by Phil Mason
Events spiralled out of control. By eleven o’clock all the border crossings in Berlin were besieged. At 11.30pm, Lt Col Harald Jager, commander of the checkpoint on Bornholmerstrasse, decided to order his men to stop checking passports and let the crowd do what it wanted. By midnight, all the border crossings had been forced to open. The Wall was no more. After 28 years, a botched announcement by a tired and partly informed official had let the genie out of the bottle. What had been hurriedly put up overnight in 1961 had come down in a similar one-night event a generation later.
On the 10th anniversary, Schabowski was reported as saying, ‘It was one of many foul-ups in those days. I’m just happy that it went off without bloodshed.’ Egon Krenz, the supreme leader then, maintained that the intention had been not the scrapping of the Wall but a calming of the emigration flood. Instead, the German Democratic Republic collapsed within 11 months. By October 1990, Germany was a reunited state.
If the Wall came down by accident, there is evidence to suggest that its creation was unwittingly prompted too, and not by the Communist regime but by the free West. The genesis of the Wall on 13 August 1961 was East Germany’s chronic loss of people – mainly young professionals, the sort the young Communist republic could ill afford to lose – who were streaming across the open border in Berlin to freedom in the city’s western zones still administered by the Allied occupying powers from the Second World War. On average, 2,000 every week were flooding through East Berlin. By mid August it had reached 1,500 a day.
As the exodus, and the sense of crisis, intensified the East got some odd signals from the West. President Kennedy had sympathised with Soviet leader Khrushchev in private about the problem, and three weeks before the Wall went up, on 25 July, gave a television address in which he emphasised that America would protect its position in Berlin but significantly said nothing about guaranteeing free access between the East and Western zones of the city.
Even more pointedly, five days later, the chair of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William Fulbright, said publicly, ‘I don’t understand why the East Germans don’t close the border because I think they have a right to close it.’
The Soviet and German authorities, struggling to contend with their crisis, could have been forgiven for reading into these statements hints that America would not forcefully resist the move they eventually made. And, when they did, their assumptions proved right.
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History’s Tricks – Accidents, Illnesses and Assassinations
Charles I, whose decisions polarised England between royalty and parliament and led to the Civil War, and whose disastrous reign ended in his beheading in 1649, should never have been king at all.
A weak, indecisive and stubborn character, he had been backward as a child (he did not talk until he was four or walk until seven). He had few attributes to mark him out as a good candidate for the throne. His personal weaknesses contributed heavily to the lack of political tact he showed in his rule and he created for himself many of the problems of his times.
He only became heir to the throne when his elder brother by six years, Henry, Prince of Wales, died from typhoid at the age of 18 in 1612. Henry, by contrast, was intelligent, learned and responsible – except, perhaps, for his choice of exercise: according to some accounts, he contracted the disease after going for a swim in the polluted Thames. That swim would have catastrophic consequences for Britain’s history when Charles found himself elevated to the throne on the death of his father James I in 1625, still only 24.
Within two years he was at war with both Spain and France, which began the sorry tale of his prolonged fight with parliament over raising the taxes to pay for the conflicts, and which were to lead inexorably to civil war.
The madness of King George III (1760-1820) was probably entirely avoidable, scientists in the United States concluded in 2005.
George was renowned for his abstemious approach to dining. He was always worried about getting fat, took a lot of exercise, often eating little more than boiled eggs or bread and butter with a cup of tea, which he would consume while pacing up and down. He rarely held state dinners or dined with his ministers. Court life has been described as ‘intensely dull’.
According to a research team led by Dr Bruce Spiegelman from Harvard Medical School, the disease which afflicted him, porphyria, a hereditary complaint, has been found to be aggravated by low intake of carbohydrates and sugars which triggers a particular protein to become overactive and cause the mental instability. Said Dr Spiegelman, ‘We have explained how porphyria symptoms can [be] triggered by fasting, and why they can be treated by feeding carbohydrates and glucose.’
Ironically, it would seem, George’s frugal diet and concern for his health appears to have been precisely what ended up derailing him.
In contrast, historian nutritionists in 1989 concluded that Henry VIII’s reign might have been a more stable affair had he eaten his vegetables. That might then have led to avoiding the break with Rome and Britain remaining a Catholic country.
The almost complete absence of vitamins in Henry’s diet, which consisted pretty much entirely of meat and alcohol, fuelled his famously erratic mood swings. He is more likely to have died of scurvy brought on by malnutrition than the usually suspected causes, gout or syphilis. The puffy face of his later portraits, and descriptions of his foul breath and ‘fungus legs’ are classic symptoms of scurvy.
Had he eaten better, Britain’s historic links with the pope may have turned out very differently indeed.
Had Franklin D. Roosevelt not been disastrously mistreated when he first developed polio, he might have been spared the lifelong crippling that the disease caused him. He could have lived a healthier, and longer, life and thus had a stronger impact on the peace settlement at the end of the Second World War.
