The inevitable echoes of John F Kennedy reverberated around Barack Obama's speech before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin last month. Jane Dailey, a professor of American history at the University of Chicago, recalls the visit to the divided German city of an altogether different US leader: Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1964, King was invited by Willy Brandt - then mayor of West Berlin - to speak at a commemoration ceremony for the slain JFK. The adoration of West Germans was not enough; King insisted on crossing into East Berlin, where he "preached a sermon of non-violence and universal brotherhood to an overflow crowd in the Marienkirche". Despite having his passport - as well as his German translator and guide - confiscated by the American embassy, King came through a seemingly unbreachable divide, transcending the implacable politics of the Cold War.
Obama made no reference to King during his speech heard around the world. After all, as Dailey notes, American observers would have twisted any mention of King to Obama's detriment. The Democratic candidate cannot evoke the history of the civil rights movement and the American struggle for racial equality without his "electability" for "all Americans" coming into question. His appeal, we are told, rests largely on the embracing of the universal, not the particular.
At the same time, Obama cannot but help evoke King. Through his charisma, sweeping oratory, lofty vision and, of course, skin colour, Obama is reminiscent of the heroic fighter for civil rights. That Obama can draw 200,000 people in Berlin is testament to his larger-than-political appeal; he is seen - rightly or wrongly - as more than just a statesman, as a visionary leader of great symbolic significance. Courting such symbolic power is part-and-parcel of Obama's campaign tactics. He is a figure of shadow and mirrors, upon whom people of different stripes can project their own yearnings. This is perhaps Obama's greatest accomplishment to date as a politician.
Obama's Berlin address was a chance to channel the strong, positive leadership of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, not the darker greatness of King, who inspired as much soul-searching as he did admiration. But what if Obama had chosen instead that site of the great crossing, the Marienkirche, where King reminded the residents of East Berlin how much they shared with those of the West?
The humble church of Mary cannot recall the grandeur and triumphalism of the Brandenburg Gate, where Kennedy and Reagan faced down the evil empire. Nor can it hold hundreds of thousands of Berliners glowing golden in the afternoon. But it does overflow with a different kind of symbolism. It is where an American - of a "particular" background - recognised and reaffirmed his own struggle in the struggle of others across a vast geopolitical chasm. As a politician committed to, on one level, "healing" divisions and, on another level, turning American foreign policy in a more mature direction, Obama couldn't have found a more meaningful place from where to speak to the world.