When John Kennedy spoke in Germany in the midst of the Cold War, more than a million people followed his progress across Berlin. People leaned from windows and sat on the branches of trees to watch him pass. More than 400,000 were present to hear his speech in person. Kennedy's declaration of solidarity with the people of Berlin drew cheers that rattled windows on both sides of the wall.
When Ronald Reagan spoke at the Brandenburg Gate the situation was... different. Both very different from the situation Kennedy had faced more than two decades earlier, and very different from the way it's presented to us by a GOP and media who have deified Reagan.
When Reagan visited Berlin in 1987, the Soldiarity union was already seven years old. It had been formed in the strikes at the Gdańsk Shipyard, struggled through a period of martial law in which Soviet forces were expected in Poland at any moment, and lived on to begin negotiations with the collapsing communist government. Pope John Paul II had stepped back into his native country four years before Reagan came to stand next to the wall, widening the cracks that were radiating through Eastern Europe. Gorbachev had been at the front of a crumbling Soviet leadership for two years, and it was increasingly apparent that he could not hold the faltering empire together either militarily or economically. Protests in Czechoslovakia had led to invasion in the 1960s, but this time it was obvious that the tanks weren't coming. How could they? 115,000 Soviet troops were still tied up in Afghanistan that summer, the seventh year of their costly invasion. The cost of that war -- in men, in reputation, and in rubles -- was the heaviest straw on the back of a Soviet camel already on its knees.
In short -- no one was paying any attention to Reagan. Far from bringing out a thronging horde, Reagan's second visit to Berlin was barely noticed either by the press or the populace. There were no crowds on the street. No one even thought of climbing a tree to see him.
At the Brandenburg Gate, the streets weren't choked by hundreds of thousands eager to listen. Instead, about 20,000 Reagan supporters were brought in for the occasion, positioned to provide a backdrop, and prompted to cheer. When the speech was over, they were bused home.
In 1963, Berlin was looking to Kennedy to show that Berlin would not be allowed to fall to communism. In 1987, communism was near the end of a two decade collapse, and Reagan's speech was a media event made for America, not Berlin. It was staged as much as pulling down the statue of Saddam. What he said was little noted by the people of Europe, and had no effect on the end of communist control. Only in retrospect, and in the minds of Reagan's fanatical supporters, did the speech gain mystical connotations.
In 2008, Barack Obama is stopping to pay a visit in Berlin. It's too much to expect that his words will have the kind of electrifying effect that Kennedy had in 1963. The situation then was so dire, and the lines of delineation so stark, that the speech raised up not just the people of Berlin, but the people of the world. One thing is clear enough: the huge crowds already forming by the Victory Column show that there's far more interest in what Obama has to say than there was for Reagan.
The question for today is, in these times when the problems at least seem so much more complex and tangled, will Obama be satisfied with reminding us of the importance of what Berlin stood for in the past, or will he use that location as a symbol for our future?
