Redstate

By Josh Painter Posted in 2008 — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Word is out that Barack Obama and his campaign's brain trust are thinking of staging the most audacious photo op in American political history. But this one will take place on German, not American, soil:

Democratic US presidential candidate Barack Obama has requested permission to give an address at the Brandenburg Gate when he visits Berlin later this month, according to German media reports.

If permission is granted, the address would be loaded with historical significance. The Brandenburg Gate is where former US President Ronald Regan gave a famous speech in 1987, during which he asked then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall.

The four-paragraph story from the German media doesn't even mention it, but two other American presidents made memorable visits to the Berlin Wall.

In 1963, when President John F. Kennedy visited the Gate, the Soviets hung large banners across it so he could not see the East Berlin side. JFK's tour of Berlin is described in Kenny O'Donnel's memoir of his late boss, Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye:

When President Kennedy stopped to look at the Brandenburg Gate, a guard handed him a bouquet of flowers that had been thrown over the Wall with a note asking that it be given to him. Later, when we stopped at Checkpoint Charlie, the American-controlled gate to East Germany, a small group of East Berliners beyond the gate waved and cheered him.

In West Berlin he made a forty-mile tour of the city, thrilled by the sight of the biggest crowds he had ever seen anywhere. It was said that more than half of West Berlin's two and a third million people were in the streets that day, lined up four deep along his route and crowding every window and rooftop. The square outside of the City Hall, when he delivered his famous speech of challenge to the Communist world, was jammed solidly as far as he could see in every direction by a tightly crowded mass of people, chanting steadily "Ken-ah-dee! and shouting a roar of approval when he repeatedly punctuated his thrusts at compromising appeasers ... with the resounding refrain, "Let-- them-- come-- to-- Berlin!" The crowd was swept by a surge of pride and warmth, and deeply stirred as few such massive audiences in history have ever been moved, by Kennedy's opening and closing words. A German government official told us later that Adolf Hitler, at the peak of his popularity and power, had never attracted a crowd as large and as warmly emotional as the crowd that listened to Kennedy that day in Berlin.

Kennedy's fighting speech in Berlin, as magnificent as it was, actually was a grave political risk, and he knew it. Such a heated tribute to West Berlin's resistance to Communism could have undone all of the success of his appeal for peace and understanding with the Soviets... But Kennedy could not prevent himself from saying what his heart wanted him to say. He was carried away by the courage of the West Berliners, and shocked by the sight of the Berlin Wall that he had seen that morning, and he had to tell the people how he felt about them.

On July 12, 1994 President Bill Clinton addressed a speech to the people of Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate, talking mainly about peace in post-Cold War Europe. Though Clinton was well-liked in Germany and his speech well-received by Berliners, it was not the history-making stuff of the addresses given by Kennedy and Reagan.

President Reagan's speech, delivered on June 12, 1987, appeared at first to have little immediate impact beyond those cheering on both sides of the wall who heard it as he spoke. But that would soon change:

In the days and weeks following the event, neither the American nor the European press treated the speech as an especially noteworthy event. Neither, of course, did the Soviets.

It was only after November 1989, when the Soviet Empire began to crumble, that the world began to honor President Reagan’s challenge as a harbinger of change. President George H.W. Bush’s immediate support for Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s dramatic push for reunification transformed perceptions of the American role in Germany. Almost overnight, the 1987 speech was resurrected as proof of the American spirit that had made reunification possible. Until then, West Europeans had relegated it to the archives as another example of the poetic license the former movie star allowed himself on such ceremonial occasions.

Today, of course, President Reagan’s Berlin challenge has become an object of admiration and legend. As with all legends, its origins and purposes have been subject to many interpretations. Some have defined the speech as a singular demonstration of American idealism, transcending the less lofty aims of then-contemporary American foreign policy. Learned professors have sought to find still deeper truths in a text essentially written by a fractious committee. In any event, all such interpretations of Reagan’s Berlin speech miss a critical point: The President’s appearance before the Brandenburg Gate was not an isolated event. The speech was part of a calculated strategy, conceived over several years by Administration officials, to counter the damage to Transatlantic unity caused by the massive public opposition to NATO INF [western intermediate-range missles to counter the Soviet SS-20] developments, and to arrest the steady drift in Germany toward accommodation with the Russians. How do I know? I was the person charged with much of the planning and substance of the event.

Now Barack Obama presumes to want to bask in the glow of JFK and Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate. If Team Obama goes ahead with this ill-conceived plan, it will be the most arrogant stunt yet attempted by the Democratic presidential hopeful, a man who is long on spellbinding oratorical rhetoric but short on actual achievment. Arrogance on the part of the accomplished is just arrogance, but arrogance on the part of the unaccomplished is sheer buffoonery.

At least Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton had managed to become presidents of the United States, and to some degre, each had managed to achieve something significant in the field of foreign affairs. JFK had sat down with Khrushchev at the 1961 summit and then stood up to him in 1962, when he got Soviet missles removed from Cuba. Reagan had met with Gorbechev in both Washington and Moscow on a number of occasions to hammer out arms agreements. Even Bill Clinton was able to expand the NATO alliance and use his rapport with Yeltsin to establish a cooperative relationship with Russia, which resulted in Moscow helping the U.S. resolve ethnic conflicts in the Balkans by sending peacekeepers to Bosnia in 1995 and intervening to force a capitulation by Serbia in the 1999 Kosovo war.

The staging of a big photo op at the Brandenburg Gate for an American political candidate is more than just an exercise in theatrics and perhaps a new high water mark in the annals of opportunism. It is literally stealing the honor and diminishing the accomplishments of the real American presidents who stood at the great gate before him.

Don't do this, Sen. Obama. Get yourself elected first, and then accomplish something noteworthy in foreign affairs. Then, and only then, should you presume to follow in the footsteps of American presidents to Germany's historic Brandenburg Gate.

- JP