I was a freshman in college, watching this Peter Jennings broadcast with my roommates in 75 Holder Hall with a sense of complete astonishment that the world could shift so suddenly– all the while trying to adjust the rabbit ears of our early 1970s TV to try to get better reception.
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neurodoc says:
Before the Berlin Wall came down, I would see the occasional car with a bumper sticker demanding that the Soviet Union set free the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia). I would think there was a believer in miracles, because surely the Soviet Union would be around for generations to come, if not longer, and wasn’t about to cut those countries loose. Well, after the Wall came down, it came to pass that those countries and the others of Eastern Europe regained their independence, and in astoundingly short order. Since then, I am less certain generally of what is impossible in world developments. (And I never contemplated that Communism would be superceded as the greatest threat to Western Civilization by radical Islam.)
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November 9, 2009, 10:05 pmJohn Moore says:
I was a Reagan Conservative at the time (well, still am) and had been watching the cold ward for a long time. I knew about the horrors of communism, but never expected the sudden victory. It was truly a magnificent moment. Reagan, btw, entered office intending to topple the wall.
Two decades before that, I took a tour of East Berlin — after passing through the wall at Check Point Charlie. The sad mess on the Eastern side told the whole story. There were Berliners, in shabby clothes, just standing there looking at the wall blocking their freedom. Also on the tour was a beautiful monument to Soviet war dead — East Germany was trashed out, but the memorial was well taken care of.
We drove through a hole in the “Iron Curtain” not long after the wall fell, stopped, and knocked off and took home a piece of it. It is a treasured piece of history.
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November 9, 2009, 10:53 pmChrisTS says:
So, OK was a first year college student when I was in graduate school — and fairly far along. Ouch.
We philosophy grad students and some others watched TV that night with a visiting German student, whose cousins and aunt and uncle were all on the eastern side of Berlin. He had never met his cousins and had only met his uncle once or twice. I think the uncle was his mother’s brother; they had simply gotten separated at the end of the war and then were kept apart by the division of the country.
‘Tears of joy’ is a cliche until you see someone truly break down and weep with happiness. We stayed up all that night, and the next day two of our professors paid for our friend to fly home to the newly united Germany on the first available flight. I saw him again a few years ago at a conference, and he immediately started to reminisce about those 30 or so hours.
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November 9, 2009, 11:21 pmChrisTS says:
P.S. I should add that our friend’s mother and uncle both died before the Wall came down. Still, he did get to meet and come to know his cousins.
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November 9, 2009, 11:23 pmgeokstr says:
I read today that neither Obama’s video statement nor Hillary’s speech nor ABC News (in a 4 page story) mentions Reagan at all. What a coincidence.
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November 9, 2009, 11:50 pmSplunge says:
A college freshman, huh? So OK is a relative whippersnapper: explains a lot, that does. I was about to file my PhD dissertation at Berkeley. Contra others, I don’t remember feeling very surprised. I think it had become increasingly clear through the late 80s that the Soviet Union was just plumb running out of gas, increasingly threadbare and desparate, the pretensions to parity with the West becoming increasingly delusional and laughable. (They were only really credible as long as the Democrat-midwifed national malaise of the 70s persisted, anyway.)
I remember thinking the only explanation for Gorby after the long stupefying stolidity of Brezhnev was near panic amongst the Party elite. Things were, it would seem, even worse than the silly smoking Trabants and wistful would-be defectors in each Western tour group would suggest.
When the Soviets failed to crush Solidarity I think most close observers felt the end was only a matter of time. What was unknown was whether the Soviets would go out with a bang or whimper. In retrospect I give full marks to George Bush the Elder for making it clear the United States would like to see the Soviet Union dead but had no existential quarrel with Russia. My impression is that this allowed Russian patriots to shed their hated (even by themselves) Soviet skin, and the USSR to die fairly unlamented by anyone, here or there.
