… uttered his famous words “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner) on this date in 1963. As The New York Times put it at the time:
President Kennedy, inspired by a tumultuous welcome from more than a million of the inhabitants of this isolated and divided city, declared today he was proud to be “a Berliner.”
He said his claim to being a Berliner was based on the fact that “all free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.”