his party reached Italy (I remained in Washington), Ken Duberstein, the deputy chief of staff, sat the President down in the garden of the palazzo in which he was staying, then briefed him on the objections to my draft. Reagan asked Duberstein’s advice. Duberstein replied that he thought the line about tearing down the wall sounded good. “But I told him, ‘You’re President, so you get to decide.'” And then, Duberstein recalls, “he got that wonderful, knowing smile on his face, and he said, ‘Let’s leave it in.'”

   The day the President arrived in Berlin, State and NSC submitted yet another alternate draft. Yet in the limousine on the way to the Berlin Wall, the President told Duberstein he was determined to deliver the controversial line. Reagan smiled. “The boys at State are going to kill me,” he said, “but it’s the right thing to do.”

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   There are things going on here in Evansville that the public may never know about unless some people of strong moral character speak up because “it is the right thing to do”.

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2. Is it true that Magic Man and his Magic Minions (didn’t even know I had “followers” 🙂 ) wish to thank the CCO for it’s possible role in getting this matter resolved? That, according to information received this evening, this “problem” is rapidly being swept under the carpet by the “public officials” involved. Is it true that, upon unspecified pressure being applied by concerned individuals, this rapidly became a finger-pointing contest between The State Exercise officer and the Health Department official involved? Is it true that your quote …”when people fear its government there is Tyranny and when government fear the people there is Liberty” is so perfectly applicable to this situation that it should outrage true Americans who believe that government exists to serve the people and not the inverse? It it true that the two “public officials” involved in this need to go read the Constitution instead of sitting around their offices all day trying to figure out ways to screw with people?

3. One additional comment:

   Is it true that Magic Man has absolutely no involvement whatsoever with any of the organizations involved in this “misuderstanding” and was simply passing on information received in passing from an acquaintance, so any ill will caused by “his” commentaries should be directed solely at “him”?

4. I’m kind of confused here. Are you saying that there should not be any kind of regulations involved in a individual/group making items intended for human consumption? Even if it’s for charity, there has to be protection for the consumer when it comes to food and beverage, especially an alcoholic beverage. Are the members of the Home Brew Club leaving themselves wide-open for a liability lawsuit should something go wrong? In this lawsuit happy and corrupt world we live in, someone could see that wide-open door as an opportunity to take advantage of them.

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