Walk of the People – A Pilgrimage for Life

[1] Walkers started on March 1, 1984, from Point Conception, California, and covered about 7,000 miles, ending in Hungary in late 1985 after the former East Germany and other countries denied the group visas to walk.

[2] Some members attended the Geneva Summit and arranged a trip to Moscow, Russia, and Warsaw, Poland, via train to meet with officials and others to distribute many letters of peace and other materials they had collected.

Declassified documents published by the National Security Archive in 2013 showed that, behind the scenes, leaders of the U.S. and former Soviet Union drifted the countries closer to nuclear war than anyone previously admitted "through suspicion, belligerent posturing and blind miscalculation.

"[3] The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its traditional "Doomsday Clock," which has marked the danger of nuclear war since 1947, to three minutes before midnight in 1984.

One method of trying to break through this wall of East-West division was a peace walk through Western and Eastern countries, of which several occurred in the early 1980s.

Besides meeting with Reagan administration officials at the White House, they spoke with representatives of the Soviet, Polish, and East German embassies in Washington, D.C., to lobby for visas to walk.

Members flew to Dublin, Ireland, in January 1985 and walked through Great Britain, France, Belgium, and the former West Germany, meeting political and religious leaders and everyday folks.

They were denied entrance into East Germany in June 1985 and settled in an old mill house in a border town to figure out a plan.

A few weeks later, they walked to Vienna, Austria, then took a train to Budapest and some other cities in Hungary as part of a tour organized by the government's Hungarian Peace Committee.

A 450-mile American-Soviet Peace Walk from Saint Petersburg to Moscow involving about 230 Americans and 200 Russians, which was organized by another group, occurred in 1987.

[11] One participant, journalist Kevin James Shay, wrote a book about the inside story of the project called Walking through the Wall.