Elsewhere in this issue, Robert D. Novak dismantles Edmund Morris's bizarre "memoir" of Ronald Reagan. But THE SCRAPBOOK's friend, Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson, has a footnote to add: Morris's ludicrous mistreatment of Reagan's celebrated "Berlin Wall" speech (which Robinson drafted).
Dutch calls the audience for this speech "too small . . . to make for genuine drama." In fact, the crowd, by all accounts, numbered more than 10,000. Morris writes that Reagan was "trying hard to look infuriated" throughout his appearance at the Wall, but managed only "a look of mild petulance." In fact, shortly before he began his remarks, the president was informed that East German police had forcibly dispersed a group of spectators on the Wall's Communist side. The incident was reported at the time. As was the fact that Reagan was incensed by it.
Then there's this. Morris calls the speech a "rhetorical opportunity missed." How so? Reagan "could have read Robert Frost's poem on the subject, 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall,' to simple and shattering effect." In other words, according to Morris, Ronald Reagan should have cited, at the Berlin Wall, an over-anthologized poem about the virtue of walls.