Romesh Ratnesar

Romesh Ratnesar
is Deputy Managing Editor of Time magazine. He has written on U.S. foreign policy and international affairs and reported from many countries around the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel and the Palestinian territories.
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News & Reviews

Nov 5th

The Words (and Deeds) that Brought Down the Berlin Wall

Time just posted this video of me discussing "Tear Down This Wall"

Mar 4th

“A President’s Relentless Optimism”

I was just interviewed by Kathryn Jean Lopez for the National Review. Here's an excerpt:

LOPEZ: Your subtitle is “A City, a President, and the Speech that Ended the Cold War.” Why is it not an overstatement that this one speech was the turning point or catalyst for the end?

RATNESAR: Reagan’s speech was delivered in the context of his evolving relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev — which, as I argue in the book, ultimately defused the superpower rivalry that had dominated world politics for the previous half-century. What Reagan’s speech accomplished was to identify Berlin as the litmus test of Gorbachev’s intentions to seek a better relationship with the West. In Reagan’s view, arms-control agreements were a necessary but not sufficient condition for ending the Cold War; if the Soviets were truly serious about making peace, they would have to let the Berlin Wall come down. It took another two years, but in the end that’s what Gorbachev did.

Read the interview at the National Review

Dec 1st

Obama at West Point. Can he Make the Moral Case?

I recently published my piece on Obama's West Point speech at Time: "Obama at West Point. Can he Make the Moral Case?". Here's how it begins:

If the leaks and speculation are anything to go on, President Barack Obama will deliver a number of different messages in his Tuesday-night speech about the war in Afghanistan. He will announce plans to send some 30,000 additional troops to the war zone. He will lay out benchmarks that the government of Hamid Karzai will be expected to meet. He may even sketch a timetable for an eventual U.S. withdrawal. At some point, he will likely describe the conflict in Afghanistan as a war of necessity.

The mere fact that Obama has reached a decision on Afghanistan, coupled with the speech's West Point backdrop and the President's oratorical gifts, will probably boost public support for the war effort in the short run. But it is unlikely to convince most Americans that a war that has already lasted more than eight years is worth fighting indefinitely.

The Washington Times Review

Mr. Ratnesar's book...gives us both an accurate and detailed picture of our cumbersome governmental policymaking process and a remarkable re-creation of the last days of the Soviet empire, with East Germany as the culmination of the Marxist dialectic, and the wall the perfect symbol for that strange alternate universe.

-John R. Coyne Jr.

Link: Book Review: Finding origin of the potent words

(read more »)

Romesh Ratnesar, deputy managing editor of Time magazine and author of this fast-moving and splendidly written book, quotes from "White House Ghosts," Robert Schlesinger's authoritative study of White House speeches: "Seeking the origin of a specific phrase, then, is, akin to straining to find the source of the first noise in an echo chamber."

Frequently true. Franklin D. Roosevelt's "fear itself" phrase has been credited at various times to Henry David Thoreau, the Chamber of Commerce, and a department store ad. John F. Kennedy's most memorable phrases are similarly attributed to a variety of sources. Also, as time passes, there's a tendency among people who worked in or around administrations to take or be given credit for memorable lines - "effete corps of impudent snobs," "axis of evil" or "tear down this wall" among them.

Despite various attributions, the first was Vice President Spiro T. Agnew's creation, and he was very proud of it. As for "axis of evil," at least three contenders have laid claim to it - or not, depending on the direction of the prevailing political winds. Aram Bakshian, a former White House speechwriter, suggests they split it three ways - one taking credit for "axis," the second for "evil," and the third for "of."

But no matter. Here the lines are clearly drawn. Peter Robinson, a young speechwriter, had just returned from a trip to Germany with the team advancing Ronald Reagan's upcoming visit. He had seen the wall, talked with Berliners, and the effects were profound. Mr. Robinson had been assigned to write Reagan's Berlin speech, to be given at the Brandenburg Gate. At dinner in West Berlin, he told Mr. Ratnesar, "the idea of removing the wall had burst into his mind." He told chief speechwriter Tony Dolan that he'd like the president to say "Tear Down the Wall." Mr. Dolan's response, according to Mr. Ratnesar: " 'What a great idea. What a wonderful idea.' "

The phrase was incorporated in a preliminary draft and presented to the president at a meeting with the writers to review trip material. Mr. Robinson's speech was the last discussed, and the president had minimal comments. Mr. Robinson asked what he'd like to say to the people on the other side of the wall. " 'Well, there's that passage about tearing down the Wall,' " he said. " 'That's what I'd like to say to them.' "

Thus, writes Mr. Ratnesar, Mr. Dolan "had gotten what he came for: The president's endorsement would be his most powerful weapon in the bureaucratic battles to come." And indeed it was. Reagan had chosen the basic phrase and image, and as Mr. Robinson plowed through successive drafts, Mr. Dolan guided the speech through the heavy seas of bureaucratic approvals every presidential speech draft must navigate.

