Why the Berlin Wall came down

WE HAD WON. That was how it felt 25 years ago as we gathered in front of TV sets to watch exultant East Germans bash and smash at the wall that had caged them in their sector of the city since 1961.

At least 100 people were killed trying to get past that wall. About 15,000 were caught, and stopped. The reason the wall had been built in the first place was the East German's government inability to stop 3.5 million people who fled.

But then cracks began to appear in the Iron Curtain. Puppet regimes supporting Russian authority in Poland and Hungary had crumbled.

And then came Nov. 9, 1989. George H.W Bush had been president for about 10 months. Ronald Reagan had finished a triumphant eight years that saw the Nixon-Ford-Carter malaise lift and the United States regain its mojo. The stock market was up, unemployment was down, and ….we were right. Damn it, we were right and freedom was right and Bruce Springsteen was right and walls were crumbling and democracy would prevail and, not to sound overly patriotic but it was an awesome moment, and awesome evening, to be an American.
And to be with Germans.

I was 18 that year, and living with an old friend who was getting his master's degree in international business at the University of South Carolina. The program required students to learn a foreign language (students that studied each language were part of "tracks," like Spanish track and Arabic track) and study abroad for a year.

And it enrolled a fair number of exchange students from other countries.
Including Berndt and Clement, "the Germans."

Berndt and Clement held half the parties, and attended the other half. They lived together off campus, and hailed from West Germany. They were smart, cosmopolitan, good-looking, always a bit beer-sodden (or at least it seemed that way) but never drunk.

And it was at their home, at their party, that I and all my friends at the time watched the Germans of Berlin beat at the wall with hammers and pickaxes and whatever came to hand.

I don't remember ever being more certain of the triumph of the American way. Less than a year later, we would bomb Iraq in defense of Kuwait, and I remember sitting in a bar with some of those same people, cheering that, too.

But that bombing didn't solve much, and 13 years later I was in Baghdad as a journalist, in bunkers rather than bars, as the United States continued to try to straighten out Iraq."

I still believe in the American way. I think most of us do. We may now know a little more about how much nations we would see be free need to do for themselves, and how hard it is to establish such a society for them.

But I believe democracy and capitalism can spread. I believe in justice, and liberty and even the inevitable march of humankind toward those goals.

But I don't know whether I've ever felt it more deeply than I did on Nov. 9, 1989, cheering the freeing of a people and the triumph of liberty in the company of Berndt and Clement. They had come to America, and loved it, and were watching their own people grasp a piece of the same type of freedom we had modeled for the world, in their own hometown, and the tears, and cheers, and beers did flow.