Michael Malice

This is going to take some doing.

It fell the next day.

And Helmut Kohl literally says, I'm at the wrong party.

And he got in a plane and got out of Warsaw.

So why this book has a broader message than the actual stories of these incidents is that as these wonderful things are happening...

The universal consensus at the time is it's never going to happen.

Or if it does happen, it's going to happen only through an enormous amount of carnage and blood.

And when it doesn't, then everyone's like, oh, it was inevitable.

You didn't say it was inevitable at the time.

You only said it was inevitable after the fact.

And the other thing that was really brought me a lot of joy is there are so many moments of men with guns saying, we're not shooting anyone.

Because they wanted...

several Tiananmen squares.

They wanted it in East Berlin.

They wanted it in Romania.

They wanted it in Moscow.

And these strong, tough, trained men with guns were like, no, we're not shooting the civilians.

And then everything else was history.

I think a large part of it had to do with the closer interconnections between people like Gorbachev and Thatcher and Gorbachev and Reagan, because both of them visited Red Square.

And in the years before, these are enemies.