Robinson ‘79 Addresses Students at The PEP

Peter Robinson ’79 is the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, host of the web series Uncommon Knowledge, former chief speechwriter for then-Vice President George H. W. Bush, and former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. Robinson visited campus as the subject of a Political Economy Project (PEP) event on Monday, October 25th. After meeting with a select group of Political Economy Project students for a lunch, generously paid for by Mr. Robinson himself, at The Pine, he paid a visit to his old fraternity: Tri-Kap. After hearty banter about the glory days of his youth and the current state of the recently renovated but less-than-pristine physical plant, Mr. Robinson made his way across Main St. to Haldeman for the PEP’s 5 o’clock event.

Haldeman 125 proved to be a rather intimate space for the event, which witnessed at least three dozen attendees. In addition to student and professor attendees, townsfolk came from near and far—I personally spoke to two gentlemen following the event who were not even from Hanover, but more distant, northerly parts of the Granite State. After many were seated (and others remained standing all around the room and even overflowing into the hallway), Mr. Robinson began his presentation by playing a clip of the famous “Tear down this wall!” speech he had written for President Ronald Reagan in 1987. Impressively, Robinson wrote this landmark speech a mere six years after graduating from Oxford University with a second B.A., this time in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics—a fitting major considering his collaboration with Dartmouth’s Political Economy Project—following his B.A. in English from Dartmouth.

Following the clip, Robinson explained the motivation for keeping in the inspiring and polemical line: during a visit to Berlin leading up to the June 12th speech, Robinson had asked a group of college students if they had gotten accustomed to the Berlin Wall, to which the hostess of the group responded that she “[hadn’t] seen [her] sister in twenty years.” It was after this poignant exchange that Robinson became absolutely convinced of the barbarous nature of the wall; its forced separation of loved ones, arbitrary violation of individual liberty, and restriction of human flourishing could not go unaddressed.

Not everyone in the Reagan administration agreed. In fact, Robinson explained that for the three weeks leading up to the speech, virtually all the staff were opposed to including the “tear down this wall” excerpt, finding it too impolitic and incendiary to the Kremlin.

Robinson light-heartedly recalls thinking: “the boys at State are going to kill me for this, but it’s the right thing to do.” One particularly adamant opponent of including the line was Colin Powell, then National Security Advisor and lieutenant general in the Army, whom Robinson described as “howling” at him to remove the line. Robinson, imbued with the youthful spirit of idealism and courage which he impressed upon the young members of the audience they must embrace in their own lives, howled right back at the far more senior Powell.

Seemingly harkening to Friedrich Hayek’s emphasis on local knowledge from his seminal 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Robinson explained that he was able to have the courage of his convictions amidst opposition from well-regarded officials because Robinson had traveled to Berlin himself and drew his own conclusions from primary sources, e.g., the students and hostess with whom he had conferred. Colin Powell, on the other hand, represented bureaucrats who drew their opinions from talking only to one another. A member of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, Robinson gave a grateful nod to his alma mater for impressing upon him the greater legitimacy of primary sources than secondary sources or technocrats’ pretense of knowledge.

Although presently regarded as one of the most important lines from a presidential speech in American history, the ever-modest Robinson admitted that neither he nor President Reagan expected the wall to come down, certainly not a mere two years later. Robinson emphasized that nobody knew how anything was going to turn out in the Cold War; that the collapse of the Soviet Union was far from inevitable. As any worthy history teacher does, Robinson warned students from viewing the realized outcome of events as necessary, predestined, or otherwise teleological.

Still, while the outcome of the Cold War and the impact of Robinson’s speech was not self-evident at the time it was given, Robinson was approached by East Germans who said that, after they heard Reagan deliver his speech, something that was previously unthinkable became thinkable; Reagan had said just the right thing, at just the right place, at just the right time. As Robinson put it, a Dartmouth graduate penning words about freedom and dignity had an appreciable impact on the world.

Although never afraid of retaliation from the U.S.S.R. or the State department, Robinson confessed that he was afraid he’d get fired for keeping the famous line in. His fear did not stop him; his immediate boss had agreed that the line was right and that they would circumvent the editorial staff and get the speech right into Reagan’s own hands. They hatched a convoluted scheme that involved tricking a junior staffer into handing the unapproved speech directly to Reagan while boarding Marine One. The plot was a success: Reagan specifically singled out the passage as something he wanted to say. Once he read it, he immediately understood its salience and would not be deterred by any State department official from expressing it.

