Free To Move the World by Jeffrey D. Sachs Page B

and Ireland, and less public stops in England and Rome. The whirlwind trip, from June 23 to July 2, was among the most memorable nine days of Kennedy’s presidency, and indeed of his life.
The Trip to Europe

 
    John Kennedy’s arrival in Europe in late June in many ways recalled Woodrow Wilson’s arrival in Europe forty-five years earlier. In both cases, Europeans looked to the American president for deliverance. Wilson personified Europe’s hope for a just and lasting peace after the most devastating war in the continent’s long and bloody history. Kennedy embodied the hopes of Western Europe for peace and economic dynamism in the Cold War era. To a war-weary continent, Kennedy offered youth, charm, and American optimism. He no doubt had Wilson very much on his mind for more reasons than their similar receptions. Wilson’s triumphant European arrival was bookended by his failure to win Senate confirmation of the Paris peace treaty, which doomed the new League of Nations. Wilson drove himself nearly to death in his frenzied campaign for treaty ratification, suffering an incapacitating stroke in the process.
    Wilson had arrived in Europe to adoring masses. “As soon as he set foot on French soil, an explosion of celebrations began. French and American soldiers lined the streets of Brest as the Wilsons rode in an open car under triumphal arches of flowers … Hordes of cheering people packed the sidewalks and hung out of every window.” 16 Kennedy’s greeting was no less euphoric. Schlesingerdescribed Kennedy’s entrance into Berlin, with “three-fifths of the population of West Berlin streaming into the streets, clapping, waving, crying, cheering, as if it were the second coming.” 17
    Kennedy’s itinerary was geared to the treaty negotiations. The first stops were in Germany, first Frankfurt and then Berlin, the front line of the Cold War, with a political leadership that had to be handled with care. West German leaders, especially Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, reacted nervously to any signs of U.S. rapprochement with the Soviet Union, out of fear that West Germany’s interests might be undermined in some grand bargain on European security. Whenever Kennedy took pains to emphasize that he would make no agreements at the expense of the Western allies, he had West Germany first in mind. *
Let Them Come to Berlin

 
    The speech in Berlin marked the most remarkable occasion of the whole European trip. 18 After taking a tour of the western part of the city, including a solemn visit to the Berlin Wall, Kennedy’s car slowly proceeded through throngs of cheering people, finally arriving in the city center. Kennedy’s visit was an unprecedented public event. Over 1,500 journalists were accredited to cover it, † and many businesses and schools were closed for the day. 19 Hundreds of thousands of people filled the square; the empty streets of East Berlin could be seen just over the Berlin Wall. It was an emotional crowd that, in turn, moved Kennedy into a flight of improvised rhetoric that went further than he himself had intended in the prepared draft.

    Kennedy delivers his
“Ich bin ein Berliner”
speech in Rudolph Wilde Platz, Berlin (June 26, 1963).
    “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:
    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 huge crowd roared its delight. As Kennedy’s locution was not exact (the
ein
was out of place), the translator repeated Kennedy’sline, 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