0:00 You ever see four hundred thousand people hold their breath all at once?0:05 Can't say I have, love, no.0:07 Sounds like a proper church quiet, only outdoors.0:10 In our last episode, we stood backstage watching the sheer panic before Lincoln stepped up at Gettysburg.0:18 But June twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-three, in West Berlin, was a whole different kind of tremble.0:25 The air felt heavier than a loaded coal drag sitting on a grade.0:30 Ey up, I can imagine.0:31 Just twenty-two months after that awful wall went up, cutting right through streets and back gardens.0:39 Families torn clean in two.0:41 That's it exactly, Nan.0:43 And just eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the whole world right to the edge.0:49 You had West Berlin sitting out there like a tiny island, completely surrounded by Soviet armor and East German guard posts.0:59 Kennedy lands at Tegel airport, rolls up to the steps of the Rathaus Schöneberg, and folks are hanging out of second-story windows just to catch a glimpse.1:10 Ulrich Mack, that photographer, he said folk lined every inch of that road.1:15 They weren't just curious, were they?1:18 They were terrified.1:20 West Berlin official Egon Bahr said they were all quiet as mice inside that city hall.1:26 Just trembling, because they knew their lives hung on what that young American president said out on those steps.1:34 Now, I know how that sounds, but hang on.1:37 Kennedy had a razor wire to walk.1:39 Just sixteen days before, on June tenth, he gave that big peace speech at American University, trying to cool down nuclear tensions with the Soviets.1:50 He couldn't go to the Brandenburg Gate and start a shooting war.1:55 So he stood on the town hall steps instead.1:58 And he was tweaking his own words right up to the line, wasn't he?2:03 Swear on my tackle box, he was.2:05 On June twenty-fifth, the day before, Kennedy took his pen and scribbled down a phrase in his own handwriting.2:13 He'd used the old Latin boast, civis Romanus sum—"I am a Roman citizen"—down in New Orleans the year before.2:21 But he wanted something the folks right in front of him could feel in their bones.2:27 Ooh, and he didn't just rattle it off with his Boston twang, did he?2:32 He sat with his translator, going over it and over it until he got the tongue round it proper.2:39 Mm-hmm.2:40 Practicing over and over.2:41 And you've heard that old tale people love to spin, claiming he stood up there and accidentally told the crowd he was a jelly doughnut?2:51 Aye, my neighbor tried telling me that over a brew!2:55 Said he called himself a pastry.2:57 Rubbish, isn't it?2:59 Absolute foolishness.3:00 Every German linguist and historian will tell you: in that context, saying "Ich bin ein Berliner" meant "I am one with you." It was grammatically spot on, and that crowd understood every syllable.3:15 When he stepped up to that microphone, you could hear a pin drop in the square.3:20 Then he laid down the challenge: "There are some who say communism is the wave of the future.3:27 Let them come to Berlin." Ted Sorensen, his speechwriter, was standing right there in the wings.3:34 He said the crowd's energy was so explosive, if Kennedy had told them to march on that concrete wall right then, they'd have torn it down with their bare fingers.3:46 Edith Hancke was down in the crowd, and she said the second those German words left his mouth—proclaiming that all free men, wherever they live, are citizens of Berlin—people started yelling like crazy.4:01 Sobbing, shouting, throwing hats.4:03 Because freedom isn't half-measures, is it, chuck?4:07 Like he said: "Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free." It made that little, hemmed-in city the very center of the whole free world.4:19 Kennedy walked off those wooden boards, wiped the sweat from his neck, leaned over to Sorensen, and said, "Phew!4:27 We'll never have another day like this as long as we live." And he was right, love.4:33 It didn't bring the wall down that afternoon, nor shift the Soviet tanks back an inch.4:39 But it gave four hundred thousand frightened folk something to hold onto in the dark.4:46 Well.4:46 That's about the size of it.4:48 Words don't knock down concrete, but they sure can keep the spirit standing till the walls finally crumble.4:56 Right then, love.4:57 Rest easy now.4:58 Night night, sleep tight, chuck.
