When Bertie accounts for himself today, will we see Brandt or Nixon?
He travelled straight from here to Germany and Berlin, the first American president to visit the city since the end of World War II.
The phrase has gone down in history for a number of reasons. Kennedy was at the height of his powers when he visited Berlin, and the city was a place in desperate need of his support.
Berlin was a divided city then, located in the heart of East Germany and accessible only with the permission of the dictatorial East German government.
Kennedy spoke to tens of thousands of West Berliners, a people under siege, and he spoke within sight of the hated Berlin Wall, topped with barbed wire, that divided the east of the city from the west. He spoke mostly about freedom and concluded by adding a couple of sentences he had thought of moments before he spoke.
He said: “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was ‘civis Romanus sum’ (I am a Roman citizen). Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man I take pride in the words Ich bin ein Berliner”.
Standing beside Kennedy that day, and clearly taking pride and delight in Kennedy’s message of freedom, was one of the greatest men that modern Germany has produced. Willi Brandt was then the Mayor of West Berlin. Born in Lubeck 50 years earlier, Brandt had fled from Germany in the 1930s to escape persecution by the Nazis. On his return he joined the German Social Democratic Party, becoming Mayor of West Berlin in the early 1960s and ultimately Chancellor of Germany in 1969.
As chancellor — and remember he was chancellor of a country divided by the Soviet Union — he became one of the great architects of peace with the old enemy. His policy of Ostpolitik (literally Eastern Politics) encouraged Germans to look east as well as west, and to build better relations with the countries around them. Although the Berlin Wall remained, the policy added to the confidence of the German people and ultimately laid the groundwork for the reunification of the country. Brandt was known to be one of the great European statesmen, an architect of peace, and a leading voice for European cooperation. He was widely respected at home and abroad, and seemed politically invulnerable. But in 1974 he was approached by the West German security forces with some terrible news. They suspected that one of his closest aides, a man called Gunter Guillaume, was an East German spy. He worked for the much-hated Stasi. Shocked by the news, Brandt wanted to confront his aide, but the security advisers asked him instead to help them lay a trap for the spy. This Brandt did, even inviting Guillaume to go on holiday with him, where they were kept under constant surveillance. When eventually Guillaume was arrested and confessed, it was widely known that not only had Brandt no idea the man was a spy, but that he had actually helped to have him unmasked.
Brandt, however, had lived a life of total commitment to democratic action and believed absolutely in democratic accountability. He became so depressed at the thought that his actions, in trusting and employing Guillaume, had allowed a spy into the inner workings of the German government that he even contemplated suicide.
Brandt didn’t do that, but he did come to the conclusion that accountability for the mistake had to be accepted. And so, at the crest of his popularity and success, and to everyone’s astonishment, he resigned, taking full responsibility for a mistake.
One of the people most astonished at Brandt’s resignation was former President Richard Nixon who had himself resigned in disgrace a couple of years earlier. Nixon knew and admired Brandt, and had given him some of the credit for one of Nixon’s own great foreign policy accomplishments, the policy of détente with the Soviet Union.
Nixon couldn’t understand what Brandt had done wrong, and what he felt accountable for. He despised the fact that Brandt had, as he saw it, given in to his enemies.
MANY years earlier, Nixon had faced a crisis in his own life. After making his name in the US Congress by demanding high standards of integrity and patriotism, he had been selected as Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate in the presidential election of 1952. A scandal had blown up in the middle of the campaign, when it was alleged that Nixon had taken money from friends. Fighting for his political life, Nixon made a famous TV broadcast.
He began this way: “I am sure that you have read the charge and you’ve heard that I, Senator Nixon, took $18,000 from a group of my supporters. Now, was that wrong? And let me say that it was wrong. I’m saying, incidentally, that it was wrong and not just illegal. Because it isn’t a question of whether it was legal or illegal, that isn’t enough. The question is, was it morally wrong? I say that it was morally wrong if any of that $18,000 went to Senator Nixon for my personal use. I say that it was morally wrong if it was secretly given and secretly handled. And I say that it was morally wrong if any of the contributors got special favours for the contributions that they made”.
He then went on at great length to rebut the charge, producing all sorts of papers to establish that the money was a political fund. But his master stroke came at the end, when he said: “One other thing I probably should tell you because if we don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something — a gift — after the election. A man down in Texas heard my wife on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us … You know what it was.
“It was a little cocker spaniel … that he’d sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl — Tricia, the six-year old — named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it”.
Of course, the Checkers speech, as it became known, saved Nixon, and he went on to all the great things we know about.
I’ve been thinking about these two men the past week. Two men of real achievement, with dramatically different personalities and outlook. Two models for their own and subsequent generations.
And I’ve been wondering, when Dáil Eireann meets this afternoon, which one will we see? Brandt or Nixon? Or something, perhaps, in between?
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
