On the 9th of November 1989, the most famous part of the Iron Curtain--the Berlin Wall--was breached. This year we celebrate the 20th anniversary of this world-changing event and the chain of events that it triggered across the globe.

There are events in everyone's life that mark "watersheds" in human history, and we tend to remember where we were when those events transpired. Obvious examples in my lifetime include events such as 1) the assassination of President Kennedy, 2) Man's landing on the moon, and 3) the terrorist 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. For our parents' generation, it included: 1) the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and 2) V-E (Victory in Europe Day) and V-J Days (Victory over Japan Day). The fall of the Iron Curtain was another historical watershed that must be recognized.

I was born at the beginning of the Eisenhower Administration. My earliest memories outside of my family were of President Eisenhower, the progress of The Cold War, and the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain was a constant presence in all of our lives. This presence would continue in my life for 36 years.

The "Iron Curtain" is a term used to describe the boundary that separated Eastern European countries, which were occupied by the Soviet Union's Red Army--the Warsaw Pact--from Western European countries--the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries during the time period between the end of World War II in 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991. One needs to stress that the Iron Curtain described both a physical and ideological division of Europe. The Warsaw Pact countries were subordinate to the former Soviet Union, and these countries included Albania (aligned itself with Red China after 1960), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. While Yugoslavia was a leftist totalitarian--a Communist--country, under the dictator Josip Broz Tito, it was not part of the Warsaw Pact and maintained access to the West. NATO was comprised of the Western European democracies with the United States.

The term "Iron Curtain" was first coined by the German politician, Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, but it was made popular by Sir Winston Churchill, who first used it in a public speech in Fulton, Missouri in March 1946. The term was first used to denote the actual metal barriers that cut Europe in two from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Adriatic Sea in the south. Soon, however, the term also became a reference to the ideological barrier as well. In a telegram to President Truman, Churchill said, "An Iron Curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind."

While the Iron Curtain fence stretched thousands of miles to separate Eastern and Western European countries, and it was particularly noticeable in Germany where the Berlin Wall could clearly be seen as an "Iron Curtain." In some areas the Iron Curtain was nothing more than a plain chain link fence; however, in other areas, it was a highly guarded area with many physical barriers, guards, and weapons. The ironic element of this situation, however, is that the Iron Curtain--the Berlin Wall--was built not to keep out people, but to keep people in and prevent them from leaving.

The Berlin Wall was built by the Russians in 1961 to seal up the allied--the American, British, and French--the western portion of the city of Berlin. After the Second World War, Germany was occupied by the Allied Control Council while it was rebuilt. In the occupation agreement, the Soviet Union was given control over a part of Germany that came to be known as East Germany. The non-Communist World War II allies--France, Great Britain, and the United States--occupied West Germany.

Berlin, the traditional capital of Germany, was located in East Germany and was also split up by the major powers. The splitting of Berlin produced an island in the midst of East Germany, which made both sides uncomfortable. The East Germans feared that the West might attempt the liberation of East Germany, while the Western Powers feared for the safety of the West German citizens and NATO soldiers in West Berlin.

Access to Berlin had been restricted before, most notably in 1948 when NATO was forced to conduct the Berlin Airlift--a round-the-clock series of airdrops of food and supplies into West Berlin. Many East Germans saw West Berlin as an island of safety, and many defected to West Berlin in the search for a better life. East Germany realized that they were losing control of their citizens, and during the dark early morning hours of 13 August 1961, they began to build the Berlin Wall, a physical blockade ringing West Berlin. The Berlin Wall closed West Berlin to East Germans, but it also made passage into and out of West Berlin difficult for the West Germans and NATO personnel.

In one of the first famous public acknowledgements of the unnatural nature of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, President John Kennedy delivered his famous, "Ich bin ein Berliner...." address that expressed American solidarity with the people of West Berlin. President Kennedy observed that West Berlin was an island of democracy in a sea of Communism. The Berlin Wall claimed numerous lives during its history. The first death occurred in 1962 when Peter Fechter was shot to death and left to bleed to death in the neutral zone between East and West Berlin.

On 9 November 1989, Gunter Schabowski, a spokesman for the East German Politburo, was handed a note during a press briefing, and as he ended the news conference, he quietly mentioned that East Germany had decided to open the Berlin Wall. Hundreds, then thousands of East Germans formed a queue at Checkpoint Charlie, and the East German guards waved them through instead of shooting them. Crowds gathered on the West Berlin side of the Wall too. Many hoped that family members or long-lost friends would cross over the line.

It was a night of extraordinary joy. Family members and friends did reunite with many seeing each other for the first time in decades. It was a night that celebrated freedom and hope for the future. Soon citizens on both side of the Wall cooperated with each other in tearing it down so that all of the 192 streets that had been closed by the construction of the Berlin Wall were reopened.

While the East German government had hoped that the opening of the Wall would be a relief valve against the resentment of its people, it inevitably meant the end of East Germany, and reunification occurred within a year. Communism can only exist behind walls. In the case of the Berlin Wall, the free movement of goods, capital, and people helped to destroy the rotting facade of Marx in East Germany. Leftist totalitarianism had failed to produce prosperity for its citizens. A police state was necessary to stop individual enterprise. Shortages of consumer goods and services were not the failing of the system, they were the system. The only way that one could have access to good housing, schooling, employment, vacations, or consumer luxuries was to be a member of the Communist Party and be subservient to the state.

As the Berlin Wall was torn down by the people it had separated and as Germany reunited, all of the other Warsaw Pact countries also saw their governments fall as the Red Army was pulled back into the Soviet Union by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The remaining bastions of Communism in China, North Korea, and Cuba tried to learn lessons from the fall of the Berlin Wall. North Korea saw it as a failure of the Soviet Union's will to crush dissent. China, which had used its tanks to crush such dissent in Tiananmen Square a few months before, quietly began to dismantle its central economy while maintaining its political facade.

Twenty years ago during the destruction of the Berlin Wall, my house was filled with excitement and happiness as my family, neighbors, and I watched the Iron Curtain disappear. In fact, today, more pieces of the Berlin Wall can be found in the USA than anywhere else in the world—which shows the importance that Americans placed on eradicating that loathsome structure. The Iron Curtain had molded a great deal of Americans' lives up to that point. The divide between the East and West ignited the Space Race—the race to the moon--as well as competitions in every form of human endeavor.

By the 1970s, some Americans had lost sight of the nature of the Berlin Wall and of the Cold War. Unfortunately, many of them were found in the American higher education where historical revisionism flourished. This became apparent to me upon entering graduate school where one could see the great inroads that Marxism was making in the American Academy. In addition, one was seeing more and more revisionist historians and their works included in required course texts and in library offerings, such as William Appleman Williams and his work, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Thankfully, not all historians and political scientists accepted his argument that the Cold War was the fault of the United States. At Penn State, Robert James Maddox checked Williams’ scholarship in a ground-breaking book, The New Left and Origins of the Cold War. He not only found Williams’ scholarship lacking—in fact, great portions of it were simply fabricated. Yet, the Williams’ text had served as a misleading academic source to conceal the truth about the Cold War and, ultimately, the nature of central planning in a society.

Indeed, I saw the nature of the Iron Curtain during my visits to Germany in the 1980s. On one long train ride from Frankfurt to Hamburg, I passed miles and miles of the Wall. Nothing has ever looked bleaker or more foreboding to me. Unending streams of barbed wire, concrete walls, guard towers, and dog patrols. Of course, all structures to keep East Germans just where they were, not to keep out any potential invaders. Few sights have ever affected me more than the Wall.