John Kerry on Biking around post-war Berlin

Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speach on his first day and talked about his first diplomatic passpart - the one he got as an 11-year old when his father was a Foreign Service Officer. 

we went to Berlin, and this was not too long after the war, and I used to ride my bicycle around Berlin, it was my pastime, my passion, and rode everywhere, the Grunewald, around the lakes, up and down the Kurfurstendamm, the church where the steeple burned down, past the Reichstag, burned out, past Brandenburg Gate, past Hitler’s tomb with these amazing, huge concrete slabs blown up. And I just roamed around. It was stunning how little control there was.

And one day – in my sense of 12-year-old adventure, I think it was then – I used this very passport to pass through into the East Sector, the Russian sector, and I bicycled around, and I’ll tell you, as a 12-year-old kid, I really did notice the starkness, the desolation. In fact, I was thinking about it the other day. If the tabloids today knew I had done that, I can see the headlines that say, “Kerry’s Early Communist Connections,” something like that. (Laughter.) That’s the world we live in, folks.

But I would reassure them by saying I really noticed the difference between the east and west. There were very few people. They were dressed in dark clothing. They kind of held their heads down. I noticed all this. There was no joy in those streets. And when I came back, I felt this remarkable sense of relief and a great lesson about the virtue of freedom and the virtue of the principles and ideals that we live by and that drive us. I was enthralled.

 

Comments

[Will]

When I was 12, I used to go rollerblading at night after my parents were asleep. I think one time I went on a 6 or 7 mile roundtrip. I lived in suburbia, so if a car came by I could usually duck behind a tree so as not to be noticed. But going to Soviet East Germany puts this adventure to shame. Hell of a heart on young John Kerry, and to think that now we worry about 12 year olds riding their bikes to school!

[Crikey7]

"There was no joy in those streets."

Kind of like the lady who wrote the WaPo letter to the editor last week.

[George T.]

Since Kerry was born in '43', his travels to Berlin would have been in the middle of the 50's.

Probably a wake up call to a 12YO.

Well after the war and the blockade. But before the 'WALL'.

[contrarian]

I would think the 12-year-old John Kerry would be very disappointed in the 70-year-old John Kerry.

[M.V. Jantzen]

I noticed the same lack of joy in the streets after passing through the security barricades and security screenings of the inauguration. The SS (USSS) managed to turn DC into East Berlin for a day.