Category: State of the Fourth Estate



By George Merlis

While listening to a recent broadcast of NPR’s Weekend Edition I heard host Scott Simon describe the venerable Dan Schorr, NPRs senior analyst, as “ the only man I've ever heard of who covered the Wall when it went up and you covered it when it came down.”

As it happens, I, too, covered both the beginning and end of the Berlin Wall. And I witnessed how television -- 48 years ago -- nearly turned the cold war into a hot war and how the medium -- 20 years ago -- was part of the joyous circus surrounding the end of the wall.

As souvenirs of those two momentous events, I have a lucite display case containing two newspaper stories I filed from Berlin in 1961 and a piece of the wall handed to me by a Berliner in 1989. The artifacts are reminders of that long-running story; the story of a wall which divided a city for 28 years -- time enough for an entire generation to be born and grow up with no personal frame of reference to a wall-less, undivided Berlin.


My Berlin Wall display.

In August of 1961, I was working for the “Rome Daily American,” a small-circulation tabloid that catered to expatriots living in Italy. In a bit of journalistic miscasting akin to having the late Hunter S. Thompson serve as a society editor, I had been hired as the paper’s sports editor.

When a German classmate from journalism school tipped me that there was about to be a big story breaking in Berlin, I went to Ed Hill, the Daily American’s editor, and asked him to send me there. He told me he wouldn’t assign me to Berlin, but that I could quit my job and go there and cover the news as a free-lancer. I did.

Before I left, Hill said, “Stay out of East Berlin.” Americans had free access to all sectors of Berlin, and I thought Hill was being overcautions. What I did not know at the time was the Rome Daily American was a CIA front, a fact I didn’t learn until 1973 when hearings chaired by Sen. Frank Church disclosed intelligence agency abuses. The Daily American had legions of “reporters” working in the Middle East as spies while back in Rome a small handful of us non-agents wrote and edited the paper.

In blissful ignorance of my real employer, I set off for Berlin, which was a unique city-state 100 miles inside the communist DDR, or GDR in English (GDR stood for German Democratic Republic, and the country was two out of three: it was German and it was a republic, insofar as there was no monarch. Democratic? Not so much.)

A little background is in order: At the end of World War II, Berlin was occupied by the Four Powers: the U.S. the U.S.S.R., France and England and the city was divided into four sectors, one under each nation’s control. Because the city was the traditional German capital and was so deep into East Germany, the Soviets unilaterally decided it was “Berlin Hauptstadt der DDR,” or Berlin, capital of the GDR. In fact, in June, 1961, Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev demanded that Berlin be ceded to the GDR. The U.S. allies wavered, but President John F. Kennedy told Khruschev that the U.S. would not hand West Berlin over to the Communists and would pay any price to defend its democracy. As he did in the Cuba Missile Crisis, Khruschev blinked first. But two months later, faced with a steady stream of East Germans defecting to the west via Berlin, the GDR and its Soviet sponsors erected the first iteration of the Wall over the course of a single night -- August 12-13.

This early Wall, the one I saw that summer of 1961, was only several courses of crudely cemented cinderblock surmounted with with some strands of barbed wire. As you can see from the photo below, architecture, it was not.



The Wall was so low I could see over it; the cinderblock rose no higher than four to five feet, in some places it was only three feet high. The wall was set back a couple of meters from the sector border line, which meant anyone who cleared the cinderblock and wire had to jog several paces to freedom. That short jog was enough distance to give the dreaded East German Volkspolizei -- People’s Police, or VoPos -- a chance to shoot defectors. And they did. Regularly.



On September 5, the Rome Daily American, above, carried a first-person account I filed after riding in a two-hour U.S. Army jeep patrol along the Wall in the American sector. There were four enlisted men in the jeep -- a driver, a sergeant who was in charge, and the two-man crew of the .50 caliber machine gun mounted behind the front seats, its long barrel extending out over the jeep’s hood. The story was headlined “A Jeep Ride Along Berlin’s ‘Chinese Wall.’” The G.I.s called it the Chinese wall, not realizing that the Great Wall of China was built to keep people out, while the Berlin Wall was built to keep a captive population in. As we drove, East Berliners who spotted us looked around cautiously for VoPos and, if they saw none, waved to us. VoPos, on the other hand, tended to stare at us through binoculars or unsling their rifles when we came into view.


I took this photograph from a sniper's nest overlooking Checkpoint Charlie on the second floor of a building housing a very busy, lively bar. The Soviets knew it was there and had hostilities broken out it would have been an early target.

The very next day, September 6, I ignored Ed Hill’s warning and crossed over into East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie -- the only opening between east and west in the American sector -- and I strolled around East Berlin. World War II had ended 16 years earlier and while West Berlin still exhibited some damage, East Berlin looked as if the war had ended 16 days earlier. There was rubble everywhere. In vacant lots here and there I saw parked Soviet tanks, their crews lying on the fenders and turrets, sunning themselves. I walked deeper into the Communist zone, never realizing my two pieces of identification might be dangerous -- a press card from a CIA-front and a passport with a year-old 14-day Soviet visa and stamps indicating I had been in Leningrad and Moscow for only six of those 14 days. (Six days into a student tour of Russia in the summer of 1960, I had been arrested for distributing “noxious anti-Soviet propaganda” -- a Russian version of Life Magazine -- and expelled from the Soviet Union.)

