My previous book called 1989, the struggle to create post cold war europe. These books are in the reverse order. 1989 talks about the Foreign Policy that followed the fall of the berlin wall. The collapse is actually about the fall of the berlin wall. So the new book is a prequel to my previous book. So how did that happen . This book is about the Foreign Policy that followed the fall of the berlin wall, and when i did book talks like this one, id say, im here to talk about the Foreign Policy that followed the accidental opening of the berlin wall. And often i would not even get to that sentence. Somebody would interrupt me and say, timeout. What do you mean the accidental opening of the berlin wall . That was the polite version. Sometimes i also got, youre an historian. Dont you know that president reagan opened the berlin wall . When he went to berlin in june of 1987 and said, mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall, that the wall opened . I got that question so many time is realized that it was not a oneoff question, that it was a deeply held belief here. Theres actually a cartoon in the new yorker about it. It has a man reading a fairy taleto his daughter, and it con tis of the falling, tear down this one, one king said to the other, and dont came, and they all lived happily ever after. You know when something earned its own new yorker cartoon its a cultural phenomenon. I thought for the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall there should be a good book in english about this topic. I read german. I lived in germany for a number of years, and i thought if i didnt read german, what would i read in english . The more i looked, i realized there was not one good book on the opening of the wall in english. Then the more i thought about it i realized this lack of a good book, this lack of an accurate account was more than just a historical interest. The belief that the United States single handedly opened the wall has affects on u. S. Foreign policy to this day. It has the effect of making the United States think that it single handedly opened the wall with little risk and little cost and that it can repeat the experience quote, from berlin to baghdad. Which was a frequent saying in washington in 2001. Also gave right to a very triumphant attitude about the berlin wall. So, for example, at the george h. W. Bush president ial library, you see a statue of horses galloping over chunks of the berlin wall, showing the triumph of the american wild west over the berlin wall. Theres a similar statue at the Ronald Reagan president ial library. A s a much simpler statue, single panel of the wall, what is priceless if you think about the eyewatering price of real estate in Southern California, you suddenly realize how much it means an entire hilltop is dedicated to this memorial. Its part of the Ronald Reagan president ial library site and also his grave site. So, these are just two of the memorials that exist in the United States. There are many of them. Theres one in missouri, number in washington, d. C. The embodiment of the sense that the United States opened the events the author of this and can repeat it. And when i actually looked at the evidence, when i actually interviewed the people who were there, that was not the story i saw. Theres a saying in english, success has many fathers. The opening of the berlin wall was a huge success. So nowdays there are many, many fathers, and for the 25th anniversary i decided to try to let the actual fathers and mothers of the event speak in their own voices. So, thank you very much for taking the time to come out tonight and help me tell their stories. Let me still talk about famous people for a minute, to set the context. Of course, the context, the cold war context, the superpower contest was crucially important. Nothing im going to tell you about the details of the opening of the wall challenges that. The contest between mikhail gorbachev, the leader of the soviet union time magazines man of the year, time magazines man of the decade. Man of the year in 1988 and man of the decade in 1990 and then went on to the Nobel Peace Prize and a number of other awards. He came to power and instituted reforms. He made clear that soviet tanks would stop rolling into Eastern Europe, as they had done in poland and hungary and east germany in the past. He made clear he wanted reform to be the order of the day. But that wasnt enough to open the wall. It creates the possibility that it can open but not the actual reality of the opening. He of course dealt with his american counterparts, president Ronald Reagan and president george h. W. Bush, who previous to becoming president was Vice President george h. W. Bush under reagan, and he had a series of summit meetings with Ronald Reagan but they did not result in any agreement to open the wall, even though there were agreements about arms control and other issues. Bush president george h. W. Took office in january 1989, it turns out that he had an entirely different attitude. That was one of the biggest surprises of my research, was discovering the way that the Bush Administration when i say bush today im talking about george h. W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States, not the son, not george w. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States. When george h. W. Bush took office, even though in public they said very kind things about the departing president reagan, internally the tone was very different. So internally, president bush, when he took office in 1989, essentially stepped on the brakes. He and his team thought that orbachev might not be for real and might be trying to lull the United States into a false sense of security and they didnt want to be trapped by the ruse. There was a tiny chance he was for real but he could be dispensed with a single bullet and the soviet union retained the capability to destroy the United States. So either way, either he was a fake or for real, either way the result was the same. The new bush team thought they needed to be very wary of hip. So the new bush team decided to really clean house in a radical way. Political scientist arent as interested in the history of this period, just interested in the mechanism of political transition, so how one president ial administration switches to another, studied this transition from reagan to bush as one most hostile ever, as paul light, an expert has put it, the Bush Administration, quote, fired everybody. And the internal discussion shows why. Secretary baker talked about reagan holdovers who were incapable of thinking things anew, whose thinking was mush, and