There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  I

  It was 26 June 1963, to be exact, over 880 days into the thousand days of Camelot, and JFK was still very much alive that afternoon—as were the more than 120,000 West Berliners who gathered in the war-ruined Rudolph Wilde Platz many hours before he arrived, and who erupted in cries and shouts when he appeared on the steps of City Hall, and who hushed when he approached the microphone and began to speak:

  Two thousand years ago, the president declared, after wasting one minute, twenty seconds acknowledging people onstage before declaring again—Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was “civis Romanus sum.” Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

  Those last words—I am a Berliner—made Mr. Kennedy’s speech famous. But as with many things that lead to fame, the words did not convey what he and the speech were all about. The next lines did:

  There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin.

  To understand what he meant, why the crowd cheered after hearing this, you should know that by 26 June 1963, whoever had decided that it was a good idea to split one city among four nations—America, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—must have been either fired or full of regret. The split had devolved into the greatest geopolitical conflict since the last great geopolitical conflict, which also involved these four nations plus Germany, in a slightly different arrangement. I’m no historian, but from what I can tell, America tried to mind its business (and get rich while doing so) until some mix of the Japanese and Winston Churchill convinced Franklin Roosevelt to finally do more to defend the West and assist the battered British Empire, which might have held on a little longer if France had not surrendered so quickly to the German Third Reich, which might have actually lasted a thousand years or at least more than twelve if the Soviets (or Joe Stalin) had not been willing to send ten million soldiers to die, almost as many dead soldiers as every other country in the war combined (yet not as many dead soldiers as murdered Jews and Roma and homosexuals, real and accused, and people with disabilities and Jehovah’s Witnesses and asocials and resisters and ordinary citizens living through an extraordinarily terrible time). As thanks for their sacrifice, the Soviets were granted the eastern portion of Germany and the eastern portion of Berlin at the end of the war. In the fifteen years between that 1945 accord and Mr. Kennedy’s 1960 election, the Soviets, as those who believe in Causes often do, got mad as hell at anybody who did not agree with them, so they began to employ all kinds of tricks to convince their people that Communism was a good idea—going so far as to prevent the people from seeing anything that was not Communism, which was clever if sad. But this trick was hard to pull off in a single city shared with three occupying nations that did not like Communism much, so in 1961 the Soviet-created German Democratic Republic hung a barbed-wire partition between their side of Berlin and the other side, the side that represented Western civilization, the side that John F. Kennedy visited on 26 June 1963—a visit that the people in East Berlin could not even see because, by then, the East Germans had replaced the barbed wire with a concrete wall almost twelve feet high. And standing at and near and in towers above the wall were East German soldiers, just waiting for any East Berliner to develop enough unmitigated gall to wave at Jack Kennedy on the other side or to shout amen (also amen in German) when the American president put words to their muffled lament:

  While the wall is the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see, we take no satisfaction in it, for it is . . . an offense not only against history but an offense against humanity, separating families, dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters, and dividing a people who wish to be joined together.

  If I had been running East Germany at that time, I probably would have wanted to shoot my people, too, instead of letting some slick bastard come to town and give them that kind of ammunition against my scheme. But all the bullets in the world cannot protect an awful idea—and so Mr. Kennedy’s short, famous, yet mostly unknown speech joined forces with his actions and twenty-six more years of speeches and action and all the forgotten words and acts of all the people behind the Iron Curtain who preferred to be free, even with the cost being as high as it was, so that on the night of 9 November 1989, Western civilization prevailed and blew its horn so loud that damn near every able-bodied young person east and west of the Berlin Wall rushed to it to dance and kiss and start to tear it down. Kudos to those kids and to President Kennedy and everybody else involved, because twenty years later I showed up to a united, Communist-free (as far as I knew) Berlin in June 2009.

  II

  There was nothing ruinous about the city when I arrived. It stretched, like Houston, for miles and miles beyond any obvious use for the space, yet unlike that hot humid jumbled mess on the Gulf of Mexico, Berlin was cool and clean and as thought through as perhaps a museum or, better yet, a mausoleum—a city embalmed to preserve the memory of all that its people and the West had endured.

  But if in June 1963, the proudest boast had been Ich bin ein Berliner, in June 2009, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast was not a slogan or a city, but a man: Obama. At least that was the boast when, on my seventh day in Berlin, I went to prison.

  I can still see that gruel-gray sky, the concrete walkway, dark and wet, leading to the prison, which stood behind thin white iron bars. It was a stocky building made of bricks, brown and tan; three, four stories high; rows of tiny prison cells inside meant to hold men like Hans-Eberhard Zahn, who had once been a thin young man but was, in 2009, a big old man with thin white hair and long tan fingers, one of which was pointed at my face as I stood on the back wall of the interrogation room.

  You resemble Obama! he squealed.

