Ich bin ein Berliner

There are speeches a president writes, and there are speeches a city writes through him. The first kind is drafted in the cabin of an aircraft, in cabinet rooms, in the long fluorescent evenings of a White House staff. The second kind is composed by a crowd that has been standing in a square since six in the morning, and the man on the platform is only the throat through which it speaks. The trick, for the man on the platform, is to know which kind of speech he is giving before he opens his mouth.

THE GREAT-GRANDSON OF DUNGANSTOWN

He is forty-six years old. He is John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, born at 83 Beals Street, Brookline, Massachusetts, the great-grandson of Patrick Kennedy of Dunganstown, County Wexford, who left Ireland in 1849 with thirty-eight shillings and a coffin-ship ticket and died of cholera in Boston nine years later. Four generations have closed the distance between a fever shed on the Boston waterfront and the upstairs office of the mayor of West Berlin. Two months ago he was in Wexford, on the lane outside the Dunganstown farmhouse, drinking tea with cousins. Five months from now he will be in the back of a Lincoln on Elm Street in Dallas. He does not know the second of those things. He knows, in the way a politician of his blood always knows, that the distance from the coffin ship to the platform is the only distance that matters, and that it is not a distance you cross once. You cross it every time you stand up to speak.

THE WALL, TWENTY-TWO MONTHS UP

The wall has been up since the thirteenth of August 1961. The East German government built it overnight to stop the haemorrhage of its own citizens westward through the only seam in the Iron Curtain that still leaked. He inherited the wall ten months into his presidency, and he did not tear it down, because tearing it down meant a war that would have ended Berlin and a great deal else besides. He has been called weak for that. He has been called weak, also, for the Bay of Pigs. He was not called weak last October, for the thirteen days over Cuba; but the country, and the city in front of him today, want to see the President of the United States standing within a quarter of a mile of the wall, in person, in daylight, with his hat off. That is the office. The office is sometimes a body in a square.

THE UPSTAIRS OFFICE

It is twenty past one on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth of June 1963, in the upstairs office of Willy Brandt in the Schöneberg Rathaus. The loudspeakers in the square are playing Bach softly under a crowd that has been assembling since dawn. On the desk in front of him is the typed speech card. The closing peroration has been redrafted three times in the last twelve hours. Sorensen and Bundy have, between them, taken the line out, put it back, proposed it as the closing, proposed a closing in German, dropped the German, proposed it again. Robert Lochner, the West German interpreter, is in the office now. He has just spent ten minutes practising the phrase with the President, who has the vowel right on Berliner and is uncertain about the bin. Lochner says, by his own later record, that the German for civis Romanus sum is exactly Ich bin ein Berliner. The President says: write it on the card. Lochner writes it phonetically in pencil over the typescript. Ish bin ine Bear-LEAN-er. The President reads the line aloud, three times.

THE SECOND BEFORE HE GOES OUT

He puts the card in his right inside pocket, and stands a moment at the window. The empty stage on the east side of the Rathaus is below him, the crowd behind it stretching back to the far buildings, six in the morning to one in the afternoon of waiting, an audience large enough that the police have given up counting and rounded the estimate to somewhere between three hundred and fifty thousand and four hundred and fifty thousand. He has practised the phrase ten times in this room and the vowels are still not natural; the crowd will hear that they are not natural, and the crowd will not care, because the only way to hear in German what is about to be said is to say it in German, and the saying of it is the whole point. There is another thing in the room with him, unspoken, which is the memory of who his father was: ambassador to the Court of St James's in 1939, on record as having told London in 1940 that the British war effort was finished, a man whose name in this city has a particular freight. The Germans will not have forgotten the father. The son has crossed an ocean to speak to them in four words of their own language, and the four words will not be about the father. They will be about the wall, and the city, and the boast a free man is entitled to make in 1963 standing twenty minutes' walk from barbed wire. He buttons the jacket. He goes down the stairs.

NINE MINUTES

He climbs to the platform at half past one with Brandt on one side and Adenauer on the other. The microphone is in front of him. The speech runs nine minutes, in the cadenced Sorensen rhythm he has used for five years. The peroration begins: two thousand years ago the proudest boast was civis Romanus sum. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner. The crowd takes thirty seconds to roar. He closes the speech, in the form Lochner pencilled, with the line repeated: and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Berliner. The crowd is by every contemporary account ungovernable for several minutes after he leaves the platform.

THE LOBBY, AND THE NEXT SPEECH

He stops at the foot of the wooden stairs in the lobby of the Rathaus. Sorensen is at his shoulder. By Sorensen's later memoir he says, quietly: we'll never have another day like this as long as we live. Sorensen agrees. They go back upstairs, because there is another speech that afternoon, at the Free University, in which he will reverse ground entirely and press for negotiation with the Soviets, the long peace-feeler that the Schöneberg speech has bought him room to extend. The Free University speech is, on paper, the more substantive of the two. The Schöneberg speech is the one that lasted. Sorensen will outlive him by forty-seven years and never write of that afternoon without coming back to the sentence in the lobby. In the city outside, the crowd is still in the square at three.

WHAT WAS LEFT IN THE SQUARE

The Berlin Wall stood for twenty-six years and four months after that morning. It came down on the night of the ninth of November 1989, by which time he had been dead for twenty-six years, shot from a sixth-floor window in Dallas on the twenty-second of November 1963, five months to the day after Schöneberg. The day after the killing, the City of Berlin renamed Rudolph-Wilde-Platz, the square in front of the Rathaus, John-F.-Kennedy-Platz, and hung a bronze plaque on which the four words appear. The speech card, with Lochner's pencilled phonetics over the typescript in the President's right-hand pocket that afternoon, is in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library at Boston. The Penguin urban legend that he had accidentally called himself a jelly-doughnut was floated in the United States in the 1980s and is, by every German linguist asked since, nonsense; the pastry is not called a Berliner in Berlin, and no native of the city in the square that day mistook his meaning. Tradition in Berlin holds that there were old women in the crowd that morning whose parents had stood in other squares thirty years before, for other speeches, and who would tell their grandchildren, half a century on, that they had stood for the one and they had stood for the other, and only the second had been worth the standing.

A city writes some speeches through the man on the platform, and the man, if he is the right man, knows to get out of the way of the sentence the city has handed him. Four generations from a coffin ship in 1849 to a balcony in Schöneberg in 1963 is not a long time, in the life of a name; it is one lifetime laid end to end with another, four times over. The pencilled card sits today behind glass in Boston, the ink of the typescript faded and the phonetics in graphite still legible: Ish bin ine Bear-LEAN-er, in a hand that closed the distance.