the bush team needed to restore american security. So, this intense process of american soviet reproachment comes to a halt under the Bush Administration. So he is not making progress on a plan to open the berlin wall ither. As a matter of fact, he actually ended the practice of annual summits with gorbachev. So it seems like a new chill is returning to the cold war, and then even more frighteningly in the spring and summer of 1989 there are protests throughout china. They are most visible in tiananmen square, in the heart of beijing, where chinese art students build a goddess of democracy who stares down mao in the face in tiananmen square. Those who visit the square know this statue is no longer there. Of course, in june 1989, the Peoples Liberation army starts shooting at the people. Clears the square. Theres of course the famous image of a row of tanks halting briefly in front of what a man who is now known as tank man, one demonstrator who is soon hauled away to we know not where. The happens in the summer of 1989 and is deeply scary. Id like you for the remainder of my talk to keep the image of iananmen square in your heads. Be know the ending of the berlin is peaceful but the people im going to talk about, the people on the streets dont know that. The image they have in their mind is of tiananmen square. Theyre very afraid that the practice of a communist regime using force to defend itself is something that will be repeated in cold war europe as well. So, they dont know if this is going to happen to them or not. So, if you can just keep that kind of sense of uncertainty in your mine is a talk about the rest of the events it will help you understand the mental world and some ways the courage of the people im describing. In the summer of 1989, there were of course protests in europe as well. The Solidarity Movement in oland, under leadership of to ensia has tried constitute reforms in poland. It was a crucial trail Blazing Movement from protesters across Eastern Europe and the summer of 1989 it gets the polish regime to agree to semi free elections. Semi free. Itself actually wins 99 of the 100 seats its allowed to contest. But it has to still share power with the communist regime. So it seems like that might be the way forward. A very slow process where the reformers grab one handhold but still have to share power. That might be how change comes to Eastern Europe. But then something very expected happens. The hungarian regime, which is also interested in reform, the hungarian regime decides to put holes in the iron curtain. At first only for its own citizens. It decides to open the border for hungarians to cross into austria. What they do not anticipate is that other east europeans and east germans will try to sneak out through the holes as well. And the hungarian government is bound by treaty to east germany not let east germans out. It can only make this decision for its own citizens. So first it has to restrain and send back the east germans and does so with force and theres even an east germn who is killed n front of his wife and child in august of 1989, trying to get out via hungary. And it becomes a huge crisis and the west german chancellor, helmut kohl says to the leader of hungry, i have friends who run banks. If you let these east germans out and my banks will be very good to you. So the hungarian leader decides to let the east germans out in september of 1989, and indeed, west german banks immediately afterwards are very, very good to hungary, and make loans to hungary. So, now there is a hole in the iron curtain. What is happening is east ermans are going south through czechoslavakia to escape via back into west germany, a whole flow of people going down and up from east germany down to czechoslovakia, through hungry and back up into west germany, and this horrifies the east german regime. It seemses themselves bleeding to death. So the east german regime tries to choke off travel to hungary, and that only results in a new crisis which is refugees piling up in the west German Embassy in prague. So the east german machine makes the decision too seal the borders to east germany entirely. This turns out to be a huge mistake. It turns east germany into a pressure cooker. Theres a theory of life under dictatorship that helps explain while. According to theory if you live under a dictatorship you basically have three choices how to conduct your life. Loyalty, exit, or voice. Loyalty, exit, or voice. And what that means is either you can just be loyal and just put up with and it not complain, and stay quiet. Which had happened during long periods in east german history. Or you can exit. You can try to flee, and so when the border opened, between hungary and astoria, suddenly exit became an option. Then when the east german regime sealed off east germany, exit was withdrawn and loyalty seemed no longer tolerable so the only remaining option was voice or protest. And so there starts to be massive protests, particularly in the southern part of east germany, region historically nope at saxony, because people have been trying to get to czechoslovakia and hungary and get stuck there. So huge numbers of people who taken ven up everything, everything they can in two okays taken their children they are fed up and are not going to go home. As you tart to see in this region huge numbers of protests. Theyre particularly large in this city, the city of leipzig, a city in saxony. I realize this might be hard to see the text you. Dont need to see the exact words. If youre interested in the details, feel free to buy the book. But let me just point out a few things to you here. Your see a ring road here around the city center. That ring road is where an old medieval wall was built and when it was turn down it was turned into a ring road. Heres the main train station up here. What starts to happen in the city of leipzig. Starts to be large protests at the nikolai church, and the protesters come out of the they meet at the church, come out, gather here at the square, and they try to get as far around the ring road, around the city of leipzig as possible, and the police and east german secret employs stop them. This keeps happening again and again and the police are using increasing level of violence and more people show up and they use more violence and it becomes apparent to everyone involved that the night of october 9, 1989, october 9, is going to be the showdown, and one of the biggest surprises in my research i thought i knew his time period fairly well having already written a book about it. One of the biggest surprises when i got into the secret police records, local