  You may not know this, but I do not resemble Barack Obama. I also don’t pick fights, especially not behind bars, especially not with old men who are kind enough to take me on a tour of the prison they were held in by the East German secret police, the Stasi. Such was the fate of Hans-Eberhard Zahn.

  He had been only twenty-five years old on 13 November 1953, a student at the Free University of Berlin and a minor resister. Once the Stasi picked him up off the street on November 14, he was promoted to major resister and victim and hero, surviving for seven years before release. Five decades later, Hans was still exacting his revenge, informing visitors of all the wrong the Stasi had done.

  He shepherded my delegation through the Hohenshönhausen prison, the most notorious of its kind, through the sandpaper-colored hallways down which he had been dragged to his cell and its tiny bed, and to the punishment cell which had only a bucket, and to the interrogation room, which I can’t really remember because we went there at the end of the tour, by which point my feet were tired and I was ready to leave. I had not planned to visit to another jail after the last time Clarice walked me into Lew Sterrett to see my daddy, and there was nothing that Mr. Zahn showed me in Hohenshönhausen that made me any more or less interested in keeping people out of jail or away from Communism. Once I’d learned about the wall and all the political prisoners they kept in concentration camps after the war, I was sufficiently opposed to the Communists and to anybody who was into Communist kind of stuff. But then Mr. Zahn said I resembled Obama, and for just a moment, I was pleased that the Stasi had gotten ahold of him for a little while.

  I was standing behind a tall German boy when Hans pointed at me. The German boy leaned to the side so there would be no confusion. Hans received a clearer view of me, and I of him. His eyes were those of a child who had just seen her first puppy in the window.

  Oh . . . okay, I muttered, siphoning all the anger from my voice and into my hands, gripping my book bag straps. I’ll take that as a compliment.

  No, really! Hans was bouncing in his interrogation chair, looking to the rest of th
e delegation for a witness. Don’t you think so?

  Whether they thought so or not, they grabbed their book bag straps, too, and stared at the floor and the walls away from Hans, and laughed in such a way that laughter may have meant I’m sorry, Casey, which would have been nice to hear.

  Now that I’ve grown and have other grudges to tend to, I can give Mr. Zahn, who passed from this world into the next or nowhere in 2013, a break. He had been on the east side of the wall, I assume, on 26 June 1963. But he was free, or out of jail, forty-five years later, on 24 July 2008—the day that Barack Obama, not yet President Obama, proved that he had a historic amount of unmitigated gall when he decided to make a campaign stop in Berlin. Shocked the hell out of everybody, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who didn’t even attend his speech at the Brandenburg Gate, a gate that had come a long way since Napoleon stood under it in 1806 to celebrate his victory over the Prussians—had come so far that it was right back where it started, welcoming a man on the rise. Perhaps Hans had been there to welcome him, too. Or perhaps he had just heard the candidate’s words—People of the world, look at Berlin—and appreciated the recognition. And if he did not hear the actual speech, Hans likely read Der Spiegel’s translation of Mr. Obama’s message: People of the World, Look at Me. And old man Zahn, poor of sight or of imagination, looked and saw but through a dark man, darkly.

  He was not alone. Hans was but one victim—a more advanced, pathetic case, no doubt—of that glaucoma that dimmed the view of all who hoped to truly see the man in question, or others like him. That’s something I learned at George Washington’s house a while back. I had bussed down to Mount Vernon to check out the place, and to take a photograph with the defense secretary whose job it had been to get us out of Iraq (he provided no update), and to hear from a presidential historian who I assume knew his stuff, since he’d taught the future king of England about Abraham Lincoln many years prior. Anyway, the historian said something that you might like to know: It takes thirty to forty years to really understand a president and his term.

  Now, if this is true, then you and I are in one awful bind, since Mr. Obama has only just retired, just moseyed off to sunbathe and Jet Ski while the whole goddamn country falls apart or at least is held in the hands of a madman. I don’t blame him. But if we need anything right now it is some understanding, and so the best solution I’ve come up with is based on the hunch I already told you about—that President O was as much a symbol as he was a man, such that, as with every symbol, the best way to talk about him (and tell the truth) is to talk about us and gamble that a composite sketch of our desires and beliefs will form at least a faint image of him—and if not that, then at least a glimpse of the time that produced him and the world he tried to shape—and if not even that, then at least a decent explanation of why I was in such despair when I left Berlin and moved to Washington, that sister capital, lined similarly with monuments and perfumed similarly with the odor of history though also the stench of ambition, sprawling though not as far and wide, and not as clean, and not as cool.

  III

  Despair might not be the right word. I still had a great deal of hope for myself if not the world, and whatever the feeling was—frustration, disillusionment, rage—it did not set in immediately, not even when I could not find a job in the new president’s administration. I continued my search based on instructions from the most credible person I knew on the matter, Charles Hill. If you have not heard of him that means he’s good at his job: advisor. Good enough for Henry Kissinger, good enough for Ronald Reagan and, even though I distrusted both of those men, good enough for me.

