Well, the fall of Berlin Wall is one of the defining moments of my career
And I wish I could say I was prescient. I knew it was gonna happen. That's why what that did not happen that way
Jerry Lambrecht was our foreign core a director of news and he came to me on a Monday or Tuesday
And he said not much going on here
Yeah, a lot of turmoil in Berlin, they're going out. There's Czechoslovakia
Why don't you go over there and do a couple days and then come back? And I said, yeah, that's a good idea
So I actually have lunch with dick Holbrooke a well-known American
Gap fly but also a really astute guy when it came to you know, foreign developments. He said oh, that's a great idea
So I flew that night and the next day
We made all kinds of arrangements in case the example we had a wives
Crane was a camera. I could do a satellite feed and we'd made arrangement had a good Bureau and
Brewin
But it was so slow the next day. I said, I won't think it'd have to show here or tonight because
There's not enough to toll it
I was able to go back and forth at Checkpoint Charlie in a way that we never been able to before
and the guards were kind of
Motioning us to but there was no anticipation and the second day that I was there
We asked for an interview with good for boskie. Who was the propaganda chief of the
of the East German poet Bureau
He was gonna have a news conference of at five o'clock in the afternoon Berlin time
Things were rumbling around but there was no anticipation. That was good
So I go on I'm about half asleep because I've been up for two days at that point my camera crew Sherman national
So I'd worked with forever. They'd been there from the beginning of the Cold War
And I remember vividly is that in the room the East German journalists are suddenly emboldened
They were asking him questions that they never would have before and he was the fucking I'm saying. Oh, we're gonna work
And about halfway through the news comfort. Somebody hands him a piece of paper
And the paper he reads it. He says oh
the East German Politburo has decided that
members of the GDR can exit
The ger and return to the same gates without the basis of a knee or something like that
And it was like lightning it struck the room
I turned to my
German camera crew and they were shaking in a head and the AP guy who had been dozing off said my god
I think the wall is gonna come down and
shahboz, he
Said well, that's the ruling of the poll girl. He got up and left the stage
went upstairs
Where I had the interview with him and I had this wonderful
Woman who?
saw her body against the door to hold off the other course while I was trying to get into the room and I said
Take out that piece of paper again
Mister shabazz can read it to me and he did and I said does that mean that?
members of the GDR can come and go through the wall at will
Or worse than that effect
He said oh
That's what it means and then I began to worry him about how he felt as a lifelong communist
About what had gone on there and he said I'm still a communist and I said do you think you made wrong decisions?
what we're trying to do the best we can to cope with this I
Leave his office. I go downstairs and some of my print fellows are there on the
Landing and they're reading
Trying to figure out what the hell does this mean and I said it's down the wall is coming down
I just was with him. He said it means exactly what he said it meant
So, you know, I think this is the real deal and when town called, New York
One out of the year was garrick, utley spent a lot of time injury was very familiar with it
all I was doing live stuff and then we had a
We'd ordered a boom. Thank God at the Brandenburg Gate where we had the live set up and
That all got arranged around went back to the office and start working on this
went out the Brandenburg Gate at about
53545 New York time and there were the wall was covered with students from the West who had gone up on top of the wall
And we're saying to the students on the other thing come on. Come on
and the students on the other side were persuading they'd be shot if they did that because the
The political police were all over the place and then they started hosing off him the Westerners from the eastern side
There was a wonderful moment because they hose him off one point one guy stayed
Turned his back to him or the leather
Jackets arms outstretched big burner in his face and they were trying to drive him off the wall
And I said the Martin Fletcher one of my colleagues
Go over and get him. You'll be on the cover of Time magazine next week the new German
the new German
it comes back running over me and
Martin says not what we think and I said we mean it is not what we think
He said he's a drunk who's been living over here on the forest. This is a first shower at about three weeks
That's that's always interested
anyhow
We still don't have
footage of them coming through the wall any worm and one of our Cameron was at
hofstra gate or the you know, the first people started to come across and
He came he ran about two miles with his camera with this video cassette
Said here. It is there down. It was like five minutes to go and
We put it in and I came on the air that night is just and I said
New York to the
Show Gould who was in the control room and others
Just stay with me
There's no way I can do a script I'm gonna have live my way for the next half an hour. Just stay with me
and so they did and
It was another one of those case where I really never looked at my entire performance, but my friends
Martin Fletcher's and others have said maybe your best night ever, you know the whole broadcast
Off the top of your head and then I did an essay at the end
Saying that I thought that 1968 was a defining year of my political
I mean of my journalistic career
But never anything like this has happened in our lifetime
Because this is the effectively this is the unwinding of the Soviet Union the wall was down
Change has come to our world of ways. We could not have anticipated
These Germans have been living over there are now free to come and go and it's can they have a profound effect?
and I don't like that and
We see on the air long time got up early the next morning went to the wall and it was
The scene unlike anything I had ever seen when my favorite stories was on the west side of the wall
There was a man who had an apartment who looked out over the wall in effect
to a
East German tailor who was working at his sewing machine every morning and it would kind of wave at each other
Then going out for 30 years
And they never talked and they had a real next morning
Think about that
and the East Germans came over and they're
Cheap denim outfits and
fake fur jackets and
the waters a little two cycle cars that were belching all kinds of smoke and they were
Driving down a person on a great great shopping road in Berlin
filled with Mercedes and was
You know
Parisian fashions and
elegant lighting and the West Germans had their babies and problems that they were pushing along and
these
One part of the German population
Was living on earth
the other
Population was living on Mars. And the people from Mars were coming to Earth for the first time is the only way to describe it
