The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago to this Sunday, which Tom Brokaw broadcast live for NBC News, the only network anchor on the scene.
"When we went, we had no idea the wall would fall on our watch," Brokaw told TODAY's Erica Hill, adding that his team had cameras and satellites booked just in case. "It was one of those times in a journalists' life when everything breaks in the right way."
- On how to grasp how serious the wall's division was: "Think about dividing California in half, and for 45 years the northern half has to live behind a wall like San Quentin, and the southern half can go about being Southern California," he said. "That's what they were."
- On the energy while the wall was being torn down: "Oh, it was absolutely palpable," he said.
In a flashback clip from the fall of the wall, Brokaw said: "I guess I always thought that 1968 would be the most memorable year of my journalistic career. The deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, of course. But 1989, think about what we have witnessed this year, the wall has effectively come down."