police records, the east german regime was planning a tiananmen level event in leipzig on the night of october 9 them. Guns went out, towards shoot ent out. Machine guns went out. Its hard to save exactly how many but at least 8,000 Security Forces deployed. Possibly over 10,000. Hospital staff were told to come in, bring extra blood reserves. Hospital staff had leaves cancelled. Schools dismissed kids early. Businesses sent people home early. The regime prevented foreign journalists from coming to the city because they didnt want the world to see what they were planning. He dissidents involved decided they needed to do two things. The first thing, they needed to show up in massive numbers to show they were not afraid. And safety in numbers is a huge factor in order to get as far around the ringing a possible. Another small group of dissidents decided they should do something else. They should try to film what was happening so that no matter what happened, if it was bloodshed no matter what then world would see it. So try to film a video cassette and smuggle it out and the man in charm of doing this was this man here. I apologize for the poor quality of this photo. Its an east German Secret Police photo taken without his knowledge or permission. Its actually part of a series. He was followed extensively by the secret police as he put it to me, almost like having a weird diary of your own life you didnt write because theres a complete record of his daily movements for most days and photos. Heres a series of three surveillance photos. Here he is again. With his back to the camera. And now here is another urveillance photo. And the reason the secret police followed him, he decided the way to fight the regime was with information. He had started making video casssets of environmental abuses and human rights abuses and started smuggling them out to the west, to a friend in the west who worked at a western television station. And then they would then be broadcast. And turned out he was really good at this so good in fact he actually was earning so much money in the west as a video journalist he owed taxes on his footage, which became a problem because his friend had to pay it for him. And secret police were frustrated by the mans activities and the only reason they didnt put him in jail is they figured he couldnt possibly be causing as much trouble by himself as he was causing. They figured he had to have dozens of helpers, possibly including western intelligence agencies, and they decided they would follow him and interrogate him but not arrest him because they wanted to catch him meeting with his helpers so it could arrest them as well. The problem was the really was doing this mostly on his own or the help of two other friends. So the secret police would openly follow him. Five guys would stand in the courtyard of his building and follow him but he never met with the helpers. He never went and met with the dozens of helpers they were expecting. He didnt know this so he lived in constant fear of arrest and constant fear that the five agents or more following him around would steal his cameras, but it didnt happen. That was crucial in the fall of 1989. So, in the fall of 1989, october 9th, he lived in berlin. He and a friend go to leipzig and hide on the roof of a church, on the northern arc of the ring road around the city center of leipzig. So as their friends are gathering to march, they basically crouch down in pigeon dung on a church roof and prepare to film whatever is going to happen, and on the ground, the protesters assemble, and something amazing happens. Despite everyone knowing that this was going to be the tiananmen, in the diaries, of people who were there you see in the notes, i tonight is china. Despite all of that, at least 100,000 people, possibly more, show up to protest. And the regime did not expect that. And they also maintained strict nonviolence. So they give no cause to the Security Forces to attack, which is good, because the ordered orders said if you are attacked, youre allowed to attack in response. So the roughly 100,000 people assemble and they start to move across the ring road, the local commander, the Party Commander on the ground, doesnt know what to do. He is the Party Commander already is someone who didnt expect to be in charge that night, he was actually the second Party Secretary. The man who was supposed to be in charge was the first Party Secretary, but he had, and im not making this up, you cannot make this up he called in sick that night. [laughter] and so the second Party Secretary suddenly found himself in charge of this deployment. These at least 8,000, possibly more, armed men. And the plan was if the armed men could not stop the protest in the church, that stop them from gathering and moving up the ring road, the plan was to attack them at the eastern knot, a sharp bend in the road. And the idea that was smart because the road took such a sharp bend the demonstrators have to slow down. It would be easier to catch them and shoot at them there. So the plan was to attack here at the eastern knot and as the crowd of people starts moving owards the eastern knot, the second Party Secretary suddenly decides to call east berlin and say are we really going to do this . He is starting to worry that he is being set up. And he is going to cause a bloodbath and then will be tried for war crimes or worse. So he calls east berlin, the head honchos and gets one of the big party bosses on the phone, and says, are we really going to do this . And this is when the protesters are about 15 minutes away from the eastern knot, and the big boss says, ill call you back. And then he doesnt. And so the second Party Secretary, as the crowds were approaching, the phone fails to ring, begins to feel he is being set up and issues an order to retreat. Copies of that order to retreat survive. And so the forces pull back. He says pull back but if you are attacked you can still attack. So its crucially important that the protesters maintain nonviolence because they could still have gotten shot if they had in any way attacked but they dont. The dissident leaders had worked very, very hard to lecture everyone, tell everyone, ministers have given ceremonyons saying use only nonviolence, and it works. So, with the permission of ziggy who i interviewed for the book, i can actually show you a piece of historiedow clip from the his video clip from the night. He and his friend are on the roof of the church. They have no idea what theyre going to see, blood bath with security or what. Ill show you the footage of what they see coming around the