Television and the Wall

...But at 10 P. M., after West Berlin television showed a couple actually passing through a checkpoint, the exodus began...

...Gorbachev, tear down this wall...

...As I write, they show no such intention...

...He managed to get invited to a White House dinner where, he reported, he observed Reagan close up for an hour-and-a-half...

...Meanwhile the renewed fighting has developed an ugly racial component, with people from the Caucasus in danger in Moscow because of their dark skins...

...The report spoke of Reagan's "weak intellectual capacity...

...Playing Power Politics In the case of President Slobodan Milosevic's assault on the people of the Serbian province of Kosovo, NATO ignored the issue of sovereign rights in the name of human rights and subjected the Serbs to 78 days of bombing...

...Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said she was "troubled" by what she called the Russian "overreaction...

...Twenty-four per cent said yes...

...Perhaps no less important, the decision to strike was popular with the Russian public because of the general assumption that Chechen terrorists were behind the series of apartment house bombings that cost some 300 lives...

...Nevertheless, the Clinton Administration has no intention of further exacerbating the situation by coming down hard on the matter of Chechnya...

...It goes back to 1971, when Buchanan was a speechwriter for President Nixon...

...He drafted a speech that had Nixon promising a Catholic audience he would rescue the parochial schools despite Supreme Court decisions barring Federal aid to them...

...We haven't seen crime statistics that low since the 1960s...

...it's self-deception...

...So far, the U.S...

...The Reagan Riddle If Ronald Reagan's biographer, Edmund Moms, felt frustratedby his inability to fathom what made his subject tick, he may be consoled to know that he had lots of company...

...My problem with him —or maybe his problem with me—goes beyond his much criticized defense of Hitler as "an individual of great courage...

...Republican Presidential front-runner George W. Bush, in his major foreign policy speech at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, indicated that he favored a bigger system to protect U.S...

...But ask them how safe they feel their schools are, and 87 per cent say somewhat to extremely safe...

...a soldier's soldier...

...The development of an antimissile system would require amending the 1972 ABM Treaty, a move Russia has firmly refused to entertain...

...Asked to report how this would be done on the CBS Evening News, I checked with education officials and Catholic school lobbyists and reported that the speech seemed to be little more than political rhetoric...

...When an East German official announced during a live news conference on East German television at 7 P. M. on November 9,1989, that travel restrictions were being lifted ab sofort—immediately—people didn't react...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Television and the Wall The 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, was cause for a great international celebration— and retrospection...

...Soviet intelligence tried for years to read the intentions of this smiling conservative who joked during a microphone warmup about unleashing a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union...

...The politician in question here is Patrick J. Buchanan...

...At their meeting in Oslo early this month, Bill Clinton so much as told Prime Minister and presidential candidate Vladimir V Putin that it was Russia's duty to defend the sovereign state against terrorism, but urged the Russians to try to keep casualties to a minimum and seek a negotiated solution...

...Clearly, this could be an election issue...

...Like the U. S. maintaining human rights sanctions against Cuba but not against China, Clinton's failure to seriously chastise Putin is an illustration of realpolitik...

...five years ago that figure was 40 per cent...

...As a result, the Congressional leadership hasn't been inclined to extend economic aid to Russia...

...But if my involvement is such that it could color my views, I count it my obligation to make full disclosure...

...What did he learn...

...The dictionary defines that as "policy based on power rather than ideals," and Russia, as the Administration sees it, has plenty of power despite its weakness...

...Yet the statistics tell a different story...

...plans to develop a missile defense system...

...It would invoke the escape clause that allows a country to abrogate the treaty when that is deemed to be necessary in the national security interest...

...I was present at the creation of the Wall, which was started with stretches of barbed wire early Sunday morning, August 13, 1961.1 was nearby when an East German youth, trying to flee, was riddled with bullets and left to bleed to death...

...Putin, who is Yeltsin's chosen successor, must show in the next few months that he has solved the Chechen problem and not gotten bogged down in a quagmire...

