The Year that Changed the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

remarkably nuanced balancing act. It managed to acknowledge how far the Soviet Union had come, while underscoring how far it had to go. Yet what many Americans heard only as a challenge was also an invitation—an invitation to engage, to continue further down the road the two men had come, a holding out of a hand, an offering to meet halfway. Certainly that’s how the men standing at Reagan’s side heard it that day; Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen said so at the time. Today’s buzz phrase for this sort of diplomacy had not yet been coined:
soft power.
But that’s what it was—a conviction, in the heart of the ultimate cold warrior, this consummate idealist, that cooperation and compromise and faith in the power of America’s example would go further than militarist confrontationin making a better world. Reagan knew this, even if his disciples did not.
    Within half a year, he had jettisoned the easy rhetoric of the “evil empire.” That May, he visited Moscow, chatting with ordinary Russians in Red Square and delivering a talk to the students of Moscow University. Reagan clearly sensed a dawning of a new era. Nor was the symbol of Ronald Reagan in Moscow, hosted by a man calling for change in the Kremlin, lost on the people of Europe, especially those who had the misfortune to live on the wrong side of the Wall. They heard the real message, coming from both sides: accommodation, not confrontation. And that gave them hope and the courage to act.
    The history of the revolutions in Eastern Europe was not written in Washington. It had little to do with American military might. It had far more to do with the rise of Gorbachev, coupled with the economic collapse of the Soviet system and the glaring contrast to the dynamism of Western Europe. The preparedness of East European leaders, with the exception of those of Romania, to accept peaceful change was critical. So was the role of sheer accident and happenstance, as we shall see. Above all, it had everything to do with people, individually and collectively, on the ground, deciding for themselves to tear down that Wall.
    This is the story of how they did it, shorn of mythology.

CHAPTER TWO

The Wall
    Arriving in Berlin, I would do what I always did: drop my luggage at the hotel and hail a taxi toward the East. I went to touch the Wall, to lay hands upon it. It didn’t matter how many times I had done it before, or how many times I would do so again. It was my lodestone, my centering point, my story as a journalist covering Germany and the East bloc.
    Nothing has ever been so freighted with symbolism, ideology and history. The Wall was World War II, the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, the high tide of totalitarianism and communist dictatorship, the frontier of democracy. You could feel it, smell it, run your hands over it, look across it. On the one side, us. On the other, them.
    It didn’t matter what direction you took. Berlin was an island; all paths led to the Wall. Usually I went down Bismarck Strasse, past the Siegessäule, the winged column celebrating Prussia’s victory in the 1871 war against France, to the Reichstag. The Wall cut a few feet behind the old parliament, still blackened and pockmarked from flying debris from the war. A dozen crosses memorialized a few who died there trying to escape. An East German patrol boat, with spotlights and heavy machine guns, idled on the far shore of the River Spree. Only a few weeks before my first visit, a young man was gunned down near the spot and left to bleed to death where he lay.
    Usually I would walk south, along the Wall past the Brandenburg Gate, across the muddy and eerily empty lots around Potsdamer Platz, the heart of old Berlin, once crowded with hotels and department stores and so busy in the 1920s that it received Europe’s first traffic light. Hitler’s bunker lay there in the death strip, a swelling breastof earth easily glimpsed from a spectator platform,