curve. [shouting] whistle] [shouting] they are shouting, join s. They are shouting it at Security Forces and its actually working. As theyre sweeping across the road, gradually the Security Forces are putting aside their weapons and joining in the protests. You can see in a moment the camera starts to sway because the notice on a roof directly opposite them other men openly making a video who they assumed were secret police agents. At one point they suddenly have to duck. [shouting] now the chant is switching to we are the people. You can see the camera sways wildly because theyre trying to cover up the red light on the camera to avoid detection. Can you show where exactly that was yep. So that footage was actually made from the reformed church on the northern arc of the ring road of leipzig on the night of october 9th. They filmed the whole demonstration. It was so long, it takes two hours to walk by. After that they wait for another hour because they dont want to be arrested as soon as the come down but finally they come down and are able that night to smuggle the video cassset out to west berlin where it is then shown on western television stations, announced as the work of an italian camera team to protect them. So that is hugely important. This is a still photo of the same event because two things have now happened. Number one, the regime has retreated and, number two, that retreat was broadcast, and both of those things are important. Both the protesters and their chroniclers are important. Because that footage is then broadcast back into east germany, other east germans throughout the country see and it are emboldened and start protesting in their own cities as well. Now you have a peaceful revolution in full swing in east germany. And gradually those massive protests claim a victim. The very top boss, a man named eric honnickkerr, is ousted. He in response to what i just showed you, wanted to escalate the violence yet again. He actually called for aerial attacks. In the second world war, dresden was fire bombed from the air. Unthinkable even to his colleagues they would do that. So there is an internal palace coup and the top box is ousted. He is replaced by man who becomes head of the east german ruling regime, the socialist unionist party. And he takes over and decides to use a different approach because this approach of steadily escalating violence is selfdefeating. He decided he is going to talk a good game in public, but not actually change much in private. So he is going to make it sound like hes going to copy gorbachev and institute reforms without actually doing them, and most importantly, on the night of november 9th in 1989, in divide berlin, he decides to announce some relatively minor changes to immigration rules as a soft to the crowds. The regime still retains its ability to control the movement of people absolutely on a whim. It still has the berlin wall. There are still guards at the berlin wall. All of that. Nothing changed. The bottom line has not changed. Hes going to announce a reform that sound goods in public. But the problem is that, at the press conference to make this announcement, the member of the politburo who announces it botches the announcement and makes it sound as if the changes are real. And in the superheated atmosphere, where people are mobilized and energized, have lost their fear, this announcement has an amazing reaction. The politburo member making a mistake, that is nothing new. They made mistakes all the time. But in the context of a superheated atmosphere of 1989, people have an amazing response and decide to charge the checkpoints in the wall, that was new. I find this amazing, the interaction between individual mistakes and broad societal forces and what happens is as a result of this press conference, thats the member of the politburo who mistakenly makes it sound as if the wall is open before the assembled media, including tom brokaw, after he makes the announcement, people go to the checkpoints in the berlin wall. Let me just describe to you a little bit about berlin. You see a map here of the city of berlin. It is also in my book. And west berlin consisted of the french, british, and american sectors, the soviet sector was east berlin. The west berlin had a wall around it entirely. Of course because all of berlin is an island inside east germany. This made west berlin the only ity in the world with an exact outline visible to astronauts. The wall is fully lit along the entire length, at all hours of darkness. So west berlins outline was visible frontal outer space. In order to go into east berlin or west germany, you today to go to a checkpoint. Thats what the little dots are. The northernmost checkpoint the others are in more desirable locations and the party had given that real estate nearby to agents, officers, loyalists, people who would not storm the wall. From the point of view of the eastern regime, its in a bad eighborhood. He and his friends were among the first to go to the checkpoint. Other interviewed dissidents about that moment, i naively thought they would say great things at the press conference. I envisioned it being a great moment and they would say it was fantastic. I knew i had my freedom. Instead, Something Different happened. I said wasnt that a great moment and they responded no. That guy was an idiot. He did not know what he was talking about. It was useful because it was leverage. We could make the border guard possible lives miserable. Numbers and huge made the guards life miserable, indeed. This is the Border Crossing. I apologize for the poor quality. The quality is not great in the original. Let me describe what we are seeing. This is east berlin right here and west berlin right here. The Border Crossing is this walled off area. It is a number of acres. If you are coming in as a pedestrian, you get processed over here. If you are coming in a vehicle, you drive into one of these lanes. Your car gets checked. You come back up here to the ,inal bridge and member that the final guard tower, the final bridge. You cross over into west berlin. I have a schematic representation of this same image. This is a duty map of the Border Crossing. At the top, it says overview of boarding homer street. East berlin is down here. West berlin is up here. You come through the buildings here. The car lanes are over here. This is the final guard post and the final bridge. The man in charge that night, the senior officer on duty that night is this man. Haroldn name is yeager. He opens the berlin wall. Harold yeager is an unlikely candidate for that title. He is a complete loyalist. He has been working for tony five years. He