ABSTRACT
It was June 12, 1987, and President Ronald Reagan’s motorcade was speeding along the streets of West Berlin on the way to the Brandenburg Gate, the iconic structure set in the middle of the nearly ninety mile-long wall running between East and West Berlin. Reagan had come to speak at an event celebrating Berlin’s 750th anniversary. With little more than a year and a half left in offi ce, the president was focused on his historic lifelong task of destroying communism. Nothing represented the scar left by the decades-old rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States more vividly than the Berlin Wall.
