He related his great career—from Army Second Lieutenant all the way to four-star General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He didn’t have to mention that when he was born, nearly seventy years before, no black man could have aspired to lead the greatest military in the world.

He said that his career was defined by one word: containment. Containment of the Soviet Union was what he was doing when, as a junior officer in the Army he was stationed in West Germany. Ten years later, as a major, Powell was told again. “Go to the Berlin Wall, turn left. Stop at the Fulda Gap. And don’t let any Soviet tanks come through.”

Finally, he said, as a four-star general, he was still engaged in containment. Except now, under President George H.W. Bush, his job was to oversee the entire scene of the East-West face-off. Gen. Powell was responsible for making sure that the United States and NATO would not be surprised by any Soviet thrust into Western Europe.

All of this was most impressive. Gen. Powell is the kind of smart, courageous, skilled professional you would want guarding the Fulda Gap, standing watch for our freedom at the Wall.

If that is all we wanted to do.

For nearly fifty years, that is all we wanted to do. Containment was our goal until Ronald Reagan became President. Reagan was not content with containment.  Ronald Reagan did not consent to a permanent division of Europe into captive and free nations. Ronald Reagan was all about prevailing. He was about Freedom Rising.

Twenty-one years ago today, the Berlin Wall came down. It seemed a miracle at the time.

Tom Brokaw, the former NBC news anchor, was in West Berlin when the Wall fell. He thinks it was all an accident, that some East German Communist official mixed up his instructions and erroneously opened the floodgates—and the puppet regime couldn’t put it back together again.

President George W. Bush doesn’t’ see it all as an accident. He recognizes what Reagan meant. He said Reagan never urged the Soviets to knock the three top bricks off the Berlin Wall; instead, Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and publicly challenged the Soviet ruler. He proclaimed to the whole world: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Open this gate.

He did more than that. When President Reagan delivered his famous speech at the Berlin Wall, he also described the East Berlin radio tower the Communists built to overshadow all the church steeples in their sector. There was, the President pointed out, an unfortunate defect in that tower. The Communist authorities had tried, with paint, with acid, by sandblasting, to get rid of the defect.

Still, when the sun shines on the globe of that radio tower, it reflects the Sign of the Cross.

Ronald Reagan was the only President in our history to invoke the Sign of the Cross in a public address.

Americans love Babe Ruth’s called shot. We love the story of the bambino pointing to the right field stands and hitting a home run on the next pitch, just where he had pointed.

We also love the story of young President John F. Kennedy pointing to the Moon and saying we would get there first, we would land a man there before 1970. We did it and we beat the Soviets in the process.

Ronald Reagan’s speech at the Berlin Wall was the third in this trilogy of called shots.

Twenty-one years ago today, his great purpose was achieved.

President Obama spoke to an interviewer about the Ft. Hood shootings. He had just come from the Memorial Service for the fourteen people whose lives were taken by the terrorist, Nidal Hasan:

OBAMA:  In a country of 300 million people, there are going to be acts of violence that are inexplicable, even within the extraordinary military that we have. I think everybody understands how outstanding the young men and women in uniform are under the most severe stress.  There are going to instances, in which an individual cracks.

Forget, for the moment, this confused part of the statement that seems to psychologize the killer’s actions. I want to focus on the “inexplicable” part.

This is a serious problem for liberals. They are forever finding such murderous acts inexplicable. They often employ words like “random” and “senseless acts of violence.” One of their favorite bumper stickers is “Practice random acts of kindness.” Random is okay if it’s kind. But if kindness and terror are truly random, what’s the moral difference?

Whatever.

Historian John Lukacs can help these confused people. Lukacs has developed deep insight into the mind and character of Adolf Hitler. In books like The Duel and The Hitler of History, Lukacs enables us to understand some of what is inexplicable to President Obama.

Hitler, Lukacs writes, was not a monster. He certainly did monstrous things. Think of all those children’s shoes in the Holocaust Museum. That’s enough to appreciate monstrous acts. But if we think of Hitler as a monster, then there really is no lesson to be drawn from his life. Monsters are like aliens. They’re inhuman. They are not like us.

Nor was Hitler insane. It may seem insane to us for anyone to plan to murder all the Jewish people, enslave all the Poles, and sterilize all the Ukrainians. Simply to dream that anyone could invade Russia and give orders to shoot millions on sight partakes of madness. But if Hitler was insane, Lukacs teaches us, then he is not morally responsible.

We do not hold even mass murderers responsible for the actions. He was not mad.

No, Hitler was evil. Not a monster, not a madman, but a very, very evil man. We need to understand man’s capacity for evil. Didn’t the Twentieth Century teach us anything? Let’s all take time off and read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

This week, we’ve seen another great public ceremony, the celebration of the anniversary of Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Retired NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw managed to hold forth for 1 ½ hours at the Newseum last week about the great events of that November evening. He never mentioned Reagan. Well, we understand why. Nor did he mention Communism. Or the KGB. Nor did he use the word “evil.”

Similarly, President Obama hailed the coming down of the Wall. But his remarks seemed more to be commemorating the removal of an architectural barrier than the end of something cruel and unjust. After all, the Soviet puppet regime in East Germany managed over twenty-eight years to shoot 136 people who tried to escape. Is it somehow more “explicable” to kill ten times as many innocent people as the Ft. Hood shooter if we stretch out the killings over three decades?