had an additional three years of service before that. He helped to build the wall. I pulled his entire service record. Service, his years of he had one minor demerit and a raft of awards and promotions. He is a loyal servant to the regime. He said i believe the wall was tragic but necessary because there would have been a world war iii. He said the war was bad but better than the alternative. He was not trying to bring down the regime. In the course of that night, he becomes the man who, as i said, opens the wall. He actually sees the press conference on television. He is on the 24 hour shift that started in the late evening and went through the night, into the next day. He watches at the job. When he sees that press conference, he cannot believe it. He simply cannot believe it. He calls the officer and he is using expletives that i will not repeat here. He says what just happened . I have no orders. And his officers says it is business as usual. Keep gaetz closed. He says i have a ash keep the gates closed. He says he says keep the gates closed. They say the board is open. What should i do . The Security Officer says keep the gates closed. Business as usual. He told me he made 30 phone calls over the course of the next four hours and never got any useful instruction. Only once did he get anything other than keep the gates closed. What he got made matters worse. After he had been calling for a couple of hours, his direct superior said be quiet, i will patch you into a call with my boss so you can hear what i am telling you is true. He gets patched into a call with his bosses. As he gets patched in, yeager is reporting hundreds of thousands of people. Is he delusional . Is he an idiot . Is he a coward . Is he capable of assessing the situation accurate late accurately . The phone goes dead. He thinks, you know, i have been working here for 25 years and they will call me a coward and ask if i can file an accurate situation report . What they dont know is he is going through a cancer scare. It turns out he does not have cancer. He thought he did. He had a number of tests and has a doctors opponent appointment the next day to get the results. He feels like he may be a dead man anyway. What tips him over is what happens when his boss called him back. Saysoss calls him back and we have a suggestion for you. Go to the eastern side of the wall and pick out the biggest troublemakers. The people who are screaming to get out and let them out. Hopefully the rest of the people will quiet down. What you should do is pull them aside. Stampedir passport and their face. Let them out, dont tell them they have been expelled forever. Therprisingly, one of loudest groups is ziggy. They get their faces stamped. Their passports are now in museums. They get let out. They dont know that they have been expelled forever. This causes two problems. The first is that people on the eastern side figure out the system. If you get loud, you get out. They upped the volume and tension down the eastern side. And then, a new and serious problem emerges on the western side. Among the people let out first were some young parents. No one expected the people let out would turn around and come back. They wanted to have a quick look. They come back to the western side and said we are back. Our kids are home in bed. They are told you have been expelled forever. You cant go home. I know that sounds like a bad joke. When the berlin wall went up, it split families and they did not see each other for years or even a decade, in some cases. These young parents, as you can imagine, are beside themselves. Once they realized the guards are serious, they start screaming. They start crying. The guards on the eastern side cannot handle it. They say you will have to deal with these people. Whend yeager goes out and faced with these grieving parents, he snaps. Harold, for the first time that i can find, disobeys a direct order and lets the parents act in. When i interviewed him, he said that was, to me, personally the key moment. That was the beginning of a slippery slope of disobedience. He says let them back in and more people want to come in and he lets them in. The westerners start showing up and he says let them in. There is this whole cascade where he starts, one by one, tearing down the structures of his professional life and his mental world. Has 20,000 30, he people on the east. He has disobeyed more orders in one night than in his whole career. He looks around and says either we are going to shoot all these people are we are going to open up. Or we are going to open up. Makes the decision to open up. Here is the result of his decision. Street the board homer Border Crossing. Here is the final guard tower and here is the bridge. Beyond his west berlin. You see people flooding across and you see cameras capturing it. His colleagues looking on in the guard tower. The event itself and the chronicling of the event are important. The wall is open and because people are filming get, it is broadcast. Is. It is broadcast. The wall really is open. And, when the other boarding crossing checkpoint guard sees this, he thinks maybe i should open up too. In an uncontrolled fashion, one by one, the other Border Crossings open. There are hardliners who tried to reseal the wall. The brandenburg gate, which is a very visible symbol of the heart of berlin, there is not actually any gates. There is no way to get through. People have to go up and over the wall. The stasi reseals this area. By the early hours of november 10, they have retaken the brandenburg gate. There are military units trained in combat and urban terrain that are mobilized to retake the city. Caught the opening anyone by surprise and was in the middle of the night, a ,umber of decisionmakers particularly the ones in moscow are asleep. By the time, early the next morning, that moscow wakes up, that there is a military response to be organized, it is too late. By that point, there are millions of people. Not just thousands or tens of thousands, there are millions and it is too late to reseal the berlin wall. Think,l stays open and i in closing, it is important to of the mind the actions an locals. Let me show you board homer street today, the site i have been describing. You can see how unspectacular it is. This is my personal photo. The white lane lines and the leftover lane lines. The reason i took this photo is because i got a tip from a friend of mine that they were going to tear up the site and put in a Discount Grocery store. If you go there now, there is a Discount Grocery store there. I ran around and took as many photos as i could in 2010. The Historical