...Georgi Arbatov, the head of the Soviet institute studying the United States— identified in this book as a KGB agent— was sent to Washington...

...And a quartercentury later, on June 12,1987,whenPresident Ronald Reagan stood before this symbol of a closed society and said, "Mr...

...Yet when Russia launched the second round of its war with Chechnya last month, killing hundreds of civilians, creating a quartermillion refugees and attacking clearly marked Red Cross vehicles, the Clinton Administration called it an internal matter...

...From this treasure trove of top secret papers we learn that Communist boss Leonid I. Brezhnev, in a secret speech to a KGB conference in May 1981, denounced the policies of the new American President as "a threat to peace...

...At least the Russians seem to learn from their mistakes...

...Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev told East German boss Erich Honecker that he could not count on Soviet bayonets to sustain him...

...Television, by its emphasis on violence, makes the risk seem much greater...

...The reality is that Congress has already authorized a so-called "national ballistic defense system" intended to ward off limited strikes by rogue states like North Korea and Iran...

...From China to Kosovo, new channels of freedom have been added to radio and television: the fax machine, e-mail, Internet broadcasting...

...If history is any guide, the forces of nationalism, ethnicity and religion will not be easily contained, and a guerrilla war will ensue...

...Oppressive rulers are finding that border-defying technologies can subvert tyranny...

...It remains to be seen whether indefinite occupation will work...

...Russia and China have drafted resolutions for the United Nations calling both for ratification of the Test-Ban Treaty and strict ABM Treaty compliance...

...That's not intelligence...

...A KGB psychological profile of Reagan speculated on whether his health as a young man had been affected by his father's alcoholism...

...According to the FBI, last year the crime rate in the United States declined 6.4 per cent and the murder rate 7.4 per cent...

...This time the Russians, borrowing a page from the NATO KOSOVO campaign, started with a week of air bombing before moving their ground forces into the level plains of Chechnya, where their tanks could operate to advantage...

...And when Soviet and American tanks confronted each other that October across Checkpoint C (for Charlie)—in a sort of rehearsal for World War III...

...Ask kids if the shooting at Columbine High School could happen in their schools, and 52 per cent say yes...

...That Reagan played President, but with genuine emotion, tears in his eyes when the four Armed Services flags came into the room...

...Constant worries are that nuclear weapons may go astray, and that Russia's foundering economy remains a potential threat to the world economy...

...That Reagan's speech was "exceptionally shallow," but he played perfectly the role of "father of the nation...

...Between 1991 and 1997, the number of students who said they had been in physical fights decreased by 14 per cent, those injured fell 20 per cent, and those carrying guns went down 30 per cent...

...Should it turn out that the Russians mean business about deploying enough warheads to overwhelm such a system, we may see the emergence of a new anns race...

...The then KGB chief, Yuri V Andropov, announced to the spymasters a global operation intended to penetrate what the agency believed were plans for a nuclear first strike at the Soviet Union...

...What else...

...In orderto please our superiors," he said, "we sent in falsified and biased information...

...To learn that, you need a spy...

...Russia was close to parliamentary elections in December, with a presidential election set for next spring...

...In Russia, Chechnya is being portrayed as the leading edge of a drive from behind the Caucasus to establish an Islamic state...

...They also saw politicians in Bonn spiritedly contending over policy and power, and they wanted some of that freedom too...

...But the Soviet intelligence agency never did find the "mad bomber" plan, and in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a KGB officer acknowledged that station chiefs had supported the theory because they thought that was what the Kremlin wanted to hear...

...Groping for an answer, Buchanan said, "When you've got a guy that's hatcheting you on the air night after night, maybe you say to yourself, 'Why don't we offer the clown a job and give him a big fat paycheck and get him off?'" What Buchanan would have done with the dirt on me, if the FBI had found any, I would not venture to say...

