Transcript
Immediately, Without Delay
November 9, 1989
November 9, 1989 Thursday · 6:53 p.m.
For nearly an hour, a Communist Party spokesman, Günter Schabowski, had been reading announcements to the world's press. Near the end, he picked up a note he'd been handed on his way in. He hadn't read it through.
It said East Germans could apply to travel abroad. A reporter asked when the new rule started.
He leafed through his papers and answered. That comes into effect, according to my information, immediately, without delay.
Most East Germans watched West German TV. On the late news, the gates in the Wall stood wide open. They didn't. So people went to look.
At the Bornholmer Strasse crossing, thousands of people chanted, 'Open the gate!' The officer was told to let the loudest out and stamp their ID cards, so they could never return.
At about 11:30, with the crowd still growing, Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger opened the gate. The Wall had stood for twenty-eight years. It opened because of a note nobody had read carefully.
Six years earlier, the American president had called the Soviet Union an evil empire. So who ended the Cold War? Reagan's pressure? Reagan's diplomacy? Mikhail Gorbachev? Or the people on this wall?
1981
1981
Evil Empire
1981–1983
Ronald Reagan called détente a one-way street the Soviets had used for their own aims. His plan, as Richard Allen recalled it later: We win and they lose.
In London in 1982, he said Marx was right: a great economic crisis was coming.
It was coming to the Soviet Union. He would leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.
In 1983, speaking to evangelical ministers in Florida, he went further.
Ronald Reagan the aggressive impulses of an evil empire
Then he paid for the words. In five years, military spending rose by more than a third after inflation. New bombers, new missiles, more ships.
In June 1982, hundreds of thousands of people rallied in New York's Central Park against the arms race.
In March 1983, Reagan asked scientists to make nuclear missiles impotent and obsolete by shooting them down in flight. Critics named that plan Star Wars.
That November, NATO rehearsed a nuclear war. Some Soviet officials feared the exercise was cover for a real attack. A secret American review later warned that relations had been on a hair trigger.
The scientists moved their clock to three minutes to midnight.
"Freedom Fighters"
1981–1987
Reagan rarely sent American troops. He sent money and weapons to rebels fighting Soviet-backed governments, and called them freedom fighters.
In Afghanistan, the CIA armed rebels against the Soviet army. In Nicaragua, from Honduras, it armed the Contras against the leftist Sandinistas.
In El Salvador, an American-trained battalion killed nearly a thousand people in and around El Mozote. More than half were children. Reagan's officials dismissed the reports. A UN commission confirmed them in 1993.
On October 23, 1983, a truck bomb killed 241 American servicemen at their barracks in Beirut. They had been sent as peacekeepers. Within months, Reagan pulled the Marines out.
Two days later, U.S. troops invaded Grenada, where hard-liners had just murdered Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. Reagan gave two reasons: about 600 American medical students, and a new airport runway.
Ronald Reagan Grenada, we were told, was a friendly island paradise for tourism. Well, it wasn't. It was a Soviet-Cuban colony.
Was he right?
Most Americans cheered, and so did many Grenadians. The UN condemned the invasion.
Ronald Reagan And, you know, it didn't upset my breakfast at all.
In 1984, Congress banned military aid to the Contras.
So White House aides secretly sold missiles to Iran, for American hostages in Lebanon. They sent the profits, through Swiss accounts, to the Contras.
Ronald Reagan We did not—repeat—did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.
Ronald Reagan My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.
Trust the second one. It cost him something to say.
Enter Gorbachev
1982–1986
Meanwhile, Soviet leaders kept dying: Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, Yuri Andropov in 1984, Konstantin Chernenko in 1985. Vice President George Bush flew to all three funerals.
The next leader was 54, the youngest man on the Politburo: Mikhail Gorbachev.
He took over an economy that had nearly stopped growing.
Then, in 1986, the price of oil, its biggest export, fell by more than half. Oil and gas were about 60 percent of Soviet hard-currency earnings.
Glasnost let people say what was wrong. Perestroika loosened the planned economy. He needed to spend less on weapons. That meant a deal with Reagan.
They first met in Geneva in November 1985.
At dinner, Reagan explained that if aliens attacked the Earth from Halley's Comet, the whole world would unite. The American note-taker wrote it down.
They agreed on one sentence. A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
At Reykjavík, Iceland, in October 1986, they talked about getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether.
It broke down over one word. Gorbachev wanted Star Wars kept in the laboratory. Reagan refused.