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November 10, 2009, 12:39 amLarryA says:
I remember from high school when the wall went up. It was, for me, a long 28 years before it came down. I was very glad Reagan was president. IMHO he was the reason the USSR went out with a whimper instead of a bang.
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November 10, 2009, 1:00 amNeil C. Reinhardt says:
While I served in the active reserves and/or the National Guard for six years and on active duty for over three more
years, the closest I came to being in combat was when the Russkis were building the Berlin wall. (Come to think of it, their buliding the wall, got my service time extended by three months.)
In those days, one of our Battle Groups was always on ‘alert status’ and this day it was my unit, B Battery, 321st FA. 101st Airborne Div. (We were the 105 mm howizer fire support for the 502nd BG)
Anywho, while we were on our morning PT run (doing the “Airborne Shuffle” which is faster than walking and slower than “double time”) this jeep came screeching up and slammed on its breaks, Our Duty officer yelled from the jeep saying something to the effect of:
“We are on alert, Double time back to the barracks”
Which we promptly did. We saddled up all of our gear as quickly as possible, & drove to the Air Field at Ft. Campbell, Ky. We were issued our parachutes, live ammo and silk maps of Berlin.
Then we taxied out on to the runway and sat there with the engines running for some period of time. Eventully, the planes taxied back to the stagging area, we de-planed and returned to our barracks.
As I am sure I would not be writing this had we jumped into Berlin, I’m very glad it was as close to combat as I ever got.
When the wall came down. I was back in Colorado visiting my dad. We sat there watching while being both very amazed it had happened and very happy it was. It truly was a historical moment.
Last, in my view, the former Liberal, Ronald Reagan and his polices was the
MAIN reason the USSR failed.
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November 10, 2009, 1:08 amSplunge says:
Thanks for your service, Neil.
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November 10, 2009, 4:13 amOperationCounterstrike says:
Please. This is old news. An occasion for Reaganolators to worship their celluloid-and-tv image.
And let’s just be honest: we didn’t have much to do with the collapse of USSR nor with the Berlin Wall coming down. Communism collapsed because all economic activity was illegal activity. If USA had been annihilated by flying saucers any time after the election of Jimmy Carter, it might have sped the collapse of USSR up by three years; no more.
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November 10, 2009, 5:15 amSk says:
I was in the army in Germany at the time, and had a colleague who had a very interesting experience...
The weekend the wall came down, he just happened to have scheduled a family vacation in Berlin. Thus, by chance, he witnessed, or lived, the fall of the Berlin Wall, first hand, real time.
Which is a neat coincidence, but certainly not unique. What made it unique, was that a few weeks later, he decided, on a whim, to take his family to Prague-on the exact weekend of the Velvet Revolution.
So, not a journalist, not a college student, not a kid touring Europe, not somebody who is paid to travel, not someone who is employed in international affairs or pursuing the news, but a middle class family, with kids (I don’t remember, they were probably between 7 and 15 years old), while working a full time job, managed to coincidentally experience first hand two of the most significant events of the late 20th century.
Sk
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November 10, 2009, 7:36 amDoug says:
I remember watching this on TV. Several months later, before East Germany joined with West Germany, I travel to Europe on a preplanned trip with friends. We drove across the nonexistent border and were amazed at the shabbiness of the border towns. It looked as if WWII had only recently happened. I would like to go back today and see these places.
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November 10, 2009, 8:28 amHouston Lawyer says:
I was not too surprised when the wall came down. For months, the nightly news showed images of East Germans being allowed to leave the Eastern Block through other Warsaw Pact countries. I recall trains full of Germans headed for the West throwing their worthless communist money out the windows. In addition, there were nightly marches of protestors in East Germany numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Nonetheless, it was with pure joy that I watched the celebration in Berlin on the night the wall fell.
What I felt was truly ironic though was that all of a sudden it was politically correct to espouse anticommunist sentiment here in the US. Before that date, such sentiments were frowned upon by all the right sort of folks.
