Meghan Cox Gurdon: The Wall separates Reagan from Obama
[Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursday.]
If you knew nothing more of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama than what each man said about freedom at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, it would still be painfully obvious which of the two was a fierce defender of liberty, and which the avatar of toothless internationalist generalities.
At the height of the Cold War, President Reagan knew what he was about. The Soviet tyranny that held half of Europe in its grip had to be defeated. Reagan called it what it was: an evil empire. Worldly types snickered. Yet deep in Soviet forced labor camps, hearts leapt: Prisoners urgently tapped out in secret code to each other what Reagan had said, the bitter truth they knew that he had dared to utter.
Twenty-two years ago, Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate with the hated wall stretching out on either side of him. Addressing the boss of the communist bloc, Reagan said: "Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate." The crowd roared. The president went on: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
Reagan had resisted efforts by his aides to tone down his remarks, to keep the presidential neck from sticking out too dangerously. No one knew if the wall would ever crumble, after all.
Reagan would have none of it - no temporizing, no accommodation. Two years later, he was vindicated as jubilant Germans smashed the wall to bits with sledgehammers.
This week, the world again turned its eyes to the Brandenburg Gate and saw a flat-screen American leader. The president who dropped everything to schmooze in Copenhagen in an attempt to win the Olympics for his pals in Chicago, the busy husband who makes time for ostentatious date nights with his well-dressed wife, could not be moved to visit Berlin to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall, a most extraordinary milestone in human freedom.
Instead, President Obama delivered a speech via video link so milky bland, so smothered in boilerplate, that he might have been speaking almost anywhere, about anything. "Even in the face of tyranny, people insisted that the world could change," he observed, not troubling to specify who, exactly, was so insistent...
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If you knew nothing more of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama than what each man said about freedom at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, it would still be painfully obvious which of the two was a fierce defender of liberty, and which the avatar of toothless internationalist generalities.
At the height of the Cold War, President Reagan knew what he was about. The Soviet tyranny that held half of Europe in its grip had to be defeated. Reagan called it what it was: an evil empire. Worldly types snickered. Yet deep in Soviet forced labor camps, hearts leapt: Prisoners urgently tapped out in secret code to each other what Reagan had said, the bitter truth they knew that he had dared to utter.
Twenty-two years ago, Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate with the hated wall stretching out on either side of him. Addressing the boss of the communist bloc, Reagan said: "Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate." The crowd roared. The president went on: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
Reagan had resisted efforts by his aides to tone down his remarks, to keep the presidential neck from sticking out too dangerously. No one knew if the wall would ever crumble, after all.
Reagan would have none of it - no temporizing, no accommodation. Two years later, he was vindicated as jubilant Germans smashed the wall to bits with sledgehammers.
This week, the world again turned its eyes to the Brandenburg Gate and saw a flat-screen American leader. The president who dropped everything to schmooze in Copenhagen in an attempt to win the Olympics for his pals in Chicago, the busy husband who makes time for ostentatious date nights with his well-dressed wife, could not be moved to visit Berlin to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall, a most extraordinary milestone in human freedom.
Instead, President Obama delivered a speech via video link so milky bland, so smothered in boilerplate, that he might have been speaking almost anywhere, about anything. "Even in the face of tyranny, people insisted that the world could change," he observed, not troubling to specify who, exactly, was so insistent...