Through it all, the speech underwent numerous changes, and there were concerted efforts to deep-six the key phrase. But the president insisted that it remain. And on June 12, 1987, Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and demanded: "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate," and "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" And with those words, on that date, the Cold War unofficially ended.

Mr. Ratnesar's book, based on interviews with former Reagan administration officials, American and German eyewitnesses who were present at the event, State Department documents and East German records, gives us both an accurate and detailed picture of our cumbersome governmental policymaking process and a remarkable re-creation of the last days of the Soviet empire, with East Germany as the culmination of the Marxist dialectic, and the wall the perfect symbol for that strange alternate universe.

Also valuable here is Mr. Ratnesar's re-examination of the relationship between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, who developed a mutual respect that transcended diplomatic niceties, and led to the unprecedented steps taken by Mr. Gorbachev to begin dismantling the "evil empire." As Mr. Ratnesar notes, Reagan understood that by openly calling on him to tear down the wall, he was in effect providing Mr. Gorbachev with the rationale necessary to put the process in motion.

In all, Mr. Ratnesar captures the vision, consistency, steadiness of purpose and unshakeable belief in the ultimate triumph of democracy that carried Reagan through his two terms and allowed him to function, to the frustration of his critics, with something very much like serenity. And despite the best efforts of those critics, he will be remembered as one of our greatest presidents.

Mr. Ratnesar leaves us with this assessment: "The liberal historian Sean Wilentz ... wrote in 2008 that Reagan's 'success in helping finally to end the cold war is one of the greatest achievements by any president of the United States - and arguably the single greatest achievement since 1945.' "

John R. Coyne Jr., a former White House speechwriter, is co-author with Linda Bridges of "Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement" (Wiley, 2007).

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Nov 10th

My “Tear Down this Wall” Annotations in the New York Post

The New York Post has published my annotations on Reagan's 1987 Brandenburg Gate speech. Here's an excerpt:

"Chancellor Kohl, Governing Mayor Diepgen, ladies and gentlemen:

Twenty-four years ago, President John F. Kennedy visited Berlin, speaking to the people of this city and the world at the City Hall. Well, since then two other presidents have come, each in his turn, to Berlin. And today I, myself, make my second visit to your city." (see footnote 1 below)

1. Throughout the Cold War, Berlin was the most visible proving ground of the US-Soviet conflict. When Kennedy visited in 1963, two years after the construction of the Berlin Wall, close to a million West Berliners turned out to see him. Reagan first visited Berlin in 1978, before his 1980 run for President. During that trip, he went to an office building overlooking the Wall. “You could tell from the set of his jaw and his look,” says Peter Hannaford, a longtime aide who accompanied Reagan to Berlin, “that he was very, very determined that this was something that had to go.”

The fall of the Berlin wall caught the world by surprise. For months, East Germany's beleaguered communist rulers had tried in vain to silence a growing opposition movement and stem the tide of people pouring out of the country. On the night of Nov. 9, 1989, an East German official held a press conference to announce new government travel policies but inadvertently announced that crossings to the West would be opened "without delay." Within hours, thousands of East Berliners began lining up at checkpoints near the Wall. At first the border guards tried to check passports, but they quickly realized it was futile. The masses surged through. Many of them ran. Crowds of West Berliners waited on the other side, hugging strangers and popping champagne. The scenes were stunning. By the fall of 1989 cracks in the communist bloc had started to emerge. But few people imagined the Berlin Wall would disappear anytime soon.

Ronald Reagan did. "I didn't know when it would come, but I have to tell you, I'm an eternal optimist," the former President said in an interview with ABC's Sam Donaldson that night...

Read the rest and see images and related articles at the Time Magazine Website.

Photo from the Time Website, Credit: Tom Stoddart / Hulton Archive / Getty

Nov 3rd