The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2019 71 floodgates of reform in the rest of the Soviets’ European satellites. On Nov. 10, as Veterans Day was being celebrated in Washington, D.C., I returned home after a long bike ride to urgent messages frommy Bulgarian service that long-time Bulgarian Communist Party Chief Todor Zhivkov had fallen. Within a week the ruling Czechoslovak Communist Party also toppled, although it took almost a month for the govern- ment to be formally replaced. The hardest nut to crack proved to be Romania, where mass protests led to the arrest and execu- tion of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife on Christmas Day. In December I was able to visit Warsaw, where I formally opened the new VOA office; Budapest, where I signed a coop- eration agreement with my counterpart from Hungarian State Radio; and Prague, where I witnessed a four-mile-long line of Czechs dancing in the streets to celebrate the fall of the Com- munist government and had talks with the incoming head of Czechoslovak Radio, so new to his job that he did not know the location of anything in his office. It is still exhilarating to recall the excitement of that autumn. I believed then, as I do now, that the events of 1989 brought change, hope and opportunity to Europe similar in scope and magnitude to those of 1789. As with the French Revolution, not everything has worked out in the optimistic fashion many of us envisioned three decades ago with the end of the Cold War. There have been clear setbacks and reversals in some of the former Warsaw Pact states. Russia’s relations with the West are not what we had hoped when President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev concluded their groundbreak- ing Malta summit in December 1989. Even so, the events of 1989 brought real independence, politi- cal pluralism, market economies and elements of the rule of law to most of Central Europe. This, in my view, remains on balance a positive result; it was a privilege to have a front-row seat to witness this process. WilliamH. Hill is a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer who was chief of VOA’s European Division in 1989. After leaving the State Department, he became a professor of national security strategy at the National War College in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is No Place for Rus- sia: European Security Institutions Since 1989 (Columbia University Press, 2018). High School in a Divided City Laura D. Williams West Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany o n Nov. 9, 1989, I was a 14-year-old student at the John F. Kennedy German-American School in Berlin. My father was the political adviser at U.S. Mission Berlin, located in Clay Compound, the headquarters of the American Sector of the city. That night my parents had gone to see “Dead Poets Society” at the Outpost military theater. I was home alone, ostensibly doing homework but more likely watching MTV—still quite popular in 1989. Our boxy landline phone had a special red button on it. My parents told me that if I ever took a call on that line, it would be important, so I should use my nicest manners. When the red line rang that evening, I answered. It was the embassy in Bonn asking for my father. The caller told me in a very excited voice that East German travel restrictions had just been lifted, and that I needed to tell my parents as soon as they returned from their outing. I was not sure what this meant, so I called my German boyfriend. He told his parents, who were quite confused. They told us that we must be mistaken. We hung up, and I went back to my math homework and MTV. An hour later my boyfriend called back to say that we needed to go at once to the Brandenburg Gate, where a large crowd was gathering. It was bitterly cold that night, so I dressed warmly for the trip down- town via U-Bahn and S-Bahn. When we arrived, hundreds of people had gathered. Some with hammers were chipping at the wall, others were singing, still others were drinking and danc- ing. We walked around for hours, well into the morning. We met Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, who were setting up cameras to interview people. They were excited to find English-speaking students, and we had a lively discussion about what this change would mean for East and West Germany. The following days are a blur to me. We kids were excited that school was closed for several days, and everyone was calling family and friends to rejoice. On the second or third day of that delirious, long weekend, I climbed up on the wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate. My mom joined us, but my dad was in his office at Clay Compound, writing cables. Getting onto the wall was not easy, as it was some 12 feet tall, but many helping hands Getting onto the wall was not easy, as it was some 12 feet tall, but many helping hands boosted us. –Laura D. Williams