His wit rivaled only by his sense of humor, Peter Robinson said that when he turned on his TV to hear Reagan deliver the speech, his first thought wasn’t about the philosophical or geopolitical impact of the line’s inclusion, but that he “got those bastards on the N.S.C.!”

Robinson’s sincerity and modesty were evident when he described not feeling that he had accomplished anything world-changing following Reagan’s delivery. He described the speech as “retrospectively prophetic” only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Likewise, he gave the credit for its popularization in the zeitgeist to the producer at whichever cable news network had originally singled out the line to summarize the end of the Cold War in 60 seconds. Robinson concluded this section of the event by stating that, just like the dozens of speeches he wrote for the President, “all he knew was when the speech was due,” not what its impact, if any, would be.

Before pivoting to student questions, Robinson posed two rhetorical ones of his own: Is America capable of an act of self-renewal? What exactly are we up against?

His answer to the latter was one word: China. Robinson went on to describe the Chinese Communist Party as “cutting-edge; communist, but competent.” Robinson emphasized that we must do our best and bet on human dignity and freedom prevailing in the end, despite the power of the Chinese regime that stands in direct opposition to these Enlightenment values. When asked by a student what he’d do if given the reins of government to address this threat, Robinson said that his first act in office would be to double the fleet of the Navy so that China could not even “conceive of conflict”; to make military conflict so unthinkable, that it would never have to be fought.

When asked by a clever ‘25 if a better way to combat China’s rise as a global superpower is to recognize the failures of globalization, neoliberalism, and free-market capitalism and to embrace “egalitarian capitalism,” both Robinson and Prof. Doug Irwin, his interviewer for the event and Director of the PEP, responded practically in unison: “I reject the premise.” This dismissal was entirely predictable given Prof. Irwin’s work for the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which reveals the myriad benefits of free trade, and his highly impactful novel Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (1997). Similarly, Robinson’s earlier observation of the proportion of Americans receiving some form of transfer payment quadrupling since the Reagan Era and compromising our capacity for another act of self-renewal should have signaled to this attentive listener his rejection of such a premise.

Luckily, not all the questions posed were so tendentious; one student was clearly an avid listener of Uncommon Knowledge and was curious to know which one of his hundreds of interviews Robinson would most recommend his audience listen to. Unable to constrain himself to one answer and scarcely able to contain his giddiness in having this query posed to him, Robinson listed four:

Firstly, his interview with Milton Friedman in which Robinson recalls the Chicago School economist as saying: “Of course I’m making a moral argument; is there any other kind of argument?”

Secondly, Robinson encouraged the audience to listen to “anything from an interview with [Thomas] Sowell,” describing the student of Friedman, accomplished economist, and prolific author as “a free man and mind in undistracted pursuit of the truth,” despite his humble upbringing and innumerable obstacles he faced as a black man of the Silent Generation.
Thirdly, Robinson recommended people listen to his recent interview with Great Barrington Declaration co-author Jay Bhattacharya. He is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford, holding both an M.D. and a PhD in economics, and a vocal critic of draconian lockdown policies and business closures, favoring a focused approach instead.

Finally, Robinson expressed his praise for Condoleezza Rice, the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution, describing her as “always impressive” and possessing the rare talent of being ever “well-structured” and perfectly “poised.”

Another student asked what Peter Robinson reads to stay up-to-date and informed on a wide range of subjects. Robinson described The Wall Street Journal in glowing terms, describing it as the best newspaper in the world, and said he reads “any word by Joseph Epstein,” Holman Jenkins, and Bret Stephens. He also directed students to former New York Times op-ed staff editor Bari Weiss’s Substack and to Commentary Magazine.

Towards the end of the event, one student simply asked the former English major what books had the greatest impact on him. With virtually no hesitation, Robinson instructed not just the student who posed the query, but all the students and other life-long learners, presumably, to “read the Bible and Shakespeare” and to “concern [themselves] with first principles.”
This mention of first principles, coupled with Robinson’s earlier lamentation of Leftists’ subversion of the academy, prompted one concerned student to ask how best to escape the ideological indoctrination of the English, History, and Philosophy departments, to name but a few.

At this point, Robinson implored students to “cling to the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth.” Robinson credited the PEP and its founders—Doug Irwin, Russ Muirhead, Meir Kohn, and Hank Clark—with bringing “the great ideas back to the forefront of the curriculum.”

After getting to know Professors Kohn and Clark, working with PEP professors, and serving as Co-Chair of the PEP Student Leadership Council, I cannot help but wholeheartedly agree.

I echo Peter Robinson’s sage advice: steadfastly cling to the Political Economy Project!