Sorry I’m so late to this but I just wanted to make clear: Reagan’s trip to West Berlin in 1987 was an abbreviated disaster. He only stayed for a couple of hours. His visit generated one of the biggest riots in the lefty neighborhood of Kreuzberg for that very riotous year. The city was under lockdown with the U-Bahn (i.e. West Berlin’s subway) halted. People said you had to be invited to the speech and there certainly was less of a crowd than the visit by, for example, Jesse Jackson two years earlier and possibly no more than Carter attracted during his visit. Those were the circumstances. The fact that it’s constantly brought up is nothing but an attempt by the rightwing crowd to rewrite history and to continually place its fake heroes at the center of historical events for which it had no real effect.
(Dedicated to Mike Pompeo)