The Wall – Live in Berlin council meeting, and felt they needed some kind of an event to focus attention on it… So I agreed to have a meeting with Leonard Cheshire. And I was very impressed, and said I would do what I could, although I thought it was very unlikely that it would come off… Then, in November [1989], when the wall started coming down, we started negotiating." The show had a sell-out crowd of over 350,000 people. Right before the performance started the gates were opened which enabled at least another 100,000 people to watch. While this broke records for a paid-entry concert,
Berlin Wall Times" columnist James "Scotty" Reston. Kennedy made the regrettable error of admitting that the US would not actively oppose this action in the Soviet sector of Berlin. On Saturday, 12 August 1961, the leaders of the GDR attended a garden party at a government guesthouse in , in a wooded area to the north of East Berlin. There signed the order to close the border and erect a wall. At midnight, the police and units of the East German army began to close the border and, by Sunday morning, 13 August, the border with West Berlin was closed. East German