Peter Robinson (speechwriter)

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For other persons named Peter Robinson, see Peter Robinson (disambiguation).

Peter M. Robinson (born 1957) is an American author, a research fellow, a television host and a former speechwriter for George Bush and Ronald Reagan.

Robinson grew up in Vestal, New York. He attended Dartmouth College from 1975 to 1979, where he was a member of Kappa Kappa Kappa, and wrote for The Dartmouth. He majored in English and graduated summa cum laude, then continued his studies at Oxford University, England, pursuing a second Bachelor's degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and graduating in 1982.

Immediately upon graduation, Robinson applied for a position at the White House. In an event he describes as a "fluke"^[1], he was given a job as the chief speechwriter for Vice President Bush. In what he calls a "second fluke", he was then transferred to President Reagan's staff as a special assistant and speechwriter, where he authored the Berlin Wall address.

This address was delivered by Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, West Germany on 12 June 1987 and contained the sentence "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

On arrival in the city before authoring the speech, Robinson was warned by US diplomats to avoid cold war rhetoric and that Berliners had adjusted to the presence of the Berlin Wall. After consultation with local Berliners he, however, found them deeply wounded and concerned about the wall, which in many instances had separated families and represented an intrusion of a police state into daily life. Returning to Washington D.C., Robinson's phrase became controversial with the State Department and other experts. Repeated attempts were made to delete it from the speech, although Reagan liked it, and as a result Reagan overruled these attempts, wishing to communicate not only with West Berliners but with East Germans on the other side of the wall.

In total, Robinson authored more than 300 speeches during his tenure at the White House. After serving for six years, Robinson decided to attend business school at Stanford University, graduating a third time in 1990 with a Masters in Business Administration. The journal he kept of his two-year experience there was the basis for his book Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA, published in 1994, which details the considerable difficulty he encountered during the first year of business school due to his lack of a "quantitative background".

In the early 1990s, Robinson joined the News Corporation run by Rupert Murdoch, serving as press secretary to the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 1993, Robinson became a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford's public policy research center. In addition to writing about business and politics, he also edits the Hoover Digest and hosts a PBS public affairs television program Uncommon Knowledge. He has written How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life and It’s My Party, a study of the US Republican Party.

Robinson lives in northern California with his wife and their five children. On May 12, 2005, Robinson was elected to the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College. As of 2005, he is working on his next book which will be about Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.