Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [165]
Calling civil rights “a moral issue . . . as old as the Scriptures and . . . as clear as the American Constitution,” he framed it in the context of the Cold War. “Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it.”
The commonsense truths he spoke that night were framed in the idiom of everyday American conversation.
“It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops.
“It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.
“It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color. In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case.
“If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public; if he cannot send his children to the best public school available; if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him; if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”
Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that the speech he’d heard represented “the most sweeping and forthright ever presented by an American president.”
But it was one thing to speak eloquently in one’s own language, and another to confront an audience on foreign land. Driving through the streets of West Berlin later that month, on June 26, Ben Bradlee watched Kennedy struggling to rehearse the German sentences he intended to use in a speech. Bradlee knew his friend was no linguist. In fact, Jack was secretly taking French lessons, having resented Bradlee’s own fluency, which he’d gained years before as a press attaché with the American embassy in Paris. “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.’ “
Twenty-two months earlier, the East Germans had stepped back from the edge of conflict and constructed the Berlin Wall, taking the city—and the watching world—by surprise. Overnight, the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire symbol of totalitarianism had taken shape as a scar on the landscape of European history. More than a hundred miles long, one section of the Wall divided East and West Berlin, while a much larger one encircled the American, British, and French sectors, cutting them off from the rest of East Germany. Where once there had been reasonably free passage between the halves of the politically bifurcated city, now there were checkpoints and guards with guns.
Kennedy tackled the problem of addressing the beleaguered West Berliners straightforwardly. He and his country stood for democracy, and everything else derived from that simple reality.