Fifty years ago Wednesday, John F. Kennedy made a speech in which he famously said: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” The Berlin speech was just seven paragraphs on the page, and only nine minutes in a delivery continuously interrupted by cheering and applause from a throng of hundreds of thousands of people.
But in those nine minutes, Kennedy tautly defined the terms of the Cold War, and correctly predicted the outcome. The heart of the speech was the refrain: “Let them come to Berlin.”
Standing in front of the Berlin Wall, he declared: “There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Let them come to Berlin.”
And of the Berlin Wall, erected in 1961, he then said: “Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.”
From West Berlin and East Berlin to Berlin. From West Germany and East Germany to Germany. Who could have foreseen that then? Kennedy did: “When all are free, we can look forward to that day, when this city will be joined as one, and this country and this great continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe.”
He was predicting the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Berlin and Germany, the emergence of the European Community and the end of the Cold War.
But even as Kennedy was poking a rhetorical stick at the Russian bear, he had launched a summer peace campaign with Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev. Earlier in June 1963, Kennedy gave a commencement address at the American University in Washington in which he proposed to end nuclear-weapons testing. The resulting treaty, negotiated over the summer of 1963, was approved by the U.S. Congress and presented to the United Nations.
One of the tests of politics is the policy continuum from one government to the next. Kennedy’s Berlin speech met that test.
Nearly a quarter-century later, on June 12, 1986, Ronald Reagan made the second famous Berlin speech, also renowned for four words: “Tear down this wall.”
Standing in front of the wall at the Brandenburg Gate, Reagan directly challenged Mikhail Gorbachev: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
But even as he was challenging Gorbachev, Reagan offered the outstretched hand: “We welcome change and openness,” referring to Gorbachev’s signature policies of perestroika and glasnost.
And they were already at work on the same agenda as Kennedy and Khrushchev — arms control. At their Reykjavik summit in October 1986, they came very close to a major agreement, only to fail at the last minute. But Reykjavik set the table for the December 1987 agreement to eliminate short-and medium-range missiles.
In November 1989, the Berlin Wall was breached and neither the East Germans nor the Soviets made any attempt to close it again. It was the end of the Warsaw Pact. And at the end of 1991, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. In 1990, Berlin and Germany were reunified, the great project of chancellor Helmut Kohl.
All of which began exactly half a century ago with Kennedy’s speech.
It was by no means the most elegant or eloquent of Kennedy’s speeches — for that, you need look no further than his splendid address to the Irish Parliament only two days later. But no speech in modern times has proven more prescient or consequential. Let them come to Berlin.
L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy magazine.
