On the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, an unremarkable East German functionary named Günter Schabowski bungled an assignment—and accidentally helped bring down the Berlin Wall. A Politburo member, Schabowski had ended up with a thankless job: trying to mollify the vast, growing crowds of East Berliners who had been inspired by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s promises of glasnost (or “openness”) and reform. By early November 1989, protests numbering in the hundreds of thousands were overwhelming communist East Germany.

The besieged regime had ousted its hard-line leader, Erich Honecker; his replacement, a Honecker protégé named Egon Krenz, was struggling in his first weeks in office. Krenz was hardly a reformer, but he decided to try acting like one. As a sop to the protesters, he proposed a draft travel law that seemed to promise some increased freedom of movement—but still enabled the regime, for little or no reason, to keep its citizens from traveling. The move was essentially a public-relations ploy, and the luckless Schabowski got the task of announcing it.

At a press conference that was broadcast live and attended by Western journalists, including NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, Schabowski botched his delivery of this news. He broached the topic only in the final minutes, after a stultifying, hourlong description of the East German regime’s internal debates. A bored Brokaw had been nodding off. Then a reporter asked about travel possibilities for East Germans. Schabowski initially answered in soporific fashion, with frequent pauses and “uhs.” But then he mumbled that the party had decided “to issue a regulation that will make it possible for every citizen…to emigrate.”

A reporter shouted, “When does that go into force?” The interruption visibly irritated Schabowski, who fumbled with his briefing papers to search for the answer. His aide finally pointed out the relevant page, and Schabowski read the text aloud so rapidly as to be almost incomprehensible: “Private trips to foreign countries may, without presenting justifications—reasons for trip, connections to relatives—be applied for. Approvals will be distributed in a short time frame.” Someone shouted again, “When does that go into force?” Schabowski scanned the unfamiliar text again and picked out some of its words: “Immediately…without delay.”

The reporters erupted with questions. A British journalist asked, “What is going to happen to the Berlin Wall now?” Schabowski ducked the fusillade of queries, mumbled excuses and scurried out. The stunned journalists were left to guess at what he had meant—even as East Germans rushed to the wall to see whether the guards would open up on the basis of Schabowki’s remarks.