...When the Washington Post broke the story of the investigation with a front-page headline, "FBI Probes Newsman Critical of President," the White House devised a cover story: My background was being checked because I was under consideration for a White House appointment—about which someone had neglected to inform me...

...The Communist regime sent squads of blue-shirted teenagers to tear down antennas pointed toward West Berlin, then finally gave up...

...For most of the 17 million people of East Germany, West German television had become their internal means of communication...

...The Kremlin considers abrogation of the ABM Treaty, on top of the Senate's rejection of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, as threatening the whole structure of nuclear arms control erected in the past generation...

...East Germans tuned in to West Berlin television to catch Dallas and Dynasty not only for the stories they told, but for the affluence reflected in the limousines and the estates...

...A New York Times/CBS poll asked kids across the country if they worry about being crime victims at school or in the streets...

...a genius...

...The Atlanta Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reports on violence as a health hazard—and it certainly is—also has some findings that suggest it is declining...

...In the first round of the Chechnya war, in the mid-'90s, the government waged a ground campaign that cost an estimated 5,000 lives of largely ill-trained conscripts...

...Buchanan expressed his resentment to the President, and Nixon had J. Edgar Hoover investigate me in the hope of digging up some dirt...

...In 1987, a pro-democracy demonstration in Dresden was ignored by East German television, so people switched on West Berlin TV...

...In a London speech in 1989, President Reagan said that "electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain as though it were lace.'" He had it right...

...A Full Disclosure I have always prided myself on being able to maintain journalistic detachment about politicians, even Richard M. Nixon...

...The KGB's preoccupation is documented in a new book, The Sword and the Shield, based on voluminous notes that were spirited out of its archives by Vasili Mitrokhin...

...Gorbachev and Reagan deserve much credit for the final collapse of the Wall, but some credit belongs to the media—especially television...

...He worked at the KGB's Lubyanka headquarters for 30 years and defected in 1992...

...By that time the Wall was already crumbling from within...

...five years ago that figure was 40 per cent...

...Right behind the storm over the war in Chechnya, a Russian-American weather front was building up over U.S...

...Appearing on ABC's Dick Cavett Show, Buchanan was asked why a journalist so critical of Nixon would be considered for an Administration job...

...Different this time as well was the political calendar when the fighting broke out...

...Perhaps not incidentally, a Gallup poll says that 40 years ago 50 per cent of Americans reported having guns in their homes, while last year the figure was 35 per cent...

...Yeltsin mainly disappeared from public view, leaving Putin stage center to take the heat if the Chechen campaign failed again...

...Russia tried a negotiated solution to its Chechnya troubles three years ago, and it didn't take...

...Perception of Violence The recent sensational shootings in schools have left us with an impression of rampant violence and pervasive fear of violence among teenagers...

...has not gotten much cooperation from the Kremlin in the investigation of massive Russian money laundering...

...From West Berlin, a subversive beam had radiated for years...

...As Professor James Alan Fox of Northeastern University notes, with about 48 shootings a year among 50 million kids in school, an individual youngster's chances of running into harm's way "are literally one in a million...

...Following a series of apartment house bombings this past September in Moscow and elsewhere that have been attributed to the Chechens, Putin has been acting tough and riding a wave of popularity...

...It didn't help that the conflict was universally unpopular, as was President Boris N. Yeltsin, often seen drunk in public while his poll ratings sank to low single digits...

...Thirty-four per cent said yes...

...Did they personally know someone who has been shot...

...Deputy Defense Minister Nikolai Mihailov has warned that Russia is ready to deploy enough nuclear warheads to overcome any such defense...

...troops and allies abroad, and to shield the United States from "attack and blackmail...

...President Clinton is scheduled to make a final goahead decision next June...

...With the political situation being what it is, and with Governor Bush out in front on the question, there seems to be no doubt that the Clinton Administration will proceed with the missile defense system...

...Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott is understood to have warned during his recent visit to Moscow that if Russia doesn't agree to amendments, the United States would withdraw from the ABM Treaty...