Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: staff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined as usual by staff writer
Speaker 1: Josh Clark, County Candice Hey. So, Candice, I was perusing
Speaker 1: the my favorite news sites. I won't mention any of them,
Speaker 1: but UM, I found that there was a little article
Speaker 1: about a guy named Graham Pierce who retired from the
Speaker 1: Dallas Police Force at the end of July. Have you
Speaker 1: heard of this guy? Yeah? Well, UM, normally you wouldn't find,
Speaker 1: you know, um, articles in national newspapers about retiring police
Speaker 1: officers from Dallas. But the thing that made this guy's
Speaker 1: retirement significant was he was the last uh Dallas Police
Speaker 1: force officer. UM, Dallas police officer who was on the
Speaker 1: force when JFK was assassinated in nineteen sixty three in Dallas. UM,
Speaker 1: so of course it's going to make you know, headlines
Speaker 1: here there. I think that it did make the fact
Speaker 1: that it did make headlines, UH couldn't have been more
Speaker 1: of a godsend for the Barack Obama campaign. UM. Just
Speaker 1: four days earlier, Obama was in Berlin giving a speech
Speaker 1: to like twenty thou Berliners, UM, about how we can't
Speaker 1: allow walls to be erected among the people's of of uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the West and the world, and we have
Speaker 1: to fight things like a terrorism and global warming together
Speaker 1: rather than separately. He was warning against isolationism and obviously
Speaker 1: speaking in favor of globalization. UM. And the reason Obama
Speaker 1: chose Berlin, and the reason his camp would be very
Speaker 1: very happy that this Dallas police officer retired just a
Speaker 1: couple of days later, was because Barack Obama loves to
Speaker 1: be compared to JFK, another young American president exactly the
Speaker 1: works wait exactly right with young kids, which is another
Speaker 1: another comparison. Um. So Obama chose Berlin to give this
Speaker 1: to give this speech because Kennedy had done it in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three. UM. And he did it right next
Speaker 1: to the Berlin Wall, which was this very literal dividing
Speaker 1: line between East and West, communism and right and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, freedom and tyranny depending on on your view
Speaker 1: or your opinion or where you were born. Um. And
Speaker 1: what Kennedy was saying when he gave that speech was
Speaker 1: that you know, there's this wall here and and the
Speaker 1: East Germans erected it but America would stand behind the
Speaker 1: West Germans and the rest of the free world. And
Speaker 1: if if they the Communists, came across this wall, they
Speaker 1: would not only be messing with Germany, they would be
Speaker 1: messing with America too. And in front of a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand Berliners. Uh. He ended his speech very famously with
Speaker 1: each being I am beer leaner, right, my Germans a
Speaker 1: little rusty. But I've heard along the way in my
Speaker 1: thirty two years that he actually said, not I am
Speaker 1: a Berliner, but I am a jelly donut. Um is
Speaker 1: that fact or fiction? Please put this to rest, because
Speaker 1: I've heard it before, and I've heard both sides. What
Speaker 1: what are you saying? It's sort of a sticky subject.
Speaker 1: Now put on the jelly donut. But I think anytime
Speaker 1: you're dissecting and interpreting a political figure speech, they're going
Speaker 1: to be people who interpret it different ways. And to
Speaker 1: be perfectly honest, I mean, you could say that that
Speaker 1: is a fact. He did say he was a jelly donut,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to lean toward decide that it's fiction.
Speaker 1: And then he didn't actually say it's a jelly donut.
Speaker 1: So this comment essentially it wasn't even something that Kennedy wrote.
Speaker 1: You know, most presidents have speech writers, and his was
Speaker 1: Ted Sorenson, who in his memoir actually said, you know,
Speaker 1: I can't believe I put that in there. We were
Speaker 1: trying to coach Kennedy on how to make that uvuler are.
