WITNESS: Reuters and the many drafts of history

Tom Heneghan was Reuters chief correspondent in Germany in 1989 and directed coverage of the Wall's fall from East Berlin. He is the author of "Unchained Eagle: Germany after the Wall" and is now Religion Editor, based in Paris.

By Tom Heneghan

BERLIN (Reuters) - The night the Wall fell, Reuters reporters in East and West Berlin hammered out thousands of words depicting the end of the Cold War's worst eyesore and the joyous street party on both sides of the once-fearsome border.

As I stumbled back to my hotel in the gray morning that followed, the old saying "journalism is the first draft of history" echoed in my head. This was History with a capital H, a stunning world-changer that nobody could have predicted.

Over the days and weeks of relentless work that followed, that idea never left our heads. On an adrenalin high, we pumped out what seemed like an endless stream of reports on how Berlin and Germany were changing right before our eyes.

It wasn't until a year or so later, after the scramble to reunite was over, that the "first draft" part of that cliched description of journalism really began to sink in.

Reporting major events under deadline pressure, journalists rarely have all the facts. We know we have to go with what we have. We focus on the big picture and tell it as best we can.

So it can be humbling when, sometimes years later, the main actors in a drama or historians studying it write second, third and fourth drafts of the same history, revealing details that would have made stop-the-presses headlines if known at the time.

Some details of those confusing days are still coming out. Only last month, Britain and France released documents showing how worried their leaders were by a reunited Germany.

THE HIDDEN SIDE OF THE STORY

On November 9, 1989, journalists on the spot saw how East German politburo member Guenter Schabowski inadvertently sparked a rush to the Wall by announcing East Germans could travel to the West and telling a journalist the new rule was valid immediately.

What we only found out much later was that Schabowski, as he replied to that question, silently asked himself: "I wonder if this has been cleared with the Soviets." He didn't know!

Later that evening, as the world's eyes zeroed in on the partying at the Wall, East Germany's distraught communist leader Egon Krenz was pacing the long corridors of the Central Committee headquarters alone mumbling "What should I do now?"

What a gem that would have been in our story that night -- but I only found it five years later in a book about the Wall.

The day after the Wall opened, East Germany secretly ordered combat alert for the elite ground forces and paratroopers trained to seize West Berlin in an East-West war.

This would have been bell-ringing news if we'd known it. The Wall fell without bloodshed, but nobody knew that day that the military and Stasi secret police wouldn't intervene. By the time this was published in 1994, it was only a footnote to history.