Society protested this and put up informational panels. These informational panels are nothing like the massive american monuments. This one has fallen prey to weather and somebody put a sticker in the middle of it and peeled it off. That is supposed to be a picture of crowds going across the board homer street bridge. You can see what is happening to it. It is not substantial. In some ways, i find this lessapproach more problematic than the american response. The germans prefer lower key monuments that memorialize individuals who died trying to escape. They are trying to remember the individual human stories. I find that better than this that they can go from berlin to baghdad. I will conclude with this. One of the interviews i did for the with thiss woman. She was an important distant. After the wall came down, she went on to a career in politics in united germany. She became a politician and stasi archive. E that is an important post in germany. She was the second head of the stasi archive. I interviewed her and she was very happy to talk to me. She was busy. I am so glad youre going to tell this story in the west to english speakers, she said. So often, if i meet people from the west, they seem to assume that the wall opened and the opening of the wall gave us our freedom. In reality, it was the other way around. We fought for our freedom and then, because of that, the wall fell. Thank you very much for your attention. I am happy to take a few questions about the process and interviews. Because it is on television, if you could wait until the microphone comes on to you. If you could identify yourself and speak toward the mic, that would be great. I find this fascinating. Ive family members. I am wondering what happened to, it was a man who botched the announcement. There anything that happened to him . What became of him . This man sitting he is still life he is ill and he has dementia he was a member of the bureau, that was the leading body of the ruling party. He was responsible for media affairs. Despite that title, how should i put this . You did not have much incentive to develop media skills. That canhave a regime censored the newspapers and, in east germany, they would write the headlines and news stories. The same story would appear in multiple papers. You dont need to understand how to deal with journalists. He had little experience in westernstyle press conferences. This was a new development. He, his lack of experience really showed on the night of november 9 when he gave his press conference. The announcement he botched, he did not bother to read until he was live on air, even though he had it in advance. He knewassumed it was what was in it. It is almost impossible to follow him. I have viewed this videotape over and over again. Certain words pop out at you. The words are things like permission to cross the border. Including west berlin. There are also other phrases like you still have to apply for permission and it is harder to hear that. The journalists in the room heard these key phrases and the reporters, the young ones in the room, that is the fastest way to get news before the end. They run out before he finished speaking. And the first wire report goes at 7 02 p. M. And he starts to realize something is going horribly wrong, and he starts to backpedal as best he can, but the reporters are already reporting. As i said, making a mistake is nothing new. They made mistakes all the time, but the bottom line was always the same. There was a border for the wall and armed Border Guards. What changes everything is the power of peaceful revolution crashing against the wall and forcing people like Harold Yeager to deal with them. Whats happening. Actually goes on a sort of long drive in the night to see whats happening but does not issue any orders or anything and he eventually ends up being tried in united germany, and he is convicted because of the regimes participation in the deaths on the borders. He is one of the few members who does show a sense of responsibility. He serves his time and basically lives quietly and becomes very ill and as i said now, becomes as i said, now has dementia. He is a tragic figure after this evening. Another question . Ms. Sarotte the question is where is Harold Yeager today. Harold yeager, i was able to interview. I interviewed him twice. By opening the berlin wall, he put himself out of a job. The man had 25 years of experience in guarding the berlin wall, and he had just opened it. He put himself out of a job and never again held steady employment. He had a bunch of odd jobs. For a while, he worked as a taxi driver in west berlin. People would get in the taxi and say, take me where the wall used to be. I can just imagine that scene in the taxi, him saying i used to work there and the person in the back thinking yeah, sure he did. He also owned a newspaper store for a while until that went out of business, and then he worked as a Security Guard and now is retired. He lived near the germanpolish border in a small cottage that used to be a summer cottage, but he winterized it. Under complicated provisions of german unification, he is able to receive some fraction of his pension from his time of service, so he lives on his pension, and he is one of the few Border Guards willing to talk to scholars, so im grateful to him that he made the time to talk to me, and i think the world is grateful to him that the that he did not decide to shoot. This is another one of those accidents. His direct colleagues could have had night shift that night, reportedly much more of a hardliner, and Border Guards and other water crossings did call for reinforcement with machine guns, so i think it was a very happy accident that he was the person on duty that night. Yes, question . Thanks a lot. This is a great story. I went through checkpoint charlie in the summer of 1969. Glad it is not there anymore. I have a couple questions about communication which are intriguing to me. One would be about how communication happened between the crossing that youre describing and other crossings. If people were hearing what is going on there, how were they hearing when it was happening . You mentioned may later there might have been reports on western television or something. Theres another question about the film you showed. Its also about the press conference. There were networks i mean u. S. Agencies, intelligence agencies would have had an interest in Something Like this, maybe facilitating it, not that they made it happen, of course, by any means, but how did that film you said it got out to the west. How did it get out to the west . And in the past, the cia