The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

All summer long John Kennedy had brooded, waiting for Nikita Khrushchev to make good on his threat to get rid of "the bone in my throat" -- partitioned Berlin. But he had not anticipated what would happen on that warm August afternoon in 1961 when he set out from Hyannis Port, Mass., on the yacht Marlin loaded with family and his favorite picnic dish, fish chowder.

When the flash came from Washington that the Wall was going up, the Army major on duty became so agitated that he walked into the surf in full uniform ! to deliver the bulletin to Brigadier General Chester Clifton, the President's military aide, who was swimming just offshore.

Clifton signaled the Marlin back and handed Kennedy the terse message. "You all go ahead," J.F.K. told his family. "I won't be out." He climbed into a golf cart with Clifton and in silence rode to his house. "Why in hell didn't we know about it?" he blurted, not expecting an answer. "What can we do?" he asked, turning to Clifton. "What can the military do?" Clifton told him that out of some 40 contingency plans for Berlin, he could not recall a single one dealing with a wall being built between the Soviet and Allied sectors. In fact, there was not much he could do.

Later, in the Oval Office, he sighed that the Wall would stay until the Soviets tired of it. "We could have sent tanks over and knocked the Wall down," he mused. "What then? They build another one back a hundred yards? We knock that down, then we go to war?"

When Kennedy did see the Wall, the event became one of the great spectacles of the cold war, his speech one of the most memorable in his presidency. When Kennedy flew into Berlin that June morning, he had a text that did not please him. "You think this is any good?" he asked the U.S. Berlin commander, Major General James Polk, who had joined the Kennedy caravan.Polk scanned the speech and replied bluntly, "I think it is terrible." Kennedy agreed and began to write a new one. But before he taunted the builders of the Wall, he rode four hours through the streets of West Berlin in the midst of a human fury of adoration intensified by the city's constant isolation. Nothing before in Kennedy's exuberant political life had approached this demonstration of between 1 million and 2 million cheering, roaring Germans.

At Checkpoint Charlie he asked that family members and other guests not climb up to the viewing stand. Mouth set, Kennedy studied the strange, gray emptiness before him. Then, in far windows in East Berlin apartments, three women appeared waving handkerchiefs. "Isn't that kind of dangerous?" wondered Kennedy. Yes, he was told. Kennedy stood several seconds in tribute to those tiny figures.

The crowd that waited for him to speak in front of West Berlin's city hall occupied every foot of the square and all the connecting streets. Kennedy raised his jaw and chopped the air with his hand, his voice growing ragged as he shouted his challenges to the other world and answered with his famous $ refrain, "Let them come to Berlin." In that moment the tribute Kennedy gave to those people was as honorably held, as profoundly pure as anything he had ever said. It was made of truth and given to history. "Ich bin ein Berliner."