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November 10, 2009, 8:46 amDave N says:
OperationCounterstrike provides the expected liberal talking point that the Reagan policies had absolutely nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In fact, the arms build-up pushed by President Reagan caused the Soviets to feel the need to respond in kind, ultimately bankrupting an intellectually bankrupt regime.
The Soviets pushed the idea of a nuclear weapons freeze (which was a major leftist cause in the early 80s) because such a freeze would have stopped the arms race that the Soviets felt obliged to respond to and which was providing severe economic pressures on the Soviet economy.
I just love the historical revisionism of leftists like Counterstrike: both wrong and delusional.
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November 10, 2009, 9:33 amShelbyC says:
OperationCounterStrike, yer knee just kinda jerked.
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November 10, 2009, 10:09 amMark Field says:
I was there 6 weeks ago, and there’s still a lot of shabbiness, less so in Berlin than in other towns (Dresden, say). Plus some holes in the ground that you’d never see in a Western city. But a lot of rebuilding has taken place in the last 20 years thanks to the fact that the West German economy has had the resources for that.
I know this view has taken on religious significance on the Right, but I don’t find it convincing or true. The Soviet economy was failing because it was impossible for it to succeed — their economic theory was a failure, and it was only a matter of time before the economy collapsed. The identity of the particular president when the Wall fell was and is irrelevant.
What was important was the policy of containment initiated under Truman and continued by every subsequent president (including Reagan). All those presidents properly ignored the actual right wing policy of those days, namely “rollback”. That would have caused a war far more destructive than even the Cold War (and had we been smart enough, we could have avoided both Korea and Vietnam).* Reagan, for all his talk, in practice simply continued Truman’s policy and Bush Sr. was the lucky beneficiary of the combined effects of that policy and the failure of Soviet economics.
The only real issue, IMO, is whether the US actually delayed the collapse by foolishly spending much more on its military than necessary for the containment policy (not just in Vietnam and Korea, but for a nuclear arsenal far larger than necessary). As every good libertarian here would agree, this government spending inefficiently re-directed resources away from the private sector, causing our GDP to grow more slowly than otherwise. Since it was the failure of the Soviet economy in relative terms which led to the collapse, it seems plausible that better US economic performance would have hastened the day.
*I say we probably could have avoided Korea because Acheson’s stupidity seems to have led to the go-ahead for the invasion. It might have happened anyway, of course, given the less than sane personalities involved.
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November 10, 2009, 10:10 amOld cold warrior says:
Mark Field and anyone else –
Putting aside the question of whether Reagan caused or sped up the fall (or the Pope or Gorbachev or Walesa or any other causes/people), what are your thoughts on the separate question of about the Reagan/left/right differences in who predicted it as possible?
It seemed to me that Reagan and others of his worldview spent the 80s saying that Communism COULD fall. For example, in one early speech (I think Notre Dame around ’82?), Reagan said something about how Communism’s last pages were being written, would be on ashbin of history, etc. (turning around the Marxist line about ashbin or dustbin or whatever).
Most or all of the liberal world pooh-poohed that talk as silly pie-in-the-sky stuff. Then, after the fall, most quickly changed tune to say “of course it was tottering on the bring, it was obviously about to fall, etc.” But I never heard anyone significant admit “well, I think it was internal economic rot and not Reagan’s pressure, but he did see that coming and I did not.”
So, again, assume it was internal rot and not nudged by Reagan one iota — was there not a big ideological divide in predicting, and if so (1) why? and (2) why no mea culpas?
And if you do not see such a divide, can you point me to any significant liberals who agreed that the end was in sight in 1980–85?