have had assets in the associated press. For example, all that is documented over many years. Is it at all conceivable that somebody was eager to rush out of the press conference with a particular characterization, how the wall is open . What is the evidence if there is any, about those linkages that might have helped support this . Ms. Sarotte i tell a lot of those details in the book. Obviously i would say this because i wrote the book, but its an amazing story. You should really read the book. I tell the story in detail. It has to do with something called the conference of security and cooperation in europe, which was an agreement involving the United States and soviet union, the countries of europe that tried to improve human rights in europe. The soviet union had signed it because it also in the eyes of moscow guaranteed the borders in Eastern Europe, which is something moscow had hoped to get in a world war ii peace treaty, but that never happened, so the soviet union signed the final act which it saw as the next best thing, but it did not realize how dangerous human rights positions in that treaty were. Among other provisions, they allowed for special Border Crossing privileges for western journalists to Eastern Europe. Some of these were worked out in subsequent conferences, not in the act itself. There were west german journalists stationed in east berlin who were allowed to cross the border without a search. I tell the story of one of them who worked very closely with ziggy and became his main courier. That night, when ziggy and his friends make the video in leipzig, they get back to berlin. They get the videocassette to this west german journalist who then crosses into the east and delivers it to a television station, and it is then broadcast as the work of italian journalists which, of course, its not. I tell the story of how that is smuggled out. On the night of the press conference itself, obviously its possible there were intelligence operatives masquerading as journalists at the press conference. That is certainly possible. I dont have information on that one way or another, but even if they had sort of had a plot to report that it was open, they had so much help from actual journalists there, they hardly needed to lift a finger because so many people reported the wall was open and so many languages. Its possible one was working for intelligence agencies, but the net effect was cumulative. Finally, communication between checkpoints at the Border Crossing it was such a centralized system, they were very strongly discouraged from talking to each other. It was a hub and spoke system. You call central and we will call other people, right . He said they were very strongly discouraged from crosschecking with each other. He said it was difficult at night because when he was calling 30 times to superior officers and failing to get answers, he at some point started wondering what people were doing at other Border Crossings, but he did not have any easing means there was no sort of standard means set up for him to communicate with them on a regular basis. Thats not how it worked, right . He had for that night surprisingly little contact with the other Border Crossing. Its interesting i actually had a former military officer who has no interest in east germany at all saying it was an interesting study and crisis management. It shows you what can go wrong if you dont empower people when a crisis hits, you leave them dangling. It is a failure of management and leadership, generically even if you dont care about the details. There are again western reporters broadcasting on radio and television the border is open and at the other Border Crossing points, they have television. Theres an interaction throughout the evening between the media and the actual events where our points, the media is actually causing the story it is reporting. It is a great story of how in the modern Era Television and politics interact. There is its a very complicated story. Dissidents and the others gathered at the Border Crossings, if they knew what was going on. Ms. Sarotte that seems to have been very ad hoc and spontaneous. Ziggy and his friends, there was a bar where they usually drank. Ziggy was in that barn did not actually see the press conference. One of his friends went to the bar and said the wallace open it, lets go. Wall is open, lets go. Some of his friends said, youre nuts, have another drink. Another said lets check it out. The ones who said lets risk it said the others who were not back in a couple hours were in the west, and they actually did not get back for five days. Actually, let me get a question in the back, the young man over there. You started talking at the beginning of your speech about how people, like, i guess in the United States. The u. S. Was the one who opened the wall. For younger generations, like people my age, how do you think would be the best way to really clarify that we did not . Ms. Sarotte what im using here to step back and be a little bit academic if you will forgive me for being a little academic, im a professor, its hard to avoid im using a design called a powder keg model, which is to say in order to understand a revolutionary event or dramatic event, you need to understand not only the powder keg or the fuel, but you also need to understand the sparks or the catalyst that set it off. Academics like myself have long been better at studying the powder keg than the sparks of the catalyst. The cold war context provides the necessary context. The gorbachev institutes, the fact hes making clear tanks will roll into Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, in the western side, the u. S. Gives organizations solidarity. That matters. Im not saying the United States is unimportant. That does not actually under the open the wall. The point and the context under which the wall could open, but you need a spark. A man who used to teach at dartmouth sent catalysts are not like buses. They do not come along every 10 minutes. They do not all look alike. We cannot just talk about the powder keg and assume the catalyst shows up and it will have a standard result. The nature of the catalyst on the way it interacts gives shape to the explosion of the revolution. I realize he was right and i thought i need to look at the catalyst, the locals, the people who turned potential for the opening of the wall into the reality of the opening. I think the sort of take away lesson is the United States needs in its Foreign Policy to Pay Attention to the locals. It goes badly wrong when it fails to do that. I think the United States is good at things like context