“Ich bin ein Berliner”

For the past few days I’ve occasionally been browsing through Dallek’s biography of John F. Kennedy. I have no time to commit to reading it (or anything non-work related) seriously at the moment, but it’s a good mental reset button.

And the first thing I wanted to say is that I’m always annoyed by the quasi-urban myth that when Kennedy lectured in Berlin, the crowd laughed because “ich bin ein Berliner” was interpreted to mean “I am a jelly doughnut”. The point being that you wouldn’t usually use the indefinite article “ein”.

However, every single time I was in Germany doing a language course, some American fellow student would bring up that incident as if expecting to share a big laugh. And never once did I meet an actual German person who understood the joke. One of them even explained, thank God, that it was simply false. His take on the grammar (and he was a very respected elder expert in German grammar) is that you can only drop the “ein” if you are literally a resident of Berlin. But for an outsider to express solidarity with the city of Berlin, the “ein” is appropriate. Regardless of the details, I was glad to see him shoot down one of the most annoying pseudo-intellectual tropes in recent American political history.

Back to a more serious point about the book itself… My first impression of the Kennedy family, perhaps not original but one that never occurred to me in quite this way before… Many rich and successful families do put obscene amounts of pressure on their children to succeed, with all sorts of emotional problems as the result. What makes the Kennedys interesting is that they were a quite openly competitive bunch. But while there were indeed some obvious emotional problems that resulted from this for numerous members of the family, there was also a strangely healthy underside to it.

This, I think, is what made the family somewhat unique. Normally, an overbearing and highly successful father who insulted his kids for failing would lead to nothing but a morass of family resentment. There was certainly a bit of that in the Kennedys as well, but in a weird way they also all seemed to enjoy it and flourish as a result of it. For instance, Joe Sr. was fairly reactionary in some ways (at least on foreign policy issues) but was fully willing to let his sons lip off from a slightly more leftward position. He seemed to enjoy their taking independent positions and contradicting him.

Special families, special people, quite often seem to have this sort of formula. At first they look like just another stereotypical such-and-such, but with a certain interesting twist added to the mix. So, the Kennedys could easily have been just another ambitious and upwardly mobile ex-middle class family, resentful over anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment in Wasp’ish Boston and determined to force their way into the social elite anyway. And all of that is there, but it wasn’t all that was going on. There was also a streak of “excellence for its own sake” in the family, along with a sort of warmth toward other humans that prevented a sickly selfish and interiorized ambition for high social prominence.

Incidentally (and perhaps this has been said before, but I never thought of it until Dallek mentioned it) sibling rivalry was at least partly responsible for the death of Joe Jr. in the skies of Suffolk. John Kennedy’s good press over Navy heroism made Joe want to top his younger brother, and that’s what led him to volunteer for an absurdly ridiculous mission– flying a plane loaded with 20,000 pounds of dynamite and bailing out just before the plane crashed into German rocket launchers. What happened, of course, is that the dynamite was triggered too early with the pilots still aboard, and Joe Kennedy Jr.’s body “was never recovered”; the plane itself crashed on the ground in Suffolk, with some 60 buildings damaged by the blast. Joe Jr. had already completed his 30 missions, and would have been allowed to return to the USA. But that would have meant departing WWII with no special citations, whereas younger brother Jack was already a sort of hero. (Joe Jr. had sent his brother some snide “congratulations” insinuating that a real hero would never have allowed his boat to be sunk in the first place.) So, some aspects of the sibling rivalry were just typically sick, but it did also seem to work in a favorable way for all of the brothers.

If not for Joe’s death, it is of course less likely that JFK would ever have entered politics, given the active tradition at the time that politics belonged to the eldest son.