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November 10, 2009, 10:28 amDotar Sojat says:
I was four years out of law school after 11 years in the Army. A friend with whom I had served was visiting and we decided to call another mutual friend who was then a LTC stationed in Berlin. We got him through the information operator just as he and his wife had returned from the wall. Unable to sleep with all of the celebration, they had taken a couple of bottles of champagne and some plastic cups down to the wall and passed out champagne to the East Germans streaming through. He had aimed his career at being the US Military Attache in Moscow and was slated to go Moscow in that position upon his promotion to COL. “The irony of it,” he said, “just as I get there, the Cold War is over.” I also recall being on duty at a border station in West Germany, and witnessing an East German soldier being shot as he tossed his weapon and made a dash for freedom. The East German border then, with its guard towers, machine guns, razor wire and minefields, all to keep people in, was the most obscene thing I had ever seen.
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November 10, 2009, 10:34 amMark Field says:
I don’t personally recall predictions about the imminent fall of communism, which doesn’t mean they weren’t made, it just means I’d have to do research to find out if anyone made them. What I recall in general from living through, say, the late 70s and early 80s is that the right wing insisted that (a) the Soviets were much stronger than the Carter Administration said (a position that we know today to have been wrong); and (b) that we needed to spend more to combat this threat. All that strikes me as somewhat inconsistent with predictions of imminent demise.
The claim that the arms spending of the 80s caused the fall was not commonly, to my recollection anyway, advertised as the goal at the time. I first heard it after the fall of the wall by people whose purpose was pretty obviously political (and thus discredited in my eyes).
I hope, btw, that the distinction I’m making is clear. I’m not casting aspersions on Reagan or Bush Sr. I’m just denying that they deserve any extra credit for following a policy that had been laid out 40 years previous and followed by every subsequent president.
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November 10, 2009, 10:53 amDerHahn says:
From NRO’s The Corner (in partial answer to ocw’s questions.
Not Everybody Applauded Reagan’s Berlin Speech [John J. Pitney Jr.]
In The Ambition and the Power (p. 486) John Barry reports how House Speaker Jim Wright (D., Texas) reacted to President Reagan’s speech at the Berlin Wall:
Wright’s face hardened. Reagan’s declaration had destroyed any chance of the wall coming down, since Gorbachev could not appear to bow to him. Wright fumed, “It just makes me have utter contempt for Reagan. He spoiled the chance for a dramatic breakthrough in relations between our two countries It bespeaks his pettiness and self-centeredness. He just couldn’t bear Gorbachev doing it of his own volition.”
— John J. Pitney Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. With James Ceaser and Andrew Busch, he is co-author of Epic Journey: The 2008 Elections and American Politics.
link
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November 10, 2009, 10:57 amdrunkdriver says:
I love how Merkel yesterday first thanked– GORBACHEV. I might not expect her to thank the other Nato powers who protected Germany and Western Europe all those decades; but to go out of her way to praise the last dictator– for what, not going mad and starting a nuclear war?
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November 10, 2009, 11:03 amMuskrat says:
A couple of years after the Wall fell, I was working in government and a morning report I was helping prepare had an item on the last Soviet Army unit pulling out of the then-reunified Germany. The analyst felt it was important to note the event, but he had to flag it because in those 2–3 years the Soviet military presence in Central Europe had gone from a constant source of worry to being a historical curiosity. Now the Baltics are part of NATO.
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November 10, 2009, 11:16 amHouston Lawyer says:
A lot of forgetfullness on this thread regarding those who opposed Reagan. The left treated the Soviet Union as a power that would always be there. Anything that Reagan or the conservatives did that challenged the Soviets was a threat or provocation. We must not make the bear angry, it must be appeased.
In this mold we have Obama playing the role of Carter, with our adversaries giving him the same level of respect.
Only after the wall fell did lefties start to say that the collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable.
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November 10, 2009, 11:30 amShelbyC says:
Second (or third) the other folks on this thread. Reagan not only argued that it could fall, he did everything he could to make it fall. The reaction on the left was not, “it’s unnecessary to make it fall, it will fall anyway” it was “OMFG, Reagan’s insane! He thinks we can win the cold war! He’s going to get us all killed!”
So it seems a little disingenuous to hear those folks arguing now that Reagan’s efforts were unnecessary. But I guess that’s the best they’ve got, isn’t it?
