Democracy in Action - 12 November 1999

There was an immense to do here this week - a triumphant celebration of an historical event that happened 10 years ago last Monday.

Till now 9 November has not been known or reverently recorded in the books as a date for ever more, like 1066 or 4 July or 25 December.

But what last Monday celebrated was made possible by two scenes. Both of them happened before an enormous crowd packed into a Berlin square, both listening to a president of the United States 25 years apart.

The final event took more than 25 years to prepare for its emergence as history and here, I think, some distant background ought to be brought forward.

We must look at embattled Europe in the spring of 1945.

The Nazi armies are everywhere destroyed and distraught. There remains one prize of war left to seize - it is Berlin.

There was an intense backstage dispute, at the time, between the allied leaders and Joseph Stalin as to who should get there first.

It was a race as well as a dispute - whether Churchill was right in urging the forward armies, led by General Patton, to beat the Russians for the occupation of Berlin or whether Eisenhower was right in saying the political future of Germany was none of a soldier's business. He had to beat Hitler on all fronts as soon as possible. And he held Patton back in Vienna.

The Russian opposition to the premature arrival of American and British troops in Berlin was abrupt and massive. All objections to policy, mounted by Joseph Stalin, were massive.

He knew, his generals knew, the Allied generals if not their peoples knew, that the Soviet peoples had suffered during the Second World War the incredible loss of over 13 millions - military and civilians - dead against, in the whole American effort, 400,000.

To the Soviet peoples Berlin was a symbolic reward for the immense sacrifices they had made in contrast with all the Allies or for that matter with all the enemies.

Stalin knew that his people would see an Allied entry into Berlin ahead of Russians as a resounding slap in the face. And newly-discovered archives have shown he was quite ready to shoot his way into the centre of Berlin, if necessary, through an American advance guard.

Well Stalin won. He won the race and he took Berlin.

Eisenhower sighed, Churchill puffed a cigar and predicted with absurd but, as it happened, terrifying precision exactly what would happen to the balance of power in Europe and to the two types of Berliners - the democrats of the West, the virtual Communist slaves of the East.

I've gone into this teasing bit of history because I find that succeeding generations, even of interested and intelligent people, often wonder what was all the fuss about Berlin?

It was not, at first, a strategical, geographical ambition but the war had been fought to rid Germany of the monster Hitler whose capital was Berlin.

From the beginning the war had been a struggle to the death between self-governing democracies and two alarmingly successful dictatorships.

We could not, now, allow Berlin to become the property of a third dictatorship to which for painful, necessary reasons we'd had to ally ourselves in the recent war.

So the effective compromise was the Russians grumblingly agreeing that the city should be run equally by the four Allied powers planted in respective zones - if you could then call France a power.

Needless to say, while this arrangement was disagreeable to everybody - not least the entrapped, half-famished Germans - it was a mockery and a blazing insult to Stalin.

Within two years of Berlin's being set up as a four-power compound he decided to put an end to the British-American-Franco-Soviet control of the city. He would starve out the Germans.

He controlled all the ports of entry, all the highways. He imposed a land blockade of the Allied sectors of Berlin on 1 April 1948 and he was not fooling.

However, in probably the most successful combined operation of the war or post-war, the Americans and British mounted a joint airlift.

I don't have the figures here but with something like 20 - 30,000 flights a month, mostly night flights, these two Allies alone delivered 2,340,000 tons of food and coal in 15 months.

Stalin gave up. How many generals, food ministers, flight controllers, truck drivers paid the usual price of liquidation we may never know but the Soviet and post-Soviet archives are cornucopias of horrors we never suspected.

And we can barely imagine the intensity of Stalin's rage - his defeat over Berlin permanently soured his relations with all the statesmen of the West.

And succeeding American statesmen were made well aware of it - it was, you might say, Berlin was the thermostat of the Cold War, ever ready to maintain the temperature at freezing.

This background may help explain the puzzling depth of feeling on the other side - namely of successive American presidents. And at first none so conspicuously as John F Kennedy - he is at the centre of the first of the two scenes I'm talking about.

About the middle, I think, of his short reign he went to a summit meeting with Mr Khrushchev. It was a disaster.

JFK rejected Khrushchev's bluster at once, departing from the meeting with the exit line - "It looks like it's going to be a cold winter."

But Kennedy went on to Berlin and before half a million surging West Germans he shouted, in a series of oratorical flourishes - "Anyone who wants to see democracy in action - let him come to Berlin.

"Whoever would know what freedom means to a German - let him come to Berlin."

Then he took a great breath and shouted - "Ich bin ein Berliner."

There was an engulfing wave of what might have been massive cheering and might have been laughter. It probably was both, for to the people of Berlin "ein Berliner" is a bun - a cake. It was as if Kennedy had proclaimed - "I am a hamburger."

Nevertheless he was a colossal success - hero for a day and longer - keeping aflame the promise that the American frontier was at Berlin.

So almost 20 years go by and we come to the second historic scene. This time a different president and to many in the Western world not the man to conduct delicate live-and-let-live negotiations with the Soviet Union.

He'd barely got into the White House before he infuriated the Kremlin, shocked the governments of Western Europe, disgusted the Democrats here and even disturbed many of his own Republicans.

His name was Ronald Reagan and he said straight out in a public speech with ringing conviction that the Soviet Union was "an evil empire".

No president was so ridiculed until President Ford lost the next election by saying that Poland was not a satellite of the Soviet Union.

Mr Reagan did not back down. He never apologised, on the contrary he went on saying things like - "The Soviet Union is one of the saddest, most bizarre stories in the history of the human race."

He believed so passionately in the old founding fathers' line - "Men are everywhere born free" that he had to remind us how the Soviet Union worked - "It holds millions in its slavedom by the threat of imprisonment, torture, exile, death."

Now this was something which good Democrats, liberals, the intelligentsia of the West, scorned or reviled as a slander on a once noble experiment.

Came eventually a day in 1987 when Mr Gorbachev was in power and had dropped large hints of wanting to introduce dollops of freedom, a touch of liberalism into the Soviet Union - just enough to produce an even stronger but reformed Communism.

"It's all or nothing," Mr Reagan sorrowfully teased him.

So the great day, the second day, I have in mind, however, was when President Reagan - standing there before a huge crowd in Berlin itself - pointed and shouted - "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

Like all Ronald Reagan's solutions that was an absurdly simple one and in this case he was acting out of one of his more inspired simplicities. But, at the time, all good Western liberals put it down as soaring, hammy rhetoric.

What we didn't know and learned only lately to our amazement was that that line alone gave enormous and widespread courage to dissident leaders in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, in Poland - a typhoon of promised change swept in fact across Eastern Europe.

Two years later the deed was done. And last week the pulling down of the Berlin wall - 10 years ago - was being commemorated there and here with all the pride and certainty of the storming of the Bastille.

A subdued Mr Gorbachev was present at the Berlin celebrations. He never really recovered from Reagan's day. He called it later - "The beginning of the end."

He did produce two reforms in the union, just enough - after 70 years - as somebody said, to destroy Communism by mistake.

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