Mr. Reagan, Give Them Back Their Wall!
So little is left of the Berlin Wall that Reuters reports authorities have resorted to handing tourists a GPS powered device if they want to recreate that closed in feeling.
We know where the Wall went: vast chunks carried off to America for victory displays. Prime offenders are Presidential Libraries, which are cluttered with the stuff.
Let’s review:
George H.W. Bush has a cheesy salute to Berlin and all things Texan outside his museum, and indoors Wall as well. And Bush Secretary of State James Baker got a chunk for his Rice University Institute.
Ford has a piece, although the Wall rested undisturbed throughout his presidency.
Kennedy saw it built on his watch.
The Hoover Library has a Wall piece, although he barely lived long enough to see it built, three decades after his presidency.
Truman hosted Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech at Westminister College in Fulton Missouri, and the campus now hosts both a plain chunk and a Wall “sculpture” – a piece with holes punched in it by Churchill’s granddaughter. She also sold one of these horrors to the Roosevelt library.
The greater glory of Ronald Reagan requires the most concrete, with Wall samples at his Dixon Illinois birthplace, alma mater Eureka College, at the federal Reagan office building in Washington, aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, at the Reagan Ranch Center, and at the Reagan Library indoors & out.
And they used to sell bags of chips.