  Be a special assistant to someone at the top, he nearly whispered from his desk one afternoon toward the end of my senior year. It’s very hard to know how to run something on a big scale if you haven’t seen it from the top.

  The something was America, of course, and I soon discovered that the top was six blocks east and one block north of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, at the Center for American Progress, or CAP, which called itself a think tank but which Time magazine called Obama’s Idea Factory in Washington. I applied straightaway. Somebody helped secure the job, of course, but what else is new? In my mind I was a real if minor member of the president’s best and brightest. On my résumé, I was a special assistant to one of CAP’s founders. The only difference, I should mention, between a special assistant and a regular assistant, as far as I could tell from my time in Washington, is that the regular assistant wants to help his or her boss succeed at their job. The special assistant wants the boss’s job. Immediately. Maybe that was just me, though.

  I rose early on my first day and rode the bus to a nondescript building at Tenth and H Street Northwest. Elevator to the tenth floor, across the small lobby, through the spotless glass door, and finally to my desk, more like a shelf built into the wall, where I found a seven-hundred-page book: Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President, which I did not read and did not have to, since the words on the pages were already on their way to becoming laws. Turns out that Washington was not too different from South Oak Cliff High School—ruled on the surface by people with authority, ruled in fact by people with power—people, often, in the shadows. Each representative answered to more than seven hundred thousand constituents. Each senator answered to the residents of an entire state. The president answered, in theory, to the whole country. Yet there were powerful people in Washington who answered, it seemed, to no one.

  And if that wasn’t delicious enough, I was invited at once to do something many in Washington wait their whole lives to do: work for a Kennedy.

  She was a Shriver, technically. No matter. Especially since the Shrivers, at least Sargent Shriver, Maria’s father—chairman of the Yale Daily News, founder of the Peace Corps, czar of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s War on Poverty, which, if it did nothing else, provided the welfare that helped me and my sister pay rent and take long hot showers and buy a Christmas tree—meant a great deal to me. To be a Kennedy was one thing. But to be a Kennedy and a Shriver was almost too much—she was almost too much, Maria Owings Shriver.

  I had never in my life seen a woman who looked as completely rich as Maria Shriver did that Saturday morning when she walked through CAP’s glass door. She did not open the door herself, that I remember (though I don’t believe I opened it for her), and if she removed her floor-length mink coat, then she did it with such ease, such insouciance, that it seemed to carefully remove itself from her shoulders all on its own. Installed on one of her fingers was a diamond ring that reminded me of those Ring Pops we wore as kids, except that it was an actual diamond and not a blue ball of high fructose corn syrup. She was a brilliant gesticulator, as anybody with jewels that nice should be, and so she gesticulated a great deal as she traipsed down the hallway, guffawing as I’ve only ever heard unstoppably rich people guffaw, especially rich and beautiful people, as she was, a gleeful taut piece of history, traipsing down the hallway to the corner office where my boss would brief her and John Podesta, CAP’s don, for their appearance the following day on Meet the Press, which was at that time the most important forum in politics, since no one seemed to take the Senate chambers seriously anymore, preferring instead the reach and glamour of television.

  Their purpose: to promote a new report, aptly named The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, that chronicled all the ways that America had become a woman’s nation, and everything that, as a result, had changed or would be changing soon. It was true that, for the first time, over half the workers in America were women. But despite our deepest hopes, it was and remains unclear whether the nation belonged to women and whether it had changed much for the better, if at all. I read the report anyhow to know what was to come, and also because the only special assistants who succeed in Washington are those who are prepared—those who know where everything is and who everybody is, those who watch and listen and write it all down.

  You hear that
, Casey?

  The voice of Maria Shriver. I glanced up from my briefing book and saw her, turned around in her back-supporting office chair, diamond ring hanging over the side, deep-set eyes staring at me on the couch. She had been testing different talking points for Meet the Press, searching for the best message to persuade men that they should care about a woman’s nation, that they should encourage their wives’ and girlfriends’ desires to work, and look after the children every now and then and, generally, get their boots off women’s backs for the first time in human history. The message had been found: Guys, hello! It’ll get you more sex!

  Ms. Shriver wanted me to understand this point. I nodded and laughed since she was Maria Shriver and all but, of course, there were a few problems with her advice. Most obviously there was my stomach-sickness at the thought of touching a woman in that way. Beyond this, though, was the general point that I had taken a vow of celibacy for my time in Washington. If I was going to be president I needed to prove, if only to myself, that I had near-supernatural self-control and near-saintly personal values. Again, it was a very different time. (Let me add that I would have been flawless in my attempt, had it not been for one jezebel who connived his way, just by being gorgeous and persistent, back to my apartment a month or two before I left Washington to continue down my path to destruction.)