When I headed back toward West Berlin, all those parked tanks were out in the streets, their engines roaring, dirty exhaust fumes filling the air. The crews were wearing their helmets and there were companies of infantry -- both Soviet and the East German NV troops (National Volksarmee, or National People’s Army) -- in formation behind the tanks. This looked serious, so I hurried to Checkpoint Charlie and presented my passport to an East German border patrol officer, who thankfully was too preoccupied to study it and let me pass through. Just beyond the crossing gate, I learned the reason for the border patrol officer’s preoccupation and the tank-and-infantry alert: television.

NBC talk show host Jack Parr had brought his program to Berlin and, for the benefit of the cameras, the army loaned him 50 fully-equipped infantrymen, a jeep armed like the one I had ridden in the day before, and a few high-ranking officers. With his little army, Parr staged a war game, having the G.I.s rush toward the wall, carrying their weapons at port arms. This was alarming enough to get the Soviets to scramble their tanks which, in turn, provoked the Americans to scramble their tanks. On either side of Checkpoint Charlie there were dozens of tanks and hundreds of troops lined up, facing each other because Jack Parr decided to invent reality television by playing war in the most dangerous city on the planet. Fortunately, no soldiers on either side of the checkpoint got trigger-happy and both armies stood down after a confrontation that lasted hours. It was the first time I observed television becoming, rather than covering, a news story. As a print reporter, I waxed self-righteous about that.

The coincidence of my stroll through East Berlin at the exact moment Jack Parr and crew decided to see how close they could come to igniting World War III, was matched by another coincidence 28 years later.

At the time I was supervising producer of ABC-TV’s Home Show, a nice mix of homey content that was rendered obsolete by the birth of the Home and Garden Television cable network. In the autumn of 1989, the East German government had begun loosening the restraints on its people; allowing East Germans to walk into West Berlin at specified times through some of the checkpoints. It was clear that it was only a matter of time before the GDR collapsed. Our show’s executive producer, Woody Fraser, decided to send Bruce Jenner, as a correspondent, and me, as his producer, to Berlin to do some pre-Thanksgiving segments with U.S. troops on the East/West border and to talk to Berliners about the gift of freedom.

On the ninth of November, 20 years ago, Jenner and I were set up to do a live feed. Because of the time difference, it was night and our lights illuminated our broadcast platform and a portion of Wall. The Wall itself looked nothing like the one I had seen in 1961. It was concrete, not cinderblock and rose to the height of a two-story building. On the Western side it was covered with graffiti. Just over the Wall patrolling VoPos and their police dogs stood on high scaffolding, the men visible from the knees up. As soon as it was clear we were going to be broadcasting, they began waving at us, smiling broadly. It was a world removed from my introduction to the VoPos three decades earlier.

Five minutes before we went on the air live we caught an amazing break: the East German government announced it was opening the wall at the Brandenberg Gate, a symbolic act that signified the end of the divisive Wall. West Berliners took that announcement as clearance to attack the wall and they immediately had at it with hammers, sledges and anything they could lay their hands on -- all of it unfolding as we went live on the air. Even the VoPos atop the scaffolding got caught up in the moment, leaning over the Wall and shouting encouragement to the hammering West Berliners.

Afterward, TV journalists asked me how I, producing a show for housewives, had known exactly when the big story was going to break, how we had arranged to be on live just when the announcement came and the destruction started, how the Home Show had scooped everyone else. No one would believe it was just dumb luck and the fortuitous time difference between Berlin, where we were originating, and Los Angeles, where the Home Show show was fed to the network live at 7 a.m., Pacific time. THAT was reality television.


When our segment ended, our translator handed me this shard of the Wall which he had secured from a hammer-swinging young man who had never known a wall-less Berlin.

HISTORIC PRESIDENTIAL SPEECHES
AT THE BERLIN WALL

The Berlin Wall has served as a dramatic backdrop for major political speeches almost from the start. Two U.S. presidents, Kennedy and Reagan, each made one of their most memorable speeches in front of the Wall.


In 1963, President Kennedy came to Berlin and delivered his famous "Ich bein ein Berliner" (I am a Berliner) speech. It is estimated that fully half the population of West Berlin -- well over a million people -- thronged the streets that day to catch a glimpse of the president who stood up to the Soviet demand that their city be handed over to East Germany


Twenty-four years later, another American President, Ronald Reagan, stood in front of the Brandenberg Gate and also used a German phrase: "Es gibt nur ein Berlin" (There is only one Berlin). Then he demanded of the Soviet Communist Party's General Secretary, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Last year, while still a candidate for the presidency, Sen. Barack Obama delivered a speech where the Wall once stood and drew the largest live audience he had ever spoken to up until that time: 200,000-plus.

For more on Experience Media Consulting's services, click here.WWW.MasterTheMedia.com

To order "How to Master the Media," click on the image of the book.