( CNN ) -- Richard Blystone was CNN 's senior correspondent in Europe throughout 1989 , witnessing and reporting on the momentous events of that year from the first protests in the communist Eastern Bloc to the fall of the Berlin Wall and revolution in Romania . CNN 's Richard Blystone reports from the former Iron Curtain in 1990 . The following year Blystone traveled the length of the former Iron Curtain to report on the new Europe emerging from its shadow . Here he recalls how the the divided continent had simply become the only reality that most people knew . It was there . Like the stop sign on the street or the wastebasket in the corner of the living room . Like a long , long overcast day . Just there . Growing up in America the Cold War , the East-West confrontation and the prospect of Mutually Assured Destruction were so prosaic you never really thought much about them . You could n't remember anything different . The situation seemed as immutable as the profile of the mountain tops or the patterns of stars in the night sky . And then , when I was 53 , in the length of a football season , it was gone . If you 're reading this online , chances are you do n't remember and ca n't ever know what it was like in the days before the collapse of communism . There was `` Duck and Cover , '' a jingly film that showed little American children what to do in the event of nuclear attack . In later years , the black humor . Tom Lehrer 's line about `` someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away . '' Nothing to get excited about . If you were male , the U.S. draft loomed ahead , promising to take anything from six months to four years from your civilian life . Maybe more than that if you were in the Korea or Vietnam age group . During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 , I was flying back and forth over the North Atlantic in a Navy patrol plane for 15 hours a day , not knowing what the hell was going on , trying not to dwell on the orders that could send us on a one-way mining trip to Murmansk Harbor if the balloon went up . For Germans and others along the line that divided Europe , the symbols of the threat of war were still harder to ignore . In Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 Soviet troops had helped crush efforts to loosen Moscow 's grip . But ignore them they did . `` We could n't think about the wall , so we did n't , '' said the mayor of a West German village standing right on the border , when we talked to him in 1990 . `` The bushes had eyes , '' West German border guard Ernst Wackernagel told us , describing the creepy job of patrolling a few yards from the binoculars and guns of their East German counterparts . Very few of the people we taxpayers paid to know about such things had any idea how close the collapse was . A couple of years before , the former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt had advised me tartly to quit asking whether Germany would ever be reunited . Not in his lifetime or mine , he said . When it came , we were all surprised we had n't seen it coming . The Poles and Hungarians had been levering into chinks in the wall for years . The rulers of the Eastern Bloc were largely aged , ossified , inflexible and corrupt , and those who served them were all that plus scared . Their system was beyond repair . Along came Mikhail Gorbachev , the first Soviet leader born after the Russian revolution , who saw things as they were and was tired of pouring money into a clapped-out old car . He became a hero to young people in the East . Near the end of August , activists from East and West had celebrated a `` Pan European Picnic '' on the now-neutered border between Hungary and Austria . A few weeks later , the rush was on . CNN poured resources into the story . I was there , and will always be glad that I was . Poland , Germany , Czechoslovakia , Bulgaria . And finally , at the end of the year , poor tortured , abused Romania threw off the system in what I found the most emotionally charged days of the whole upheaval . But I was never satisfied with the way the West received it all . We had become used to instant gratification , and this was an example . The drama was over , the commercials came on , and world was supposed to live happily ever after . And it did n't . The whole experience made me realize that liberty is not a thing . It is a way of life . If you do n't practice it , you do n't have it . A couple of months later , three of us made a journey along the line to check on what was happening . We called it the Iron Curtain Odyssey . But that 's another story ...
`` Iron Curtain '' dividing Europe felt permanent to those who grew up after WWII . Former senior correspondent Richard Blystone covered momentous events of 1989 . Blystone : East-West divide was `` like a long , long overcast day '' Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev recognized system was `` clapped-out old car ''