"individual liberation and social progress"

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. kept journals from 1952 to 2000.  His sons published them in book form, in 2007.

In 1962 Schlesinger was working for President Kennedy and he wrote,

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February 22

We arrived in Berlin on a cold, snowy day.  Willy Brandt...met us at the airport....The streets were lined with cheering people, who had waited for hours in the bitter cold.  It was all deeply moving until one remembered that a good many of them were cheering just as hard twenty years ago for Hitler.

...Bobby made a fine impromptu speech.  When balloons with red flags floated over from the Communist zone, he observed, "They will let their balloons come over -- but not their people."...

I had met Brandt before but had never had the opportunity for a long talk with him.  He seemed calm, intelligent and detached and inspired confidence.  I asked him about the Wall -- whether in retrospect he feels that steps should have been taken to prevent it, or to tear it down.  He replied, "If I were to say that now, it would be inconsistent with the things I said at the time.  On August 13, 1961, no one proposed that we try and stop the Wall. 

We all supposed that such action would run the risk of war."  He went on to say that counteraction might have been justified if one believed that the East Germans had put up the wall on their own, but most indications were that they had prior Soviet approval and support.  He added that he was critical of the allies because of their slowness to note and condemn the East German action -- but even if they had spoken out immediately, he said, it would not have brought down the Wall.

He expressed great interest in steps under way to assure the future of West Berlin.  Apparently the flight from West Berlin has come to a halt; at least the outflow is now balanced by the inflow.  But Brandt wanted to know what could be done to encourage private investment, develop educational centers and the like. 

In the evening Brandt gave us a dinner.  This occasion was made most notable by Bobby's remark that this was the birthday of two distinguished Americans -- George Washington and Edward [Teddy] Kennedy -- and by his teasing insistence that Teddy (who had joined us in Berlin) and his sidekick Claude Hooten sing a song in honor of the day.  They finally obliged with "Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home" -- a performance which thoroughly mystified the Germans at the dinner.

We then went on to the Free University where Bobby gave his speech.  It went over, I thought, exceedingly well.  The most uproarious applause came when he said, "We have not forgotten those in East Germany"; but the non-Berlin sections, showing that free society was the best means to individual liberation and social progress, also seemed to go over well.  They were largely ignored in the press reports, however. 

After breakfast [the next day], we embarked on a tour of West Berlin.  A good deal of the trip was along the Wall.  No matter how much one reads or how many photographs one sees nothing prepares one for this ugly and sordid reality.  The wall is an obscenity.  Not only is its conception barbaric but its execution -- the crude, gray concrete blocks, the bricked-in windows of apartment houses along the sector line, the vicious tank traps, the tall picket fences to prevent East Berliners from waving to sons or fathers in West Berlin -- is repellent and hateful.  It was a sobering and maddening experience.
------------------------ {end excerpt}

{from Journals, 1952 - 2000, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Copyright 2007.  The Penguin Press.  New York}

You can read about stuff -- and I've discovered it's interesting to read what someone wrote, at the time, when they were in the midst of it.  When a person reads the journal entry or article written that day, at the time, it can be both more accurate and less accurate than than something written about the event or issue, years later with the perspective of distance and more information.

The person writing 30 years later has the perspective gained by distance and more information, but he may gloss over, or even skip over completely, details and aspects which were important at the time but which he chooses to ignore.

You can "re-write" history -- they called that revisionism, or "revisionist." 
Someone said "history is an argument without end."
If we can know the real essence of Things That Happened and how they were handled, then we can understand Today and plan Tomorrow.

Maybe.

One hopes.

A guy who used to work where I work, who was maybe -- I don't know -- somewhere around 24 years old -- didn't know about the Berlin Wall.  He didn't know that before 1989 when the wall came down, people who lived in Poland, Russia, East Germany, etc. could not leave of their own free will -- they were for all practical purposes prisoners inside of their Soviet-controlled group of countries. 

I wasn't trying to "teach" this kid anything -- I only happened to mention the "Wall" -- the "Iron Curtain"...it did not occur to me at all that he would not know what I was talking about...

That made me feel kind of worried because it's like -- if the new generations don't know the Very Recent history behind freedom which we take for granted, how are they going to be prepared, and wary, if someone tries to take it away from us?  We need context in order to have an understanding of freedom, current conditions, new proposals, and to be able to tell the difference between things that are problems and things that are not problems.  And to be aware of the potential for policies to be instituted which are controlling, dictatorial, and as Schlesinger wrote, "repellent and hateful."

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