Word: berliner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fall of the Berlin wall caught the world by surprise. For months, East Germany's beleaguered communist rulers had tried in vain to silence a growing opposition movement and stem the tide of people pouring out of the country. On the night of Nov. 9, 1989, an East German official held a press conference to announce new government travel policies but inadvertently announced that crossings to the West would be opened "without delay." Within hours, thousands of East Berliners began lining up at checkpoints near the Wall. At first the border guards tried to check passports, but they quickly realized...
...have to tell you, I'm an eternal optimist," the former President said in an interview with ABC's Sam Donaldson that night. "I believed in all my heart it was in the future." Two years earlier, Reagan had addressed a crowd of some 20,000 near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Wall. At the time, even his closest advisers dismissed the notion as far-fetched. "It's a great speech line," Reagan's National Security Adviser, Frank Carlucci, remembers thinking. "But it will never happen." When the Wall came down...
...years later, Reagan's role in bringing about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the peaceful end of the Cold War remains exaggerated, manipulated and misunderstood. To many of his conservative admirers, the challenge to Gorbachev in Berlin epitomized the toughness that made Reagan great: by refusing to compromise his core principles, he defeated communism and won the Cold War. But the truth is that Reagan was more adaptable, politically shrewd and open to compromise than either his champions or his critics prefer to admit. He may have called the Soviet Union an "evil empire...
Reagan loathed the Berlin Wall. "It's a wall that never should have been built," he often said. As early as 1967, while still governor of California, he said the U.S. should have knocked down the barbed wire separating East and West Berlin the moment the communists put it up. On a trip to West Berlin in 1978, he was told the story of Peter Fechter, an East German youth who had been killed trying to crawl over the Wall in 1962. The authorities left Fechter unattended for nearly an hour while he bled to death. "Reagan just gritted...
...German government has asked GM to come up with a restructuring plan as quickly as possible. Government sources said only then would Berlin decide whether GM would be eligible for any of the $6.7 billion in state aid that Germany had offered to Magna. Union leaders want the government to stand firm and not send any German taxpayer money across the Atlantic. But the car giant is prepared to play hardball too, reminding German workers that the insolvency of its entire European operation is still an option. "Failure to reach the restructuring that is needed would result in the operation...