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November 10, 2009, 11:45 ammischief says:
I don’t remember the fall itself so much as the next day.
Because I had been thinking “this is all the lull before the storm” all along, expecting repressions at any moment.
And the next day I read an article about it that said that 99% of the East Berliners who had crossed the wall had gone back to go to bed.
So — they must have been really confident that the next day they could cross it again. And if they believed it was real. . . .
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November 10, 2009, 11:54 amMark Field says:
ShelbyC, how’s that knee condition? :)
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November 10, 2009, 12:01 pmDuffy Pratt says:
I was happy about the fall of Communism, but had some misgivings about a re-united Germany. German unification had never been such a great thing for the rest of the world. So I had mixed feelings about the wall coming down.
Does anyone have any evidence of any time where Reagan said that he would destroy the Soviet Union by encouraging it to spend itself into oblivion? He gets all the credit for it nowadays. And perhaps he should. If it was the goal of his policy, then its also a goal that you would probably not want to broadcast to the enemy, else it might not take the bait. But are there any private records that have been released that show that this was part of a plan?
My impression back then was that Reagan and the right wing people thought the Soviet Union was a strong, enduring threat. And that we must be ever vigilant against it. The idea was that we were actually somewhat behind in the arms race, that there were windows of vulnerability, and we needed to spend more to catch up. I never for a moment thought that are military spending policies were part of an orchestrated attempt to make the Soviet Union collapse. Also, I find it hard to believe that this was our policy, given the utter astonishment of the intelligence communities about the internal weakness of the Soviet Union when the collapse did happen.
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November 10, 2009, 12:29 pmpete says:
I went to Berlin in 1994 to visit an aunt who had lived in West Berlin in the 80’s and I was amazed by the contrast between the two halves of the city. This was 5 years later and you could still tell which side was which just by looking at the conditions of the buildings, with the western half being nicer than the equivalent areas in most big cities I had been to in America and the Eastern part significantly worse. There were construction cranes all over the place at the time so I doubt that this is still the case 15 years later, but if East Berlin was one of the least worst places to live in the Eastern Bloc that is pretty depressing.
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November 10, 2009, 12:42 pmSk says:
“I went to Berlin in 1994 to visit an aunt who had lived in West Berlin in the 80’s and I was amazed by the contrast between the two halves of the city.”
I was in East Berlin right around the fall (just before, and about six months afterwards). I recall seeing damage on the side of a building that appeared to be the trace of a machine gun-a series of bulletholes roughly horizontal, but rising slightly from one side to the next. We assumed it was still damage from the Battle of Berlin in 1945.
Sk
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November 10, 2009, 12:53 pmMark Field says:
This is consistent with what I saw. East Berlin must have looked downright awful most of the time after WWII. There was some rebuilding, of course, but pictures show large piles of rubble and open space in what was once the heart of a large and powerful pre-war capital city. That in itself is a pretty strong condemnation of communism. And as I say, you can still today see open space (not parks, empty spaces where buildings should be) in a central city area, which is unimaginable in, say, London or NY.
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November 10, 2009, 1:22 pmDennis N says:
A f(r)iend of mine happened to be in Berlin and at the Wall when it came down. He has some great photos of him and his pals, arm in arm with some East German border guards, wearing each others’ hats. The think that was striking was the look of absolute panic on the border guards’ faces. You could almost see the thought balloon,
“Oh my God, this had better work. I think we’re all going to be shot in the morning.”
Fortunately, it did work.
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November 10, 2009, 1:45 pmShelbyC says:
:-). I don’t know if it was him or not, I’ll I’m saying is that it sounds kinda funny for the folks who were saying he was nuts for thinking that the cold war was winnable (I was one for a while, but I was in high school) are now saying that no action on his part was needed.
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November 10, 2009, 1:53 pmDotar Sojat says:
In order to disparage the idea that Reagan had anything significant to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, the lefties argue that communism didn’t work anyway and was doomed to failure. I kinda’ like that.
