The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

64 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL but without Soviet employees—a lingering consequence of the 1988 Lonetree scandal. By November, we had just driven our personal car down from Helsinki and were beginning to settle in comfortably. Our Moscow apartment came with all of the usual listening devices, a (ridiculously inexpensive) rented upright piano and a TV that could receive CNN in English over the air with just a “rabbit ears” antenna. The workload in P&C was heavy, in part because of a non- stop VIP visit schedule, but also because I was charged with maintaining the embassy’s administrative relationships with more than 100 resident American journalists. In those days, when properly registered, journalists received special embassy privileges, including medical care, APO mail and—in a city with few restaurants—coveted access to the embassy’s snack bar. I never served at a post, before or after, where they tried so hard to get on my good side. In any case, on Nov. 9, 1989, and for many evenings there- after, I was able to follow the earthshaking events in Berlin from the comfort of my living room. CNN’s coverage of the fall of the wall (much better than Soviet coverage) let me watch German civilians hammering away at the wall in real time. My resident American journalist charges, of course, were doing the same thing, and many were soon on their way to cover the Berlin events in person, while I stayed put in Moscow. Thirty years later, my main memory of that time is of one American journalist, an energetic young woman who had arrived in Moscow not long after me and who had just begun the process of registering for her embassy privileges. I recall her confiding to me that she had a husband back in New York who wanted her to give up the foreign correspondent life and come home to start a family. She wasn’t interested. Before I got her completely registered with the embassy— it took some time—she, too, was off to cover events in Berlin. When she returned, a few weeks later, she presented me with a small piece of the Berlin Wall. I still have and treasure this personal souvenir, even if she gave it to me just to curry favor. Not long after that she decamped from Moscow for the appar- ently greater excitement of the fighting in the Balkans where— I later learned from another journalist—she was killed by a piece of shrapnel that had ripped through her. I thought of her husband back in New York. James L. Bullock, who was serving in Moscow when the wall came down, retired from active duty in 2009 after a 30-year career in the Foreign Service. He and his wife, Carole, live on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. A Vacation from History Ray Orley Hanover, Federal Republic of Germany I n early November 1989, I was director of the U.S. Informa- tion Agency’s Amerika Haus in Hanover, West Germany. It had been gray, cold and rainy for days, and Music Days U.S.A.—a two-week festival of American music that I dreamed up—had just come to an end. The festival comprised 15 separate events ranging from Samuel Barber performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Lorin Maazel and solo recitals by American singers employed at the Lower Saxony State Opera to performances by rock and country groups (American and German) resident in the area and a real hoedown-style square dance with caller and audience participation. Altogether, some 6,000 Germans attended. This rather ambitious project could not have been achieved without the valiant efforts of my excellent German staff and the goodwill of many local contacts, as well as more than six months of planning, organizing, phoning, wheedling and beg- ging—all on a close-to-nonexistent budget and in addition to the Haus’ everyday activities. So when it was finally over, I was beyond exhausted—and it was still cold and rainy in Hanover. I headed for a travel agent, looking for a last-minute trip to somewhere, anywhere warm and sunny, and came up with a week for my wife and myself on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Departure: Saturday, Nov. 11. But history intervened. For many weeks there had been rumors, rumblings, even demonstrations (in East Berlin!). And then, on Nov. 9, the unimaginable happened. The wall was coming down, dumbfounding all the experts, including of course myself. Amerika Haus Hanover staff and library patrons huddled around the available televisions. Eventually, AH closed for the rest of the day. I rushed home. Wendy and I hugged each other, utterly glued to the TV, watching hundreds of people laughing, singing, dancing, clambering up the wall. What to do, what to do? We could hop in the Jetta, speed (no German limits) the 180 autobahn miles to Berlin and join the dancing, the beer guzzling, the rejoicing …maybe not the wall-climbing. Previously, because we had diplomatic plates, the advance planning and red tape involved in that drive would have been monstrous. Now, we heard, the border was unmanned, all the way to the Brandenburg Gate and beyond. But there were those tickets to Tenerife, our flight departing very early Saturday morning. Hanover (and probably Berlin)