Martin HenryTHAT OCTOBER morning in 1983, our scheduled lecturer for the Diploma in Education suspended regular class for a discussion of the events unfolding in Grenada. The Maurice Bishop government, which itself had come to power by coup d'etat, had been overthrown by some of its own Marxist hardliners.
Details were fuzzy for days but a deep and tense interest ran through the English-speaking Caribbean. Jamaica itself was running a decade of sharp ideological battles with the last general election a bloody confrontation. But the Grenada Marxist coup was the sort of thing people only heard on BBC world news from some distant place; not in our midst. Bishop's own coup against a corrupt and oppressive Gairy regime had been widely regarded as a tolerable act of liberation and Bishop himself was Mr. Nice Guy. Now this was something else. A fearful Caribbean was seeing red!
TURNING THE TIDES
We still have yet to fully untangle the consultations which took place among Caribbean leaders and with the United States. But a dozen days after the counter coup United States troops were thundering into Grenada in Operation Urgent Fury, ordered by President Ronald Reagan. Grenadians, by and large, and Caribbean peoples regard the badly named military operation as an act of liberation by a powerful friend.
Not in his wildest dreams could Ronald Reagan have imagined that his dangerously simple-minded challenge to communism could have so dramatically turned the tide in his lifetime. No one predicted the early unravelling of what Reagan referred to as the 'evil empire' and its Eastern European satellites, to the gasps of his wise and urbane technocrats and policy advisers embarrassed by their simplistic President. Nor was the quick reunification of the Germanies anticipated.
CHANGING THE WORLD
On Jamaican soil, Reagan declared a year and a half before Operation Urgent Fury that, "Economic development and freedom are compatible and, in practice, mutually reinforcing." To which his erstwhile foe Mikhail Gorbachev can say amen, certainly in hindsight. China, Cuba, Vietnam and any other residual Marxist states out there are about to learn the grand Soviet lesson: open markets, and political freedoms will follow. Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika marked the end of the Soviet Union not by design or accident but by a certain inevitability embedded in the imperative of freedom.
The towering greatness of the 40th President of the United States is assured alongside that of his dogged British ally Margaret Thatcher. Both are still deeply hated at home and abroad, and not entirely without good reason. But they have changed the world in fundamental and dramatic ways.
The more I survey the scene of human history, the more I am convinced that great leadership requires an acute simplicity and clarity of vision, certitude of principle, and the capacity to act with singleness of purpose. In a complex and diverse world, such a 'narrow' approach to leadership is dismissed by sophisticates as simple-minded stupidity a label which critics sought to attach to Ronald Reagan but which the remarkably brief history of less than 20 years has shaken off and dropped in its dustbin.
His most memorable speech line delivered in that fight almost never survived his advisers and editors. Speaking in Berlin, the divided city between East and West, in 1987 the old man shook his fist at the wall and commanded, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
TEARING DOWN THE WALL
Reagan's youngest speechwriter then, Peter Robinson, tells the story of the line in his book How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life excerpted in Reader's Digest of February 2004. A senior U.S. diplomat in Berlin advised the young speechwriter that since West Berliners were intellectually and politically sophisticated (unlike Reagan implied), the President was to carefully watch what he said. No chest-thumping. No Soviet-bashing. And above all, no inflammatory statements about the wall. People had accommodated themselves to the fact of the wall. Robinson flew over the city by helicopter and saw both sides and the difference freedom made to reality on the ground. He spoke to West Berliners. And pulling hard on that inspiration wrote the line.
In briefings, Reagan loved that 'passage about tearing down the wall.' "That wall has to come down. That's what I'd like to say," he said when quizzed about his central message. The State Department, the National Security Council, and even Secretary of State George Shultz, all nervous about provocation, tried to squelch the line, 'an affront to Mr. Gorbachev', by outright cutting or softening through seven drafts of the Berlin speech. "One day this ugly wall will disappear."
The officials pursued the matter with the President on the European tour into Italy and on to Berlin itself. "The boys at State are going to kill me," the President smilingly said, but it's the right thing to do. Let's leave it in."
On June 12, 1987, Reagan delivered. The wall came down. And the President's place in history went up as a great and visionary leader, clear and simple, who has changed the life of the whole world.
Martin Henry is a
communication specialist.
