Nicholas Burns, who specialized in German affairs while serving in the U.S. State Department during the fall of the Berlin Wall, is the keynote speaker at a Nov. 10 forum at Southern Connecticut State University commemorating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall.
The program is titled “Remembering the Fall of the Berlin Wall: 25 Years Later.” It runs from noon to 2 p.m. in the campus”™ Michael J. Adanti Student Center, Grand Ballroom, in New Haven.
The wall”™s breaching Nov. 9, 1989, marked one of the final chapters of the Cold War. It had divided East and West Berlin for 28 years and was a tangible symbol of Soviet oppression of Eastern Europe. East Germans trying to tunnel under it, fly over it and race through it ”“ often with fatal results ”“ were news staples for a generation.
Burns was involved in the discussions on Berlin and Germany before and during the time that the wall came down. In 1990, he was appointed by President George H.W. Bush to the National Security Council, a post he would hold until 1995, bridging the administrations of Bush and President Bill Clinton. He would later serve as undersecretary of state for political affairs, the third highest post in the State Department, under President George W. Bush. Today, he is a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Burns will discuss what the Bush administration and the State Department were thinking during the lead-up to the fall as well as how they addressed the situation before and after the wall came down.
For more information, contact forum coordinator Joe Musante at 203-392-5073 or at musantej1@southernct.edu.