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November 10, 2009, 2:05 pmMark Field says:
This strikes me as odd. The whole point of the containment doctrine adopted by Truman was that the Cold War would be won in the long run. That’s pretty much what containment does, it isolates the problem until it goes away. Now, I don’t doubt there were those who had given up on the idea of winning after 40 years, but I don’t believe these were the people in charge of foreign policy at any time (if someone has a Carter or Brezinski [I never can spell that name] quote, then obviously I’m wrong).
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November 10, 2009, 3:27 pmMark Field says:
Those of us on the non-communist left never had this issue. We were always telling the commies they were fools.
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November 10, 2009, 3:28 pmJoan in Juneau says:
I was at home with my young children when The Wall came down. I cried like a baby and cried and cried. I had been in Europe a couple years before, and we traveled from East Germany into West Germany on the way to USSR where I spent 2 wks. I remember the feeling as we crossed the checkpoint. It was dark and gloomy, almost like it was sucking the life out of me. It took a couple hours for that feeling to leave. On the way back I can remember the anticipation to cross back into the West and how I felt when we were finally through the checkpoint again. It was like the weight of the world had lifted and the grey clouds were gone again. When I returned to the US, people asked me if I would go back and although I enjoyed the USSR, I saw a lot there that made my heart bleed for them but the idea of having to cross into the West again and those feelings would have kept me from going again. We also went to Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechslovakia, and Romania and it was almost 2 months before I crossed back to the West but I can just imagine the feelings many had when The Wall came down. I still want to cry when I think about that day 20 yrs ago. I also felt on that day that we had a president who truly understood what America and Freedom were all about.
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November 10, 2009, 3:45 pmLarryA says:
Half true. The USSR certainly collapsed because communism doesn’t work. But there are a number of ways for an empire to collapse. One is to stave off the inevitable by attacking its neighbors or enemies. The soviets had an extensive nuclear arsenal, and had Jimmy Carter still been president I believe they would have been mightily tempted to use it. They could have knocked the U.S. out and trashed Europe. Would Carter have risked deepening the projected nuclear winter by retaliating, knowing the communist leaders were all in shelters? I think they would have gambled on his reticence. Once everyone was reduced to their economic level or below it would have been business as usual.
But they knew without a doubt that Reagan would have launched everything we had, leaving what was left of the USSR vulnerable to the Chinese. So they folded instead of playing hardball.
I researched the economics for a short story I published, and interviewed a woman who grew up in East Berlin and later emigrated to the U.S.
After the wall came down she went across the border just to see what was there. She said there was really one thing that made her decide not to return to the East.
In West Berlin she walked into a store anyone could shop in and selected a box of a dozen manufactured disposable sanitary napkins from a shelf full of different kinds. The whole process took less than ten minutes. In the East, she still had to wait three or four hours in a line to purchase, at a much higher cost, cotton wool, cloth, and thread to hand-make her own pads.
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November 10, 2009, 4:36 pmys says:
Thanks to all for their recollections from observation points different in time and place. Mine is the case directly affected by that big extension of the wall known as the Iron Curtain. It separated me from my elderly parents for 9 long years. In 1987, as a harbinger of further openings to come, that separation ended.
It is all the more painful when prominent hacks credit the fall of communism to the nuclear freeze crowd, of all things. Hard as it is to believe, here is the pointer to an opinion piece in the Boston Globe that does exactly that. (He also credits his reticent general father, for good measure, but I don’t care about that part).
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November 10, 2009, 5:12 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
1. Hi Splunge, Thank YOU!
And you are most Welcome.
2. Hey “Operation Counter Strike”
Your comments are Total BS! Your post shows you have NO Damn CLUE!
First Child, Reagan WAS, as were many of us, a IDIOT Liberal before living long enough to really understand what the hell goes on in the world.