Trust, but Verify
1987–1989
In June 1987, Reagan spoke at the Brandenburg Gate.
Ronald Reagan Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
His own State Department and National Security Council had tried to cut that line.
That December, Gorbachev came to Washington to sign the INF Treaty. It destroyed a whole class of nuclear missiles, American and Soviet. Reagan couldn't resist his favorite Russian proverb.
Ronald Reagan Dovorey no provorey — trust, but verify.
Mikhail Gorbachev and his interpreter You repeat that at every meeting.
Ronald Reagan I like it.
Now each side could check the other. Soviet inspectors watched American rocket motors burn in Texas. Americans watched a Soviet missile factory's gates for thirteen years.
In May 1988, inside the Kremlin, a reporter asked if this was still an evil empire. 'No,' he said. 'You are talking about another time, another era.'
At the UN in December 1988, Gorbachev promised to cut half a million troops. Freedom of choice is a universal principle to which there should be no exceptions. Eastern Europe was listening.
In February 1989, the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan. About fifteen thousand Soviet soldiers and around a million Afghans had died.
Open the Gate
1989
Eastern Europeans had been pushing for years.
In Poland, a shipyard electrician named Lech Wałęsa led a union called Solidarity. Martial law crushed it in 1981, but it survived underground.
In June 1989, Solidarity won almost every seat it was allowed to contest. The next morning, the prime minister told his party, "We had a false assessment of the situation."
The same day, China's army crushed the protests in and around Tiananmen Square. Hundreds were killed. Some estimates run above a thousand.
Everyone in Eastern Europe knew it could happen to them. Instead, Hungary cut its fence with Austria, and East Germans poured through.
In Leipzig in October, 70,000 people marched with candles, chanting, "We are the people." Nobody gave the order to shoot.
Moscow wasn't coming. A Soviet spokesman called it the Sinatra Doctrine. Hungary and Poland are doing it their way.
Then came Schabowski's note.
Four causes met on this wall tonight.
Pressure raised the cost of the arms race. A failing economy pushed Gorbachev to reform, and to make deals. Reagan's diplomacy gave him a partner. When he refused to send tanks, Eastern Europeans took their chance. Historians still argue about which mattered most. The exam asks you to explain how they worked together.
In Washington, a reporter told President Bush he didn't seem elated.
George H. W. Bush I am not an emotional kind of guy.
He didn't want to provoke the Soviet military.
The Last Flag
1989–1991
After the Wall, Communist governments fell fast. Only in Romania did it turn violent. More than a thousand people died.
In October 1990, Germany became one country again, inside NATO, with Gorbachev's consent.
In August 1991, hard-liners arrested Gorbachev and sent tanks into Moscow.
Boris Yeltsin, Russia's elected president, climbed onto a tank and called for resistance. Three young men were killed. The coup collapsed.
The coup was meant to save the Soviet Union. It finished it.
On Christmas night, Gorbachev resigned on live television. His pen ran dry, so he borrowed one from the president of CNN.
The atomic scientists moved their clock to seventeen minutes to midnight. It has never been farther.
One Superpower
1989–1999
The Cold War had told American foreign policy what it was for. Now the United States was the only superpower.
What was all that power for?
In December 1989, Bush sent troops into Panama to seize its dictator. Manuel Noriega had been a CIA informant. Indictments charged him with drug trafficking.
Hundreds of Panamanians died.
George H. W. Bush This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.
In August 1990, Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait.
Bush built a coalition of thirty-four countries. The Security Council approved the use of force. The Senate agreed by five votes.
The ground war took a hundred hours.
George H. W. Bush By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Saddam Hussein stayed in power. American troops stayed in Saudi Arabia.
In Somalia, American troops were guarding famine relief. In October 1993, a battle in Mogadishu killed eighteen Americans and hundreds of Somalis. Clinton pulled out.
In 1994, extremists who controlled Rwanda's government murdered some eight hundred thousand people. Most of them were Tutsi. It took about a hundred days.
The United States stayed out. Its officials avoided the word genocide.
…who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.
At Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb forces murdered about eight thousand Muslim men and boys. NATO bombed. The peace was settled at Dayton, Ohio. In 1999, NATO bombed Serbia over Kosovo.
There were new partners, too, from the White House lawn to the Pacific.
In 1999, three former Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO. George Kennan, the father of containment, called it the beginning of a new cold war.
Policeman, partner, or bystander? Americans argued about it all through the 1990s. Bush had laid out his new world order to Congress on September 11, 1990.