It was twenty years ago today . . .

. . .that the Berlin wall came down. We were shocked. Yes, we believed that the wall would come down some day, but had not dared hope it would be in our lifetime.

Once the East Germans were free, could the Lithuanians be far behind?

The next phase was the argument by the Baltic states that they had been incorporated into the U.S.S.R. against their will, which was obviously true. Already Vaiva was thinking about how she could participate in these momentous developments.

Ronald Reagan played a crucial role in bringing the wall down. The peoples of eastern Europe understood this long before I did. Here's an account from Reagan's speechwriter about how furious the State Department was that Reagan asked Gorbachev to tear down the wall. Here's a photo montage in the NYTimes of the wall, then and now.

The Wall Street Journal weighs in here. Note how strenuously "liberals" objected to Reagan's efforts:

Yet it bears recalling that even these obvious political facts were obscure to many people who lived in freedom and should have known better. "Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy," said CBS's Dan Rather just two years before the Wall fell. And when Reagan delivered his historic speech in Berlin calling on Mr. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," he did so after being warned by some of his senior advisers that the language was "unpresidential," and after thousands of protesters had marched through West Berlin in opposition.

Ann Althouse has posted the video of Reagan's speech, and JFK's.

Those were great days. Some of Althouse's commenters draw the comparison to today.