Next, he was a GREAT Governor and damn good President
Reagan’s support of those fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, his build up of U.S. forces and his insistence our building on Star Wars is MOSTLY what caused the Russians to go broke.
This led to the disintegration of the USSR.
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November 10, 2009, 5:37 pmyankee says:
There is no evidence whatsoever that Reagan or his advisors had a plan to bankrupt the Soviet economy through arms races. Rather, Reagan’s policies were motivated by the need to combat the supposedly enormous Soviet military threat. As it happened, the Soviet military wasn’t remotely as powerful as Reagan and his advisors thought.
Perhaps the USSR really did fall because it was unable to keep up with American military spending. But if that’s what happened it’s something Reagan blundered into while trying to do something completely different.
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November 10, 2009, 7:03 pmJohn Moore says:
When I was there in 1966, it was still rubble. The old government buildings were bombed out shells. At one point where we stopped to look at the wall from the West, there were a few concrete floors still standing, with Vopos pointing their machine guns at us from their sandbagged nests.
Our guide (the *east german* one) told us that the scaffolding we saw on the buildings in downtown East Berlin had been there since shortly after the war, and were just for show. No repairs to the mess were in progress.
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November 10, 2009, 7:08 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
Well Larry A,
Sorry, part of whart yo said is in error!
Due to the extreamly difficulty of our getting accurate intelligence on what they actually had, we did, for a period of time, THINK the Ruskis had all those A bombs as well as a effective means to deliver a sufficient amount of them to our shores.
On the other hand. due to both our very open society and their intelligence, the Russians KNEW the U.S. was WAY ahead of them in them in not only the number and size of our A bombs, our ability to effectively deliver them also far exceed theirs.
Their knowledge of our capabilities is not only what prevented them from going to war with us. it IS also the MAIN reason they backed down during the Cuban Missile crisis.
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November 10, 2009, 7:55 pmDuffy Pratt says:
Umm, they didn’t fold when Reagan was President, so I don’t think their fear of Reagan retaliating is what finally caused them to give up. Did Bush the First inspire the same kind of fear and respect? Maybe so, but here’s another example of Reagan getting credit for stuff he clearly did not do.
And I’m still waiting for someone to show me a single shred of evidence that Reagan planned to bankrupt the Soviet Union.
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November 10, 2009, 8:09 pmChrisTS says:
ys says:
I hope you are able to celebrate this anniversary with joy as well as sorrow.
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November 10, 2009, 9:05 pmBlargh says:
An interesting article on the fall:
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November 10, 2009, 9:20 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
Hey Duffy,
YOU should learn how to read with a much higher degree of comprehension.
I NEVER said a damn thing about Russia folding due to any FEAR of Reagan.
NOR did I say he PLANNED to bankrupt them.
Yet bankrupt them he did! And CHILD, THAT IS WHAT HAPPENED!
Last, it makes NO DAMN difference if you, and/or any other totally Clueless Clod believes it or not!
YOUR mere belief has NO more effect on the FACTS than do the beliefs of the FLAT Earthers have on our OVAL world!
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November 10, 2009, 10:02 pmRicardo says:
People forget that many popular revolutions swept across the world between 1985–1991. Does Reagan get credit for all of them? Reagan had very little to do with the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa and vetoed economic sanctions against the regime. In the Philippines, Reagan had cordial relations with Marcos up until the final moments of the People Power Revolution. Only at the end did U.S. officials tell Marcos that maybe it’s time he gave up and then proceeded to hand him and Imelda visas to the U.S. and offered to evacuate them to Hawaii on board an Air Force aircraft. The popular revolution in the Philippines served as one of many inspirations to the people of Eastern Europe when they took to the streets several years after.
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November 10, 2009, 10:19 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
Hey Duffy,
YOU should take a course on how to read with a much higher degree of comprehension.
I NEVER said a damn thing about Russia folding due to any FEAR of Reagan. NOR did I say Reagan PLANNED to bankrupt them.
