Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV 20150131 : vimarsana.com

From you. Tweet as twitter. Com booktv or post a comment on our face book page facebook. Com booktv. The man in charge that night the senior officer on duty that night is this man harold yeager. Cheryl yeager is the man who opens the berlin wall. Harold yeager is an unlikely candidate for that title. He is a complete loyalists. He has been working for 25 years, had an additional three years of service before that, helps to build the wall. I pull his entire Service Record that still survives and he had in all his years of service only one minor demerits and a raft of awards and promotions. This is a loyal servant of the regime. He said i believe the wall was tragic but necessary because if we had not built a wall there would have been world war iii between the soviet bloc and the west. Was bad but better than the alternative. He was committed to his job. This is not a man who was trying to bring down the regime but in the course of that night he finally, in the course of that night he becomes the man who opens the wall. How does that happen . Let me go back to is that image of the Border Crossing. He actually sees the press conference on television. He is on a 24 hour shifts that started in the late evening and went through the night to the next day. He watches television at the Border Crossing on the job and when he sees the press conference he cant believe it. He simply cannot believe it. He calls this superior officer using expletives that i wont repeat here, he says what just happened . I have no orders, what did he Just Announced . His officers as it is business as usual, keep the gates closed and he calls back and says a dozen people like telling me the wall is open. What should i do . A superior officer says business is usual the gates close, calls back and says it is more like a hundred people, the borders open, his superior officer says keep the gates closed, business as usual. I interviewed him twice, he told me he made 30 phone calls over the course of the next four hours and never got any useful instructions. Only once did he get anything other than keep the gates closed and what he got made matters worse. After he had been calling for a couple of hours one of his superiors finally said i am tired of your phone call, be quiet i will patch you into a call with my boss and you can hear what im telling you is true. Get attached to a call with his boss and as he gets patched in heres some things, this guy yeager reporting hundreds of thousands of people, is he delusional . Is the an idiot . Is she a cowardly is capable of assessing the situation accurately . The phone line goes dead. This gets his back up. I have been working here 25 years and they are going to call me at coward and ask if i can file an accurate situation report . What they dont know is he is also going through a cancer scare. Turns out he doesnt have cancer but he thought he did. He had a number of tests and a doctors appointment scheduled the next day to get the test results. For that night he feels he may be a dead man any way. What really ticks him over is what happens when his boss finally calls him back. His boss calls him back and says all right we finally have a suggestion for you. Go to the eastern side of the wall and pick out the biggest troublemakers, people who are really screaming to get out and actually led the now because hopefully the rest of the people will quiet down, those big loudmouths. What you should do is pull homicide take their passport stamped their face, let them out, dont tell from they have been expelled forever. Of course one of the loudest groups get pulled aside get their faces stamped, passports are now in a museum and they get let out and they dont know they have been expelled forever. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. Coming up next on booktv, historian Harlow Giles Unger discusses his book John Marshall the chief justice who saved the nation. This is of little over an hour. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the last installment of our blockbuster first ever constitutional book fair. [applause] thanks to all of you for having stayed with us through these remarkably substantive and engaging ours. I am so proud of you, our great in cc members and audience who