Nearly everyone is familiar today with President Ronald Reagan’s demand, delivered in Berlin in June 1987, that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall.” They may not be aware of his comments during a visit to West Berlin five years earlier.

“At this very moment, the forces of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are poised only a few miles from here,” Reagan said in June 1982. “They aren’t there to protect the people of Eastern Europe. The Iron Curtain wasn’t woven to keep people out; it’s there to keep people in. The most obvious symbol of this is the Berlin Wall. And, you know, if I had a chance, I’d like to ask the Soviet leaders one question … Why is that wall there?”