Yet bankrupt them, his policies did!
And that IS what happened!
Period!
End of Damn Story!
And Child, your mere beliefs has NO more effect on the FACTS than do the beliefs of the FLAT Earthers have on our Oval world.
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November 10, 2009, 10:21 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
SORRY for the double post!
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November 10, 2009, 11:53 pmLarryA says:
True, they didn’t have as many nukes as we estimated. But it wouldn’t have required the destruction of too many of our biggest cities to totally disrupt our economy, particularly when a lot of our communications were via paper and wire. There was also the MAD doctrine, which convinced lots of people that any nuclear war would be the end of humans.
But would we have had that capability had Carter been followed by a president with a similar philosophy?
Kennedy was president during the Cuban crisis, and he was a lot closer to Reagan than Carter in terms of will and political savvy. The question with Carter wasn’t what nuclear arsenal he had, but would he have used it.
Reagan left office in January 1989, and the wall fell in November. If Bush the Second can still be blamed for everything that’s wrong with the U.S. ten months after he left office, then I’d think Reagan is due a little credit for something that happened ten months after his departure. ;-) As others have noted, the main effects of Reagan’s policy, intentional or not, were in place for the eight years before the wall fell.
For this, yes. And by 1989 it was too late for intimidation to be effective.
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November 11, 2009, 1:36 amDuffy Pratt says:
Hmmm... It’s funny that you take me to task for not reading carefully enough when I was, in the first part, quoting and responding to LarryA, not to you.
And in the second part I was re-iterating a question I raised before. So I wasn’t responding to you at all. I wonder why you took such offense. I also wonder why you feel the need to be so cantankerous.
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November 11, 2009, 4:32 amTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » When the Berlin Wall Came Down, Twenty Years Ago -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by PostRank – Economics, George Bright. George Bright said: The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » When the Berlin Wall Came ... http://tinyurl.com/ydyyw5v [...]
Dotar Sojat says:
Neil, you’re trying to get folks to renounce part of their religion.
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November 11, 2009, 11:43 amRichard Aubrey says:
I was dealing with faith-based lefties at the time.
I was amused at the elephantine manuverings aimed at showing they’d been on the right side all along.
Unfortunately for them, sideline protestant churches don’t have a real, functioning, actual memory hole.
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November 11, 2009, 1:29 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
While I was JUST watching (and listening to) a documentary on the USS New Jersey, I hear an American Admiral say something to the effect of:
“Reagan wanted to out build the USSR and surpass them in military force.”
And as our doing so too cost us a MUCH SMALLER percent of our GNP than it did the USSR in trying to keep up„ it had a HUGE negative impact on them.
———–
While I was JUST watching (and listening to) a documentary on the USS New Jersey, I hear an American Admiral say something to the effect of:
“Reagan wanted to out build the USSR and surpass them in military force.”
And as our doing so too cost us a MUCH SMALLER percent of our GNP than it did the USSR in trying to keep up„ it had a HUGE negative impact on them.
————-
Yes Dotar,
As I have been an Agnostic Atheist Activist for well over 50 years, I have found it is easier to get some religious people to become Atheists than to get ANY of the supposedly rational,
and intelligent
people to accept
provable facts and change their position. One example is the anti Iraq War FOOLS.
I have a list of 18 FACTS which PROVE the Iraq War is fully justified and yet these Clueless Clods of the Loony Left just as if FACTS do not matter if prove they are wrong.
While Christians at least have the programming they received from the time they were babies until they reached age they had a clue to blame for hanging on to the total BS beliefs they have, it really amazes me how non-programmed people will hang on to unsupported beliefs no matter how much proof there is they are wrong.
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November 11, 2009, 4:44 pmOpher Banarie says:
At the risk of seeming not to appreciate the event (I do), I wanted to point out that the event was predicted — on national televsion — twenty years earlier. Yes, in 1969 — even before Nixon went to China.
See the video here.
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November 11, 2009, 7:06 pm