The Cold War Gets A Wall

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel

History, Education, Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

February 22, 1962. The city of Berlin is cut in half by a concrete and barbed wire wall. On the west side, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy is giving a rousing speech when suddenly, what look like balloons explode above the crowd, revealing Soviet-red flags. “The Communists will let the balloons through,” Kennedy says. “But they won’t let their people through!” Meanwhile in the east, the streets are quiet. The people on both sides of the wall live in its shadow. They are family members and former neighbors, many of them wondering, “Is this really here to stay?” How did Berlin become the bitter borderland in the global propaganda war between the United States and the Soviet Union? And why did it take so long for the Berlin Wall to come down?

Special thanks to our guest, Hope Harrison, professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University and the author of Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, original podcast.
0:04.0	History this week, February 22, 1962.
0:09.0	I'm Sally Helm.
0:14.0	An excited German woman rushes up to the motorcade
0:17.0	and hands Robert Kennedy, a bouquet of flowers.
0:22.0	The US Attorney General has been dispatched to West Berlin by his brother,
0:26.0	President John F. Kennedy, JFK.
0:29.0	And now hundreds of thousands of people have turned out to hear what RFK has to say.
0:35.0	Kids run alongside his car as it moves through a crowd 10 people deep.
0:40.0	They shout, Bobby, Bobby, and wave whatever cloth they have on hand.
0:44.0	Anchorchiefs or towels, tablecloths or flags.
0:51.0	There's a reason for their passion.
0:54.0	West Berlin is a tiny bastion of American and Western influence
1:00.0	smack in the middle of East Germany, which is a communist country.
1:05.0	It's been controlled by the Soviet Union since the end of World War II.
1:09.0	And about six months ago, West Berliners woke up to a new and troubling feature in their city.
1:16.0	A wall circling all around them, keeping them in and East Germans at the end of the world.
1:23.0	West Germans out.
1:26.0	It's the front line of the Cold War.
1:29.0	And today, at Berlin's city hall, Bobby Kennedy denounces the wall.
1:35.0	He stands in the bitter cold before an even bigger crowd and says that the wall is a symbol of failure,
1:42.0	of the bad dream that is communism.
	...

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