creation but bad at producing specific results. It is better when it empowers people on the ground to push through and make those final changes. It is also not advisable for the United States to just sort of assume it is singlehandedly responsible because then it becomes a kind of delusion that you could do this elsewhere regardless what the locals think. I think that is in many ways the takehome lesson. As i said, even if you dont care about the details of the story. Thats what im telling, the story of a successful peaceful revolution. It succeeded and left behind itself an amazing amount of evidence. There are people who want to talk. It is an amazing story, so we would like to know how that succeeds. Here is a great way to do so as a historian two read the story, to learn the story. It does not help us predict the next peaceful resolution, but it helps us and other people prepare for it, so i think that if the longerterm takehome lesson. You have been waiting very patiently over here. Yeah, mine is a simple sort of technical question. What advantages did you get by working at harvard . What Research Advantages did you find as a political scientist that you did not have back in california, i think it is . I should say, there have been multiple phases. Ive been working on the project for 25 years because i was doing a study abroad in west berlin in 1989. That was the reason i got interested not only in this particular story but in being a historian altogether, living in berlin in 1989 and experiencing many of these events. I was very young then. I was two. [laughter] of course i was not thinking as a professional scholar, i started collecting materials in a sense, so when i decided to write this book, so there was a long phase of directing materials. The topic would not let go of me. I was always collecting materials and they just kind of collected dust or were on my desktop, but after i wrote the book on Foreign Policy that followed the fall of the berlin wall and realized there was a huge curiosity about how the wall came down, once i decided to write the book, i went to germany for more targeted interviews, so i did about 50 interviews and they are listed in the book, but in the final days when you are just sitting down and writing, its great to have oath a Great Library both a Great Library, which harvards library is, and its great to have people around to share your ideas, to share concepts. The question was what i gain from harvard. It was partly the access to Library Resources here and partly access to colleagues who read through versions, help me clarify the argument, and that was wonderful as well. I have wonderful colleagues at the university of Southern California as well, but the Library System is better here area that was definitely very helpful. I should say, though, i had throughout the research phase, Excellent Research support from the university of Southern California, soy really could not have done it without either of my institutions, my Home Institution or my guest institution here. It really was a combination of both institutions supporting research of this kind, and im grateful to those institutions for doing that. Last question. Im being told last question. Do you want the last question . If no one else has one. I guess my question was not apparently clear. I was interested in how the people who were pressing to the Border Crossing, how they knew about each others activity and successes at other Border Crossings. I dont know that you really spoke to that. Ms. Sarotte at that point theres sort of two ways that happen. The first, that the sheer size of the crowd at each individual Border Crossing becomes very, very large and people can see that with their own eyes. There are estimates that by the point at which Harold Yeager opens up, you have 20,000 people there. I cannot verify that, but there are multiple estimates. The first way it happens is people see with their own eyes just how many people are at the Border Crossing, and although its the side of the biggest crowds, similar phenomena are occurring elsewhere. Then there also starts to be wordofmouth. People try to get to the Border Crossing and realize theres 20,000 people here and they cannot get anywhere near the Border Crossing. They run home and tell everyone. Again and again, over the course of the night ive heard many of the stories, i was sitting at a bar and someone ran in and said you should go to board homer. Or i was in my building and someone started knocking in my building. They may have access to hearing radio broadcasts, seeing television, then they are starting to see multiple images. You sort of have these multiple reinforcements of this process of the real opening. Wall opening. Again, thank you for coming out and helping me tell these stories. [applause] im happy to sign books either to you or any of your holiday gift recipients. Thank you very much for coming out tonight. This is American History tv on cspan3, where each weekend, we future 48 hours of programs exploring our nations past. Follow the house impeachment inquiry and the administrations response on cspan. Unfiltered coverage, live on tv, our radio app and online. Watch primetime rears on cspan or stream any time at cspan. Org impeachment. This weekend on american artifacts, we visit the Smithsonians National portrait gallery marking the centennial of the 19th amendment. Here is a preview. Through the end of suffragists led by alice paul continue to pick it. Pickett. I was interested because i wanted to emphasize that these were individuals with their own lives. Spending their time, which we all know is precious on an important cause. The video is playing through images of them picketing. They kept up the pressure. By creating the headlines and creating the spectacle, i think the suffragists finally gained the momentum that they were searching for throughout the entire movement. Pressure that they placed on president Woodrow Wilson was so much that he endorsed the cause. Continued the tour on american artifacts, sunday at 6 00 p. M. And at 10 00 p. M. Eastern. You are watching American History tv. Next, the association of the u. S. Army hosts a book for with forum with three authors titled controversial and unconventional leaders in the u. S. Army. The generals are george patton, edward allmond and john. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you very much for being here. This is our annual book program we put on every here. Every year. We have very talented authors for this year. We appreciate them being here. I have read all their books, discovered some things in the books that we did not know