JFK interpreter remembers the night the Wall went up

Lochner

By Robert H. Lochner

Late in the evening of August 12, 1961, Edward R. Murrow, the famous wartime correspondent and television personality, arrived in Berlin on a routine visit to familiarize himself with his new job as director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA).

Radio in the American Sector (RIAS), whose German-language broadcasts were the main source of information for East Germans living under communist rule, was the biggest USIA operation overseas. I was its director.

At one minute after midnight I received an urgent call from the monitor section of RIAS that East Berlin radio had just announced traffic circulation between West and East Berlin would be stopped. Within 15 minutes, all my leading collaborators and I were at the station, switching the program to solemn music and news every 15 minutes.

Twice during the night I drove to East Berlin in an official car of the U.S. Mission, a tape recorder hidden under a raincoat, since my German reporters wouldn't have gotten through. I had a U.S. diplomatic passport and wasn't stopped. I recorded for later broadcast my impressions of the rolls of barbed wire being laid across the East-West streets.

Around 10 a.m. I went over a third time and got out of the car at the Friedrichstrasse railroad station, later the main crossing point during the long years of the Wall. Inside the station a scene of desolation: Thousands of East Berliners and other East Germans were milling around in utter desperation. They had not heard the news and had come to the station to take the next train to West Berlin and freedom. (During the last few days before the Wall, the number of daily refugees going to West Berlin had swelled to more than 3,000.)

Lochner took Ed Murrow to the Brandenburg Gate the day traffic between East and West Berlin was stopped

The staircases up to the station platforms were blocked by chains of black-uniformed Trapos (transport police), whose getups and arrogant attitudes reminded me sickeningly of the SS of Nazi time. As I was standing close by and observing the scene, a timid old woman with the typical pitiful cardboard box with probably all her belongings asked one of the Trapos when the next train would go to West Berlin. Sneeringly he answered: "None of that anymore, grandma: You are all now caught in a mousetrap."

Later on that fateful day, August 13, I took Ed Murrow to East Berlin and to the Brandenburg Gate, where thousands of West Berliners at the borderline were venting their angry frustration in taunting shouts at East German workers tearing up the street. (The workers were supervised by soldiers so they wouldn't try to escape.) At a later reception given by U.S. Mission Chief Alan Lightner for cabinet-ranking Murrow -- there had been no time to call it off in the face of the crisis -- Murrow asked me to arrange a call to President Kennedy.

Apparently most historians agree that only this call from Murrow really alerted Kennedy to the seriousness of the situation in Berlin. Some have told me that in this phone call the idea was born to send Vice President Johnson and General Clay to Berlin six days later. This visit helped considerably to buoy the flagging morale of the West Berliners.

But the greatest boost came from Kennedy's visit two years later. Clay, whose interpreter I had been, had recommended me to Kennedy, and I interpreted for the president during the whole trip to Germany. The reception Kennedy received in Cologne, Bonn and Frankfurt had already been enthusiastic but paled against the reception by the West Berliners.

As we walked up the stairs to the city hall in West Berlin for Kennedy's major speech, he called me over and asked me to write on a piece of paper in German, "I am a Berliner." I did, and when we got to West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt's office, while the hundreds of thousands of Berliners were cheering outside, Kennedy practiced it with me a few times before going out on the balcony for his historic speech.

John F. Kennedy

To Kennedy's political adviser, McGeorge Bundy, if nobody else, it was immediately apparent that making the famous "I am a Berliner" pledge in German gave it considerable additional force. Some historians argue it wouldn't have gone around the world and into history the way it did if he had said it in English. When, after the speech, we again briefly assembled in Brandt's office, I stayed close to the president in case he should talk to any Germans. I could not help overhearing Bundy saying to Kennedy, "I think that went a little too far."

Kennedy seemed to agree and, taking Bundy and me along to a table, made a few changes in the second major speech scheduled at the Free University later in the day, changes that amounted to being a bit more conciliatory toward the Soviets.

Kennedy's famous address is fondly remembered in Berlin, and was the highlight of my career as an interpreter.

Robert H. Lochner, an American raised and schooled in Berlin, was head of the European department of the Voice of America from 1958 to 1961 and director of RIAS from 1961 to 1968. Besides working as an interpreter for President Kennedy, Lochner also translated for Gen. Lucius Clay and President Lyndon Johnson.