Video: 'June 26, 1963 - John F. Kennedy in Berlin'

(Wednesday, June 26, 1963, 12:50 p.m. Central European Time; during the Cold War) — U.S. President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech — one of the best-known speeches of the Cold War and among the most famous anti-communist speeches — before 120,000 people today in front of the Berlin Wall on the steps of Rathaus Schöneberg in West Berlin.

Video: 'President Kennedy's remarks to the people of West Berlin in the Rudolph Wilde Platz, June 26, 1963 It is in'

Twenty-two months earlier, East Germany had erected the Berlin Wall to prevent mass emigration to West Berlin. The speech was aimed as much at the Soviet Union as it was at West Berliners.

Another phrase in the speech was also spoken in German, “Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen” (“Let them come to Berlin”), addressed at those who claimed “we can work with the Communists,” a remark at which Nikita Khrushchev scoffed only days later.

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The speech is considered one of Kennedy’s finest, delivered at the height of the Cold War and the New Frontier. It was a great morale boost for West Berliners, who lived in an enclave deep inside East Germany and feared a possible East German occupation.

“Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum [“I am a Roman citizen”],” Kennedy said. “Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner!”… All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner!”

Video: 'This program is "America Remembers John F. Kennedy" (circa 1983) This is part 13 of a 14 part program.' (June 26, 1963, at 0:09)

Kennedy used the phrase twice in his speech, including at the end, pronouncing the sentence with his Boston accent and reading from his note “ish bin ein Bearleener,” which he had written out using English orthography to approximate the German pronunciation.

He also used the classical Latin pronunciation of civis romanus sum, with the c pronounced [k] and the v as [w].

For decades, competing claims about the origins of the “Ich bin ein Berliner” overshadowed the history of the speech. In 2008, historian Andreas Daum provided a comprehensive explanation, based on archival sources and interviews with contemporaries and witnesses.

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He highlighted the authorship of Kennedy himself and his 1962 speech in New Orleans as a precedent, and demonstrated that by straying from the prepared script in Berlin, Kennedy created the climax of an emotionally charged political performance, which became a hallmark of the Cold War epoch.

There is a widespread misconception that Kennedy accidentally said that he was a Berliner, a German doughnut specialty. This is an urban legend that emerged several decades after the speech, and it is not true that residents of Berlin in 1963 would have mainly understood the word “Berliner” to refer to a jelly doughnut or that the audience laughed at Kennedy’s use of this expression.