To Move the World (16 page)

“I am proud to come to this city,” he began, as he sized up the mass of humanity before him at ground zero of the Cold War:

The huge crowd roared its delight. As Kennedy’s locution was not exact (the
ein
was out of place), the translator repeated Kennedy’s
line, prompting Kennedy to quip that he appreciated “my interpreter translating my German!”

Kennedy then threw down the gauntlet, as Ronald Reagan would more than twenty years later when he called on another Soviet leader to “tear down this Wall.” Standing before the grim wall, in a city divided between West Berlin’s rising prosperity and East Berlin’s evident gray stagnation, Kennedy told the assembled multitude:

Kennedy continued, “I know of no town, no city, that has been besieged for 18 years that still lives with the vitality and the force, and the hope and the determination of the city of West Berlin.” He bid his listeners to “lift your eyes beyond the dangers of today, to the hopes of tomorrow”:

And then he closed with his reaffirmation that “as a free man, I take pride in the words
‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’
”

The crowd was euphoric, and Kennedy was exhilarated. He had achieved his political purpose: to secure the support and confidence of the German people. Still, he knew that he had gone a step too far with his anti-communist rhetoric. Swept away by emotion, his language seemed to contradict the conciliatory message of the Peace Speech. Years later, his close aides Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers recalled, “Kennedy’s fighting speech in Berlin … actually was a grave political risk, and he knew it. Such a heated tribute to West Berlin’s resistance to Communism could have undone all the success of his appeal for peace and understanding with the Soviets in his American University speech two weeks earlier.”
²⁰
To gain the political room to negotiate the treaty by winning German public opinion, while simultaneously closing the deal with Khrushchev, Kennedy had to tread a fine line.

At his next stop that afternoon at the Free University of Berlin, he dialed down the rhetoric a few notches.
²¹
There he emphasized “the necessity of great powers working together to preserve the human race, or otherwise we can be destroyed.” He called on the Western alliance to remain strong, noting that he had traveled to Europe to bolster the alliance’s unity. For only through a strong alliance “will genuine, mutually acceptable proposals to reduce hostility have a chance to succeed.”
²²

On that day, Kennedy effectively cemented the Western alliance, a remarkable feat considering that only eighteen years earlier Germany was a Nazi state and Berlin was aflame and in ruins. Kennedy had encouraged the German people to be resolute in the defense of freedom. He emotionally connected them to America and the Western alliance. It was a bravura performance. Despite
the heated rhetoric, the Berlin speech did not threaten the momentum toward a U.S.-Soviet treaty.
^‡
Most important, Kennedy would use the political capital gained in Berlin to deny the West German government’s aspirations for nuclear weapons. So, on the main point of substance, not only Kennedy but Khrushchev too triumphed that day in Berlin.

Ireland and Italy
 

Kennedy’s next stop was more nostalgic and personal: Ireland. Kennedy arrived with two of his sisters, Jean Kennedy Smith and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and the visit was a mix of sightseeing, public events, and memorable speechmaking, notably at the Irish Parliament, the Dáil.
²³
There he again called on Europe to join in the quest for peace, and emphasized that all countries, small as well as large, were needed in this global effort. The latter point was not intended for Irish ears alone.

The blood ties of President Kennedy and his hosts were close. The Parliament was welcoming home one of its own. He was proud, he said, to be the first American president to visit Ireland while in office and the first to address the Parliament. He was also, of course, the first Catholic Irish-American president.

Kennedy had come in part to sing Ireland’s praises:

Kennedy’s motorcade drives through Cork, Ireland (June 28, 1963).

Yet he had also come to speak of world peace, and of the role of nations large and small. Quoting John Boyle O’Reilly, a nineteenth-century Irish-American poet who hailed from Boston:

Yes, said Kennedy, “[T]he world is even smaller today, though the enemy of John Boyle O’Reilly [the British Empire] is no longer a hostile power” to Ireland. Picking up one of his favorite themes, Kennedy noted that even ancient enmities do not last forever, and that peace is a choice:

Ireland, he said, must play its part, especially in the United Nations: “The major forum for your nation’s greater role in world affairs is that of protector of the weak and voice of the small, the United Nations. From Cork to the Congo, from Galway to the Gaza Strip, from this legislative assembly to the United Nations, Ireland is sending its most talented men to do the world’s most important work—the work of peace.” And, added Kennedy, other small nations should follow this lead:

Kennedy’s peace campaign, in its essence, held that mankind can choose its fate, that we are not “gripped by forces we cannot control,” as he had put it at American University. So it was fitting that he gave an Irish spin to that philosophy, his abiding belief that we can shape our future by dreaming of a better world:

Kennedy had given Shaw’s words an interesting twist. Originally, in Shaw’s play
Back to Methuselah
, the words were spoken by the Serpent to Eve.
²⁴
In Kennedy’s retelling, they were the spirit of man striving to create his own Eden on Earth. Robert Kennedy would choose this phrase as the motto of his 1968 presidential campaign. And, most poignantly, we remember them as the closing words of Ted Kennedy’s moving eulogy of his brother Robert after the latter’s assassination.
²⁵

From Ireland Kennedy went to England. His first stop there was the most private of all: a heartrending visit to the gravesite of his beloved younger sister Kathleen (Kick), who had married a young British aristocrat who was killed in battle after D-Day. She herself died in a 1948 plane crash at only twenty-eight. From the late 1930s till her death a decade later, Kick had brought the young John into the dashing world of youthful British protégés of Churchill, young men who would continue to play an important role in shaping Kennedy’s worldview during his presidency. Among these was one of Kennedy’s closest confidants in foreign policy, David Ormsby-Gore, the future British Ambassador to the United States during Kennedy’s presidency.

Next he visited with Prime Minister Macmillan, for one-on-one meetings to coordinate positions on the upcoming negotiations in Moscow. Macmillan would instruct his negotiators to follow the U.S. lead on all points. Finally, from the United Kingdom he went
to Italy. Kennedy traveled first to Rome to meet with the government and with the new pope, Paul VI, following the death of Pope John XXIII on June 3. Then, for his last stop in Europe, Kennedy went to NATO headquarters in Naples. There he put a capstone on his peace initiative, closing the European trip by declaring, “The purpose of our military strength is peace. The purpose of our partnership is peace”:

His campaign was paying dividends. As Sorensen related, “That night, as we flew back to Washington, a message radioed to the plane told of a Khrushchev speech that day in East Berlin. It endorsed an atmospheric nuclear test-ban treaty.”
²⁷

The Final Round of Negotiations in Moscow