The symptoms appeared when he was on a lakeside holiday with his family in 1921, when he was a 39-year-old ex-Senator and Assistant Secretary for the Navy. After a swim he developed severe leg pains. The family doctor recommended a celebrated surgeon, who coincidentally was vacationing nearby, to see him. Having never heard of polio being contracted in a person so old – it is almost always a disease of young children – the surgeon misdiagnosed the complaint as a lesion of the spine and recommended ‘vigorous’ massage of the limbs, just about the worst treatment possible for the early stages of polio. He underwent the treatment for two whole weeks before the Roosevelt family got a second opinion from an expert who immediately diagnosed polio.
The massaging was to cause permanent paralysis of Roosevelt’s legs and although he learned to stand with metal callipers to hide his ailment in public – few outside the family and presidential circle ever knew of his disability – it effectively confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
The added irony of his plight is that in 80 per cent of cases, polio passes, causing no permanent damage. The treatment Roosevelt received from the unknowing doctor changed that for him.
The historic consequences may have been profound. As US President throughout the Second World War, his frailties increased as the conflict neared its end. For the last year, when crucial political confrontations with the Soviet Union set the course for the post-war territorial settlements, many historians see Roosevelt’s failing health as a crucial factor in weakening America’s resilience against Stalin’s demands as the victorious powers tussled over the fate of the Fascist empires. By the Yalta Conference of the ‘Big Three’ in February 1945 he was virtually a dead man standing, and historians universally judge Stalin to have come out on top in the negotiations. Two months later, Roosevelt was dead, aged just 63. Churchill, then already 70, in contrast would live another two decades.
The baby that would eventually rule as Queen Victoria, was nearly shot by a bird-hunting boy when just seven months old. On Christmas Day 1819 she was being cared for by a nurse at Woolbrook Cottage at Sidmouth where her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, were holidaying. A shot broke the
nursery window, and a bullet whistled close enough to the child’s head to tear the sleeve of her shawl. The boy responsible had been taking pot shots at sparrows noisily chattering outside.
In later life, there would be as many as seven attempts to assassinate her as queen.
Had it not been for a small act of kindness, history would be recording Sir Robert Peel as the second British prime minister to have been assassinated. At the peak of his powers, he escaped being shot in January 1843 when the would-be assassin, Daniel MacNaghten, shot Peel’s Private Secretary, Edward Drummond, as he walked near the Admiralty in Whitehall in the mistaken belief that he was shooting the Prime Minister. Drummond died of his injuries five days later.
The mistaken identity arose because when Peel had become prime minister two years earlier, he decided not to move into the prime minister’s official residence at 10 Downing Street but remain in his own house which was conveniently located in nearby Whitehall Gardens. Peel had lent No. 10 to Drummond. MacNaghten had been staking out Downing Street for weeks and concluded that the man he saw regularly coming and going was Peel.
Lloyd George, prime minister during the First World War, escaped what is perhaps the most bizarre assassination plot against a British politician. Police arrested an odd group of radical extremists in Derby in January 1917, led by a 50-year-old secondhand clothes shop owner, Alice Wheeldon, her two daughters and her son-in-law, a chemist. Wheeldon was undoubtedly a fanatical suffragette, angry that the war had put an end to the campaign for women’s votes.
The family devised a plan to kill Lloyd George while he was playing golf. They would shoot him with darts tipped with the deadly poison curare. The scheme unravelled when they chose the gunman who would actually do the shooting. He turned out to be an anti-subversion secret service agent, one of a pair who had infiltrated the group.
They were tried at the Old Bailey in March. After a five-day trial, the jury took just half an hour to convict. They were sentenced to varying terms of prison, Alice Wheeldon getting the highest penalty of 10 years.
Quite how the secret service had cottoned on to this nondescript group far away in the East Midlands has never been explained. An intriguing alternative theory is that the plot was an inside job sponsored by maverick elements within the establishment. The other agent who had befriended the group never appeared as a witness at the trial, and 10 years later was incarcerated in a mental asylum.
Lloyd George treated the whole affair casually. He ordered Wheeldon’s release before the year ended. She died in February 1919 during the mass influenza epidemic which struck after the war.
A British doctor’s misdiagnosis may have contributed to the sequence of events that would lead to the First World War. Sir Morell Mackenzie, an eminent throat expert, was asked in 1887 to examine the German Crown Prince Frederick, who had married the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria. The Prince was suspected of suffering from throat cancer, but Mackenzie, despite three examinations, was adamant that there was no malignancy. No action was therefore taken.
Months later, it became apparent that Frederick was indeed suffering from cancer, which by then had reached an inoperable stage. Two months afterwards, the reigning German Kaiser died and Fredrick succeeded to the throne – but ruled for only 99 days before dying in June 1888.
That left the way open for his son, Kaiser Wilhelm, whose erratic and bombastic reign destabilised European politics and did more than anything else to create the frictions that culminated in the outbreak of war in 1914.
Had his father’s cancer been spotted earlier, who knows how long a reign Frederick might have had and what impact that might have had in producing an alternative set of events to those which unfolded?
The assassination that directly triggered the First World War, the killing of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand while visiting Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, succeeded because of a driver’s wrong turn and a scarcely credible coincidence.
