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.
“For Germans, the wall was a painful barrier between family and friends,” the president said, as if the monstrous physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain was something on the scale of an awkward topic at the Thanksgiving table. “Family and friends?” How about between freedom and totalitarianism, between wealth-creating capitalism and police-state collectivism? Desperate East Germans died trying to scale that wall, shot by their own side.
Even here, Obama could not resist inserting his own awesome self: “Few would have foreseen on that day,” he said, of Nov. 9, 1989, when people poured through gaps in the wall, “that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”
When Reagan spoke, political prisoners in communist countries knew the American defender was on their side, fearless and clear-eyed. The Russian dissident Natan Sharansky remembers the disbelieving joy that spread from man to man in the Siberian gulag where he was held, when Reagan used the phrase “evil empire.” The lie had been exposed, Sharansky said: “It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew it. For us that was the moment that really marked the end for them, and the beginning for us.”
As Obama orated via video, gesturing with one hand in a way that betrayed awkwardness with his material, one couldn’t help but wonder what possible succor any imprisoned Iranian — or American in an Iranian prison — could take from his mealy banalities. What shivering North Korean convict or jailed Burmese activist could warm himself with platitudes like “the hope of a brighter day?”
The occasion was big. The crowds were big. Our president’s words were shrunken and inadequate. At the Brandenburg Gate this week, it wasn’t just the flat screen that made Obama seem two-dimensional.
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.
