He had never had a day quite like it. He had come to Berlin to see the wall for himself, and its raw ugliness sickened him. He could not imagine a life constrained by concrete and iron rods. Then he went to Rudolf Wilde Platz, where half the population of West Berlin spilled out across the square and into the surrounding streets. He stood on the platform, his words floating out over the loudspeakers up and down the square, bouncing off the buildings in an eerie echo.
There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future.
Let them come to Berlin!
And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with communists.
Let them come to Berlin!
And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress.
Lass sie nach Berlin kommen! Let them come to Berlin!
And the crowd roared with a sound that was like the howl of a huge animal. At first, he was exhilarated; a sensation of power surged through him, thrilling him to his fingertips. For one mad instant, he thought that if he asked that crowd to turn and march to the wall and tear it down with bare hands, it would obey him. But even as the adrenaline pumped through him, he was afraid of this sudden strength.
How many men had experienced such power, to know that their will flowed from them directly into the bloodstreams of the crowd, that it could control their hands and hearts! For some, the thrill would be all. But rationality was his religion, perhaps even more than Catholicism. The rule of the mob seemed to him a horror, anathema to the discipline of democracy. He believed that modern technology and communication, which pierced the veil of old secrets, moved in favor of Western democracy and against authoritarianism. But he worried, too, that the earth might not survive that long. Seeing the wall stirred up his misgivings. He was one of two men on the planet who had stood on the brink of Armageddon. Both of them knew — as no others — how it felt to have the power of hell at their fingertips. It was one thing, he realized, to know, intellectually, that the power existed, another to feel it so close that the hairs on the back of your neck stood on end and you thought, Oh shit, it could happen. I could end the world. There was unusual emotion in his voice when he said before the United Nations, “However close we sometimes seem to that dark and final abyss, let no man of peace and freedom despair. … Together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames. Save it we can, and save it we must.”
As a serious student of history, he knew that blunder, stupidity, ego and error were too often its horsemen. After World War I, two German officials met, and one said to the other, “How did it happen?” and the other replied, “Ah, if only one knew.” He thought it intolerable that one day, two survivors of a nuclear war might stand in the debris of civilization and have the same exchange:
How did it begin!
Ah, if only one knew.
He had traveled a long way from the boy who had wondered, after his brother’s death, if he were boxing with a shadow. He had carried his father’s hopes, and now he realized it was, instead, the future of the earth that rested on his shoulders. He had wanted the job because that was where the power was. Now he had it, and it sobered him. One lesson he had learned was how much he could not do, how complicated the world was. But he determined that he would take the world back at least a few steps from the abyss into which he had stared. His words still bristled with the challenges of the warrior, but he knew there was a man halfway across the world who would not take that final step either. Together, they had to forge the cold and brittle peace-, anything else was simply madness.
From Berlin he traveled to the place both his grandfathers had left so many years before, to try their luck in a raw, unfriendly land. In Ireland, the crowds gathered around him as if he were some long lost nephew, and old women touched his cheek as if he were a child. For the first time he understood, with his heart, something of his roots, of why old men gathered in bars in South Boston and listened to the sad laments of a blood-soaked land whose gray skies and lush green grass had not been able to hold them. He had grown up in Palm Beach and Hyannis, more American than Irish, perhaps more English in temperament than either, but the old country stirred that hidden romantic inside him. His wife had written a poem about him early in their courting days, and she had known him better than he imagined.
Part he was of New England stock
As stubborn close-guarded as Plymouth Rock.
But part he was of an alien breed…
The lilt of that green land danced in his blood.
Tara, Killarney, a magical flood,
They surged in the depth of his too-proud heart.
He hated the idea that anyone would think him sentimental, but in Ireland the coolness thawed under the weight of poetry and the past. As he was preparing to board the plane for home, he stood facing a throng of well-wishers, and he threw to them the words of the song he had learned by heart, sounding odd in the broad, flat tones of New England:
Come back to Erin, Mavourneen, Mavourneen,
Come back around to the land of thy birth.
Come with the shamrock in the springtime, Mavourneen.
He looked out at the crowd and paused, and when he spoke it was not from a script.
“This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection.”
He paused again, looking out at the crowd and the green land beyond, the wind making a tangle of his hair, and he made them a promise: “I certainly will come back in the springtime.”