Speaker 1: It's sort of a hard sound to make. And as
Speaker 1: we all know, Kennedy had a pretty uh well known
Speaker 1: Boston accent, and so he actually the reason he said
Speaker 1: is instead of ike was because he had trouble saying
Speaker 1: ike uh. And he went with the Bavarian, which was
Speaker 1: apparently a little easier for him because of that very
Speaker 1: that Boston exciting Yeah. And and if you listen to
Speaker 1: any of Kennedy's speeches or commentaries on the radio that
Speaker 1: he made during his lifetime, he dropped his arms quite
Speaker 1: a bit, and this was sort of a bad time
Speaker 1: to drop your R. There you have it. So the
Speaker 1: jelly donut in question, let's let's conquer this first. The
Speaker 1: Berliner Essentially, this is a German pastry. It's sort of
Speaker 1: like a jelly donut. It could also be called a
Speaker 1: Berliner balin. And this isn't the only item of food
Speaker 1: that is named after a city you've heard of Frankfurter's right. Certainly,
Speaker 1: there you have it. It's not uncommon in Germany for
Speaker 1: things to be named after towns. And Rice Erroney is
Speaker 1: the San Francisco treat that too, indeed. Um, But essentially,
Speaker 1: he wasn't saying I'm a jelly donut. He's saying I'm
Speaker 1: one of you. And there's a couple of sticky issues
Speaker 1: with that. Again, back to the sticky jelly. It's to
Speaker 1: say it literally would be I'm a resident of Berlin,
Speaker 1: but he was trying to say it more colloquially or
Speaker 1: more figuratively, I am one of you. You know, we
Speaker 1: are one of this body. We're in this together. And
Speaker 1: when it came out, he actually said this a couple
Speaker 1: of times in his speech. It wasn't just at the end,
Speaker 1: he said at the beginning. In fact, when he came
Speaker 1: up to the podium to make the speech and there
Speaker 1: was such a thunderous applause and ovation that he couldn't
Speaker 1: even begin until a couple of minutes after the crowd
Speaker 1: of one thousand had calmed down, And so he said
Speaker 1: it a couple of times, and essentially what he was
Speaker 1: implying with that back in ancient civilization. The great civilization
Speaker 1: to belong to would be the Romans, and today it's
Speaker 1: the Berliner's. You know, to be one of you, to
Speaker 1: stand for democracy in a world that's been essentially, you know,
Speaker 1: surrounded by communist forces, it's a very brave thing and
Speaker 1: I'm proud to be one of you. And the crowd
Speaker 1: was very receptive of the sentiment. And perhaps there were
Speaker 1: a couple of people who twittered, but I think they
Speaker 1: appreciated that the US was there to help, but not
Speaker 1: only the US also um France and Britain were part
Speaker 1: of this too. But the people who may have laughed,
Speaker 1: And the reason that documentation exists is that there were
Speaker 1: some negative feelings towards JFK, and that has to do
Speaker 1: with the erection of the wall itself. It was really
Speaker 1: really spooky the night of August twelfth one, the lights
Speaker 1: went out in East Berlin and when people woke up
Speaker 1: there was a barbed wire fence separating East Berlin from
Speaker 1: West Berlin. And before then, you know, there have been
Speaker 1: guard station to try to keep people from defecting over
Speaker 1: to the west side, and that was because it was
Speaker 1: becoming an anonomical problem for the communist rule. People were leaving,
Speaker 1: they couldn't support society. I can't imagine that there were
Speaker 1: too many West Germans flooding into East Germany through Berlin.
Speaker 1: Not so much. It would be sort of like I
Speaker 1: don't even know, I can't even make an analogy. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna stop right there. But when the wall there we go.
Speaker 1: When the wall and up, it was just a barbed
Speaker 1: wire fence, and then progressively it grew into this big
Speaker 1: concrete bastion with checkpoints and guns and tubes on tops
Speaker 1: of people couldn't crawl over, and guard station everywhere, people
Speaker 1: couldn't tunnel under. But when it went up that night
Speaker 1: of Office twelve, when the world woke up, suddenly there
Speaker 1: was and JFK was taken aback as anyone else it wasn't.
Speaker 1: Everyone just completely caught off guard by this. There was
Speaker 1: no announcement of these plans. It just walls up. It
Speaker 1: just happened. And a couple of countries, the afore mentioned France,
Speaker 1: Britain and US, they devised the Berlin Air Left to
Speaker 1: take supplies over to West Berlin and keep them, you know, sustained.
Speaker 1: And so they were doing what they could, but some
Speaker 1: people were still very angry about the situation and wondered
Speaker 1: why this American superpower couldn't help save them. So the
Speaker 1: people who laughed and misinterpreted the speech probably did it purposefully,
Speaker 1: just as today. You know, when we listen to comments
Speaker 1: that political figures make, we have ways of making fools
Speaker 1: out of them in our own minds, for our own
Speaker 1: personal reasons. Understood like a nuclear that would be one example,
Speaker 1: very relevant and modern. Well, you've made me very hungry
Speaker 1: while you cleared this up. I'm actually I kind of
Speaker 1: feel like a fair claw. I'm not big on jelly donuts,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to get some pastry of some sort
Speaker 1: that sounds good. And in the intro and the rest
Speaker 1: of you can read how the Berlin Wall Work for
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