According to the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) (Center for Research on Contemporary History) in Potsdam, East German border guards were given these inhuman orders: “Do not hesitate to use your firearm, not even when the border is breached in the company of women and children, which is a tactic the traitors have often used.”

Germany has worked hard to reconcile its people, or peoples. But avoiding mention of the evil implicit in orders given to armed young men to shoot women and children will not help national reunification.

What happened at Ft. Hood was evil. What happened at the Wall was evil. We need to face reality. It is especially important that our President understand reality. Three hundred million lives depend upon it.

Ronald Reagan brought two things to Washington that were very much out of fashion, I enjoy telling student interns at Family Research Council: brown suits and freedom for a hundred million people in Eastern Europe. When Reagan swept into office in a landslide in 1980, the reigning view of Washington’s foreign policy elites toward Eastern Europe was that expressed in the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine. State Department Counselor Helmut Sonnenfeldt in the 1970s was a disciple of Henry Kissinger. TIME Magazine explained Sonnefeldt’s ideas:

He was quoted as saying that U.S. policy in Eastern Europe should “strive for an evolution that makes the relationship between the Eastern Europeans and the Soviet Union an organic one.” The use of the word organic seemed to imply that he was advocating that the Soviet Union and its satellites should form one whole—a position calculated to infuriate not only G.O.P. conservatives but also ethnic groups with roots in Eastern Europe.

In simple American English, the U.S. policy toward Eastern Europe should not rock the boat.

Ronald Reagan’s view could not be further from those espoused by the Kissingers, Sonnenfeldts, and the foreign policy establishments of both political parties. Reagan had told Richard Allen, who would one day serve in the White House as Reagan’s National Security Adviser, that his idea of East-West relations was simple: We win. They lose.

To say such a thing about the Soviet Union seemed stupid. Clark Clifford, one of the certified Wise Men of the Democratic Party, called Reagan “an amiable dunce.” Others thought him dangerous. The USSR had hundreds of heavily armed divisions, tens of thousands of rumbling tanks, artillery pieces without number, not to mention 27,000 nuclear warheads atop intercontinental ballistic missiles ready to launch against Western Europe and the U.S. Was Reagan insane, they asked?

Of course, the actual acronym for U.S. strategic deterrence in those days was MAD–Mutual Assured Destruction. An entire cult of arms control had grown up since the 1960s designed to “manage the East-West relationship” by having both sides agree not to defend themselves from nuclear attack. Both sides had to know that their cities and countries would be utterly laid waste, that a “nuclear winter” following World War III could extinguish all life on earth. Only if such was the alternative, the deep thinkers thought, could a nuclear holocaust be averted. By all means, nothing should be done by the West to incite rebellion behind the Iron Curtain.

In those years, it was always “East-West,” as if the argument between freedom and Marxist totalitarianism was simply a dispute over directions. Using terms like “the Free World” horrified the sophisticates of Georgetown cocktail party circuit. They shuddered at the naïvete of the rubes who spoke of “captive nations” in Eastern Europe, and “satellites” of the Soviet Union.

Ronald Reagan came to Washington widely viewed by this set of people as a political Neanderthal. Reagan, they shuddered, actually believed in God and talked about freedom. He thought in terms of black and white. He had not forgotten the incident in 1962, for example, when 17-year old Peter Fechter was shot by East German border guards as he made his escape attempt from the Soviet-occupied zone that the New York Times referred to as “the German Democratic Republic.” Young Fechter lay bleeding to death in the minefield leading up to the ugly wall built by the East German Communists in 1961 to complete their imprisonment of their own people. As the young man whimpered, East German Volkspolizei shot at his would-be rescuers.

Reagan thought such a system was evil. And he said so. He called the Soviet bloc an “evil empire.” When he spoke to Britain’s House of Commons in 1982, he said that Marxism was even then fated to wind up on “the ash heap of history,” a bizarre chapter in human history.

Reagan was the first President since JFK to speak of the Soviet Union and Communism as evil.

And Reagan was the first President ever to use humor as a battering ram against the inhuman Berlin Wall. Asked if Communism might work, President Reagan said it might work in Heaven, “but they don’t need it.” And it surely would work in Hell, “but they already have it.”

When he went to West Berlin in June, 1987, President Reagan overruled his own Secretary of State George P. Schultz and National Security Advisor, Gen. Colin Powell. They did not want him to challenge the reforming Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, directly. Don’t embarrass Gorbachev and make our negotiations harder, they and the foreign policy establishment said.

But Reagan was determined. He had seen how the liberal media had swooned over the charismatic Gorbachev. It was Gorbachev, not the 77-year old Reagan, whom Western reporters saw as the hope for the future.

Reagan was having none of it. He knew that a hundred million people in Eastern Europe were still enslaved by the Soviet system. He knew that if Gorbachev’s reformed Communism worked, it would still mean decades before the peoples of Poland, E. Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and a dozen other states—including the Baltics and Russia itself–could breathe free.

Reagan knew there was one place on earth to test the sincerity of Gorbachev’s liberalizing claims: the Berlin Wall. So Ronald Reagan went to the Wall and threw down his famous challenge. He made it personal and pointed:

There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Today, twenty years after the Fall of the Wall, we can remember Reagan’s brave words.

We can thank God that courage and determination brought down this monument to Communist inhumanity.