Reflections on power
- 58 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Berlin, two speeches, and the America that was
By John Wohlstetter
June marks two memorable presidential speech anniversaries: John F. Kennedy’s historic address delivered June 26, 1963, and Ronald Reagan’s June 12, 1987, speech, in which he called out Moscow’s General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.
Kennedy first visited Berlin in August 1939, days before the start of World War II. In July 1945, after the war ended, he visited again, this time as a member of the press. His most memorable 1963 lines resonate today — that part of his speech, including his German exhortations, that was a departure from the written text:
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!” There are those today who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin …
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 … Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen!
The Cold War context
In those far-distant times, 39 and 63 years ago, two presidents, one Democrat and one Republican, were both fully up to the national security challenge posed by what was then the Soviet Union. No one could fully match Kennedy’s eloquence in a speech given when West Berlin was under daily siege. Reagan spoke to a West Berlin ascendant and secure, when East Germany’s failure to provide a better life for its inhabitants was evident to nearly all West Berliners. Yet Reagan’s task, though less dramatic, was much larger: paint a portrait of the many differences across the great Cold War divide, and their evolution throughout the two dozen years since 1963. His speech was timed to also mark the 750th anniversary of Berlin’s founding. His clarion call for dismantling the Wall got a standing ovation:
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall.”
Reagan had long embraced the idea of tearing down the Wall. He first said so in a May 15, 1967, televised debate with New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
Division and the Berlin Wall
At the end of World War II (in Europe, May 8, 1945), Berlin had been divided per a four-power agreement among the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France. In June 1948, the Soviets began a blockade, cutting off food, water and fuel supplies to the other three sectors, to unify Berlin forcibly under Communist rule. President Truman ordered the Berlin Airlift, and after 11 months, the siege was lifted. At its peak, an allied plane landed every 90 seconds. To grasp how immense an undertaking this was, Berlin’s 344-square-mile area was eight times greater than the area of Paris thrice London’s, and greater than the total area of New York City’s five boroughs.
In June 1953, East Germany — officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR), though in reality neither democratic nor a republic — was the scene of the first major mass uprising in the Soviet bloc against communist rule. It was quickly crushed by Soviet troops and GDR security forces under dictator Walter Ulbricht, and in 1955 the GDR became a founding member of Moscow’s Warsaw Pact, the military alliance of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states. By the late 1950s, however, hundreds of thousands of GDR residents were still fleeing or applying to move to West Germany (officially the Federal Republic of Germany), with well more than 100,000 making the move in 1959 alone.
On July 26, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev warned John McCloy, High Commissioner of Germany during the postwar occupation, that a confrontation concerning Berlin risked all-out thermonuclear war; he warned that the Soviets had a 100-megaton bomb.
Ulbricht’s response to the growing exodus was to begin building the Berlin Wall, which began as barbed wire in the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, and by June 1963 had become an ugly concrete barrier more than 100 miles long. It symbolized a West Berlin under constant siege, at the height of the Cold War. Unbeknownst to the U.S., Khrushchev had told Ulbricht that if the U.S. used force, he was to retreat.
In the closing days of October 1961, General Lucius Clay, military governor during the postwar occupation, returned to Berlin. He sent tanks to the Wall. The Soviets responded, but Khrushchev ordered them not to fire first. No shots were exchanged, ending the only direct military confrontation between superpowers during the Cold War.
The Cuban Missile Crisis connection
A final note from the Berlin episode: During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy rejected advice to invade Cuba, fearing that the Soviets would retaliate by invading West Berlin. Though the U.S. declined to use force, Khrushchev ended a three-year U.S.-U.S.S.R.-U.K. nuclear-testing moratorium on August 30; its first tests were conducted in September. On October 30, 1961, the Soviets detonated their 50 megaton “Tsar Bomba,” the most powerful bomb ever tested. Originally intended to yield 100 megatons, the bomb’s designer, Andrei Sakharov, warned that it would release radiation equal to one-quarter of all 2,000 atmospheric nuclear tests since 1945. Khrushchev relented.
The final years and fall
As late as November 1986, GDR dictator Erich Honecker vowed it would stand 50 to 100 years. At its peak, the Stasi (Staatssicherheit, “state security”) maintained an informant network of roughly one per 6,000 people. It had one officer per 166 citizens; Hitler’s Gestapo had one per 2,000. It even spied on the private life of the GDR’s 1984 and 1988 Olympic gold-medal free skater Katarina Witt from age eight to 1992.
Then, in May 1989, East Germans began to exploit gaps in coverage outside Germany, and thousands fled. The Gorbachev regime did nothing to stop it. Gennady Gerasimov, a flack for Gorbachev, publicly called the new policy the “Frank Sinatra ‘My Way’ doctrine.”
Whereas JFK’s speech aimed to reassure West Berliners that America would remain steadfast in defending their freedoms, Reagan’s speech, though directly addressing Gorbachev, was primarily aimed at East Berliners, offering them a message of hope that freedom would one day return to the Eastern Sector. It finally did, when the Wall was demolished by locals on November 9, annus mirabilis 1989. During its 28-year lifespan, more than 200 would-be escapees were killed, and thousands more captured trying. In 1994, the two Germanys were reunited, both free and democratic at last.
Bottom line
The two speeches dramatically illustrate how well-timed presidential eloquence can rally broad public support, equally at times of great geostrategic peril and those offering great geostrategic opportunity.
John C. Wohlstetter is a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and the Washington, D.C.-based Gold Institute for International Strategy. He is the author of Presidential Succession: Constitution, Congress and National Security (3rd ed., 2026), to be published later this year.