The royal entourage from the city railway station to the town hall was the target of seven Serbian nationalist terrorists. Of the potential assassins lining the route, two found themselves in awkward positions in the crowd which prevented them from firing their weapons and two lost their nerve. The fifth managed to lob a bomb that bounced off the Archduke’s car and exploded underneath the third vehicle in the convoy, injuring an officer. When the Archduke arrived at the town hall and learned of the outrage, he reacted with fury at this insult from the city, abandoned the reception formalities and asked to be driven to the hospital to see his wounded staff.
The eventual assassin, Gavrilo Princip, had heard the explosion, assumed the plot had worked and had taken himself off to a café on a street corner. The drivers of the royal cars had not been briefed of the change of destination. They drove the planned parade route along the riverside Appel-Quai back towards the station. The lead car took a tight turn off into a narrow street and the driver of the Archduke’s car followed. When told this was not the way to the hospital, he stopped and began to reverse slowly out of the street. It happened to be the precise street corner on which Princip was sitting drinking his celebratory coffee.
Princip looked up, saw the Archduke barely yards away and walked over and fatally shot him. His aimed a second shot at the Army Chief of Staff, but a well-meaning rescuer tried to grab his arm and the bullet instead hit the Archduke’s wife, Countess Sophie, who also died.
Within a month the Austrians, who blamed Russia for supporting the Serbs, had declared war on the Tsar. Their allies, Germany, also declared war on Russia, leading its ally, France, to declare war on Germany. Britain, as allies of France and Russia, followed suit. The ‘Great War’ would last for four years and lead to nine million deaths.
Emily Davison, the suffragette who died when she ran in front of the royal horse during the 1913 Epsom Derby may have achieved her lasting fame by sheer accident. An episode that has been portrayed as a deliberate suicide in the cause of women’s votes may actually have been a ghastly error of judgement.
Intriguing evidence surfaced in 1986 in the form of personal possessions kept by the family’s solicitor who represented them at the inquest. Amongst the papers was a telling item which casts doubt on the suicide theory: she was carrying a return rail ticket from Epsom back to Victoria, suggesting she had intended to go home that night.
The royal jockey, Herbert Jones, always doubted that Davison intended to bring his horse down. He is said to have been haunted by her look of surprise seconds before the collision. He was sure that she had misjudged the situation, and assumed that all the field had passed her at Tattenham Corner, but the deceptive rising ground obscured a bunch of stragglers, including his mount.
What may have been intended then simply as a public walk-on demonstration secured for Davison, perhaps more by luck than judgement, her immortal place in history.
At Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration in March 1865 a young man broke through the police ranks and almost reached the President. Police had been on the alert as a similar attempt had been made to disrupt Lincoln’s first inaugural four years earlier. They apprehended the man and detained him for questioning. They let him go after deciding he was quite harmless. The man was John Wilkes Booth, who was to assassinate Lincoln six weeks later.
Lincoln almost decided not to go to the theatre in Washington the night he was assassinated in April 1865. Although it was Good Friday, he had worked a full day, starting at 8 o’clock, with a Cabinet meeting at 11 that lasted three hours, continual meetings in between (it was only five days after the Confederate surrender and the end of the Civil War) and he made a visit to the War Department in the afternoon.
Lincoln tried to get out of the evening engagement, to Ford’s Theatre in the heart of town. He was tired and had seen the play before. One of the main reasons for him originally having to go – because Mrs Lincoln had invited Civil War hero General Grant and his wife to accompany them – was no longer an issue. Grant had sent his regrets during the day as he was going out
of town on an afternoon train to visit his children in New Jersey.
But Mrs Lincoln had set her heart on the outing. He decided he could not pull out. ‘It has been advertised that we will be there,’ he told a bodyguard. ‘I cannot disappoint the people’.
Grant’s decision to cancel saved his own life. The plot against Lincoln was to have included him as a target. He later became president himself four years later. So America nearly lost two presidents that night at the theatre.
Lincoln would not have been the first American president to be assassinated had it not been for an incredible, and inexplicable, piece of fortune for Andrew Jackson 30 years before.
In the first ever attempt on a president’s life, Jackson, who had been president for nearly six years, was shot at twice by a gunman as he left the Capitol building in January 1835. Richard Lawrence, a mentally unstable house painter, approached to within 13 feet of the President and fired. While the percussion cap exploded, it did not set off the gunpowder. As Jackson lunged forward to tackle the gunman, Lawrence fired a second gun at point blank range. This, too, failed to fire properly.
When his guns were later examined, firearms experts found both to be in perfect working order. They put the odds of both guns failing in succession at one in 125,000. Lawrence was later acquitted on the grounds of insanity and confined to an asylum until his death a quarter of a century later.
It was not the first remarkable escape for Jackson. He had carried a musket ball near his heart since a duel fought 23 years before he became president. It was so close that doctors refused to operate. His opponent in the duel, Charles Dickinson, reckoned to be one of America’s foremost marksmen, had aimed directly for Jackson’s heart but had been misled by Jackson’s unusual skinniness and his wearing of an oversized coat. Dickinson had hit exactly where he had thought he wanted, but the coat concealed the true position of Jackson’s frame. It missed by a fraction of an inch. Jackson’s shot, incidentally, killed Dickinson.
