A Lucky Life Interrupted

A Lucky Life Interrupted by Tom Brokaw

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Authors: Tom Brokaw
West and then happily return to their old lives in the East.
    I ran downstairs and yelled at some American reporters puzzling over their press conference notes, “It’sdown, the wall. Schabowski just confirmed East Germans can exit through any border crossing.”
    By the time we got to Checkpoint Charlie the word was out on the streets of East Germany and the GDR guard didn’t bother looking through our car when we stopped for inspection. I asked what he thought of the news. He offered a small smile and said, “I am not paid to think.”
    At other crossing points, notably the Bornholmer Strasse bridge and checkpoint, GDR guards were attempting to deal with the rapid buildup of East Germans who wanted to go through the wall. They were getting little or no guidance from their superiors. The guards briefly wondered whether they were expected to shoot the demonstrators.
    At Rockefeller Center in New York my colleague Garrick Utley, a longtime student of German history and politics, got in the anchor chair and interviewed me on my car phone. Others made sure the satellite booking was still good, and I raced to our office to prepare for that evening.
    We began to get reports of crowds of West German students congregating on their side of the wall at the Brandenburg Gate, which was also our satellite transmission site. By the time I arrived it was like a pep rally, with the western students shouting at the young on the eastern side, in effect, “Come on over!”
    GDR guards unleashed their water hoses, driving the students from the wall for a short time, but when the water stopped, the students returned, resuming their recruiting cries to the young in the East. We were very close to broadcast time and still we didn’t have video of East Germans actually crossing.
    Then one of our cameramen arrived from the Bornholmer Strasse bridge, breathless, with the video we needed. The guards had decided not to shoot and, getting no coherent direction from their superiors, had opened the bridge to the West. The wall was breached.
    At the Brandenburg Gate the water hoses trickled down as the West German students refused to leave, keeping up their shouted encouragement to those gathered on the eastern side. Then, suddenly, a young East German popped atop the wall, cheered by his generational new friends from the West, looking at once startled, apprehensive, and then happy when he was not hauled down by GDR guards.
    At NBC News we had a worldwide television exclusive and I thought, “My god, this video will be around forever.” So I discarded the backcountry jacket I’d brought to Germany and relieved my colleague Mike Boettcher of a handsome blue topcoat he’d just bought in London.
    It was so noisy and generally chaotic that just beforewe went on the air I told Bill Wheatley, the executive producer, and our control room producer, Cheryl Gould, in New York, “Just stay with me. I’m going to have to adlib most of this.” We opened with the unexpected scenes of throngs of East Germans on foot and in their tiny Lada automobiles, pouring through the wall at several checkpoints. It was a television moment that twinned the historic if confusing policy change with the visual effect of the announcement.
    I stayed on the air after
Nightly
for updates and a late evening special report in which I asked for an opportunity to reflect on the changes I had witnessed as a journalist in my twenty-seven years on the job.
    For me, 1968 had always been the year in bold print, when Lyndon Johnson was forced to step aside as president because his Vietnam policies caused such a revolt in the Democratic Party that he was in danger of losing the nomination to Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. Then Senator Robert F. Kennedy entered the race and was assassinated just after midnight on the day following his victory in the California primary.
    Earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered in Memphis as he prepared for a rally on behalf of striking

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