Word: berlin
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...Berlin, hostile tanks lined up on both sides, television crews mounting cameras under the menacing muzzels to show the world this latest indignity. As a reporter rounding up opinion back in Washington, I can recall the sense of real fear among many of the experts. Should we allow such an affront to humankind to stand? Should there be a showdown between East and West right then...
...Early on the morning of August 13, thousands of frightened East Germans were fleeing across the flimsy boundary into free West Berlin. At 2 a.m. there were sirens, then the rumble of tanks on the East Berlin cobblestones. East German troops carrying rolls of barbed wire, concrete pillars, stone blocks, picks, and shovels leapt out of their trucks. Four hours later, millions of Berliners lived in a huge communist pen which over the next decade would be broadened and built into an automated armed fortress of steel and concrete -a fortress which stood as a monstrous rebuke to freedom...
...Kennedy remained silent for several minutes. Then he blurted, "Why in hell didn't we know about it?" Clifton responded that out of more than 40 contingency plans he had read for Berlin he could not recall a single one that dealt with the possible construction of a barrier...
...asked to see Kennedy and talk about Berlin and was surprised when he agreed. I found him cool and cautious, but also patient, a trait we would see more of as he journeyed through the Cold War. "We could have sent tanks over and knocked the wall down," he said. "What then? They build another one back a hundred yards. We knock that down and then we go to war." He speculated that the wall would stay until the Soviet Empire tired of it. Some experts predicted it would stand 50 years or more...
...stand in museums all over the world. I've watched kids pass hurriedly by these ugly, jagged remnants covered with the graffiti from a joyous moment of freedom. It is no longer so easy to grasp the wall's meaning. Junior high school students now read about the Berlin Wall in their history texts. But it was built, flaunted, condemned and destroyed before they were born. But in my time, it was far more than just a barricade, far more than a mere symbol, it was a a very real threat to freedom for all the years it endured...